Seems Pakistan wants money, well, just because:
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told two top U.S. envoys that his country needs “unconditional support” in a range of areas to defeat the al-Qaida and Taliban fighters threatening its survival.
The sentiments reflect Pakistani dissatisfaction with American pledges to tack conditions onto billions in expected aid funds designed to help Pakistan end militancy in its borders.
Those conditions are just plain annoying, since all Pakistan wants to do with the money is put it in offshore banks and jihadi training camps.
Pakistan is perhaps the most complicated foreign policy challenge we face. China may be more important, but it is far more conventional – the government has effective command and control over its territory and is over its revolutionary phase. The folks in Beijing have an awful lot invested in our continued well-being, which conveniently limits our squabbles to sideshows such as North Korea.
Pakistan has a government that does not particularly like us struggling to stay in control of a population that hates us. It has a tenuous grip over its nuclear weapons. It is locked in an arms race with a neighbor several times its size that grows wealthier and more assertive by the day. And it knows that if the Global War on Terror ever ended – if the Al Qaeda folks were caught and the Taliban well and truly put on the run – that we would abandon it to its fate. Our future lies with India.
So Pakistan will support the jihadis to its dying day. It has no other hand to play. It needs the unconventional threat to tie down India’s numerically superior military and give it some hope of balancing India’s geographic advantage; Islamabad is but a short armor surge from the Radcliffe Line. It needs the unconventional threat to keep the US onsides; if we did not have to worry about bin Laden, Pakistan would be just another faraway oil-free country about which we know nothing.
Our strategy to date has been to look the other way. We fund Pakistan as if it were going to use the money to kill jihadis, and they pretend to go after the jihadis. We don’t know what else to do, and they don’t either. No bid to go completely rogue and throw in publicly with the jihadis; that defeats the great advantage of plausible deniability.
We have also noted, with mixed effect, that the jihadis may well take out the country’s leadership if not confronted. However, this is a weak motivation; no doubt Pakistan’s politicians look at the very same jihadi strength and figure those are groups worth keeping distracted with money and martyrdom.
What else can we do?
To start with, large-scale maneuvers against Taliban/al Qaeda forces. There is, of course, the risk this works as well as the expansion of the war from Vietnam to Cambodia. In this case, however, we are only concerned with the command and control abilities of al Qaeda. It may be easy to recruit new terrorists, but it is difficult to recruit new leaders. Kill Osama, kill Zawahiri, and the system cannot easily recreate its leadership. Since the very essence of the group is its opposition to negotiation, there is no point keeping folks alive as the UK did with the IRA leadership.
Beyond this, how about offering to recognize a Pakistani claim to some chunk of Afghanistan if and only if we are able to capture our Al Qaeda targets? If Pakistan wants to move west to have more strategic depth, it hardly bothers us; let them have the pleasure of trying to govern the Afghans. It would be a time-limited offer; Pakistan would have to deliver during the Obama administration for fear the next government would say it knew nothing of the deal. The Pakistani military would still need to make good an invasion, and whether or not they were successful it would tie them up for some time and encourage them to find a solution to Kashmir.
