Pakistan--Take What You Can Get

Senator Kerry, among others, suggests we have no real policy in dealing with Pakistan. It would be hard for me to resist answering him, if I were an American official, “Who ever has had?”
Pakistan—especially its wild and wooly border area next to Afghanistan—isn’t the sort of place you have what people like Senator Kerry like to call a policy for. You just do what a friend of mine who had the good fortune to survive a hurricane in a 30 foot boat. You lash the wheel, batten everything down—and ride the swells.
Ask the British. They were supposedly in charge of that area for over a century. Every so often they would send in troops to deal with “terrorists” coming across the border from Afghanistan (this sort of traffic has always gone both ways between the two areas).
Then they’d pray and hope this army didn’t get wiped out like the last one did. Kabul still has bullet pockmarks from the time a British force was besieged and destroyed around the year we were having a gold rush in California. That’s a long time ago—but not much has changed over there.
Or they’d just send “Gunga Din” and a detachment of cavalry to try to hold down their own side of the border. It was never a peaceful, quiet or law abiding area. The wilderness along the Khyber Pass has always been a dangerous place.
Alexander the Great—who used to complain about not having enough worlds to conquer—decided this wasn’t one he wanted. Thus, we can safely say, the United States isn’t the first power not to have any comprehensive policy in Pakistan—it likely won’t be the last.
It’s safe to say the Pakistani’s don’t have a policy for Pakistan—let alone that mountainous border area where Osama Bin Laden is said to be holed up.
We complain about Pakistani intelligence officials having close ties with the Taliban. That’s as wise as a small town American sheriff reaching an accommodation with a well armed and ruthless group of outlaws. It’s called a survival necessity.
It’s also the only way you can get intelligence in the region and, you can hope, if you accommodate the Taliban here, they may not strike in some more vital area. From a Pakistani point of view, talking with the Taliban makes imminently good sense.
From an American point of view, if we can get partial or even occasional cooperation from Pakistani authorities that’s probably as well as we’re going to do. Honestly, the only real alternative we would have to accepting that reality is a full scale invasion.
Anyone who would contemplate that for even a second HAS to be labeled a “security risk”—to himself and everyone anywhere around him! Take what we can get; accept that this is all we can get—that’s probably not just our best policy, it’s our only one.
The British would keep sending up cavalry incursions, sometimes infantry, to knock them back. They’d try to bribe this or that tribal chief, support one against another, and this “catch as catch can” affair became a kind of adjustable “policy” for that quarter of the empire.
It really didn’t do us a lot of good to have a gaggle of high ranking American officials go over to Pakistan the other week and publicly make demands and put pressure on the distracted and relatively feeble Karachi government.
We’re objecting that we gave Pakistan $11 billion over the past ten years to fight terrorism and we haven’t seen many results. Hey! If all that $11 billion did was to keep Pakistan from JOINING the Taliban, that’s a lot cheaper than sending our own people in—check the cost of Iraq.
For thousands of years, Great Powers have chosen to bribe dangerous border tribes rather than spend the money and troops to fight them. It cuts the casualty rate way, way down. Compared to the cost of Iraq, $11 billion was cheap.
The Pakistani army probably isn’t up to fighting its way through The Northwest Frontier Province that borders Afghanistan. Send in American troops? I don’t think you want to count the number of divisions that would take—to do more than merely annoy the locals.
As we’ve learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, annoyed locals can blow up and kill a lot of GIs. No—shut your mouth, keep handing over the money, and take what you can get in the way of intelligence, military support and limited cooperation.
Don’t weaken the professedly pro-western Karachi government by publicly humiliating them. We might not like what succeeds it. Then there might be no cooperation at all.
Americans have tried never to admit to themselves that we have an empire. Very much for that reason we don’t really know how to handle one. Bribes in the form of “foreign aid” (we did it all through the Cold War!), maintaining a smiling fiction that the Pakistani’s are really doing a bang-up job, all the while sending in as few of your own troops as you possibly can—that sort of POLICY maintained the Roman and British Empires for centuries.
Learn from the Old Masters. To start with, when you’re unwilling to send in millions of your own soldiers, take what you can get. Smile. Hand them the check.
That’s a workable policy, Mr. Kerry. It’s the sort you adopt when all you CAN do is ride the swells.