American Enterprise Institute

January 2, 2008

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

9:45 a.m.	Registration
10:00	Panelists:	Husain Haqqani, Boston University Thomas Donnelly, AEI Michael O'Hanlon, Brookings Institution Danielle Pletka, AEI
	Moderator:	Frederick W. Kagan, AEI
12:00 p.m.	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Frederick W. Kagan:  Ladies and gentlemen, good morning.  Thank you very much for joining us.  Happy New Year to everyone.  Before we go any further, let me ask everyone to please turn off cellphones and pagers and anything that might make noise and disturb our C-Span audience.

I’m very pleased that you could come on short notice.  We have put together this panel of distinguished experts - myself, of course, excluded - to talk about the recent events in Pakistan and to help us think about their implications for American foreign policy.  It is indeed a very distinguished group.  I’m not going to introduce everyone.  You have their biographies in your packets for those of them who you do not know.

I’m just going to make a very brief introductory comment to say in the 1990s people talked about the end of history and the strategic pause and the democratic wave and how we could have peace dividend and stuff, and pretty much go to sleep.  One of the things that the current crisis in Pakistan shows is that history is still going.  Someone hit the strategic play button again and there is going to be no peace dividend for a long time.  This is not a dream or a nightmare that we are going to wake up from, whatever you think of Iraq.  Meteorologists say, “When in drought, predict more drought.”  Strategic analysts might say, “When in crisis, predict more crisis.”  I think that this is something that is going to be with us for a long time in Pakistan and throughout the region.

So without further ado, let me turn first to the task of reminding everyone what our names are.  Thank you, Dany.  I’m sorry.  I’m Fred Kagan from American Enterprise Institute.  Speaking first will be Husain Haqqani, who is a professor at Boston University; then Michael O'Hanlon from the Brookings Institute, and finally, AEI’s own Tom Donnelly.  With that, let me turn it over to Husain.

Husain Haqqani:  Thank you very much.  Let me begin by saying that Pakistan’s crisis is not one that was not predicted.  It is just that people did not listen.  Immediately after 9/11 people like myself started saying that General Musharraf should not be built up into this hero of the war against terror, that he was an ally of convenience.  He was not somebody who really supported the goals of the war against terror.  This was a convenient arrangement for him to receive massive amounts of U.S. aid to bolster himself in power.  And the Pakistani military and intelligence services were part of the problem.  They were not the solution.  They could also be part of the solution, but they were not the solution.

People in Washington D.C. at that time did not want to listen.  I remember in this very room having comments spoken here about two or three years ago, and a lot of skepticism was there.  All the things I was pointing out that the Pakistanis, as a whole, if there was a free and fair election, would vote for either Ms. Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party or Mr. Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League; one center right, one center left.

But it is in Musharraf’s interest to keep propping up the Islamists as a means of milking the U.S. for more and more aid, and that the aid is not solving the problem because there is no trickle-down of F-16s.  So the 65 million people who live below the poverty line are not going to benefit from massive doses of American assistance to the Pakistani military.  The Pakistani military will only become stronger, and there is a history to it.  In the 1950s the Pakistani military came to Washington and said, “We will be your critical allies in the Cold War; you can have bases in Pakistan.”  Then they wriggled out of the bases by saying, “Well, our people do not like the United States.”  Then in the war against the Soviets the Pakistani military and intelligence services, again, received large amounts of aid and we all know that a lot of that aid was diverted for the Pakistani military’s obsessive compulsion with India, and that is where the jihad became more significant.

 Pakistani society as a whole before the anti-Soviet jihad was a conservative tribal, possibly, feudal society.  But that does not matter as far as American policy is concerned.  The U.S. policy should not be about feudalism and tribalism; the societies evolve themselves.  India has evolved pretty well with difficulties with its society’s complications.  Pakistan could have, too, but a lot of people in Washington since the 1950s have thought of the Pakistani military as a Pakistan’s savior.  And in case of General Musharraf, he has a serious savior complex; a man who actually says, “I’m indispensable for my country” is not only impolitic because you do not say that many, many times over.  He has an exaggerated ego.

So right now what is the crisis of Pakistan?  Let me explain it.  Terrorism is rising in Pakistan.  In fact, more assistance is being given to fight terrorism but terrorist incidents are increasing.  Ms. Bhutto is the latest victim of terrorism right in the heart of the garrison city of Rawalpindi, not very far from the general headquarters of the Pakistani military.  Now, I’m not one of those who are -- there are a lot of conspiracy theories being woven but my question about that is, “Think about it.  How can a government whose people do not trust it in a matter as simple as investigating the terrorist murder of the country’s most popular leader -- how can that government have the faith of the people in dealing with the terrorist problem?” 

People suspect the government more than they suspect the terrorists.  Not that that suspicion is true, but the very fact that suspicion exists - I do not know either way if it is true or not - creates a problem, and here is the reason - and I said this to some officials recently.  Everybody in Pakistan who has disagreed with Pakistan’s military intelligence services at some point or another has either been arrested, jailed, imprisoned, tortured, blackmailed, or repressed in some other way.  So the opinions of Pakistani civilians of the Pakistani military intelligence complex cannot be the same as those of visiting generals from the United States and intelligence officers who meet these guys in ornate meeting rooms.  There is a serious deficit of trust within Pakistan.

The number of terrorist deaths in Pakistan in 2006 was 1,471.  In 2005, it had only been 648, so it was doubled.  Now for 2007 the figure is something like 2,300.  So if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, well, with due respect, this pudding does not taste too well.  Terrorism continues to increase with the quantity of aid being increased.  Why is it?

The Pakistani military and intelligence services used the jihadis as a force multiplier in trying to compete with India.  That was the idea.  So the jihadi groups were essentially a means of trying to win Kashmir without actually going directly to war with India.

And Afghanistan was Pakistan’s backyard.  Pakistan wanted it for strategic depth, so the Taliban was a realpolitik move; it was not an ideological move.  Everybody says General Musharraf is a liberal person.  Personally, he probably is secular.  I do not know about the word liberal here but if secular is defined by having a Westernized lifestyle -- but did he consider the Taliban as important for Pakistan’s strategic depth?  Yes, he did.  And after 9/11 he realized that he did not want to have trouble with the United States so he changed the paradigm somewhat.

But throughout 2002 and 2003, we had evidence - and I can request some of you to actually check it - articles online written by none other than yours truly saying that the Taliban were regrouping.  At that time - I do not want to get into this - there were officials saying, “You are just being paranoid.”  Well, guess what?  By 2005, they did regroup and they started becoming a problem for Afghanistan.  Now, some of them have gone totally crazy and they are attacking Pakistani targets, too, and they are attacking the Pakistani military, rightly so.

So how can the problem ever be solved if the Pakistani military will not decide to totally shutdown the jihadi operations that Pakistan itself had supported and the people who supported these operations?  There is a reason here.  If you are an intelligence officer who has been running a jihadi outfit, unless and until the decision is taken that Pakistan will never ever get back into the business of jihad, this officer does not want to break his relationships with these people.  So what he tells them is, “Go disperse.  Do not do anything.”  But he does not demobilize, disarm, and reintegrate them into society. 

Many of these people are ideologically motivated.  They go out of control.  Once you have ideologically motivated someone to wage jihad to change the world, it is not easy; you then have to take on them.  You have to finish them off.  You cannot just turn around and say, “Well, you know what?  These guys should now -- because the General has changed his mind about what our objectives are.”

I have said this many times.  Before they prohibited people from coming into Pakistan’s tribal areas, I once went there and spoke to a tribal chief.  He said, “Look.  A few years ago Pakistan’s officials came to me and said, ‘These guys are mujahideen.  They are holy warriors.  Protect them, look after them.’  Well, I married my daughter to one of them.  He is now my son-in-law.  These guys are now related to me.  They are part of my tribe now.  Now, the same official came to me and said, ‘By the way, these guys are now terrorists.  The Americans are telling us they are terrorists.  The Pakistani government does not take responsibility.’”

Benazir Bhutto’s real credit is that she is the first Pakistani leader since 9/11 to go to the Pakistani people and say, “Terrorism is a threat to Pakistan.”  Forget about all the things that are being said - feudal, tribal, Benazir Bhutto and her husband’s alleged corruption.  On the issue of terrorism she had the courage to speak out to crowds of Pakistanis and tell them, “You know what?  This is our problem.  We have to deal with it.”

So far, one of Musharraf’s biggest weaknesses has been he is telling the Pakistanis, “I’m under a lot of pressure from the Americans to deal with it.”  That does not mobilize the Pakistani public against the terrorists.  That creates a problem as if the terrorists would not be terrorists; they are just nice guys, old-boy jihadis who want to do something for Islam.  Like this tribal chief, they get confused so they do not surrender them even with large amounts of money being offered as reward.

Somebody asked me, “Why does not anybody turn in information about Osama bin Laden with a US$25 to US$50 million reward?”  Well, US$25 million to US$50 million reward does not mean anything to the tribal people; tribal loyalty does.  For them, people do not realize Ayman al-Zawahiri -- one of his wives is from one of the tribes.  That tribe is going to protect him as their son-in-law.

These are things that are missing the detail.  Just insisting on dealing with the Pakistani government and insisting that Musharraf is a great ally -- look, I understand realpolitik enough to understand that the world’s only superpower has to deal with a lot of people who are not necessarily savory characters.  Fair enough.  But if you deal with them deluding yourself that they are the good guys, you have a bigger problem.  That is what has been happening in the case of Pakistan.

I’ll just run quickly through two more facts.  The emphasis of U.S. policy in relation to Pakistan has been supporting the Pakistani military and the Pakistani intelligence services.  Since 1954, Pakistan has received something like US$22 billion in U.S. economic and military assistance.  Almost US$17.7 billion during this period have gone to military regimes in Pakistan, and only US$3.4 billion have gone to civilian regimes in 19 years of civilian rule.  That comes, if you calculate it, that the U.S. has subsidized military rule in Pakistan to the tune of US$600 million per each year of military rule, and provided only US$181 million of aid under civilian rule.

I’m not making a case for more aid if Pakistan has a civilian government.  This discussion is not about aid.  It is about understanding why the Pakistani military and the intelligence services have so much control over Pakistan because the first question given to me was, “Who controls Pakistan?”  The Pakistani military intelligence services control Pakistan to the extent that they can, and now the jihadis and assorted militias, et cetera, are controlling those parts of the country that the military and intelligence services cannot.

What Pakistan needs is a strong military, but a strong military that does not run covert operations and is not out of control - a strong military that is under civilian control.  As far as Pakistan’s politics is concerned, Pakistan still has a mainstream.  Ms. Bhutto represented that mainstream; Mr. Nawaz Sharif represents that mainstream.  Those people who say they are divisive -- well, with due respect, I have been in this country seven years; they are no worse than the Republicans and the Democrats.  That is the way of politics.

When people say they are corrupt, why is it anybody’s business in the United States to start measuring people’s corruption?  We will never even find out about Musharraf and the military’s corruption because they keep things closer to their chest and they do not allow anybody to reveal their corruption.

I think those are not the issues.  The issues are Pakistan’s security and making sure that Pakistan does not remain a safe haven for the jihadists.  And for that Pakistan needs a strong government, a civilian government that has control over the military and the intelligence services and that makes the turnaround from the jihadi past to a future in which Pakistan enters the stage of modernity.

Can that happen?  Absolutely.  The one thing the Pakistani military does not want is a break with the United States.  U.S. aid is important to the Pakistani military.  U.S. support is important.  There are people in the Pakistani military who would rather have U.S. assistance than not have it.  So instead of just pandering to them, if the U.S. actually tells them that, “We are on to what you do,” and believe some of the things that Pakistani civilians say instead of being cynical about all of us, then I think there is hope.

The parliamentary elections are likely to be postponed by General Musharraf but the U.S. response should not be the usual State Department spokesman’s statement: “We have faith in General Musharraf.”  They had faith in General Musharraf on every occasion.  He rigs an election, they say, “Well, that was the past.  We look forward to the future.”  I think that has to stop.  I think it is time to ask critical questions and recognize that while General Musharraf is an American ally, he is a flawed ally.  Pakistan’s politicians and how flawed they are is said everyday.  I think it is about time to point out how flawed the military intelligence complex that runs Pakistan is.  Thank you very much.

Michael O'Hanlon:  Thank you all for the chance to be here and thank you, Fred, for the introduction.  I’m looking forward to the conversation.  I just have a few brief points to make about military options because, thankfully, Fred has allowed me to speak first on this subject and, therefore, I have the easier job of saying which options we do not have, and Tom Donnelly and others may have to wrestle, therefore, with some of the policy options that we will have to find.

Fred and I wrote a couple of months ago a short op-ed based on a longer paper we had done together previously.  We tried to examine some of the ways in which the United States and the international community might consider various kinds of extreme measures, not under current circumstances but in the event of much worse circumstances in which Pakistan seems to be really on the verge of collapse or its nuclear weapons seem to be in direct risk of being taken by the wrong people.

Let me underscore, because our argument has been misinterpreted or misread by some:  We do not envision and did not argue for any unilateral American options even under the dire circumstances that we discussed in our papers.  So the question here is what can you do as part of a coalition that would be international in flavor and working with an element of the Pakistani government that was still able to control circumstances but was seeing itself losing control as time went on?  We do not think there are.  At least, I certainly do not - I do not think Fred does either - believe there are any unilateral options that are practical.

By the way, again, to underscore what I’m talking about, this is not an option for tomorrow or next month, anyway.  I’m presuming a sequence of events that leaves us in a much worse place in Pakistan.  This is not very likely and not meant to be a prediction in any way but simply an examination of options.

So let me just give a couple of rules of thumb, and that is probably the simplest way for me to just be concise and to the point, and not sound like I’m fear-mongering about a scenario that I consider very unlikely.  But just a couple of rules of thumb that drive home the limitations of what our options would be even in the event things get much worse and we feel we have to consider worse case extreme options.

As you know, Pakistan has about 160 million people in its population; that is six times the size of Iraq.  In Iraq we had a debate, which I think has been conclusively resolved in favor of the Shinseki-Kagan-Krepinevich-Pollack camp, that we should have had a lot more people to begin with in Iraq, and that meant probably 300,000 or more people.  Multiply that by six for Pakistan because the way you size these sort of operations is relative to the population you are trying to help protect.  And you are talking about an operation that would require 2 million troops if you want to presuppose the possibility of a collapsed Pakistan that can no longer in any way hold itself together and needs to have stability restored to prevent threats to its nuclear weapons and general chaos.

In other words, it is not an option.  We do not have two million people in the entire U.S. Armed Forces.  We only have about, in fact, one million people in the entire Army, including every reservist we have got.  Even if you add in the Marine Corps we are just over 1.2 million and, moreover, there is the little problem of getting there, which is for Pakistan a daunting proposition - it is very far away; it is a complex terrain.  And I’m not even factoring in the fact that we are tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

But the basic logistics of moving even a few hundred thousand people across the oceans and into a place where they could help restore order means several months’ time would elapse at a bare minimum.  And during that several months whatever crisis that we presupposed to even initiate this conversation would have been able to run its course and get worse without any role for the international community.

So if we are ever going to be involved in helping Pakistan increase stability in certain parts of its territory, it is going to have to be at the active invitation of the Pakistani government with Pakistan’s expressed desire and need for help being acknowledged.  And moreover, building on my previous panelist’s comments, given the state of anti-Americanism in Pakistan, it is going to have to be part of an international coalition, not something that the United States just does as a friend.

So even if you want to go down this route of worst-case scenarios, I do not see any militarily practical means, leaving aside the political desirability, of us doing a whole lot in Pakistan to restore stability.  This is in the end going to have to be something where we work with a major element of the Pakistani government.  Whoever may represent that government at a given moment in time, whatever our policy is towards President Musharraf and others, we are going to have to work with Pakistanis to solve whatever kind of crisis may result down the road.

Just one more word about the nuclear weapons themselves - and here, of course, those of you who follow this issue know that Pakistan is believed to have roughly 50 nuclear weapons; plus or minus, no one knows, of course.  Nuclear weapons are small, about this size.  They are a little bit heavy typically -- not necessarily.  But they usually weigh a few hundred kilograms, so it is hard to cart them around but it is not hard to drive them around in small vehicles.  Therefore, it is very easy to hide them.  It is just as well because if the Pakistanis thought we were scheming to try to go after their nuclear weapons to prevent the possibility of a worst-case, they would be quite put out, to put it mildly, and they would take various measures like distributing those warheads even more than they already have.  So we do not really want to encourage this line of reasoning within the Pakistani military.

I think we are better off with the policy the United States government reportedly has had for a number of years which is, even though we are against the Pakistani nuclear arsenal existing in the first place, to quietly work with the Pakistanis to improve their procedures, their safeguards for making sure these warheads are well-secured; the people looking after them are properly vetted.

Ideally - and I think is the case - the fissile material is separate from the delivery vehicle, maybe, even separate from the rest of the bomb in all likelihood.  So these things may be quickly installable in whatever kind of platform is needed to deliver them.  But, day-to-day, they are not actually in a position where they could be easily confiscated and misused.  And I think there are probably at a half dozen sites around the country; these are the kinds of numbers we hear. 

That is probably about the right balance or at least the most realistic thing you could hope because Pakistan, the way any nation state would under these circumstances, is worried about preserving what it sees as a critical element of its national security resources.  So they do not want to have all their nuclear capability in one place where, in theory, it could be uncovered and destroyed by a foreign power.  They want to distribute it somewhat but we want to make sure they do not distribute these weapons too much and they do not want to either and, therefore, they are probably in about a half-dozen places.

But we do not really know where those half dozen places are.  Therefore, even if we wanted to envision in a worst-case down the road the possibility of confiscating or destroying these weapons in place as a unilateral military action by the United States, we could not.  And I do not think this is a viable proposition for American national security policy.

So the most plausible thing, even in a worst-case, even if you are looking at scenarios that are less than 10 percent, probably less than five percent likely, the most plausible thing we could do would be to work with the Pakistani Elite Special Forces to help them secure their nuclear materials.  If they thought things were so bad, they needed to plead for that additional help, and this could be American Special Forces being deployed to the existing locations where those nuclear materials are held.  Or it could be our working with Pakistan’s armed forces to move those somewhere else out of whatever trouble zone might become the subject of future chaos in Pakistan, out to a more secure, more remote location where they would be jointly guarded by international and Pakistani forces.

You can see I’m living in the world of Tom Clancy.  It is just I do not have the talent of Tom Clancy so I apologize for going down this route but this is the kind of scenario that people want to ask about.  It is the kind of scenario that raises the question of an American military response.  But even under these extreme circumstances it is very hard to see how we do it unilaterally.  The Pakistanis are not going to want to ask for help unless things are remarkably bad from their point of view and they cannot see any other recourse.

So what I have hopefully accomplished in 10 minutes is to convince you that my part of the presentation is the least important part of the panel today because these are really not the practical policy options that we have.  Also, let’s pray to heaven that we are not going to even need to consider scenarios that are nearly bad enough to even raise this specter.  I hope we can prevent the crisis working with our Pakistani friends from getting worse to the point where these extremely remote and undesirable scenarios are even on the table.  Thank you.

Thomas Donnelly:  Michael, I do not know quite how to follow that and the transition from Husain’s presentation and Michael’s presentation to Dany’s.  But I have a couple of issues that I think are worth keeping in mind as the larger frame of reference as we try to work our way forward in the immediate crisis that we find ourselves in at the moment.

I would want to pick up on a point that Husain made about the nature of General Musharraf, the Pakistani army, and Pakistan as a partner, not only in the so-called war on terror but in the larger geostrategic moment that we find ourselves in.  A good point of departure was a speech little covered in this country, but after Richard Armitage jabbed his finger in General Musharraf’s chest and told him that if we did not get access for the invasion of Afghanistan, that things might not go well for the Pakistanis. 

General Musharraf came out and spoke to the Pakistani people to prepare them for this and he said, “Look.  We have to hold our noses” - I’m paraphrasing here - “We have to accept this but we have to remember that this is necessary to preserve our long-term strategic interest.”  By which, he meant, and to which you referred to the struggle in Kashmir and the possession of nuclear weapons, which I thought was indicative of what Pakistan’s own perceptions of its strategic interests are and, importantly, the army’s perception of Pakistan’s strategic interests, which may not be quite the same thing as the people’s perceptions of what the country’s interests are. 

Because part of the story of Pakistan almost from the beginning has been the role of the army in domestic politics and the desire not only of the army but, for want of a better term, the Punjabi elite’s desire to maintain their favored position inside a society that was kind of invented or cooked up under crisis circumstances to begin with.  In many ways Pakistan is a country that has never known an extended period of normalcy but has simply lurched from crisis to crisis in a way that makes you think that, in fact, it is not a crisis.  But I really would be worried that what we are seeing at the moment is an acceleration of what has been a long-term decline of the state of Pakistan that goes almost back to the founding of the state.

Again, I will not go into this in excruciating detail.  I do not pretend to be a deeply literate South Asia or Pakistani expert but what I have read is enough to make me quite nervous.  There have been three or four coups, depending on how you count them over the course of Pakistan’s history.  Pakistan, you might say, is a state that has not known very much strategic success.  It has been a state that has retracted -- it is a lot smaller than it used to be.  Remember, there used to be an East Pakistan which we now know as Bangladesh.  It has been at war with India several times.

This is, I would say, the central issue that drives everything that the Pakistani army does, and because the Pakistani army basically controls or has control of the Pakistani state.  It explains a lot of Pakistan’s behavior over the last five decades, this fear of Hindu domination and also the internal struggle of the Punjabis to maintain their favored role inside Pakistan.  Again, to deconstruct that or go through it in detail is beyond the scope of the time that I have allotted to me. 

But as we go forward these are things that we need to keep in mind in order to understand what is happening inside Pakistan.  And as we try to adjust American policy to take account of this, these things are really, arguably, much more important than the immediate crisis, which, I would say is, again, a manifestation of a long-term decline, not a discrete event in and of itself.

I want to talk a little bit more about the nature of the Pakistani military and, particularly, the Pakistani Army and the need for change and, also, the changing role that the army has played through the years.

Again, the army -- its long-term rationale has been as a defender of the state against India.  It is interesting to read, particularly, the observation of Westerners and, particularly, American military officers who have had experience with Pakistani commanders.  I would refer you, particularly, to Tommy Franks’ memoir, which is just embarrassing the way it gushes over General Musharraf; they looked into one another’s eyes and as brother military officers they had an understanding that political interference in military affairs was a bad idea. 

But the idea that that kind of exchange could not occur without American military officers fundamentally understanding the difference between themselves and their Pakistani interlocutors is a little bit disturbing.  It continues to this day and it is something that we should guard against going forward.  The Pakistani military is a relatively, at least by regional standards -- has many Western aspects to it; Western roots; a good deal of British influence.  But that does not mean that it is the same kind of institution as a Western army is, both in a political sense but also in a military sense.  It is, however, a force that has been designed primarily for what we would describe as regular or conventional operations.

Number one, the military mission is to be able to prosecute a large-scale war against India.  Our military aid has only exacerbated that tendency over the course of the years, and it means that in some senses the Pakistani Army is a terrible counterinsurgency force, and we are making this worse rather than better.  As Husain says, the original relationship between the Army and the jihadis was to create a force multiplier for the fight in Kashmir because the Indians were much better and adapted more rapidly to the nature of the fighting in Kashmir, and the Pakistanis were suffering significant setbacks and the army was not very interested, actually, in doing the kind of -- on the political side of things but also on the tactical side of things.

So fighting in Kashmir is not something that the Pakistani Army really wanted to do in the sense that our conventional forces were reluctant to commit themselves to the counterinsurgency nature of Iraq and Afghanistan.  We see that that continues in the recent campaigns in the northwest frontier and in Baluchistan and elsewhere in the mountains where the Pakistani Army has suffered repeated defeats, a lot of casualties, and, most disturbingly, many of its units have simply surrendered.

The Pakistani army has long been a largely Pashtun and Punjabi force with a largely Pashtun-enlisted force and an excessively Punjabi officer corps.  What we are seeing in recent operations, or what I would be particularly worried about, is that the Pashtuns are less willing, particularly, in those Pashtun areas along the border to fight for the state against, as Husain suggests, their family members and their tribalists.  In fact, fully 20 percent of the Pakistani army is of Pashtun background.

So although we look at the Pakistani Army as a “secular institution” in Pakistani society, the story is really a lot more complicated than that.  And thus, going forward, our partnership with the Pakistani Army is just as problematic on a military-to-military basis as it is on a political basis.  So I would suggest that although we have given a huge amount of military aid to the Pakistani Army, it has been entirely the wrong kind of aid. 

The first thing we could do is stop selling F-16s to Pakistan not only because Pakistan needs other kinds of aid but because, as military aid, this is aid that exacerbates the worst tendencies of the Pakistani military and does not help them at all in the missions that we are most interested in and, in fact, are most crucial for the army to perform to regain any legitimacy and to help the Pakistani state regain a sense of legitimacy.

Further, I would say that the balance of military and the correlation of political forces in Afghanistan appear to be swinging away from the army toward the insurgents.  It is not just that the army is incapable or unwilling to project power into the remote regions; it is that the insurgents -- by which, I mean the Islamists, most broadly the Taliban and al-Qaeda, all of which are in some sort of a shifting but loose -- a pretty consistent alliance.  They have the ability to disrupt Pakistani life in the central region of the country.  That is deeply worrisome and it is also exacerbating other localist -- or the long repressed desires of the Baluch and the Sindhis.  The dissatisfaction with domination from Islamabad is also a factor that comes into play here.

So, internally, things are really in a mess and I would really be concerned that, again, we have been so conditioned to go to react to crisis after crisis in Pakistan -- is that we are missing the long-term pattern that really represents a more serious decline.

Finally, we have to think about not only the nuclear weapons, as Michael suggested, but that Pakistan’s strategic importance remains high.  The only thing worse than continuing to engage Pakistan, or trying to influence things internally, is to pull away.  We did have some experience with that during the 1990s, and that is when the Chinese moved in and sold them missiles and helped A.Q. Khan accelerate the nuclear program.  And I would worry that not only is China today in a much more advantageous position; its interest in Pakistan, particularly in things like the port at Gwadar and elsewhere, is quite high.

And not only the Chinese but the Iranians and, certainly, the Russians would be willing to sell -- if we are unwilling to sell F-16s, the Russians would offer pretty good terms for SU-30s and other things that, again, would not help the Pakistani military in its counterinsurgency mission but would certainly be the kind of things that the Pakistani military would want.

So I would just say, as a way of trying to step back a moment and consider American interest as we go forward, to take the longer term considerations into the balance as well as short-term.  If this turns out to be yet another contest between the desire for liberty and the desire for stability, we will end up sacrificing both as we have done so frequently in the past.

Pakistan is almost the poster child for President Bush’s assertion that the pursuit of stability has given us neither stability nor advanced the cause of liberty across the Islamic world.  The danger is -- and as one listens to the sort of conventional wisdom that is emerging in the wake of Mrs. Bhutto’s assassination, it seems to me we are very perilously close to heading down that road again.  So I will conclude there.

Danielle Pletka:  Thank you, Tom.  I would like to talk a little bit about American foreign policy.  Everybody has alluded to the problems that we face, but I would like to just go into a little bit more depth.  First of all, though, let me just say a word.  Benazir Bhutto sat here with us just a very few months ago, talking about some of these issues.  She has had a mixed career, certainly, and was loved by many and hated by many, as well.  Certainly, from our standpoint and from the standpoint of, I think, all Americans we were very sorry to see her assassination for everybody in Pakistan.  It was not to be desired or hoped for, a great loss to her family and to her party.  So with that --

As you look back historically over the U.S. relationship with Pakistan that my colleagues have reviewed, what you see, really, is, I think, what we could call a classic love-hate relationship, not something, by the way, that is ever desirable in foreign policy.  In the 1980s, everybody will remember that Pakistan was a vital ally of ours in the battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan.  Whether or not they played an entirely constructive role -- and I think we can safely argue that they did not; at the same time they were an indispensable and an important ally.  And from the standpoint of American foreign policy, they could do no wrong and they did not, so we loved them. 

But, then, that battle ended victorious although, perhaps, in retrospect, not entirely victorious.  But still, victorious on balance and a great loss for the Soviet Union, the final nail on the coffin of the Evil Empire.  And so Pakistan became, let’s just say, dispensable; all of a sudden we noticed that Pakistan was in violation of the Pressler Amendment, which, at that point suggested that had they loaded nuclear material into a core and that they would no longer be allowed to receive U.S. aid.  So, whoops, from one day to the next we noticed that they were, yes, in violation of the Pressler Amendment; we cut off all assistance. 

By the way, it was at that moment that the F-16 question attained somewhat iconic status in the Pakistani-American relationship.  We stopped delivery of these F-16s and it has been the central talking point of every single Pakistani leader since then, no matter which party that leader belonged to.  So in the 1990s, they were really intransigent and proliferators.  We were very concerned about their purchases of missiles from China; we were very concerned about their purchases of nuclear weapons parts and centrifuge materials from China.  And we were very cross with them and, by gosh, we were going to show it.  So they were bad guys.

After 9/11 and the infamous visit from then-Deputy Secretary of State Armitage, Pakistan once again made a good decision to work with the United States and, gosh, yes, we loved them again.  They were indispensable and, in fact, Deputy Secretary of State Negroponte recently referred to Musharraf as an indispensable ally.  So it has really been a bipolar relationship and we are back on the good side of the mood swings.  The truth, of course, is much more nuanced and the fact is that while Pakistan is a very important ally, they are also a very problematic ally.

What we have done, though, in our foreign policy is allow the Pakistanis, no matter, again, of what political or military stripe, to believe that they can play it both ways.  That as long as we like them it does not matter what they do, and when we do not like them it does not matter what they do right.  That is a bad message to send to any country; it has been particularly bad vis-à-vis Pakistan but it is a lesson that they have learned very clearly and that they cling to. 

“So we can have our nuclear weapons.  We can buy spare parts.  We can buy advanced missiles.  We can test them.  We can even proliferate when we are in your good graces.  And when we were in your bad graces, it does not matter what we do right.  We could fight al-Qaeda.  We could stop funding.  We could behave properly in Kashmir.  We could act nicely towards the Indians.  It would not matter because we cannot get back into your good graces.”  It sounds like grade school, and I’m afraid that I’m not really dumbing this down.  That has been our foreign policy and I think that is truly how the Pakistanis, in many discussions with them, read it.

What is in American interests?  That should be the question, first and foremost.  And as all of my colleagues have said, our interest definitely is in a stable Pakistan.  The question is:  What achieves a stable Pakistan, not in the short-term, not in the expedient moment, but in the long-term?  I thought it would be of interest to just review to our audience for a moment, the kind of assistance that we have provided to Pakistan just since 2002 - but I think the more apt way to say it would be since 9/11.

Since 2002, according to Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Rick Boucher, we have provided economic assistance to Pakistan totalling US$2.4 billion.  He adds that fighting terrorism is a preeminent goal of our foreign policy, so we have also provided security assistance to Pakistan since that time of US$1.9 billion, including US$1.2 billion in foreign military financing, US$244 million in State Department counter-narcotics funding, US$87 million in Department of Defense counter-narcotics funding, and US$37 million in counter terrorism funding.  In addition, he notes at the end of this long list, we have provided US$5.3 billion in coalition support funds to reimburse Pakistan for expenses incurred in the war on terror. 

I would say, on balance, reviewing things, we have not gotten very good value for our money if what we are trying to purchase is reliable support in our war on al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism.  To the contrary, I think the Pakistanis, again, playing it both ways, have taken our money with one hand and continued, actually, to pass some of it to others in al-Qaeda and within the Taliban for other purposes.

So how do we get there?  The first is to end this bipolar mood swing of foreign policy and to step back for a moment and ask ourselves some serious questions.  Running from threats from the deputy secretary of state, as appealing as that story was, to great aid programs to complete anger and ignorance is not the way to go forward.  We need a Pakistan with a stable government.  And the truth is that over the years with our aid, we have done very little to ensure that kind of stable government. 

We have not directed our aid towards deepening civil society inside Pakistan.  We have not done very much to ensure party-building, to ensure grassroots or, indeed, to do very much to ensure that the Pakistani government that is the recipient of so much munificence -- and by this I include Benazir Bhutto’s government and Nawaz Sharif’s governments, and we can go back to Zia ul Haq. 

We have not done very much to ensure that that wealth is in any way equitably distributed throughout Pakistan, which is another problem where I think we have seen discrepancies between the successful or the wealthy and the very poor grow deeper rather than less so.  The answer, of course, when Musharraf is doing the wrong thing, as I think some within the Bush administration have begun to suspect a little bit, is not to turn to Benazir Bhutto and say, “Aha!  Okay.  Well, you will make him do the right thing.  We will talk to him and then you can go back.  Then, we will have party and we will have an election and, by gosh and golly, we will go forward again and things will start to look a lot like the 1990s.”  This is not a desirable foreign policy and, frankly, not a desirable political outcome either.

I think that if you want to get a sense of the thinness of the Pakistani political dramatis persona, all you need to do is look at the fact that after Benazir was assassinated, who came to power within the Pakistan Peoples Party?  Was it the guy waiting in the wings, the people who have been toiling at home while she lives in exile?  No, it was not.  I could not tell you who those people were, by the way, because they are not front and center in either American minds or, unfortunately enough, in the minds of the Pakistani people.  Instead, it is her son who is 19-years old.

This is, again, not a genuine democratic political system, and this is not a deep political party.  That is not a good outcome.

I think that in the wake of, unfortunately, her assassination, what we have seen, instead, is this tendency towards hagiography, which remembers her tenure as Pakistani prime minister as an extraordinarily positive and successful one.  Let me remind everybody it was not; this was not a good time in Pakistani history; she was not a good prime minister.

It may well be that after years in exile a lot of important lessons were learned.  In talking to her, I certainly believed that she did learn a lot of important lessons.  But let us not forget that at the time that she was prime minister as, indeed, Nawaz Sharif was prime minister, there was immense corruption;  there was proliferation; there were problems with support for Islamic extremists, and worse.

If we want one tiny vignette to illustrate to us the problems that we see, let us look at that of A.Q. Khan who has not been mentioned today.  But A.Q. Khan ran what was probably the most dangerous, most serious proliferation network, the one that provided - we know and we do not know a great deal - the one that we know provided nuclear materiel, technology and more to North Korea, to Libya, and to Iran.  We suspect that a great amount is out there that we know very little about because we have had no direct access to A.Q. Khan; he lives under “house arrest” inside Pakistan where in many ways he remains a hero. 

This should be illustrative to us of the problem in our relationship.

So what should we do?  Aid should be directed to a purpose.  That purpose should be to deepen civil society within Pakistan.  It should be to bring the kind of stability that derives from a more robust democratic system.  It should be directed towards reform of the education system.  It should be directed towards reform of the financial system.  It should be directed towards all of the things that create the genuine underpinnings of a successful and a stable society, rather than the genuine underpinnings of a successful and stable leader.

We should reassure the Pakistanis that we have brought to an end this bipolar relationship where, in fact, they should not begin to suspect that two years from now if they look a little funny at us or they do something that displeases us a little bit, the relationship will be over and we will instantaneously cut off all military education, military supplies, and aid because that is not the right way to go forward.

I think that if you look back at the last two years, what you see is that, it is their fear that the United States has begun to withdraw once again, ultimately, headed towards cutting them off that has caused them to re-engage falsely and, I think, strategically, a miscalculation from their standpoint but has caused them to reengage once again with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.  It is what has caused them, again, to begin to interfere in Afghanistan in a way that is extraordinarily pernicious not just to Afghan stability but to the safety and security of our own troops in Afghanistan.

I think that we need to reassure them that when we see NATO operating in Afghanistan it is not an excuse for the United States to step back but merely the operations of an ally and that we will be stepping back up as necessary in Afghanistan, and I think we see that all is quite necessary right now.

We do need to make clear to them that we are aware of the game that they are playing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.  That, in fact, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are in many ways one and the same from our standpoint and that any support that they provide for them, whether it is junior officers or people not accountable to the intelligence directors or to the head of the military -- that we are aware of it and that we want it to stop.  Because, number one, we are aware of it and, number two, we have not made clear to them that it must stop, and that it must stop immediately.  We need to tell them that they must cease their destabilization of Afghanistan forthwith.

Again, this cannot be a kind of discussion in which we say, “We are a little bit worried.  We kind of see that you might not be doing enough.”  No.  We are aware that they are doing this, and I can assure you that the U.S. military is well aware that they are doing it, and it must come to an end.  They have a choice - they can provide support to extremist groups; they can provide support to the education that extremists provide throughout Pakistan.  Or they can perceive assistance from the United States in that regard.

We should make that choice very clear but we should not say that our aid comes without any strings attached.  We should demand an accountable government; we should demand more support for Civil Society, including through our own foreign service and our own diplomats who operate in Pakistan, very much in my view in a vacuum.  And we should do everything possible to support their military operations against extremists and I think that a lot more can be done in that regard.

I want to just say one last quick word and I think I have gone a little bit over my time.  I want to say one last quick word about al-Qaeda, and that is that what we have seen is that they are a failure and we should make no mistake; it is a failure and a defeat in Iraq -- has driven them back to South Asia.  There is ample evidence for that in al-Qaeda’s own writings and in their own discussions about their strategic situation.  We have seen interesting pleas for money and for support for them that they have had to ask for since they were driven out of Iraq.  The place that they are looking for that is through their base of operations in the Pakistani tribal areas and in Southern Afghanistan.

We should recognize that it should not require another 9/11 for us to wake up and suggest that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with forthrightly, enthusiastically, and forthwith.  Thank you.

Frederick W. Kagan:  Thank you, Dany.  And I thank all of the panelists.  Let me crave your indulgence for just a couple of points that have to come to mind as I have listened to these presentations, going from most specific to most general.

As a rule of thumb, anyone who talks to you about this problem as though it is a border problem fundamentally does not understand what the problem is or wants you not to understand what the problem is.  And I mention this because I have been disturbed by hearing this from Pakistanis, among others, that, “Yes, we have a significant problem of border control.”

For Pakistan, this is not a border problem.  When you have terrorists and insurgent training camps in your country targeting your people and neighboring countries, your problem is not that your border controls are not working; your problem is that your counterinsurgency forces are not working.  I think Tom made that point very well.  At any time that you have hundreds of prisoners being taken by these kinds of guys, there is something fundamentally wrong with the approach that you are taking.  And it demonstrates, I think, a fundamental lack of will to deal with the problem head-on on the part of the Afghan military.

Which leads me to the second point:  I think that we have created a perverse incentive for the Pakistani military.  As long as there continues to be a terrorist threat in Pakistan, we are interested in Pakistan; I think Dany made this point very well.  And as long as we are interested in Pakistan, then we provide support to Pakistan. 

If I’m the Pakistani military and I say, “What is it in for me to make my life go smoothly for as long as possible,” I say, “Well, you can keep the terrorist threat simmering for as long as I can and the Americans will keep being interested and the aid will keep coming and we will tell them we need F-16s or we will not do anything.  Then we get what we want and everybody’s happy.”  Right up until you get to the next 9/11 and then we have a catastrophe.  But I think, as Tom pointed out, unfortunately, Pakistan over its history has a tendency not really to think these strategic issues through to their logical conclusions.

I think we owe it to them to help them think this through a little bit more clearly and make sure that we are not, in fact, incentivizing the Pakistani military intelligence complex to maintain a threat that we would like them, actually, to deal with and make go away. 

I think another point that emerged very clearly from Michael’s presentation is that what we want to do is avoid getting to situations where we face a menu of nightmare scenarios from which to choose.  This has been a problem in American policy as it is for many democracies in many states over history that we prefer to pretend the problems will resolve themselves for as long as possible. 

As Dany said, we will send Benazir back in and she will get things straightened out and then we can go back to paying no attention to Pakistan, which is what we fundamentally want to do.  We need to get beyond that.  Bipolar is one way to describe it; I think, fundamentally, we have a bad case of foreign policy ADD.

I’m not sure what the Ritalin is for our particular condition but we need to find it and take lots of it.  Because we have to stop the extremely fitful and incoherent interventions that we have been making throughout the Muslim world for decades and understand that we have to track these problems on a continuous basis, and we have to know who the players are and what they are doing.  Because one of the reasons the Pakistani military intelligence complex has been able to get away with this is because we do not pay attention for long periods of time.  And then a problem comes up and we go back to them and who do we go back to?  Well, we go back to these guys and they spin us whatever tale of woe they are going to spin us.  And since we have not been paying attention, we pretty much take their word for it.  We have to move beyond that. 

We have to understand that paying attention to major important problematic regions of the world continuously is something that America needs to do right now for its own interest and for the foreseeable future.  That brings me to my last point, which is an advertisement.  In the interest of helping us concentrate on these issues, AEI will be running an Afghanistan planning group exercise in late February, but the name masks the scope of the enterprise; we recognize that even more than Iraq, Afghanistan is a regional problem.  So we will also be considering the views and issues of Afghanistan’s neighbors in that.  Stay tuned for further announcements.

With that, we will turn it over to your questions.  The usual AEI rules apply.  Wait for the microphones, state your name and ask a question.

Male Voice:  Thank you, sir.  [indiscernible] from India [indiscernible].  First of all, Happy New Year.  As far as the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, I think she was the Indira Gandhi of Pakistan and is a great loss for their democracy in Pakistan, which General Musharraf never wanted and, still, I do not think he wants anything beyond a military rule.  My question is that do you have any message for President Bush or Dr. Condoleezza Rice that anybody misleading them you think as far as the U.S. foreign policy in Pakistan is concerned?  And do you think that, now, the elections, which has been almost postponed, will ever take place or ever during General Musharraf -- any democratic rule will come in Pakistan?

Husain Haqqani:  I do not think it is my place to say who might be misleading the direction of U.S. foreign policy.  It is a very complex process and misleading takes place from all directions.  Two or three quick things about the internal situation - it is very clear that Mrs. Bhutto’s assassination has created a sympathy wave for the Pakistan People’s Party.  And while I agree that political leadership should be experienced, mature politicians, South Asia has a long tradition of what I call the sentimental dimension of politics; when Indira Gandhi was assassinated her son stepped in.  It did not do too badly.  We can criticize any government but as a system India moved ahead with a system.

Pakistan has not had a system.  So, therefore, I think if Pakistan has normal political transitions, young Bilawal Zardari can lead the Pakistan People’s Party to victory, and the elder statesmen of the People’s Party will take over the government and run it to the best of their abilities.  The civilian governments have a got a bum rap in my opinion.  We forget that in 1990 the Pressler sanctions came into place.  So while Benazir Bhutto’s first government got American aid, her second government and Nawaz Sharif’s two governments actually operated under sanctions. 

So this is an unfair comparison, comparing Musharraf performance with billions of dollars of aid not only from the U.S. but from other Western allies coming in and the civilian governments.  They worked okay under the circumstances; it is just that Washington did not learn about the complexities.  Being a civilian at that time working in government, I know what difficulties we worked under.  The Pakistani military intelligence complex always creates problems for civilians.

And because of the military-to-military relationship, just as Tommy Franks was gushing, read Anthony Zinni.  And he talks about how Musharraf picked up the phone.  Musharraf made the first phone call to General Zinni after taking over in 1999.  Both say that in their respective books; both confirm it.  Why should the Pakistani military chief call the CENTCOM commander rather than calling the chief justice, or calling the speaker of the assembly or somebody inside Pakistan?  Because the way it really works is that there is this military-to-military relationship, which I think is important and precious.  It is important.

Pakistan does need a military but does Pakistan need military rule?  Can we have a phase in which Pakistan’s military intelligence complex can actually be subjected to some accountability at all?  Benazir Bhutto’s assassination provides such an opportunity.  The forensic evidence was washed out within an hour; fire trucks came in, hosed it all down.  The request for the 18th October attack that there should an FBI-Scotland Yard involvement was not accepted.  Now I just saw on my BlackBerry - I cheated, by the way, because I wanted to read - Musharraf was making a speech so I just wanted to see what he said. 

He said two things; he is postponing the election to the 17th of February because he wants the sympathy wave to subside.  He still wants his party to be the single largest party rather than one of the opposition parties.  The other thing he said was, “We will welcome external investigators now, but we will control the investigation.”  But the truth is what investigation can take place now when the forensic evidence has been washed out?  No witnesses have been interviewed, and the intelligence services are going to intimidate any witnesses into changing their statements.

So the very fact that Pakistan has a state apparatus that does not tell the truth is something that the U.S. has to take into account.  I keep saying this:  Do business with Musharraf - I said this for five or six years - but do it while recognizing that you are not doing business with someone who tells it straight to you.  If you can figure that out then, maybe, there is potential for them.

I think the U.S. should press for elections.  I think they should not only press for elections; they should press for totally free and fair elections that are open to international monitors who can conduct exit polls and spot checks because those were the two things that Musharraf was not going to allow.  And the international community should ensure that the election takes place. 

Look.  Let the people of Pakistan decide what kind of government they want, and the military has a place.  Of course, it has a place.  But the military, because of its narrow vision of things, does not understand the complexities of the society it is presiding over.  Pakistan has too many ethnic fissures, religious secular divide.  It has now a big civil military gap. 

In the IRI polls -- the International Republican Institute has conducted polls at two-month intervals.  November was the first time that the Pakistan miliary had a favorable rating of only 55 percent, down from 80 percent.  I bet you that after Ms. Bhutto’s assassination, it has gone down from 50 percent.  It is not good for Pakistan also.  The Pakistan military should be respected by Pakistanis.  So if Musharraf is causing the Pakistanis not to respect the Pakistani military, then the United States has a problem because that military is the military that has to fight the insurgents.

Danielle Pletka:  I agree with much of what Husain said.  I just do want to make one caution and that is when we look at liberalization in the developing world -- if I may steal a phrase from the president: “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”  While I recognize that all of these foreign cultures are very exciting and different and that people do wear interesting outfits and, gosh, you know, family and tribe makes a big difference, at the end of the day I think that ideas actually matter to people in a lot of the world.

So let me just make a small pitch for ideas and not children of Gandhi’s or Bhutto’s or anybody else’s, let me add.  This is what got us in trouble in Iraq is this idea that, no, these people, tribes, sects, so much more interesting.  So let me meet with the guy in a robe.  I think that is the wrong way to go about it and while, certainly, I think we should be respectful of the legacy inside these political parties, I do think that we have a right to expect more.

I also want to remind everybody that it was during both Nawaz’s and Benazir’s rule that A.Q. Khan was so busy and so active and that on one of Benazir’s most important visits to the United States, in which she stood up and had a very warm and friendly meeting with then-President Clinton, the first and most important thing that she brought up - and she was not a military leader - was the F-16s.  So just a reminder that Pakistani history, while there is no question that civilian leaders have not been great, has been fraught with a lot of the same problems.  And we should seek to do our best to remedy those, not being, as Husain rightly said, fooled by anybody.  Fred, next question.

Husain Haqqani:  Dany, a minor correction; it was President Bush Sr. rather than President Clinton that she asked for F-16s on the first time around.  Are you talking about the second time?

Danielle Pletka:  Sorry, but that was the time where he turned to his aides standing there at the White House on the podium and said, “Why can we not give them to her?”

Frank Fletcher [phonetic]:  My name is Frank Fletcher.  I do research in the private sector.  I’m just here representing myself.  My question is for Dr. Haqqani.  Could you speak somewhat about the impact on the Pakistani government and military in the last few years of certain foreign policies of the United States with respect to other countries?  I was thinking of India and the nuclear agreement with India.  I was also thinking of the Iranian nuclear program, and this would be about Iran, not the U.S. but the Iranian nuclear program and the Saudi discontent about that.  How might the Pakistani military feel that it would like to act or not?

Husain Haqqani:  I think the Pakistani military does not really like very close relations with the United States and India and their response, if you remember, was to demand a similar arrangement for Pakistan to which President Bush rightly said that the two countries are different and the circumstances are different.  But at some point Pakistan’s concerns about India have to be addressed in the relationship.  The best outcome, of course, would be for India and Pakistan to work things out, which, I believe, is a slow and a long-drawn process.  The Pakistan military has a serious problem there.  If Pakistan and India can work problems out, then the raison d’etre of the Pakistan military ends.  So it is a slightly complex equation there.

Saudi Arabia has invested a lot of equity in the Pakistani military.  The Pakistani intelligence service and the Saudi intelligence service are brother services.  Afghanistan was a joint operation.  Even the Taliban -- I hope you remember that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Pakistan were the only three governments that recognized the Taliban.  So, therefore, even now the Saudis would rather have Pakistani influence over Afghanistan rather than Iranian influence.

Very frankly, I think Afghanistan should be under Afghan influence, neither Saudi nor Iranian, nor Pakistani.  Let the Afghans be and then be friends of Pakistan as well as -- whoever else in their neighborhood.

Iran and Pakistan have a complex relationship.  Pakistan cannot ignore Iran; Pakistan has about 15 percent of its population as Shia; the Shias of the world do generally tend to look upon Iran as the leader; Iran is a neighbor.  Iran has a Baloch population; so does Pakistan.  And there is a long border.

But that said, Pakistan’s close relations with Saudi Arabia have been a major factor in Pakistani-Iranian relations.  Iran and Saudi Arabia actually compete inside Pakistan for influence with the various religious factions, which -- and exacerbates Pakistan’s jihadi and Islamist culture.  So a lot of the sectarian outfits in Pakistan are either Shiite outfits backed by Iran or extremist Sunni terrorists backed by Saudi Arabia.

Thomas Donnelly:  I just wanted to gloss Husain’s answer a little bit.  First of all, to say that, we should also remember that the Saudis financed a good deal of the Pakistani nuclear program.  Remember the whole Islamic bomb thing; it was as much Saudi financing as it was.

I would say that in addition to my fear that things are just profoundly degenerating inside Pakistan, the relative balance of power in the region is changing.  India’s rise is going to be not a direct line or anything like that, but I think it is a profound development in 21st century politics that the Pakistanis have not caught up with.

Secondarily, the Pakistanis have also profoundly misread the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, which I would take to be apropos of Fred’s points; really, a long-term commitment.  The Pakistanis read the transfer of mission to NATO as preparation for an American withdrawal, which was a reasonable conclusion to come to but just a wrong one because it is very difficult to understand American policy under normal circumstances, and it is only complicated by adding NATO to the mix.

Again, so this pattern of internal decomposition of Pakistani problem and Pakistanis taking place within the context of a region where the relative power of its neighbors and the relative relationship between the United States and Afghanistan is really profoundly changing.

I think the danger is that as things go forward the consequences of the periodic crises are going to be echoed wider and be potentially much more dangerous for folks outside of Pakistan as well as the good health of Pakistan itself.

Frederick W. Kagan:  I’m going to turn this over to Dany for a question.  One second, but I want to throw in, apropos of the point that we have all made earlier, about the fitfulness of our paying attention to things.  One of the things that is going on is that Iran has made an agreement with Afghanistan to try to shift Afghan and, by implication, Central Asian trade so that it goes through an Iranian port rather than through Karachi, and has been heavily subsidizing the construction of various transportation infrastructure and, also, basically waving customs fees and other things in order to make that happen. 

I would venture to guess that very few Americans have been tracking on that but I would bet that the Pakistanis have been paying some attention to that issue.  This is one of those things where, as we do not pay attention for a long time, regional actors tend to create situations on the ground that are very much not to our advantage and not to the advantage even of states that we would like to try to help.  And then, we reengage years later and we say, “Oh, my God.  Look at that.  All of this trade is now going through Iran.  Nothing is going through Karachi anymore.  What is up with that?”

Danielle Pletka:  I would actually like to pose a question - sorry - on the audience’s behalf but I have a microphone sitting ready and waiting here, apropos of what Tom said.  And Pakistani fear of abandonment -- I think that the other factor in that that should be recognized is the 123 [sounds like] Agreement with the Indians, which, again, I think has further cemented their fear that we were turning in another direction and we are certain to abandon them.

But I wanted to ask you a question because it is something that we hear so often and I suspect it is not true but I also suspect that you have a better answer to this.  One of the reasons that you hear that we must stand by our good ally, Musharraf, is because, by gosh and by golly, if he falls the country will be in the hands of the extremists.  My understanding is that if we held it open to totally free and fair elections tomorrow, extremist groups would garner, maybe, 15 percent of the vote.  I would love to hear what your take on this is.

Husain Haqqani:  Well, for one thing, this 15 percent peak -- actually it was 11 percent.  In 2002, [indiscernible] with a very low turnout.  Bhutto was out; Sharif was out.  So their party base was not mobilized.  They got 11 percent of a low turnout, but the actual number of votes they got is stagnant since 1970.  It is just the same number of actual votes more or less, give and take 20,000 or 30,000 up and down.  Now they are polling at three percent of the possible likely voters.  So I do not think the Islamists are ever going to win an election in Pakistan.  They might 20 years after Musharraf, if Musharraf remains there like Mubarak.

I once wrote an article and titled it, “Hosni Musharraf”  because what has happened in Egypt?  In Egypt, 20 years ago the Waft Party, which was a corrupt political mainstream party -- but that is how politics works - Tammany Hall, Mayor Curly, et cetera.  I do know my American history a little bit.  It worked somehow.  They were a middle alternative and the solution would have been to let them come in and reform them rather than keep them on [sounds like].  Well, Mubarak crushed them all and now Mubarak keeps coming every year to Washington D.C. and saying, “It is me or the Islamists.”

If Musharraf is not checked right now with populist forces -- Benazir is gone.  What everyone may say about her -- one thing is very clear:  She was no Islamist and she would not have [indiscernible] with them.  Yes, she came under lot of pressures.  Even on the F-16s, a colleague of mine sent me a little note, “The F-16s were not a freebie.  Pakistan had paid for them and, therefore, had a legitimate right to ask for them.”  And the Pakistani military was constantly asking the Pakistani elected government to stand up for that principle.

So there are complications here.  The civilians -- I still say that the definitive book has yet to be written on the compulsions under which the two civilian governments work.  But that said, Bhutto is gone.  If Sharif goes and nobody can mobilize the vote and then the lid is put on, 10 to 15 to 20 years from now the Islamists will be a more potent force, and here is the reason:  You can shut down political parties in a Muslim country; you cannot shut down mosques.  So the Islamists organize through the mosques. 

The political parties need rallies and if you do not allow them to organize, they will -- we will -- I mean I’m already on exile; many other PPP people -- and, by the way, when you worry about young Bilawal, rest assured, he will have the best council and much better council, actually, than is currently available to General Musharraf because many smart people who have been driven into exile will come back to serve the country.

So more and more people will be driven into exile and the -- worry about Islamists should be 10 years from now, not today.  Right now the Islamist insurgents are a problem.  They need to be dealt with a combination of military, intelligence, and political means.  But, politically, the Islamist is taking over the country -- I do not think that is the real thing.  Musharraf is playing the Mubarak game [speaks in a foreign language].  That is the game here.

Frederick W. Kagan:  In the interest of getting a few more questions in, I’m going to place a moratorium on discussion of the F-16 for the remaining 12 minutes of the panel.  Please?

John Walstead:  John Walstead, a senior fellow of Discovery Institute.  Senator Biden, campaigning in Iowa, said that one of the reasons not to bomb Iran is that it would create an Islamist takeover in Pakistan.  In the unlikely event that the United States or, perhaps, the somewhat less unlikely event that Israel decided to take action against Iranian nuclear facilities or some form of decisive action, what do you think the impact would be inside Pakistan?

Danielle Pletka:  John, should we not talk about the even more unlikely event that Joe Biden succeeds in the Iowa caucuses?

Thomas Donnelly:  Michael, you talked to these guys, or you used to.

Husain Haqqani:  I do not want to blow my relations with Joe Biden.

Danielle Pletka:  I think Tom has an answer but I find that a very attenuated connection, especially based on the very correct description, I think, that exists of Pakistani domestic politics.  Why that would happen is not entirely clear to me.

Thomas Donnelly:  Also, it is not as though -- look, I mean American policy toward Iran will be dictated primarily by what the consequences in Iran and, probably, Iraq after that would be and around the region.  So there is no question that military action against Iran opens a whole lot of cans of worms.  But Pakistan is only one of those and that does not mean that a military action against Iran could not still be the least bad alternative.  I hope we are not there yet and we hope not to be there.  But the idea that Pakistan or the internal consequences for Pakistan would be the determining factor in any American policy or military action toward Iran seems to me to be, as Dany said, farfetched.

Michael Barone:  Michael Barone with AEI and U.S. News and World Report.  Has the increasing [audio glitch] relationship between the U.S. and India, begun with the Clinton administration, continued to be strengthened by the Bush administration -- does that give the U.S. more leverage in dealing with elements of the Pakistani government?  If so, how can that be advantageously exerted?

Thomas Donnelly:  I would defer to Husain, but I think it ought to and it should.  Part of our challenge -- the thing that I think we ought to really shape our Pakistan policy toward is to get them to really give up their paranoia about India.

First of all, there is nothing that can be done about it.  Again, India’s rise will be determined by actions that Indians take and I take it to be a profound element of 21st century international politics.  Pakistan’s continuing paranoia about India just gets more dangerous and more dangerous, the more power that India acquires.

To explain the behavior of the Pakistani military, you always have to keep the Indian question in mind.  So that clearly needs to be a part of our strategy and diplomacy toward Pakistan, not just the question of the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

Husain Haqqani:  Michael, if I may add to add to Tom’s point, actually, in the beginning when Pakistan became independent, there was the perception that the Indians were reluctant to accept the breakaway of Pakistan, the creation of Pakistan, and it was a genuine concern.  There were Indian leaders who talked about undoing Pakistan.  No one in India now wants to undo Pakistan.  They just want a stable Pakistan so that they can get on with their business of life.

And in Pakistan, by the way, civilian opinion is more or less unanimous that Pakistan needs a good functioning relationship with India that we need to move towards taking advantage of India’s rise for the advantage of Pakistan.  The Pakistani military will also come around to that position as long as the United States does not hold out the illusion -- again, because of what Danny was saying about how when you talk very softly, the generals do not always understand.

They need to be told, “You guys are never going to be able to win against India.  You fought many wars, won none, lost half your country.  Look.  Your security we are concerned about.  Pakistan needs to be secure.  Fair enough.  If India wants to take over Pakistan, that is wrong and should not happen.  But, come on.  Give up the illusion of competing with India gun for gun, soldier for soldier.  We are not going to play this game.  The U.S. is not going to be your ally in the hopes of making you strong enough to face up to India.”  If that can be done, it will have a positive impact on India-Pakistan relations as well.

Danielle Pletka:  I just want to add one little fillip to this, which is you asked how we could possibly leverage that new and very warm relationship.  One of the ways that we can leverage it is that if the Pakistanis are not helpful to the United States in our extremely vital national security battle against al-Qaeda in the tribal areas and in Afghanistan, we do not have to turn to them for help.  We can turn to the Indians.

I understand that the Indians are very capable of fighting counterinsurgency and I’m sure they would be more than willing to be helpful to us and I’m more than sure that the Pakistanis would not be very happy about that development.  So that is the way we could leverage it.  I hope it will not ever be necessary but it is something they should keep in the back of their minds.

Frederick W. Kagan:  I think we have time for one last quick question.

Ricardo Gonzalez:  My name is Ricardo Gonzalez and I’m a journalist for the newspaper El Mundo in Spain.  I would like to ask Mr. Haqqani up to what point Musharraf has the support of the military and whether it is possible -- a compromise between civilian leaders and the military, let’s say, as an organization to get rid of Musharraf and find a place to share power.

Husain Haqqani:  It is very interesting.  When Ms. Bhutto arrived in Karachi on October 18, she was asked that question.  She said, “The civilians are Pakistani.  The military is Pakistani.  We have no problem with the military.  We have a problem with military rule.”  So, therefore, I think that the prospect of Pakistani civilians talking to military leaders and saying, “Let’s march forward together,” has always been there.  That is why there were all these negotiations with General Musharraf as well.

The problem is that the Pakistani military, of course, is a hierarchical organization, and Musharraf has complicated things by appointing relatives, friends, et cetera, in key military positions which makes things difficult.  Secondly, the Pakistani military does not want to move too quickly against one of their own.  But if the situation that is persisting right now -- look, Musharraf right now has approval ratings that are less than anybody you can imagine.  So, therefore, he is in deep trouble and the army watches these things.  The army does not want the people of Pakistan to dislike the army.  They want the people of Pakistan to be supportive of the military.

Will General Musharraf himself make that decision and reach out to the opposition and make things easier?  I do not know.  He does not have that personality.  I think his personality is going to be in two or three days he will start a campaign of demonization against Asif Zardari; he will start trying to play ethnic cards; he is going to try and demonize Nawaz Sharif again, instead of reaching out to them.  That is his personality.  He is a combative commando.  He thinks only of the moment.  He has no strategic vision.

But others in the military, I think they are watching the situation very carefully and they are watching the situation in the best interest, as they see it, of Pakistan.  They do not want Pakistan to go up in flames.  So do I have a definitive answer to your question “Will it happen?  Can it happen?”  I will not say that I have one but I think that the Pakistani military and Pakistan civilian leaders can work together.  Pakistan’s military has professional officers and it has politically ambitious officers.  They have been generals who have never taken over power even when the civilians were making mistakes.  Then, there are the Musharrafs of this world who take over and think they are God’s gift to Pakistan.  So there are those two types of generals.

Let’s hope that the professional generals prevail and try to work with the civilians.  That may be a good domestic outcome, and then they can both work together to focus on the war against terror and getting Pakistan back on the rails.

Frederick W. Kagan:  I think that the key point that we need to take away from all of this is that this is a pivotal moment in the history not only of Pakistan but of South Asia, of the war on terror, of the world.  Our instinctive reactions in these moments to try to find the magic bullet -- “Okay.  Well, then Musharraf is our guy after all and then we do not have to think about this anymore.”  The whole effort to try to find an answer that will allow us to stop thinking about it, which actually seems to be America’s number one priority in foreign policy matter as far as I can tell, is likely to lead to disaster.

I do not think there are easy answers in Pakistan or anywhere else that are important.  Frankly, if there were easy answers, I think they would have been found and implemented already.  But the stakes are very high and it is worth our effort to continue to try to understand the situation and work to find the harder answers that might actually be more useful.

I thank the panelists for coming on very short notice.

[End of file - AEI The Crisis in Pakistan and American Policy.mp3]

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