I’m not much good at timing. I was visiting Jordan on a lecture tour when the Israelis assassinated Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin. Amman closed down and much of my program had to be canceled; Americans weren’t welcome on campuses where student groups were mourning the sheikh and vowing revenge. I was in Indonesia when the Israelis invaded Lebanon; I was able to go ahead with the program, but all the audiences wanted to discuss was the war and America’s responsibility for Israeli crimes. I first came to Pakistan about the time then-Senator Obama called for escalating the drone strikes in Pakistani territory; I was in Turkey when his endorsement of the Armenian genocide resolution (a position he wisely dropped once in office) created a firestorm in that country.
This time, I hoped to do better. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s recent Pakistan visit went reasonably well; much of the press coverage was favorable and both Pakistani and American officials were talking about how healthy, how positive, how cooperative the relationship was.
And then came the WikiLeaks, 92.000 classified documents, many of them relating to allegations that the ISI, Pakistan’s super-secret intelligence service, has been actively working with the Taliban and other unsavory figures even as senior Pakistani officials tell the US that they are doing nothing of the kind.
The news broke in the US on Sunday; it only hit here on Tuesday, possibly because the issues are so sensitive that some media figures decided to wait to test official reaction before committing themselves. On Tuesday the story made all the front pages. The Nation, a feisty and often anti-American newspaper that sees spooks in every corner and seems to believe that much of the world has nothing better to do than endlessly plot against Pakistan, has already figured it out: the leaks were a clever ploy by the ruthlessly cunning Obama administration to discredit Pakistan. Commented The Nation:
“Something is not right here,” one expert said, adding that WikiLeaks could not have done it without a wink and a nod by some elements in the administration wanting to keep Pakistan under pressure.
All the news outlets are giving plenty of space to indignant denials by Pakistani authorities that the leaks point to anything real. Denunciations of the leaks by American officials play especially well; in addition to covering the ISI’s indignant denial that there is any factual basis for the reports, The Dawn carries three separate stories about American officials denouncing, downplaying and vowing to hunt down the leakers.
One thing I’ve learned here that has been a surprise: virtually all Pakistanis are operating on the assumption that the United States plans to cut and run in Afghanistan. They look at President Obama’s stated goal of beginning to draw down US troop strength in July of 2011 and they put that together with the recent announcement in Kabul of a 2014 timetable for Afghan authorities to take over security responsibilities to conclude that the United States has already decided to leave Afghanistan by 2014 at the latest. For many here, that is good news. As the United States withdraws from Afghanistan, Pakistan’s influence, they believe, will grow. There seem to be some who hope that the “good Taliban” under Pakistani leadership will become the dominant force in post-war Afghanistan.
There is a tendency here to look at the Afghan war through a Vietnam lens. It’s easy to see why. A long, slogging guerrilla war against a resourceful enemy with backing from its neighbors and popular support. An incompetent and corrupt government unable to deliver the basics to the people. A Democratic president for whom the foreign war is a distraction from an ambitious domestic agenda. A growing chorus of establishment dissent from former supporters of the war now concluding it is hopeless. And now we have the WikiLeaks, which some are calling the new Pentagon Papers — secret documents that undermine public credibility in the government’s presentation of the war.
I’ve been telling my Pakistani interlocutors that despite the apparent similarities, Afghanistan isn’t Vietnam. Instead of the fishy Gulf of Tonkin incident as the war’s flashpoint, there was 9/11. While many Americans see little hope of clear cut victory in Afghanistan, their is little effective opposition to the war. The war is stretching and testing the American military, but morale is generally high and the public at large remains strongly supportive of the military. American politics seem to be tilting the right rather than to the left at the moment, with the next Congress likely to be less dovish than the current one. Despite the recent spike, US casualties in Afghanistan remain relatively low.
I am sure that President Obama would like to end the war as soon as possible — who wouldn’t? But there is a difference between a goal of reducing troop levels next year and a decision to pull out regardless of conditions on the ground. If the Afghan surge doesn’t bring us to a turning point in the war, I don’t think the Obama administration will ‘bug out’. If Plan A fails, Plan B is likely to look something like the plan sketched out by Robert Blackwill in a Politico piece earlier this month. Essentially, the US would concentrate on defending the non-Pashtun sections of Afghanistan (including Kabul) from the Taliban with reduced forces, relying on air power and other strikes to prevent the use of Afghan territory by Al-Qaeda. This strategy is likely to be considerably cheaper than our current war effort, and is unlikely to lead to significant US combat casualties. Pakistan would have great influence in the areas of Afghanistan closest to its frontiers, but the interests of other regional powers (Russia, India, China and quite possibly Iran) could also be taken into account.
The Blackwill plan was not exactly greeted with joy in Pakistan; Blackwill was US ambassador to India and is a leading proponent of the idea that America’s long term strategic interests are tied up in deepening our relationship with the emerging South Asian superpower. One commentator in The Dawn wrote of Blackwill’s proposal that “The Neocon Vampires, the blood-thirsty Islamophobes and the thinktank irredentist and Bharati (aka Indian) revanchists are planning another dismemberment, so that they can continue their blood-fest in the arid mountains of Afghanistan.” More levelheaded analysts make similar points in more dispassionate tones; generally speaking many Pakistani analysts look at the Afghan conflict primarily as a theater in the Indo-Pak rivalry and hope that a united Afghanistan under Pakistani influence will emerge as Washington precipitously withdraws. The Blackwill approach leaves Pakistan with a smaller slice of Afghanistan and may even increase Indian influence in the north. Pakistanis tell me that this is the recipe for 100 years of proxy war between Indian and Pakistani allies.
In private, though, Pakistanis seem more open to some version of a de facto division of Afghanistan — as long as Pakistan and its allies get a big enough slice. This outcome would be preferable to the hasty, Saigon-style bug-out which many here expect, as a hasty American withdrawal will, Pakistanis fear, force them to assert influence across the whole country to keep India at bay. The prospect of Indian influence in Afghanistan makes Pakistan deeply nervous; being encircled by India and its allies is one of Pakistan’s deepest fears.
For an American administration that wants to cut the costs and reduce the political price of a long and inconclusive war but doesn’t want to pay the political price for losing a war, some kind of compromise division in Afghanistan makes sense. Working out the details will not be an easy task.
The people I’ve talked with may not be a representative sample, but the academics, soldiers, diplomats and journalists I’ve seen so far have all been convinced that the US is on the way out in Afghanistan. If that isn’t the plan, the administration needs to find a way to make its intentions more clear. If the Pakistanis are putting large bets on a quick US withdrawal that isn’t going to happen, there’s a potential for further tension in what is already one of the most prickly alliances we have.
Meanwhile, for the hardcore Mead loyalists out there, the local press is taking some interest in my visit. This story from the Associated Press of Pakistan reports on a presentation I made at the Pakistan Studies Center at Punjab University yesterday. More recently, The News International reported on a speech I gave at GC University in Lahore.