I've been keeping a pretty close eye on the cable networks - primarily Fox News and Sun News Network here in Canada - since last Sunday, night when it announced that bin Laden had been taken out in Pakistan. I had a pretty good idea what was coming and I knew that no good could come of it.
If you've paid any attention at all to the networks, you know that their personalities have a much more profound relationship with their goddamn blow dryers than they do with international affairs. As a matter of fact, they're only slightly more informed about the topic than their audience is, and that's only because the audience doesn't have the benefit of a research staff and a teleprompter. As for the political types, they lie. A lot.
When I first saw Geraldo, of all people, first report the rumors that bin Laden had been located and killed in Abbottabad, I found myself thinking "wait for it, wait for it ...."
I didn't have to wait long. First thing Monday morning, every half hour started with the same question from some blond-headed anchorbot: "Should we cut off aid to Pakistan?"
"Great," I thought. "The stupidity is starting to take over, and it's eventually going to bite us directly on the fleshiest part of already ample asses." Stupidity, especially in foreign policy, is a lot like a malignant cancer. If it isn't aggressively countered early, it destroys the systems that keep us fully functional. As the body retards itself, an agonizing death becomes all but inevitable. I'm terrified that this is what's starting to happen with South Asian policy.
One of the thoughts that immediately gripped me upon hearing about the hit on Osama is that it pretty much means the end of the war in Afghanistan. I've supported getting out for since December of 2009, but only because it had by then become crystal clear that the United States and NATO had never taken Afghanistan seriously and never would.
In my opinion, that's a terrible mistake and one that we might live to forget, but the only thing worse than abandoning a war is fighting it by half-measures. And anything less than a full counterinsurgency strategy, complete with approximately 300,000 - 500,000 troops on the ground, is a half measure. If we're going to keep throwing our kids into the meat-grinder of Afghanistan, we had damn well better accomplish something for the trouble.
That's never going to happen, and I can't continue to ask kids in their late teens and early twenties to get dead by the thousands just so that we can lose a little more slowly than we otherwise would. The so-called "light footprint" strategy means that we have to overly rely on bombing, which is contrary to the purpose of counterinsurgency and primarily serves to create even more insurgents. For domestic political reasons, we're never going to have a larger force there than we do now, and that's pretty clearly not enough.
Political support for the war has collapsed over the last three years. And that was with bin Laden alive. Now that he's not, most folks will see 9/11 as having been avenged and the remaining popular support for the Afghan mission will evaporate completely. I'm guessing that it'll take less than six months for it to drop below 20% in the United States.
The death of Osama bin Laden may have the perverse effect of ensuring our ultimate failure in Afghanistan, which means that, yeah, he won. He might not be around for the trophy ceremony, but he achieved his strategic goal of getting the United States bogged down and humiliated in Central and South Asia. Bin Laden saw the Soviet Union beaten and bankrupted in Afghanistan and, although he won't survive to see it, he knew that the United States was headed directly in the same direction.
Having said that, we'll be able to ignore Afghanistan once again, letting it spiral into chaos until it again explodes in our face. That's not true of Pakistan and it never will be. It's simply too dangerous. South Asia makes the Koreas look like the more boring parts of Northern Europe. India and Pakistan have already fought four wars and nearly fought three more since both countries successfully tested nuclear weapons in the late 90s. Unless some sort of strategic accommodation is reached, there will be a full scale nuclear war, sooner rather than later.
With very few exceptions, American foreign policy over the last six decades been conducted on the mistaken premise that everyone shares the same interests with the United States. That's definitely not true in Pakistan and never was. Americans were concerned first about Soviet expansionism, then global terrorism. Pakistan's first, last and only concern is India.
And they aren't wrong, necessarily. Imagine if the Soviet Union was ten times as powerful as the U.S, but was situated where Mexico is and had cut America in half as recently as forty years ago. Do you think that Washington wouldn't be every bit as paranoid as Islamabad is? Now imagine that America's closest and most powerful ally had deepened relations with Moscow and made the unprecedented move of exempting it from the nuclear non-proliferation rules that bind everyone else. Looked at that way, Pakistan's conduct makes infinite sense.
Afghanistan matters to Pakistan only because it provides Islamabad "strategic depth" in the event of an overwhelming Indian invasion. Because the native terror groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan (as opposed to the Arab imports) are primarily Pashtun and tribally allied with the Pakistanis, they aren't Islamabad's primary strategic concern. Their military has been, just as it always was, mostly deployed to the east and south, to deter New Delhi. As long as they face an existential threat with severely limited resources, they have no interest in fighting America's wars - which happen to be against what Pakistan considers strategic assets - for them.
Islamabad has also been down this road with America in Afghanistan before. During the Carter and Reagan administrations, Pakistan was the conduit for American, Saudi and Chinese aid to the anti-Soviet mujaheddin. This was of great benefit to the Pakistanis, in that the aid allowed them to build influence with various groups in Afghanistan and allowed them to build training camps that could later be used in their own anti-Indian campaign in Kashmir. An unknown amount of the Afghan aid (I've seen accounts that put it at as much of half) was diverted to Islamabad's nuclear program.
Well, after the Soviets bugged out, the U.S abandoned Pakistan and imposed nuclear-related sanctions on it. Worse, the Clinton and second Bush administrations moved to strengthen ties with Pakistan's mortal enemy, India, which had been a Soviet ally during the Cold War. From this, Islamabad concluded that Washington cannot be trusted. It shouldn't surprise anyone that events in South Asia truly began to spiral out of control; with the jihad in Kashmir, the nuclear tests, Indo-Pakistani brinksmanship and the ISI's sponsorship of the Taliban, between 1989 and 9/11.
After September 11, Pervez Musharaff rightly concluded that he couldn't overtly obstruct the United States without running the very real risk of being wiped out. But he did know that he could hedge his bets so that Pakistan's options would be preserved when America inevitably betrayed Pakistan again. As we're seeing now, he wasn't entirely wrong.
To understand the situation, you need to understand the political dynamics in Pakistan. Because the threat from India is so grave, the military and ISI don't answer to the civilian government and the population likes it that way. There have also been eight military coups in Pakistan's sixty-five year history, none of which were broadly protested by the people. And if my analogy of the Soviets being on the U.S border was a reality, the same would probably be true of America.
Long story short, Osama bin Laden was able to hide in the suburbs of the Pakistani capital because finding him was far down on the list of Pakistan's national priorities.
The government of Asif Ali Zadari, which succeeded Musharraf's military dictatorship in 2008, is wholly dependent on American aid, but it only has so much room to maneuver with the army and ISI. if Zadari oversteps those bounds in ways that the military thinks compromises Pakistani security, they'll depose him. And if the United States withdraws from the region, abandons Pakistan again, or even tilts further to India, they'll depose him.
Either way, the situation returns to what it was between the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and 9/11. If that happens, the United States will have spent a trillion dollars and thousands of lives for essentially nothing. Within months you'll see exactly the same dominoes lined up exactly the same way, except that this time you won't see Arab terror groups like al-Qaeda threatening American interests, it'll be South Asian groups, trained and armed by the ISI, which will be more dangerous by several degrees of magnitude. And that ignores entirely the possibility that a threatened Iran could seek to expand its influence to their east, just as it has to the west.
Had the United States not abandoned the region after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan 9/11 probably wouldn't have happened. The change in policy set into motion that made the rise of al-Qaeda and the attacks on New York, Washington and Shanksville all but inevitable. And now congressional idiots and cable news ghouls want to do exactly the same thing again.
Put another way, the United States needs Pakistani stability a lot more than Pakistan needs the United States. Hopefully, someone will sit Bill O'Reilly and the Republican congressional caucus down and explain that to them.
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