state translates tax revenues into increasingly potent military and diplomatic
power, New Delhi will find itself less as a vulnerable supplicant playing for
advantage between Washington and Beijing. Instead, it will stand tall as an
independent third power, capable of charting its own course.
Under these circumstances, New Delhi may never feel the compulsion to
hitch its wagon solely, or even primarily, to the United States. Unless China
starts to look far more menacing than it does now, India will probably prefer to
fulfill its national ambitions by working with the United States when it makes
sense and, wherever possible, with China too. India will be too independent-
minded and ambitious to accept eagerly the role of America’s dutiful client,
which is apparently the direction many Indians believe a formal alliance with
the United States would take them.
playing out the regional game
What then is the answer to the question raised by the assembly of Peshawar’s
university students? How will the U.S.-Pakistan relationship fit within the
broader regional and global context of the next decade and beyond?
First of all, a great deal will hinge upon the trajectory of relations between
the United States and China. Just as the Cold War conflict manifested itself
in South Asia in unexpected and profound ways, decisions in Beijing and
Washington made without any particular concern for Pakistan could affect
91 Analyst Harsh Pant lists these steps taken by India, and notes that “The decision on MMRCA
[jet fighter deal] will only reinforce the perception in Washington that the much-touted strategic partnership between the US and India is more hype than substance.” See Harsh V. Pant, “India’s Continuing Search for ‘Strategic Autonmy,’” ISN Insights, May 18, 2011, http://www.isn.ethz
.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/ISN-Insights/Detail?lng=en&id=129264&conte-xtid734=129264& contextid735=129261&tabid=129261.
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198
No Exit from Pakistan
millions of Pakistanis, for better, or, more likely, for worse. The geopolitical
future does not look good for ties between Washington and Islamabad.
Indeed, even leaving aside the acrimony between the United States and
Pakistan born of the war in Afghanistan and the hunt for international terror-
ists, China’s rising power – and the increasing significance of the Asia-Pacific
region as a whole – will naturally draw Washington’s attention away from
Pakistan and toward traditional Asian allies like Japan, Korea, and Australia.
Moreover, if Washington were forced to choose a partner in South Asia, its top
choice would be India, not Pakistan. U.S.-India relations are warm and grow-
ing warmer for many reasons that have nothing to do with geopolitics, from
business ties to cultural affinities. Pakistani fears of an American tilt toward
India therefore have a solid basis.
Yet the future is complicated by the aspirations of the Chinese and Indians
themselves. These rising powers have grand plans, even if they are not yet spe-
cific. Their expanding visions of regional and global influence may eventually
send them into conflict with one another. In the near term, however, both are
fixated on economic development and regional stability. Neither of these two
Asian giants prefers to see South Asia divided into competing blocs, with India
and the United States on one side, China and Pakistan on the other.
China wants to have it all in South Asia: stability across the region, trade
with India, and long-term strategic investments in Pakistan. Beijing has already
taken steps to try to restrain conflict between Islamabad and New Delhi, and it
would prefer to avoid a rupture in relations between Pakistan and the United
States. If China remains, on balance, more risk averse than aggressive in South
Asia, this pattern could continue for many years to come.
India is not ready – and may never be eager – to join hands with the
United States in ways that tie them. New Delhi values its autonomy and is
just ambitious enough to believe it can benefit from America’s largesse without
Pakistan, but now that they worry more about Pakistan’s weakness and insta-
bility than its strength, they place a greater value on the restraining influence
of a viable U.S.-Pakistan relationship. Indians fear some of the implications
of China’s rise, but in other ways they find common ground with Beijing.
New Delhi’s independent streak will continue to test the patience of American
policymakers; it may eventually lead them to throw up their hands and leave
India to its own devices.
In the end, however, it is the threat of Pakistan as a catastrophic spoiler
that makes the two-bloc scenario (United States and India versus China and
Pakistan) most unappealing. Just as the violent “Kalashnikov culture” of Pak-
istan’s frontier regions near Peshawar spilled into the settled parts of the
country, disrupting traditional, civilized ways of life and threatening far greater
instability and violence, so too could Pakistan’s extreme ideologies, sophisti-
cated terrorists, and well-armed militants export mayhem into the surrounding
region, starting with India. An unstable Pakistan that feels jilted by the United
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From the Outside-In
199
States would be an albatross around India’s neck and a costly obstacle to Amer-
ica’s ambition for a peaceful, prosperous region in which India plays a major,
if perhaps independent-minded, role.
The threat of Pakistan as a spoiler thus provides the single most important
reason that the United States must – out of fear more than affection – factor
Islamabad into its broader geopolitical calculations in Asia. Fear is not a par-
ticularly firm foundation for partnership between nations, but it does sharpen
the mind. Put simply, the United States will have a far easier time achieving its
goals in Asia – above all managing the rise of China and cultivating better ties
with a rising India – if it can also find a way to work with Pakistan.
Fortunately, it is also possible to envision a more optimistic future for Pak-
istan and its neighbors – one defined by economic integration rather than strate-
gic competition. India and China, once (and possibly future) rivals, already see
economic growth and development as a top priority. Despite some misgivings,
their fast-growing trade ties are mutually beneficial and lend stabilizing ballast
to their bilateral relationship.
Pakistan’s neighbors could also exert a transformative and profoundly sta-
bilizing influence on its economic fortunes. Indeed, the rising tide of Asian
wealth may be the only external force powerful enough to lift even Pakistan’s
leaky
boat. A fast growing economy would create opportunities for Pakistan’s
massive young population and dim at least some of the appeal of extremism
and violence. Along the way, India, China, and the United States would also
find themselves better positioned to avoid conflicts with Islamabad or each
other.
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7
America’s Options
General Mirza Aslam Baig could not have been any more polite as he rear-
ranged the pillows on his finely upholstered sofa to make space for his Amer-
ican guest. The cool, dim sitting room with its gilded d écor was a welcome
respite from the heat of mid-May 2012 in Rawalpindi. A decade earlier, it
would have been possible to stroll the short distance from Baig’s home to
the official residence of Pakistan’s serving army chief. The threat of terrorist
attacks had, however, forced the construction of high white walls around the
neighborhoods, separating Baig, a retired army chief, from his successors. The
soft-spoken octogenarian settled into a nearby armchair and, after beckoning
for tea and a generous array of Pakistani snacks, quietly explained that it was
not he who had turned against the United States, but the United States that had
turned against Pakistan.
Baig’s early experiences with the United States were mainly positive ones. As
a young officer in the 1950s, he joined Pakistan’s newly formed Special Services
Group, an elite commando unit, and trained with American forces in guerrilla
warfare. Washington’s goal then was to build a “stay-behind organization” of
Pakistani officers that could melt into the population and resist occupation in
the event of an invasion by the Soviet Union.1
Three decades later, similar guerrilla training and billions in U.S. and Saudi
funding helped to turn the fierce Afghan mujahedeen into an effective fighting
force that held the field against the Red Army. Baig had a front row seat
for the anti-Soviet war. He served near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan
as commander of the army’s Peshawar-based XI Corps from 1985 to 1987.
While there, he remembers sending many of his best officers to the United States
1 For more on the Special Services Group and this early military cooperation between Pakistan and the United States, see Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 133.
200
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America’s Options
201
for advanced military education. In 1987, Baig was promoted to vice chief of
the army staff. This made him the service’s day-to-day leader while General
Zia-ul-Haq served as Pakistan’s president and top military commander. When
Zia died in 1988, Baig immediately assumed the most powerful job in the
country.
Baig’s public break with the United States came shortly thereafter. In 1991,
he expressed his support for Saddam Hussein’s side in the Gulf War. Baig
now justifies the move by arguing that Saudi Arabia was under no real threat
from Saddam’s forces and that America’s war was nothing more than a ploy
by Washington to weaken Iraq. At the time, his anger with Washington was
probably also linked to the sanctions that the United States had just slapped
on Pakistan for developing a nuclear bomb.2
From that point onward, Baig’s anti-Americanism only grew deeper. Like
too many of his fellow Pakistanis, the conspiracy-minded retired general doubts
the official story of 9/11. He claims it was a hoax. And soon after the 2011
Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Baig wrote that the United
States had staged the operation with a “clone” bin Laden: “This was a CIA
operation, meant to fool the world and embarrass Pakistan but the fact of the
matter is that the whole exercise was a fake and a lie, same as the 9/11 episode
was to find an excuse to launch the crusade against the Muslim World.”3
When pressed to consider when he first had doubts about cooperation with
the United States, Baig says he should have seen trouble brewing even during
the 1950s. As a young officer, he had good personal relationships with his
American counterparts, but he was troubled that Pakistani intelligence reports
(with highly detailed social and economic information that would be salient
in a counter-Soviet insurgency) were shared with the Americans. He felt that
Pakistan’s leaders were too subservient, too willing to facilitate U.S. interven-
tion in their sovereign affairs.
Looking back, Baig muses, those early missteps foreshadowed much greater
Pakistani blunders in its relations with America. Washington repeatedly
exploited Pakistan and interfered in its politics, but the Pakistani leaders who
served as willing accomplices to America’s crimes deserve a healthy share of the
blame. Chief among those culprits, at least in Baig’s estimation, was General
Pervez Musharraf.
Baig’s list of charges against Musharraf is long. He begins by proudly
recounting how, shortly after 9/11, he gave Musharraf a firm dressing-down
for selling out to the Americans. Baig told him that by turning against
2 On the nuclear sanctions, see the discussion of the Pressler Amendment in Chapter 3. On Baig’s reaction, see Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 316; Barnett R. Rubin, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State (New Haven: Yale, 1995), p. 115.
3 Mirza Aslam Beg, “Confirmation: Bin Laden ‘Clone’ Killed at Abbottabad,” Veterans Today, May 20, 2011, http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/05/20/confirmation-bin-laden-look-alike-killled-at-abbottabad/.
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202
No Exit from Pakistan
Pakistan’s erstwhile Taliban allies in Afghanistan and opening Pakistan’s soil
to U.S. supply routes and counterterror operations, Musharraf had commit-
ted an unforgivable crime against the nation. Bowing to American pressure
was, as Baig puts it, a stain on Pakistan’s honor. No self-respecting state could
accept such dictates, not even from a superpower. More than anything else,
Baig concludes, Pakistan needs self-respect; the country needs to show, just like
revolutionary Iran, that it can stand up to any country in the world.
Not only did Musharraf sell his soul to the Americans, but he also backed
the wrong horse in Afghanistan. Sooner or later, from Baig’s point of view, the
United States and its allies will be driven from Afghanistan just as the Russians
were. “People laughed at me when I said this soon after 9/11,” he recalls, “but
look what is happening now. The Taliban will win. They know it. And they
will dictate the terms of settlement.”4
&nb
sp; Baig never broke with the Taliban. By his own account, he retained indi-
rect contact with top Taliban officials. He also remained close with Pakistani
colleagues who had a hand in supporting Afghan fighters during the 1980s
and 1990s, like former Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) chief Hamid
Gul. Baig counted as a friend the infamous, now-deceased Brigadier Sultan
Amir Tarar, who was widely known in Afghan circles as “Colonel Imam,”
the ISI’s Taliban trainer.5 Most believe that Tarar died in 2010, after being
taken hostage near the Afghan border. A video released online by the Pakistani
Taliban (TTP) shows Tarar being shot in the head as the bloodthirsty TTP
leader Hakimullah Mehsud looks on.6
The killing was widely interpreted as evidence of the TTP’s unrelenting
hostility toward the Pakistani state and its agents, even longtime Taliban sym-
pathizers like Tarar. Baig, however, tells a different story. Weaving together
several unlikely conspiracies, he argues that Tarar was the victim of an elabo-
rate American assassination plot. It is not surprising that when Baig predicts
that the U.S. mission will fail in Afghanistan, there is more than a hint of
schadenfreude in his voice.
the stumbling block in afghanistan
If American and Pakistani officials were able to put all emotions aside, let
bygones be bygones, and speak honestly about their present differences, most,
like General Baig, would land on Afghanistan. Boiled to its essentials, the
disagreement hinges on how to deal with the Afghan Taliban and especially the
Haqqani network based inside the Pakistani tribal agency of North Waziristan.
4 Author conversation, May 15, 2012.
5 Carlotta Gall, “Former Pakistani Officer Embodies a Policy Puzzle,” New York Times, March 3, 2010, “http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/world/asia/04imam.html? r=1.
6 The video was accessed at http://www.defenceblog.org/2011/03/pakistani-talibans-killed-colonel-imam.html.
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America’s Options
203
Washington has demanded that Islamabad take greater action against these