matter, this would mean accelerated and intensified diplomacy, military coop-
eration and sales, and most important, a breakthrough deal between Wash-
ington and New Delhi on civilian nuclear technology. These were big changes,
49 “A Dramatic Change of Public Opinion in the Muslim World,” Terror Free Tomorrow (2005), http://www.terrorfreetomorrow.org/upimagestft/Pakistan%20Poll%20Report-updated.pdf.
See also Tahir Andrabi and Jishnu Das, “In Aid We Trust: Hearts and Minds and the Pakistan Earthquake of 2005,” Working Paper (September 2010), www.cgdev.org/doc/events/9.14
.10/InAidWeTrust.pdf; and Testimony of Andrew Wilder, “Hearing on U.S. Aid to Pakistan: Planning and Accountability,” U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform, Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, December 9, 2009, http://www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/sbhrap/news/Wilder_PakistanAidTestimony_
12_9_09.pdf.
50 On the F-16 announcement as well as the Bush administration’s new South Asia strategy, see “Background Briefing by Administration Officials on U.S.-South Asia Relations,”
Press Conference, Washington, D.C., March 25, 2005, www.fas.org/terrorism/at/docs/2005/
StatePressConfer25mar05.htm.
51 See S. Arun Mohan, “Behind the Pakistan F-16 Deal, a Tale of Many Wheels,” Hindu, May 30, 2011.
52 “Background Briefing by Administration Officials on U.S.-South Asia Relations,” March 25, 2005, www.fas.org/terrorism/at/docs/2005/StatePressConfer25mar05.htm.
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No Exit from Pakistan
spearheaded by a small group of officials who surrounded Condoleezza Rice
when she arrived at the State Department.53
By combining its announcements of progress in relations with India and Pak-
istan, the Bush team walked a fine line. On the one hand, it demonstrated that
Washington sought to improve relations with both New Delhi and Islamabad
at the same time. On the other hand, the announcement also looked as though
Washington was doling out gifts to both sides as a means to quell inevitable
Indian and Pakistani resentment.
In the end, the tactic worked, at least when compared to prior diplomatic
travails. Almost exactly a year earlier, for instance, Secretary Powell had con-
ferred “Major Non NATO Ally” status on Pakistan just forty-eight hours after
departing New Delhi. During his meetings in India, he had given no hint of this
plan. The resulting Indian furor over Powell’s diplomatic “stab in the back”
was intense.54 But the bad feelings blew over in time and Washington’s care-
ful management of the March 2005 announcements, including a preview of
American plans by Secretary Rice in New Delhi, showed that U.S. officials had
learned a valuable lesson about how to manage relationships in the region.
Other reasons for cautious American optimism came in the form of steadily
mellowing relations between New Delhi and Islamabad themselves. In the
spring of 2003, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee took the first
step back from the hostilities of 2001–2 and extended a “hand of friendship”
to Pakistan. Even though Vajpayee’s government lost the 2004 elections, his
initiative survived into the next Indian government. Over the next several
years, Indo-Pakistani negotiations took two forms, one public – the “composite
dialogue” between the foreign ministries – and the other a secret backchannel,
managed by Pakistan’s national security adviser, Tariq Aziz, together with a
succession of several Indian envoys. Aziz and his Indian counterparts met about
two dozen times from 2004 to 2007 in various hotel rooms from Southeast
Asia to London, hammering away at the text of an agreement on Kashmir and
other outstanding disputes between India and Pakistan.55
All along the way, the policy challenge for the United States was to support,
and if possible to accelerate, progress between India and Pakistan without
interfering in ways that might end up being counterproductive. The American
impulse to dive into the dispute and try to sort out a grand bargain was strong.
As one jaded U.S. State Department official explained in early 2005, “pretty
much every new secretary of state comes in thinking that solving Kashmir will
53 Ashley Tellis, “South Asian Seesaw: A New U.S. Policy on the Subcontinent,” Policy Brief No.
38, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 2006, http://www.carnegieendowment
.org/files/PB38.pdf.
54 V. Sudarshan, “Uncle Sam’s Sly Sally,” Outlook India, April 5, 2004, http://www.outlookindia
.com/printarticle.aspx?223514.
55 Steve Coll, “The Back Channel,” The New Yorker, March 2, 2009, pp. 38–51.
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U-Turn to Drift
125
pretty soon they realize just how complicated Kashmir really is. Then they lose
interest and go back to making peace in the Middle East.”56
This time, what really convinced U.S. officials not to interfere in Indo-
Pakistani diplomacy was the widely held belief that both President Musharraf
and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were as serious about making a deal
as anyone could ever expect leaders from these often hostile neighbors to be.
Neither man could, however, afford to have his peacemaking efforts look
like a weak capitulation to American pressure. By accepting that reality, the
Bush administration also accepted that its public role in the process would be
limited to friendly cheerleading.57 New Delhi and Islamabad would set the pace
and terms of their negotiations. Up until 2007, however, when Musharraf’s
world came tumbling down, the trends looked encouraging. To many outside
observers, it appeared that India and Pakistan were closer to a breakthrough
on Kashmir than ever before.
The Resurgent Threat
Unfortunately, Pakistan’s active diplomacy was not limited to its pathbreaking
negotiations with India. Starting in 2004, Musharraf’s team was also cut-
ting deals of a very different sort on its western front. Former senior Bush
administration officials now blame several of these accords, struck between
the Pakistani army and militants in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal
Areas (FATA), for the return of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. As
Condoleezza Rice argues in her memoir, Musharraf’s deals led “to a new safe
haven for the Taliban and a downward spiral in Afghanistan, one that we were
unable to halt before the end of our term.”58
By 2006, Washington was beginning to see Pakistan’s peace negotiations
as a real problem. That year, Governor (and retired Lieutenant General) Ali
Muhammad Jan Aurakzai helped to strike a deal with tribesmen in North
Waziristan. Aurakzai is an intense military man with a closely cropped mus-
tache and piercing blue-gray eyes. His taut manner evokes the Prus
sian high
command more than the tribal badlands of Pakistan’s frontier. But at the time
of his peace dealings, Aurakzai claimed, by dint of his Pashtun ancestry, to
understand the “mind-set” of the tribesmen.59
One afternoon in April 2007, Aurakzai held forth over a formal lunch at
the head of an enormous banquet table set for himself, me, and one other
colleague. Between courses served by stiff, uniformed waiters, he lectured on
the history of the region and described how he had cleverly appealed to the
56 Author conversation, Washington, DC, March 2005.
57 Coll, “The Back Channel,” p. 50.
58 Rice, No Higher Honor, pp. 345, 443–5; see also Cheney, In My Time (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 498; Bush, Decision Points, p. 216.
59 Author conversation with Governor Aurakzai, Peshawar, April 30, 2007.
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No Exit from Pakistan
tribal need for due respect when he forged his peace deal. Subsequently, other
Pakistanis would argue that Aurakzai had actually failed to understand the
tribal mentality because his displays of “due respect” were interpreted as signs
of weakness. In either case, skepticism is warranted; generalizations about the
Pashtun “mentality” are often little more than cultural stereotypes fashioned
in the service of dubious policy choices.
Aurakzai’s deal was a disaster. Rather than stemming the flow of Taliban
fighters into Afghanistan – as the Pakistanis first promised Washington – it only
magnified the problem. Karl Eikenberry, then the commander of U.S. forces in
Afghanistan and later the Obama administration’s controversial ambassador
in Kabul, reported at the time that the deal led to a tripling of Taliban attacks
from Pakistan’s side of the border.60
It is nonetheless a misleading exaggeration to blame Pakistan’s 2006 deal for
the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Blaming Pakistan’s peace deals for
the downward spiral in Afghanistan deflects too much attention from Wash-
ington’s own inattention to the many problems it faced in Afghanistan. U.S.
missteps set the stage for Pakistan’s bad policy choices and magnified their
consequences.
Central to Pakistani calculations about Afghanistan was the reality that U.S.
forces would eventually depart. Pakistan would have to be ready for what-
ever followed. A number of Washington’s policy choices fed Pakistani suspi-
cions that a U.S. departure would come sooner rather than later. For instance,
Islamabad perceived a series of U.S. decisions to reduce its direct command
authority over operations inside Afghanistan, culminating in 2006 when all
security responsibility fell under the NATO flag, as evidence that Washington
was looking for a way to exit the war.61
Pakistanis were not wrong to see drift and inattention in Washington’s
Afghan war policy. Inside Afghanistan, Kabul’s barely-there government and
weak economy opened the door to insecurity as the new democratic state
struggled to get off the ground. Courts, police, and other authorities were
impossibly corrupt or missing in action. Reflecting and contributing to these
problems, Afghanistan’s opium production shot through the roof, increasing
34 percent in 2007 over the previous year’s levels.62 Afghanistan’s Helmand
60 Ann Scott Tyson, “Generals Warn of Perils in Afghanistan,” Washington Post, February 14, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/13/AR200702130
1259.html.
61 The early part of the Afghan war was prosecuted through a “lead nation” approach, in which the United States and its allies each took primary responsibility for specific regional/functional tasks. This strategy did not produce convincing results, and as such NATO gradually took on a more prominent leadership role. By 2006 NATO had assumed operational control of the war.
For a detailed account of this transition, see Seth Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), pp. 239–48.
62 “Afghanistan Opium Survey 2007: Executive Summary,” United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (August 2007), http://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/AFG07 ExSum
web.pdf.
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U-Turn to Drift
127
province, which borders Pakistan, was a bigger source of illicit drugs than
either Colombia or Myanmar.
American officials in the field, including Ronald Neumann, who served as
the U.S. ambassador in Kabul from 2005 to 2007, recognized that Washington
had invested too few resources to achieve stability in war-torn Afghanistan,
especially with its rapidly growing cities, remote villages, difficult terrain, and
nearly 30 million people. In a February 6, 2006, plea to Secretary Rice for
additional resources, Neumann concluded, “We have dared so greatly, and
spent so much in blood and money that to try to skimp on what is needed
for victory seems to me to be too risky.”63 Unfortunately, the ambassador’s
calls for more resources made little headway.64 Officials back in Washington
obligated available funds, manpower, and focus to Iraq.
Also undercutting the argument that Pakistan’s peace deals in the FATA
were the root cause of trouble in Afghanistan, many of the most important
Taliban leaders, like Mullah Omar and his top lieutenants, were believed to
enjoy sanctuary in and around Quetta, in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province,
not the FATA. Afghan leaders in Kabul, from Hamid Karzai down, routinely
complained about the machinations of the “Quetta Shura” to anyone who
would listen. And Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador in
Kabul from 2003 to 2005, practically screamed himself hoarse about those
Taliban sanctuaries.65
Such warnings did little to change U.S. policy toward Pakistan. Looking
back, Ambassador Eikenberry observes that “until at least 2005, the Bush
administration simply did not prioritize the Taliban’s Quetta sanctuary in its
discussions with Pakistani officials. Al-Qaeda dominated U.S. attention. Pak-
istanis saw this as a green light to keep doing what they were doing with the
Taliban. Afghans saw it as evidence that America was only a temporary, fickle
ally.”66
Nor was Pakistan’s infamous 2006 peace accord the first (or last) of its
kind. The Pakistani army cut its first major peace deal, known as the Shakai
Agreement, in 2004. The circumstances of that deal revealed another problem
63 U.S. Embassy (Kabul), Cable, “Afghan Supplemental” February 6, 2006, Secret, 3 pp. [Excised], http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB358a/doc25.pdf.
64 Neumann, emphasizing the relationship between investments in infrastructure and gaining the trust of the Afghan people, explained in a February 6, 2006, cable to Secretary Rice that “The lack of some USD 400 million will not lose the war. But it will make the narcotics problem worse by next year. It will make it slower to build the
Afghan government outside Kabul. It will make the margin of our victory tighter and the Taliban’s role easier.” Six months later, Neumann reiterated that “because we have not adjusted resources to the pace of the increased Taliban offensive and loss of internal Afghan support we face escalating risks today.” His bottom line: “The stakes in Afghanistan deserve a bigger margin for victory.” See U.S. Embassy (Kabul), Cable, “Afghanistan: Where We Stand and What We Need” August 29, 2006, Secret, 8 pp. [Excised], http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB358a/doc26.pdf.
65 David Rohde and David E. Sanger, “How a Good War in Afghanistan Went Bad,” New York Times, August 12, 2007.
66 Author interview with Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, January 24, 2012.
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No Exit from Pakistan
that persisted over the course of the Bush administration. Despite having signed
on to a counterterror alliance with Washington, Musharraf and his generals
remained allergic to any acknowledged U.S. fighting presence on Pakistani soil.
They claimed they would not survive the backlash from their own people,
including from the rank and file of the military.
At first, this was not such a problem. Americans kept a low profile in joint
counterterror operations. But as these gained steam in Pakistan’s major cities,
al-Qaeda took greater advantage of its refuge in the FATA. There the tribesmen
of the region had always governed themselves, with Islamabad acting through
neo-colonial liaison officers still known as “political agents” in a method very
similar to that used by the British.
Facing American pressure to go after al-Qaeda, and believing these tradi-
tional administrative methods would never uproot the well-armed, well-heeled
international terrorists, Musharraf sent his army into the FATA, starting in
2002 and more extensively in 2004. These were the first major army operations
in the semi-autonomous region in Pakistan’s independent history. Unfortu-
nately, they were met with ferocious counterattacks. Pakistan’s troops, trained
to fight India, were poorly prepared for guerrilla warfare. Bloodied and demor-