US
troop surge ignored Pakistan-Taliban
ties By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The unilateral United States
raid that killed Osama bin Laden created a spike
in mutual recriminations between US and Pakistani
politicians, but their fundamental conflict of
interest over Afghanistan was already driving the
two countries toward serious confrontation.
The pivotal event in relations between the
Barack Obama administration and Pakistan was the
decision by Obama to escalate the war in
Afghanistan in 2009, despite the knowledge that
Pakistan was committed to supporting the Taliban
insurgents as a strategic policy in its conflict
with India.
Obama launched a desperate,
last-minute effort to get some kind of commitment
from the Pakistanis to reduce their support for the
Taliban before the decision
to escalate the war. But he did not reconsider the
decision after that effort had clearly failed.
It was always understood within the Obama
administration that any public recognition that
Pakistan was committed to supporting the Taliban
could be politically dangerous to the war effort.
As a result, Obama's national security team
decided early on to deny the complicity of
Pakistani Chief of Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kiani and
director of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
agency Shuja Pasha, despite the knowledge that
they were fully behind the policy.
On
March 26, 2009, a story in the New York Times
provided the most detailed news media account up
to that date of Pakistani assistance to the
Taliban. But the story quoted anonymous US
officials as blaming "mid-level ISI operatives"
and expressing doubt that top Pakistani officials
in Islamabad were directly coordinating the
clandestine efforts by ISI operatives to assist
the Taliban.
That did not reflect the
briefing Obama had gotten from George W Bush's
director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell,
after his election. McConnell had learned from
communications intercepts that Kiani considered
the Haqqani network, which was being targeted as
the most serious threat to US troops n
Afghanistan, as a "strategic asset".
As
Obama approached a decision on General Stanley A
McChrystal's request for another troop increase of
as much as 40,000 troops, the Pakistani military's
determination to use the Taliban and the Haqqani
network to advance Pakistani interests in
Afghanistan was a major issue in the policy
debate.
Opponents of the troop surge
request, including Vice President Joe Biden,
deputy national security adviser Tom Donilon and
Afghanistan War coordinator Douglas Lute, argued
that the Pakistanis were not going to change their
policy toward Afghanistan, according to Bob
Woodward's account in Obama's Wars.
Biden argued in a meeting on September 13,
2009, that Pakistan was determined to avoid an
Afghan government "led by a Pashtun sympathetic to
India" - ie, Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The
conclusion was that the Pakistanis would continue
to aid the insurgency the US was trying to defeat.
Despite that argument, as the policymaking
process was entering its final weeks, Obama tried
to exert high-level pressure on Pakistan.
In a November 11, 2009, letter to
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Obama said
Pakistan's use of such "proxy groups" as the
Haqqani network and the Taliban would no longer be
tolerated, as Woodward recounts. National Security
Adviser James Jones and counter-terrorism adviser
John Brennan were sent to Islamabad to deliver the
message.
Obama wanted Pakistan to
understand that he would take unilateral action
against the Taliban and Haqqani safe havens in
Pakistan, including accelerated drone strikes and
commando raids, unless Pakistani forces attacked
them.
That message was clearly received. A
Pakistani official told the New York Times,
"Jones's message was if that Pakistani help wasn't
forthcoming, the United States would have to do it
themselves."
The week of November 17,
Central Intelligence Agency director Leon Panetta
met with Pasha and other top Pakistani officials,
and complained about the presence of the Taliban
leadership headquarters in Quetta, Balochistan,
according to Woodward's account. He cited
intelligence that bombs were being made there,
then "taken across the border and blowing up
Americans".
Panetta proposed joint
US-Pakistani operations on the ground aimed at the
Quetta shura (council), but Kiani refused.
In a response to Obama's letter late in
November, Zardari voiced the Pakistani military's
rationale for Pakistan's use of Afghan insurgents
to protect its interests in Pakistan. He charged
that "neighboring intelligence agencies" - meaning
India - "are using Afghan soil to perpetuate
violence in Pakistan".
And Zardari did not
give a clear response to Obama's invitation to
plan joint operations against those forces.
When Obama met with his national security
team for the final time on November 29, he knew
that the pressure tactic had failed. Lute, Obama's
Afghanistan coordinator, warned that Pakistani
policy was one of four major, interacting risks of
a troop surge policy.
But Obama approved a
plan for 30,000 additional troops anyway,
suggesting that the decision was driven by the
political-bureaucratic momentum of the war rather
than by a rational assessment of cost, risk and
benefit.
Throughout 2010, the Pakistani
military continued to make clear its refusal to
compromise on its interests in Afghanistan. In
late January, US and Pakistani authorities picked
up Mullah Ghani Baradar, the second-ranking
official in the Taliban Quetta shura, in a
raid in Karachi - apparently without realizing in
advance that Baradar was present.
But when
the United States sought to extradite Baradar to
Afghanistan, the Pakistanis refused. And Baradar
and several other members of the Quetta
shura who had been detained by the
Pakistanis were reported in October 2010 to have
been released.
In a January 2011 interview
with Public Broadcasting System's Frontline,
General David Petraeus, by then the commander in
Afghanistan, was asked about Pakistan's release of
top Taliban leaders. "We've actually had a
conversation on this very recently," said Petraeus
blandly, "and in fact there has been a request for
information".
Two National Intelligence
Estimates (NIE) on Afghanistan and Pakistan in
December 2010 pointed once again to the centrality
of Pakistani policy to the outcome of the US war
effort in Afghanistan.
The NIE on
Afghanistan concluded that the United States was
unlikely to succeed in Afghanistan unless Pakistan
changed its policy to take military action against
insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan. But the
estimate on Pakistan made it clear that no such
change in Pakistani policy could be expected.
In mid-December, the Obama administration
issued a five-page summary of its December 2010
review of the Afghanistan war, which concluded
that the "gains" were "fragile and reversible" and
that consolidating those gains "will require that
we make more progress with Pakistan to eliminate
sanctuaries for violent extremist networks".
Immediately after that review, the New
York Times reported a military proposal for
cross-border raids into Pakistan aimed at
capturing Taliban commanders for interrogation
back in Afghanistan.
Beginning in late
2010, moreover, the US infiltrated hundreds of
unilateral intelligence agents into Pakistan,
suggesting an intention to carry out further
cross-border raids.
Those moves had
already alarmed Pakistan's military leaders well
before the US raid against bin Laden's compound in
Abbottabad.
And in a classified report
sent to the US Congress in early April, the Obama
administration strongly criticized Pakistan's
failure to attack insurgent safe havens in Mohmand
in northwest Pakistan for three straight years, as
reported by the New York Times on April 5.
Moeed Yusuf, director of the South Asia
program at the US Institute of Peace, who has been
leading a study of Pakistani elite opinion on
relations with the United States, believes the
crisis in US-Pakistan relations can be blamed on a
failure of both governments to acknowledge
explicitly the existence of a fundamental conflict
of interests.
"If there is a strategic
divergence of interests, I think Pakistan needs to
put it on the table," said Yusuf. Pakistani
leaders "need to be very candid about why it's not
in their interests" to do what Washington wants,
he said.
If the interests at stake are not
brought into the open, Yusuf suggested, "A rupture
is possible".
Gareth Porter is
an investigative historian and journalist
specializing in US national security policy. The
paperback edition of his latest book, Perils
of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to
War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.
(Inter Press Service)
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