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30/03/2009 | Afghanistan, U.S.: Pakistan's Place in Washington's Strategy

Stratfor Staff

U.S. President Barack Obama discussed his administration’s strategy for Afghanistan on March 27. The strategy includes sending funds to Pakistan for the next five years. The Obama administration’s plan for fighting the war in Afghanistan, much like the Bush administration’s plan, depends greatly on influencing Pakistan. Whether Washington’s attempts at influencing Pakistan with positive incentives will work or not remains to be seen.

 

U.S. President Barack Obama outlined his administration’s strategy for the Afghan war in a March 27 press conference. Among the strategy’s elements are more trainers for the Afghan military, more troops to hunt the Taliban and al Qaeda, and deeper integration between U.S. troops and their Afghan counterparts.

The part of the plan that most caught STRATFOR’s attention was the sharp change in the tone of the rhetoric used toward Pakistan and the strategy’s inclusion of $1.5 billion in assistance to Pakistan’s civilian government annually for five years (subject to certain conditions, of course). This amount is more or less what the Bush administration spent on the Musharraf regime.

This adjustment in tone and funding marks a fairly sharp shift in recent U.S. policy toward Pakistan, and hints at a change of the overall focus of American foreign policy away from Afghanistan and toward Russia. But before understanding where U.S. policy is going, it is important to examine where it has been.

Until late 2008, the effectiveness of U.S. policy in Afghanistan was largely restricted because of power groups deeply enmeshed within the United States’ primary “ally” in the Afghan war: Pakistan. Pakistan has always been militarily inferior to its primary rival, India, and so has had to foster various militant Islamist groups in order to counter India’s conventional military strength. These groups also proved essential both in Pakistan’s opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the Cold War and in maintaining Pakistani influence both before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Herein lies the rub. In October 2001, the Americans essentially forced the Pakistanis to facilitate the American hunt for al Qaeda in Afghanistan. This resulted in many of the militant Islamists who are so critical to Pakistani foreign policy feeling betrayed. This in turn led them to either turn on their masters or ally with elements within the Pakistani military and intelligence establishments to oppose American — and by extension, Pakistani — military policy in Afghanistan. Most of these militants were not Kashmiri or even Afghan, but actually from Pakistan’s northwestern regions. In essence, the American pursuit of al Qaeda in Afghanistan triggered a Pakistani civil war.

It is a war that the Pakistani government has not been particularly enthusiastic about fighting. Not only are most of the belligerents actual Pakistanis who retain deep links into the Pakistani military establishment, but many Pakistani policymakers see the militants as the most effective foreign policy tool Pakistan has ever had. Even those willing to hunt down their own have faced constant obstacles from those who disagree, which certainly saps the war effort. The result is that Pakistan is — at best — an unwilling participant in U.S. military operations, and lackluster Pakistani assistance has lessened American effectiveness in Afghanistan. This has also resulted in massive security complications for NATO convoys that are forced to transit Pakistan en route to the war in Afghanistan. Yet because Pakistan was critical to the war effort, there was little the Americans could do except bribe the Pakistanis to do more, a policy that — especially when one considers what the stakes are in a civil war — has met with understandably thin results.

The Mumbai attacks of November 2008 — in which some of these Pakistani-linked militants killed several hundred people in India — raised the possibility of a new strategy. The trick was to make Islamabad feel that it had no options but to more aggressively prosecute the war. This would require leveraging Indian anger to scare the Pakistanis on one hand, and forging an alternative supply route through Central Asia so that NATO would not depend so much on the Pakistanis on the other. Pakistan would be isolated, and would face the choice of cooperating more thoroughly or risk cracking apart under the strain of a civil war the United States no longer had a stake in. It was the ultimate bad-cop strategy.

With Obama’s announcement to grant $1.5 billion in annual aid — slightly more than 1 percent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product — for five years, the Obama administration appears to be emphasizing the good-cop strategy over the bad-cop one and switching back to attempts to influence Pakistan via positive incentives.

The Obama announcement, therefore, raises three questions:

  1. Why go back to playing good-cop? Critics may charge that the new Obama plan is simply reverting to the Bush administration strategy, which has not done particularly well at “winning” the Afghan war. But there are two reasons the bad-cop strategy was always a shot in the dark. First, for the bad-cop strategy to work, the United States cannot be dependent upon Pakistan. It would require a robust supply line to Afghanistan that transits the Russian sphere of influence in Central Asia. In addition to the logistical difficulties of this alternative route to ferry supplies from the north, the Russians’ price for such a supply route is for the United States to abandon not just its ambitions for Central Asia, but to forge a new continental security relationship that would roll back much of the economic, political and military gains the United States has made since the end of the Cold War. The Obama administration seems to have come to the conclusion that getting a leg up in the Afghan war is not worth the reforging of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, even if the plan was perfectly executed and the Russians blamelessly cooperative, forcing Pakistan to act against its basic self interest would have led to sporadic cooperation from the Pakistanis at best. No matter what plan was used, Pakistan would still border Afghanistan, and the border region would still be critical to the war effort. U.S. forces were going to continue to pursue militants on both sides of the border, and that means U.S. forces would regularly violate Pakistani sovereignty. Pakistan simply could not be cut out of the process because it is a significant part of the problem. Put differently, the routes through Moscow’s sphere of influence are not an alternative to the ones from Pakistan, though there is likely to be limited cooperation with Moscow and the Central Asian states for one or more supplementary routes.
  2. To what degree can the Pakistanis supply any assistance? Considering the depth of Pakistani opposition to U.S. policies, and the fact that the more recalcitrant members of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishments will see the Obama plan as a reason to continue resistance, in all practicality the best that can be hoped for is that Pakistan will supply more security to NATO convoys. Anything more is simply wishful thinking.
  3. What is necessary to make the new strategy work? The answer to this one is simple: Troops, and lots of them. With Pakistan providing at best limited support, Obama is going to be utterly reliant upon the Europeans to provide more manpower. Which is why the announcement came on Friday, March 27; next week, Obama will be in Europe for the G20 summit and the NATO summit. These are the venues at which Obama will make his case for assistance.

Conceptually, the Obama plan is about as sound as a plan for Afghanistan can be, but then again, so was the Bush plan — which the Obama plan is essentially continuing. And as Bush discovered, “conceptually sound” and “operationally sound” are two very different things.

Stratfor (Estados Unidos)

 


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