This post is part of an ongoing series preparing for the AEI/CNN/Heritage National Security & Foreign Policy GOP presidential debate on November 22nd. See the rest of the posts here.
Much as the Republican candidates (and, indeed, their incumbent opponent) might desire to wish away the problem of Pakistan, how to deal with the enigmatic nuclear state is likely to be one of their more enduring foreign policy burdens. At the core of the matter are these questions: What are American interests in Pakistan and what are the best means by which to pursue them?
For ten years, the war in Afghanistan has encouraged American presidents to interact with Pakistan with a purely “Af-Pak” mentality. The truth is that Pakistan is, in and of itself, far more important than the war in Afghanistan, or the Haqqani network, or any other single issue that seems to dominate domestic news cycles. Hackneyed but true, Pakistan is a country with a fast-growing nuclear arsenal, 180 million people on the wrong side of a radicalization trend, a hemorrhaging economy, and a safe haven for some of the world’s most virulent regional and international terrorist organizations. The U.S. has enormous interest in ensuring that Pakistan does not fail as a state.
Helping a successful, responsible Pakistani state emerge will go a long way towards neutering many of the dangers emanating from Pakistan, but the result is heavily predicated on whether the United States acknowledges what is in the interests of Pakistan. This means understanding that the welfare and aspirations of Pakistan’s people are of greater importance than the convenience of primarily interacting with, and therefore empowering, Pakistan’s military establishment, or throwing money at Pakistan’s venal political class. The United States might start by suffering through the difficulty of building relationships with facets of the state that seek to bring benefits to the whole rather than the corporatist interests of the few.
At the risk of showing too much cheek, any serious candidate will recognize that a return to the “Presslerism” of the nineties is entirely counterproductive. As cathartic as it may be to cut all ties with Pakistan each time revelations of its intransigence in Afghanistan come to the fore, doing so solves none of the vexations laid out above. At worst, it would compound those problems by diluting America’s ability to influence them. One novel proposal might be, as others have suggested, to employ targeted sanctions against those individuals, soldiers or otherwise, with irrefutable ties to terrorist groups, rather than to impose conditions that would weaken the entire military or impoverish a population with no control over its foreign policy agenda.
What is unambiguous is that U.S. interests in Pakistan are broader than the narrow basis on which interactions currently take place, and that improving the relationship will take more engagement and nuance rather than less. A too-large chunk of America’s foreign policy woes are contingent on how well its leaders (candidates and incumbent alike) understand, and choose to address, these stark realities. At its simplest, all candidates, President Obama included, must be able to explain how they plan on moving beyond a Pakistan “strategy” that is reliant on drone strikes and trying (and failing) to pay off the Pakistanis to do what they don’t want to.
Today, two suicide bombers struck a government office in Mohmand, one of the northernmost districts in Pakistan’s Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), lying approximately 100 miles west of Islamabad. The bombing killed at least 62, wounded more than 100, and damaged dozens of nearby shops, leaving behind a crater five feet deep. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the main group fighting the government in the tribal areas, has taken responsibility for the blast.