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When Pakistan Says No to the C.I.A.
NY Times
April 12, 2011
Introduction
With tensions high between the Pakistani spy agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, Pakistan has demanded that 335 American intelligence officers, contractors and Special Operations forces leave the country, and that the U.S. scale back drone attacks on tribal areas there.
The demand, officials from both countries said, is a response to the arrest of Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. security officer who killed two men in Lahore in January during what he said was a robbery attempt. Mr. Davis has since been released after the U.S. government agreed to reimburse the Pakistani government $2.3 million that it paid as compensation to the men's families.
Can -- or will -- the U.S. abide by Pakistan's demand that the C.I.A. curtail its activities? Could this be a serious blow to American efforts to control its enemies in the region?
Feeding Pakistan's Paranoia
Shuja Nawaz is director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington. He is the author of "Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within" and “Learning by Doing: the Pakistan Army’s Experience with Counterinsurgency."
Behind all the talk of a strategic dialogue and strategic partnership between the United States and Pakistan lurks the reality of a persistent transactional relationship, based on short-term objectives that intrude rudely into the limelight every time a drone attack kills civilians inside Pakistan or in the instance when an American “operative” is caught by the Pakistanis after killing two people on the streets of Lahore.
In “Paranoidistan,” as the historian Ayesha Jalal has called Pakistan, the public and the authorities are prepared to believe the worst. Conspiracy theories abound, involving the C.I.A., Israel and India, in various permutations.
So, it is not surprising that the Raymond Davis case has left mistrust in its wake. Unanswered questions abound: What was he doing driving alone in an unmarked car in the heart of Lahore’s bazaar district? Why did he shoot to kill two youths, and then step outside his car to finish them off, and photograph them again? And why was he photographing religious seminaries and bunkers, as leaked Pakistani information indicates?
Apart from allowing the extremist Pakistani right-wingers to capture the public space with their anti-American propaganda, this case left the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate embarrassed and angry. And it has sent friends of the United States into sullen silence. Then, as soon as Davis was released in a shadowy deal involving “blood money,” came the drone attack on Datta Khel in the border region of Pakistan that killed some 40 people.
Senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials maintain this was a “normal” jirga of peaceful tribesmen. U.S. officials say that it was designed to fool the C.I.A. and that the real purpose of the open-air gathering was to conduct business harmful to the coalition’s interests in Afghanistan. Regardless, the Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, cut whole categories of U.S. military personnel based in Pakistan and privately warned the U.S. that he will “react” if the attacks continue. His intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, recently in Washington to discuss the issue with his C.I.A. counterpart, echoed that hard line. Hence, the report of a senior military official raising the possibility of shooting down the drones.
The Pakistani military and government do cooperate with the C.I.A. and U.S. military in the border region, but they will not acknowledge this openly. Both countries need to address their concerns frankly and in detail rather than continue a charade that misinforms their own people about what they are doing and why.
The United States needs to stop paying the Pakistan army with coalition support funds to fight in the border region and instead provide it adequate military aid in kind, as part of a carefully structured cooperative program to build its mobility and firepower against the militants.
Money cannot buy love. It is more likely to generate contempt among the rank and file of the Pakistani military. If the ultimate objective is to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, then economic and peaceful political means, and talks with the militants to bring them into the fold of normal political discourse, are also needed. Not drone attacks. Nor trigger-happy cowboys in the heartland of Pakistan.
On a Collision Course
C. Christine Fair is an assistant professor in the Center for Peace and Security Studies at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. She served as a political officer to the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan.
Now that Pakistan has made its red lines clear, how will Washington respond? No doubt the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, has concluded that the United States needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs the United States and thus is loath to cut off security or economic assistance. No doubt the ISI reckons that the C.I.A. will grudgingly accept these limitations while seeking to develop alternatives, however constrained. No doubt, the ISI is confident it will win this game of chicken. Pakistan’s spooks may well be right.
The ball is now in Washington’s court to lay down its own red lines, likely pertaining to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Haqqani group, the Afghan Taliban and nuclear proliferation. But, with the U.S. reliance on Pakistan to resupply the war in Afghanistan and lingering U.S. concerns about Pakistan’s growing nuclear weapons program, will it and with what consequences?
The head of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, came to the United States to deliver the stark demands that included scaling back the successful drone program and withdrawing some 335 American personnel, including C.I.A. officers and contractors and Special Operations forces, from Pakistan. This was both expected and oddly refreshing.
It was expected because the break was long in the brewing. For at least a year, the United States has been increasing the size of its presence in Pakistan. Pakistan was suspicious of the growing U.S. presence and looming agenda and slowed the processing of American official visas to a sluggish grind.
I have argued elsewhere that the Raymond Davis affair was not an accidental precipitant of this impasse; rather, an event that the ISI successfully calibrated to bring about this very confrontation. Davis was protecting a cell that was trying to collect information on the Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the ISI's chief assets in its proxy war with India.
The two men that Davis killed are alleged by Pakistani sources to have been tied to the ISI, likely as contractors. The two Pakistanis did not target the case officers Davis was protecting. Had they done so, things would have been even more combustible. Thus the Davis affair was not only spook on spook, but spook-contractor on spook-contractor. Davis was released after “blood money” was paid and after weeks of political brinkmanship, amid well-orchestrated Pakistani public outrage.
The incident succeeded in creating the strategic space that the ISI needed to reset relations and regain control over the U.S. operations in Pakistan. The increasing autonomy would have vexed any sovereign country — Pakistan or otherwise.
The ISI's straightforward declaration that the American activities in Pakistan are unacceptable is also oddly refreshing. Typically, both Washington and Langley, on the one hand, and Islamabad and Rawalpindi, on the other, avoid straightforward talk in public. Both sides make various disingenuous proclamations in public while reviling the other privately. Both sides have long concluded that the other is perfidious and operating to undermine the other’s interests. Both are right.
But Pasha’s bold move is a significant departure from the routinized method of circumlocuting the simple fact that the United States and Pakistan have strategic interests that are increasingly on a collision course.
No Return to 'Reagan Rules'
Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer, is a senior fellow in the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. He was chairman of President Obama’s strategic review of United States policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009.
The Pakistani army has grown increasingly angry with American intelligence operations in Pakistan over the last two years. The army leadership, including Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the director general of Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, want a return to what they remember as "Reagan rules.” By this they mean a C.I.A.-ISI relationship like that of the 1980s when the agency provided the Pakistani intelligence agency with money and arms to aid the mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan but left administration of the program and the running of the war to the ISI. A very small agency footprint -- fewer than 100 officers ran the entire program in Washington, Islamabad and Riyadh -- never threatened Pakistani sovereignty or dignity.
Reagan rules also meant that the U.S. ignored Pakistan’s nuclear program. Every year the president certified to Congress that Pakistan’s nuclear efforts were incomplete, allowing U.S. assistance to continue to flow to Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq’s dictatorship.
The problem today is we can’t go back to this rosy world. The Pakistani army and the ISI cannot be relied on to fight the jihadi Frankenstein they have built over the last three decades. Pakistan’s own president, Asif Ali Zardari, has accused the army of playing on both sides of the war on terror, and there is abundant evidence to back him up. The terror group that attacked Mumbai in 2008 continues to enjoy army patronage. And Pakistan today has the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world, soon to be the fifth-largest just behind that of the U.S., Russia, China and France.
So the frustration level on both sides is likely to grow as trust between Washington and Islamabad erodes. We may be able to paper it over in public but behind the scenes the tension is unlikely to go away.
Bad for the U.S. and Pakistan
Reza Nasim Jan is a research analyst and the Pakistan team leader for the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute.
Pakistani demands to suspend the drone campaign and curtail the presence of American operatives in Pakistan will degrade U.S. efforts in the region — and harm Pakistani efforts as well. Drone attacks have been a vital tool against Al Qaeda and its affiliates there, especially given Pakistan’s public refusal to take on these groups.
Suspending the drone strikes will provide breathing room to insurgents and Al Qaeda affiliates attacking both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. Such a respite as the summer fighting season ramps up in Afghanistan could be particularly harmful to coalition efforts there.
The Pakistani demand to end the Special Forces-Frontier Corps training relationship, presumably out of fear that U.S. trainers are spying, is the unfortunate result of paranoia and public posturing. U.S. trainers are far too closely watched for that to be a legitimate concern. This demand will deprive the Frontier Corps of a program that has facilitated recent improvements in training and access to equipment, and hurt U.S. attempts to develop contacts with the corps, which has been on the front lines of counterinsurgency efforts in Pakistan.
That said, the game is not yet played out.
We need to see how negotiations progress. Pakistan’s leaders seem to think they have the advantage and are therefore making extravagant demands, no doubt partly for public consumption. Although the U.S. can push back against Pakistani demands, even cut off aid to the country, which would be devastating to Pakistan, America's interests in the region would ill-served by such overt hostility. The end result is likely to reflect the fact that neither side possesses a viable alternative to begrudging cooperation.
Painful as it may be, a patient attempt at resolving the current crisis is the only sound course to pursue at this time.
It Will Get Worse, if the U.S. Leaves
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former case officer in the C.I.A., is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is the author of the forthcoming "The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East."
It is entirely possible that the Central Intelligence Agency may have been a bit heavy-handed with the Pakistani military, as with the “unauthorized” drone attacks (the vast majority of these missile strikes inside Pakistan have unquestionably been coordinated and cleared by Islamabad). But it is increasingly clear that the primary problem between the two countries is the stubborn Pakistani dream that time can be reversed.
The Pakistani military liked the 1990s. Virulent anti-regime Islamic militancy was rare; Pashtun Islamic fervor, the spiritual backbone of both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban movements, was aimed at the conquest of Afghanistan; the North-West Frontier Province and its all-important trade hub Peshawar were peaceful and were pleasant weekend escapes for the elite of Islamabad; the economy was decent; and the nation became a nuclear power. The rise of Al Qaeda and its marriage to the Pakistani-supported Afghan Taliban movement weren’t Islamabad’s problems -- they were ours.
Since 2001, in Pakistani eyes things have gone seriously downhill. Islamic militancy is now a threat in the Punjab and the Sindh, the two all-critical provinces. Peshawar and large swaths of the North-West Frontier Province have become dangerous for those with open allegiances to the central government. Thousands of Pakistanis — hundreds of soldiers and intelligence officers — have died in the fight against the country’s homegrown holy warriors, some of whom had a fraternal relationship with the Pakistani army. Even though many Pakistanis may realize that the government’s aid to the Afghan Taliban was profoundly counterproductive, it’s still extremely difficult to give up the belief that Americans — not the Taliban — are the primary problem.
And the intelligence contretemps between the two countries will likely get much worse if Islamabad senses that the Obama administration really does intend to draw down troops in Afghanistan. It will feed the dream that the Americans will be gone (much of their financial and military aid, inshallah, will remain), the Afghan Taliban will again gain ground, and Pakistan’s increasingly violent jihadists will calm down and aim their hatred toward their primary targets: Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun minorities, American soldiers and a C.I.A. officer now and then.
NY Times
April 12, 2011
Introduction
With tensions high between the Pakistani spy agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, Pakistan has demanded that 335 American intelligence officers, contractors and Special Operations forces leave the country, and that the U.S. scale back drone attacks on tribal areas there.
The demand, officials from both countries said, is a response to the arrest of Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. security officer who killed two men in Lahore in January during what he said was a robbery attempt. Mr. Davis has since been released after the U.S. government agreed to reimburse the Pakistani government $2.3 million that it paid as compensation to the men's families.
Can -- or will -- the U.S. abide by Pakistan's demand that the C.I.A. curtail its activities? Could this be a serious blow to American efforts to control its enemies in the region?
Feeding Pakistan's Paranoia
Shuja Nawaz is director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington. He is the author of "Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within" and “Learning by Doing: the Pakistan Army’s Experience with Counterinsurgency."
Behind all the talk of a strategic dialogue and strategic partnership between the United States and Pakistan lurks the reality of a persistent transactional relationship, based on short-term objectives that intrude rudely into the limelight every time a drone attack kills civilians inside Pakistan or in the instance when an American “operative” is caught by the Pakistanis after killing two people on the streets of Lahore.
In “Paranoidistan,” as the historian Ayesha Jalal has called Pakistan, the public and the authorities are prepared to believe the worst. Conspiracy theories abound, involving the C.I.A., Israel and India, in various permutations.
So, it is not surprising that the Raymond Davis case has left mistrust in its wake. Unanswered questions abound: What was he doing driving alone in an unmarked car in the heart of Lahore’s bazaar district? Why did he shoot to kill two youths, and then step outside his car to finish them off, and photograph them again? And why was he photographing religious seminaries and bunkers, as leaked Pakistani information indicates?
Apart from allowing the extremist Pakistani right-wingers to capture the public space with their anti-American propaganda, this case left the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate embarrassed and angry. And it has sent friends of the United States into sullen silence. Then, as soon as Davis was released in a shadowy deal involving “blood money,” came the drone attack on Datta Khel in the border region of Pakistan that killed some 40 people.
Senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials maintain this was a “normal” jirga of peaceful tribesmen. U.S. officials say that it was designed to fool the C.I.A. and that the real purpose of the open-air gathering was to conduct business harmful to the coalition’s interests in Afghanistan. Regardless, the Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, cut whole categories of U.S. military personnel based in Pakistan and privately warned the U.S. that he will “react” if the attacks continue. His intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, recently in Washington to discuss the issue with his C.I.A. counterpart, echoed that hard line. Hence, the report of a senior military official raising the possibility of shooting down the drones.
The Pakistani military and government do cooperate with the C.I.A. and U.S. military in the border region, but they will not acknowledge this openly. Both countries need to address their concerns frankly and in detail rather than continue a charade that misinforms their own people about what they are doing and why.
The United States needs to stop paying the Pakistan army with coalition support funds to fight in the border region and instead provide it adequate military aid in kind, as part of a carefully structured cooperative program to build its mobility and firepower against the militants.
Money cannot buy love. It is more likely to generate contempt among the rank and file of the Pakistani military. If the ultimate objective is to stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, then economic and peaceful political means, and talks with the militants to bring them into the fold of normal political discourse, are also needed. Not drone attacks. Nor trigger-happy cowboys in the heartland of Pakistan.
On a Collision Course
C. Christine Fair is an assistant professor in the Center for Peace and Security Studies at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. She served as a political officer to the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan.
Now that Pakistan has made its red lines clear, how will Washington respond? No doubt the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, has concluded that the United States needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs the United States and thus is loath to cut off security or economic assistance. No doubt the ISI reckons that the C.I.A. will grudgingly accept these limitations while seeking to develop alternatives, however constrained. No doubt, the ISI is confident it will win this game of chicken. Pakistan’s spooks may well be right.
The ball is now in Washington’s court to lay down its own red lines, likely pertaining to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Haqqani group, the Afghan Taliban and nuclear proliferation. But, with the U.S. reliance on Pakistan to resupply the war in Afghanistan and lingering U.S. concerns about Pakistan’s growing nuclear weapons program, will it and with what consequences?
The head of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, came to the United States to deliver the stark demands that included scaling back the successful drone program and withdrawing some 335 American personnel, including C.I.A. officers and contractors and Special Operations forces, from Pakistan. This was both expected and oddly refreshing.
It was expected because the break was long in the brewing. For at least a year, the United States has been increasing the size of its presence in Pakistan. Pakistan was suspicious of the growing U.S. presence and looming agenda and slowed the processing of American official visas to a sluggish grind.
I have argued elsewhere that the Raymond Davis affair was not an accidental precipitant of this impasse; rather, an event that the ISI successfully calibrated to bring about this very confrontation. Davis was protecting a cell that was trying to collect information on the Lashkar-e-Taiba, one of the ISI's chief assets in its proxy war with India.
The two men that Davis killed are alleged by Pakistani sources to have been tied to the ISI, likely as contractors. The two Pakistanis did not target the case officers Davis was protecting. Had they done so, things would have been even more combustible. Thus the Davis affair was not only spook on spook, but spook-contractor on spook-contractor. Davis was released after “blood money” was paid and after weeks of political brinkmanship, amid well-orchestrated Pakistani public outrage.
The incident succeeded in creating the strategic space that the ISI needed to reset relations and regain control over the U.S. operations in Pakistan. The increasing autonomy would have vexed any sovereign country — Pakistan or otherwise.
The ISI's straightforward declaration that the American activities in Pakistan are unacceptable is also oddly refreshing. Typically, both Washington and Langley, on the one hand, and Islamabad and Rawalpindi, on the other, avoid straightforward talk in public. Both sides make various disingenuous proclamations in public while reviling the other privately. Both sides have long concluded that the other is perfidious and operating to undermine the other’s interests. Both are right.
But Pasha’s bold move is a significant departure from the routinized method of circumlocuting the simple fact that the United States and Pakistan have strategic interests that are increasingly on a collision course.
No Return to 'Reagan Rules'
Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer, is a senior fellow in the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. He was chairman of President Obama’s strategic review of United States policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009.
The Pakistani army has grown increasingly angry with American intelligence operations in Pakistan over the last two years. The army leadership, including Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the director general of Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, want a return to what they remember as "Reagan rules.” By this they mean a C.I.A.-ISI relationship like that of the 1980s when the agency provided the Pakistani intelligence agency with money and arms to aid the mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan but left administration of the program and the running of the war to the ISI. A very small agency footprint -- fewer than 100 officers ran the entire program in Washington, Islamabad and Riyadh -- never threatened Pakistani sovereignty or dignity.
Reagan rules also meant that the U.S. ignored Pakistan’s nuclear program. Every year the president certified to Congress that Pakistan’s nuclear efforts were incomplete, allowing U.S. assistance to continue to flow to Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq’s dictatorship.
The problem today is we can’t go back to this rosy world. The Pakistani army and the ISI cannot be relied on to fight the jihadi Frankenstein they have built over the last three decades. Pakistan’s own president, Asif Ali Zardari, has accused the army of playing on both sides of the war on terror, and there is abundant evidence to back him up. The terror group that attacked Mumbai in 2008 continues to enjoy army patronage. And Pakistan today has the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world, soon to be the fifth-largest just behind that of the U.S., Russia, China and France.
So the frustration level on both sides is likely to grow as trust between Washington and Islamabad erodes. We may be able to paper it over in public but behind the scenes the tension is unlikely to go away.
Bad for the U.S. and Pakistan
Reza Nasim Jan is a research analyst and the Pakistan team leader for the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute.
Pakistani demands to suspend the drone campaign and curtail the presence of American operatives in Pakistan will degrade U.S. efforts in the region — and harm Pakistani efforts as well. Drone attacks have been a vital tool against Al Qaeda and its affiliates there, especially given Pakistan’s public refusal to take on these groups.
Suspending the drone strikes will provide breathing room to insurgents and Al Qaeda affiliates attacking both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. Such a respite as the summer fighting season ramps up in Afghanistan could be particularly harmful to coalition efforts there.
The Pakistani demand to end the Special Forces-Frontier Corps training relationship, presumably out of fear that U.S. trainers are spying, is the unfortunate result of paranoia and public posturing. U.S. trainers are far too closely watched for that to be a legitimate concern. This demand will deprive the Frontier Corps of a program that has facilitated recent improvements in training and access to equipment, and hurt U.S. attempts to develop contacts with the corps, which has been on the front lines of counterinsurgency efforts in Pakistan.
That said, the game is not yet played out.
We need to see how negotiations progress. Pakistan’s leaders seem to think they have the advantage and are therefore making extravagant demands, no doubt partly for public consumption. Although the U.S. can push back against Pakistani demands, even cut off aid to the country, which would be devastating to Pakistan, America's interests in the region would ill-served by such overt hostility. The end result is likely to reflect the fact that neither side possesses a viable alternative to begrudging cooperation.
Painful as it may be, a patient attempt at resolving the current crisis is the only sound course to pursue at this time.
It Will Get Worse, if the U.S. Leaves
Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former case officer in the C.I.A., is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is the author of the forthcoming "The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East."
It is entirely possible that the Central Intelligence Agency may have been a bit heavy-handed with the Pakistani military, as with the “unauthorized” drone attacks (the vast majority of these missile strikes inside Pakistan have unquestionably been coordinated and cleared by Islamabad). But it is increasingly clear that the primary problem between the two countries is the stubborn Pakistani dream that time can be reversed.
The Pakistani military liked the 1990s. Virulent anti-regime Islamic militancy was rare; Pashtun Islamic fervor, the spiritual backbone of both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban movements, was aimed at the conquest of Afghanistan; the North-West Frontier Province and its all-important trade hub Peshawar were peaceful and were pleasant weekend escapes for the elite of Islamabad; the economy was decent; and the nation became a nuclear power. The rise of Al Qaeda and its marriage to the Pakistani-supported Afghan Taliban movement weren’t Islamabad’s problems -- they were ours.
Since 2001, in Pakistani eyes things have gone seriously downhill. Islamic militancy is now a threat in the Punjab and the Sindh, the two all-critical provinces. Peshawar and large swaths of the North-West Frontier Province have become dangerous for those with open allegiances to the central government. Thousands of Pakistanis — hundreds of soldiers and intelligence officers — have died in the fight against the country’s homegrown holy warriors, some of whom had a fraternal relationship with the Pakistani army. Even though many Pakistanis may realize that the government’s aid to the Afghan Taliban was profoundly counterproductive, it’s still extremely difficult to give up the belief that Americans — not the Taliban — are the primary problem.
And the intelligence contretemps between the two countries will likely get much worse if Islamabad senses that the Obama administration really does intend to draw down troops in Afghanistan. It will feed the dream that the Americans will be gone (much of their financial and military aid, inshallah, will remain), the Afghan Taliban will again gain ground, and Pakistan’s increasingly violent jihadists will calm down and aim their hatred toward their primary targets: Afghanistan’s non-Pashtun minorities, American soldiers and a C.I.A. officer now and then.
