CJCS "in a mood to name and shame"

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/04/22/pakistan.drone.strike/index…

Bob, I don't think anyone will disagree with you that Pakistan has interests it feels it needs to protect, but I think you miss ADM Mullen's point (which has been missing from public debate for too long), which is ISI and PAKMIL are supporting elements that are killing and maiming our troops in Afghanistan, additionally they're undermining our efforts in Afghanistan, all while accepting billions of dollars of aid from the U.S. annually.

It may be politically correct to state PAKMIL is trying to address the various militia groups, which is partially true, but there is the other truth that their supporting others.

It is a big boy world and while we try to accommidate everyone's interests, ultimately "our" interests must come first if we're going to be a credible government for our people (which includes our military). Throwing money at a nation that is killing our sons and daughters is irrational, despite all the arguments that it will take time. The clock has even started ticking yet, because they haven't made a sincere effort to stop supporting the militia elements killing our troops and undermining our efforts in Afghanistan. They are beyond a doubt a state sponsor of terror and probably are getting more foreign aid from us than the majority of other countries. They also get a lot of aid from China, because of course China would prefer they keep their unconventional warfare capability to keep India busy.

In my view we're being played as fools, and we in turn are operating under age on principle of hope. Exactly what are our interests? Nation building in Afghanistan? Disrupting AQ? Maintaining a presence in Central Asia? How exactly does allowing Pakistan to undermine these efforts support our interests? If the link to the story above is true and Pakistan closed our drone base, will be able to continue poking AQ in the eye effectively? If I was a Pakistani politician or citizen, I would feel compelled to close the drone base also. No civilian casualties are acceptable. Imagine if we allowed the British Secret Services to pursue IRA members in the U.S. during that conflict and they were using drones and just every once in a while they killed some innocent Americans when they were shooting at IRA terrorists. I suspect there just might have been an uproar, and yet we can't understand why citizens in our countries get so upset. We're not good at this, we never have been.

I met a few Pakistani officers, they were well educated and personable, so it is easy to drink the Koolaid and ignore other realities. I'm not advocating going to war with Pakistan, but the status quo is no longer acceptable. It isn't working.

I think the existence of the infrastructure of transnational terrorism within Pakistan, with state approval and support in some cases, was a problem and will again show itself to BE a problem if the state protects even part of that network for future use.
The US is not its primary victim. The argument can be made that the US would not even be a target of such terrorism if it was not intervening in the middle east on behalf of Israel. And I am not even touching the question of whether drones are a good way to attack this infrastructure or not. But I would submit that even the "good" (as in pro-Pakistani security establishment) parts of this infrastructure will be a very big problem WITHIN the region, even if the US is completely out of the picture.
In that case (no US in the picture), this network will be a cause of tension with central Asian states (until they happen to fall to the Islamists, in which case, it will be a problem with Russia), with China (even though the Pakistani state is fully committed to protecting China in this matter, the arrest of several Uighurs from lal masjid showed that the hardcore network, even nodes as closely connected to the ISI as Lal Masjid, can and will host Uighurs on the basis of Islamic solidarity), with Iran (again, irrespective of whether GHQ does or does not want to get Iran mixed up in the rise of the Af-Pak state, with India (obviously, needs no explanation), with liberal and minority groups within Afghanistan and Pakistan (including ALL shias, even those currently at high positions) and ultimately, with saudi arabia and the gulf sheikhdoms (as the matter of Osama and the reception of Turki al Faisal by Mullah Omar revealed, close relations with the ISI, sponsorship and money from the Al Saud family, all of that did not prevent the hardcore believers from hosting Osama...there is absolutely no reason to think that the next incarnation of this network will prove any more cooperative).
I agree that the US occupation of Afghanistan and subsequent nation-building efforts may be a gigantic waste of money. It may even be that the US has malafide intentions in the region that have nothing to do with terrorism or the promotion of peace. But I do not think that Robert is correct in his estimate that left to itself without having changed its relationship with the "good jihadis", the Pakistani state has the ability to control its own proxies and prevent new disasters from occurring in the future. Those new disasters do not primarily impact the US, so again, the US may be wasting it men and money in the region. But to imagine that they will not affect anyone else in the region is to miss the clear trends that already existed prior to this experiment and that will almost certainly be resurrected and restarted when this experiment ends.
This is, of course, a guess or a personal opinion. Maybe it is wrong and Robert and Salman are correct. Maybe the ISI should be trusted to do things far better on their own. I think it is likely that Kiyani sahib in particular does NOT want a return to the good old days of worldwide jihad. But the fact that the plan for the future will partly be managed through the Haqqanis, Mullah Omar and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar makes me regard my guess as at least a likely possibility. I will be very happy to be proven wrong.

Pakistan, like the U.S., has enduring vital national interests. The problem is that we have since 9/11 convinced ourselves that the route to one of those interests lies through AFPAK; thereby creating a conflict of interests.

It is unreasonable for us to assume or demand that Pakistan change. They won't. Besides, I believe their assessment of their interests is much closer to being right than our own is. Our interest in AFPAK was far more emotion driven than interest driven, and like all emotions, will wane over time. We really need to take a hard look at the interest at stake, as I believe it is serviced far more effectively through our approach to the Arab Spring movement than it is to our fixation on the FATA.

So Mullen can rant if he wants, I appreciate his frustration. I would encourage him to be a bit more empathetic and try to see things from Pakistan's perspective though.

Pakistan, like the U.S., has enduring vital national interests. The problem is that we have since 9/11 convinced ourselves that the route to one of those interests lies through AFPAK; thereby creating a conflict of interests.

It is unreasonable for us to assume or demand that Pakistan change. They won't. Besides, I believe their assessment of their interests is much closer to being right than our own is. Our interest in AFPAK was far more emotion driven than interest driven, and like all emotions, will wane over time. We really need to take a hard look at the interest at stake, as I believe it is serviced far more effectively through our approach to the Arab Spring movement than it is to our fixation on the FATA.

So Mullen can rant if he wants, I appreciate his frustration. I would encourage him to be a bit more empathetic and try to see things from Pakistan's perspective though.

Salman sahib's email is a good example of the disconnect. Apparently, no one in Pakistan was ever informed that a basic premise of Pakistani security policy (use of jihadis to project influence in Afghanistan and Kashmir, balance India by unconventional means, etc) was now (belatedly) seen by the US as ONE of the items that needed changing. Whether Pakistan should then pursue its zero-sum game with India using other means was up to Pakistan, but even GHQ generals might then have seen that the zero-sum game itself needed to be abandoned (as the lefties would say: another world is possible). In short, the US (or those in the US able to see far enough) could not be comfortable with a major military power (a nuclear power) to be hobnobbing with hardcore jihadists and working to increase their influence domestically and internationally. That even if this was being done for supposedly "secular" reasons (reasons that could be put in terms of modern nation state policies, good or bad as they may be), the ability of such a policy to encourage fanatical transnational religious terrorism (over and above everyday secular terrorism) and leave an opening for such terrorists to acquire nuclear weapons, was unacceptable. This explanation would have been a bitter pill for GHQ, but one they may have swallowed in 2002...it seems that they may be forced to swallow it in 2011 or 12 or 13 too, but the job has become much harder....

I will be the first to admit that I have no clue what happens when Mullen sits down with Kiyani and actually has those three cups of tea with him. And while I have some passing acquaintance with the kind of people who make decisions in Pakistan, I have no personal experience with the kind of people who supposedly take decisions in the US. I am just watching what is in the public domain and looking at things as they would appear to a distant observer. And to a distant observer, the problem seems to be that whatever the day to day machinations, the strategic disconnect is very deep but also misunderstood....meaning, its not even clear to the Americans who comment (as I said, I cannot claim to know what the Americans who matter are thinking in private) where the disconnect is... They seem to translate it into their own terms (Pakistan's "national interests", assuming every country has similar, even if opposed, "national interests"). I cannot get past the nagging doubt that this is not true...that somehow, they dont get how much influence they have and at the same time, how much of a gap there is....worst of both worlds.
And the nagging thought that all my old leftist friends may have been right (many, inadvertently, since they based their "correct prescription" on some seriously mistaken historical myths): the US military should stay out of the third world and its politics.
Its not the only "nagging thought" though. There is also the nagging thought that the US can fix the mess it helped to create. At some level. Not being a participant, I am permitted to hold contradictory views without serious costs....

Convincing the Pakistani army to change its strategic orientation 10 years ago would have been much easier. One hopes its not too late now.
The irony is that the army probably would have changed course rather easily if they were told exactly what was expected of them; not just in tactical terms, but in terms of their strategic worldview.
They are actually not bad at taking directions. And at that time, the disaster in Iraq had not happened, the economy seemed strong, China was poorer, the gulf states were ready to do whatever needed to be done...it was a different time.
Jihadism is not a deeply held conviction for most of the Pakistani generals, its their insane zero-sum game with India and their lack of imagination that makes them prone to dream up notions like "strategic depth" and makes them helpless in the face of their few (but more far-sighted and determined) Jihadist colleagues.
Maybe it was assumed that the worldview would change by itself once they had three cups of tea with Mullen bahadur; or it was assumed that they HAVE no real worldview beyond willingness to collect payment for services rendered. But even if that were true, wouldnt such payments be an incentive to keep the epidemic going forever? (William Burroughs wrote that he once met an American working on the "Aftosa control commission" in Mexico and asked him how long the Aftosa would last. The inspector dreamily replied "as long as we can keep it going") ....Of course, there is always the accusation that the Aftosa control commissioners from America itself have no more incentive to put an end to the epidemic than their Pakistani "allies". This last view is commonly held among leftists and until I lived in America and "met" (on the internet and in life) a lot of the people, I was somewhat inclined to believe it myself. Now, I think most Americans are nowhere near as calculatingly evil as that accusation suggests..maybe some are, at some higher level that I have never had contact with (Dick Cheney?), but most don't seem to be. Naive maybe, maybe ignorant, sometimes arrogant, but not that convoluted in their thinking. Anyway, what next?

I'd be happy if the US went all old school total war on Wazeristan. It'd be cheaper than other options, and dead extremists don't cause problems because they're dead. That the area is a TAR argues against all the prickly offense that Pakistan likes to argue over sovereignty for all that matter.

Everyone understands that Pakistan & the ISI has and continues to be complete weasels about dealing with the Taliban. The fact is American leadership is demonstrating more patience with the sleazy state of affairs than the US public likes. Unfortunately too much of the Pakistani press is a lie filled sewer, so the public there and their leadership suffer from hearing too much of the lies they like to tell each other, and too little perspective that would go with truth.

The real choice Pakistan faces is to either solve these problems with a willing partner, or end up having some other country decide they've had enough of the terror & heroin export trade and solve the problem for them. Because as sure as the sun rises in the east, if someone else has to do it, they aren't going to play half as nice about it, and Pakistan's nukes aren't half the deterrent they think they are either.