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The Devastating Paradox of Pakistan
How Afghanistan’s neighbor cultivated American dependency while subverting American policy
The Atlantic Daily, our free weekday email newsletter.
Directorate S
By Steve Coll
Penguin Press
Two months after the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Vice President–elect Joe Biden sat with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, in the Arg Palace, an 83-acre compound in Kabul that had become a gilded cage for the mercurial and isolated leader. The discussion was already tense as Karzai urged Washington to help root out Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, implying that more pressure needed to be exerted on Pakistani leaders. Biden’s answer stunned Karzai into silence. Biden let Karzai know how Barack Obama’s incoming administration saw its priorities. “Mr. President,” Biden said, “Pakistan is fifty times more important than Afghanistan for the United States.”
It was an undiplomatic moment for sure, but also a frank expression of the devastating paradox at the heart of the longest war in American history. In 16 years, the United States has spent billions of dollars fighting a war that has killed thousands of soldiers and an untold number of civilians in a country that Washington considers insignificant to its strategic interests in the region. Meanwhile, the country it has viewed as a linchpin, Pakistan—a nuclear-armed cauldron of volatile politics and long America’s closest military ally in South Asia—has pursued a covert campaign in Afghanistan designed to ensure that the money and the lives have been spent in vain. The stakes in Pakistan have been considered too high to break ties with Islamabad or take other steps that would risk destabilizing the country. The stakes in Afghanistan have been deemed low enough that careening from one failed strategy to another has been acceptable.
lamented that Pakistan had become “a black hole for American aid.” “Our tax dollars go in. Our diplomats go in, sometimes. Our aid professionals go in, sometimes. Our hopes go in. Our prayers go in,” he said. “Nothing good ever comes out.”
Members of Congress began calling for a strategy to put pressure on Pakistan by cutting annual aid to the country, but policy makers faced another quandary: As the goals the United States set in Afghanistan grew more ambitious, Washington’s need of Pakistan’s help to achieve them grew too. The swiftness with which the initial military campaign fulfilled its comparatively modest aims—to avenge the September 11 attacks by destroying al-Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan, expel the Taliban from cities, and install a more competent government in Kabul—led to hubris about what was possible in a hopelessly poor country wracked by decades of war.
The enterprise of nation building meant, in no particularly consistent order, quixotic attempts to root out corruption, lean on Karzai to sack unsavory warlords, and reengineer Afghanistan’s opium economy by getting farmers to plant crops far less lucrative than poppies. In 2004, I traveled with a team of Green Berets through gorgeous, flowering poppy fields to meet with the elders of various villages in Kunar province. “The government in Kabul wants you to plant wheat” was high on the list of the soldiers’ talking points. During the meeting, one of the elders duly declared, “Next year we will plant wheat!” Many of the others sniggered.
The more the united states invested in the Afghan War, the more it seemed as if Washington was holding on to a steering wheel detached from the rest of the car. The main supply lines that kept the war machine humming—bringing fuel, food, and equipment to the rising numbers of troops in Afghanistan—ran through Pakistan. The government in Islamabad could (and did, for as long as seven months at one point) cut off the supplies, leaving convoys of trucks sitting idle between the port of Karachi and various border crossings.
Many CIA officials were skeptical that the United States should try to root out corruption, and advocated that the agency focus on trying to decimate al‑Qaeda and its sympathizers with drone strikes. During the Obama years, they clashed repeatedly with generals and policy makers beguiled by a counterinsurgency doctrine that put a premium on anti-corruption efforts. Despite ample evidence of America’s inconsistent approach, the notion that the U.S. might have no grand policy whatsoever in Afghanistan was difficult to accept for some of the key players, notably Kayani and Karzai.
They chose to fill the void with conspiracy theories. Kayani and other top Pakistani military officials believed that the United States was secretly working with Karzai’s government to bolster India’s influence in Afghanistan as a counterweight to Pakistan. Karzai subscribed to a more elaborate conspiracy: Washington was sending ever more troops to his country to gain a permanent foothold in Central Asia, from which the United States could compete against Russia and China for supremacy in the region—the Great Game redux.
But this was fevered thinking, which was partly what prompted Biden to deliver his blunt message to Karzai in the Arg Palace in 2009. That meeting came at an inflection point: A new administration was taking over, and Biden was skeptical that the Afghanistan project was worth the candle. The American economy was in crisis, and the generals were about to present the inexperienced president-elect with a costly new plan to send in thousands of additional troops.
Coll’s majestic Ghost Wars tracked the CIA’s adventures in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion, in 1979, through the eve of the September 11 attacks. Reading it was a gut-wrenching experience, with momentum building toward a climactic, dreadful outcome. ReadingDirectorate S is more like watching a slow-motion video of a truck going off a cliff, frame by agonizing frame. And no semblance of closure ever comes. Coll may have embarked on a full accounting of the war to its end, but history didn’t cooperate. Obama announced a plan in 2014 to conclude America’s combat operations in Afghanistan. By the time his tenure in the White House wound down, the generals had persuaded him to leave thousands of troops in the country indefinitely.Penguin Press
Within months of taking office, his successor—who had campaigned on scaling back America’s overseas adventures—accepted a Pentagon plan to add thousands more U.S. troops. In a speech announcing his strategy, Donald Trump ran through a familiar litany of complaints about Pakistan, capped by the demand that the country end its support for the very groups America is fighting in Afghanistan. He also called on India, Pakistan’s archenemy, to take a greater role in Afghanistan’s internal affairs—a threat evidently intended to scare Pakistani officials into backing off. Frustration mounted as the year turned, and an outraged presidential tweet denouncing years of “nothing but lies & deceit” was followed by a suspension of security assistance to Pakistan. What the repercussions might be was anybody’s guess.
Coll sums up the war as a “humbling case study in the limits of American power.” But a decade and a half after the first shots were fired, the U.S. president wasn’t exactly projecting humility, much less a newly coherent American policy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/the-pakistan-trap/550895/
How Afghanistan’s neighbor cultivated American dependency while subverting American policy
The Atlantic Daily, our free weekday email newsletter.
Directorate S
By Steve Coll
Penguin Press
Two months after the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Vice President–elect Joe Biden sat with Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, in the Arg Palace, an 83-acre compound in Kabul that had become a gilded cage for the mercurial and isolated leader. The discussion was already tense as Karzai urged Washington to help root out Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, implying that more pressure needed to be exerted on Pakistani leaders. Biden’s answer stunned Karzai into silence. Biden let Karzai know how Barack Obama’s incoming administration saw its priorities. “Mr. President,” Biden said, “Pakistan is fifty times more important than Afghanistan for the United States.”
It was an undiplomatic moment for sure, but also a frank expression of the devastating paradox at the heart of the longest war in American history. In 16 years, the United States has spent billions of dollars fighting a war that has killed thousands of soldiers and an untold number of civilians in a country that Washington considers insignificant to its strategic interests in the region. Meanwhile, the country it has viewed as a linchpin, Pakistan—a nuclear-armed cauldron of volatile politics and long America’s closest military ally in South Asia—has pursued a covert campaign in Afghanistan designed to ensure that the money and the lives have been spent in vain. The stakes in Pakistan have been considered too high to break ties with Islamabad or take other steps that would risk destabilizing the country. The stakes in Afghanistan have been deemed low enough that careening from one failed strategy to another has been acceptable.
lamented that Pakistan had become “a black hole for American aid.” “Our tax dollars go in. Our diplomats go in, sometimes. Our aid professionals go in, sometimes. Our hopes go in. Our prayers go in,” he said. “Nothing good ever comes out.”
Members of Congress began calling for a strategy to put pressure on Pakistan by cutting annual aid to the country, but policy makers faced another quandary: As the goals the United States set in Afghanistan grew more ambitious, Washington’s need of Pakistan’s help to achieve them grew too. The swiftness with which the initial military campaign fulfilled its comparatively modest aims—to avenge the September 11 attacks by destroying al-Qaeda’s base in Afghanistan, expel the Taliban from cities, and install a more competent government in Kabul—led to hubris about what was possible in a hopelessly poor country wracked by decades of war.
The enterprise of nation building meant, in no particularly consistent order, quixotic attempts to root out corruption, lean on Karzai to sack unsavory warlords, and reengineer Afghanistan’s opium economy by getting farmers to plant crops far less lucrative than poppies. In 2004, I traveled with a team of Green Berets through gorgeous, flowering poppy fields to meet with the elders of various villages in Kunar province. “The government in Kabul wants you to plant wheat” was high on the list of the soldiers’ talking points. During the meeting, one of the elders duly declared, “Next year we will plant wheat!” Many of the others sniggered.
The more the united states invested in the Afghan War, the more it seemed as if Washington was holding on to a steering wheel detached from the rest of the car. The main supply lines that kept the war machine humming—bringing fuel, food, and equipment to the rising numbers of troops in Afghanistan—ran through Pakistan. The government in Islamabad could (and did, for as long as seven months at one point) cut off the supplies, leaving convoys of trucks sitting idle between the port of Karachi and various border crossings.
Many CIA officials were skeptical that the United States should try to root out corruption, and advocated that the agency focus on trying to decimate al‑Qaeda and its sympathizers with drone strikes. During the Obama years, they clashed repeatedly with generals and policy makers beguiled by a counterinsurgency doctrine that put a premium on anti-corruption efforts. Despite ample evidence of America’s inconsistent approach, the notion that the U.S. might have no grand policy whatsoever in Afghanistan was difficult to accept for some of the key players, notably Kayani and Karzai.
They chose to fill the void with conspiracy theories. Kayani and other top Pakistani military officials believed that the United States was secretly working with Karzai’s government to bolster India’s influence in Afghanistan as a counterweight to Pakistan. Karzai subscribed to a more elaborate conspiracy: Washington was sending ever more troops to his country to gain a permanent foothold in Central Asia, from which the United States could compete against Russia and China for supremacy in the region—the Great Game redux.
But this was fevered thinking, which was partly what prompted Biden to deliver his blunt message to Karzai in the Arg Palace in 2009. That meeting came at an inflection point: A new administration was taking over, and Biden was skeptical that the Afghanistan project was worth the candle. The American economy was in crisis, and the generals were about to present the inexperienced president-elect with a costly new plan to send in thousands of additional troops.
Coll’s majestic Ghost Wars tracked the CIA’s adventures in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion, in 1979, through the eve of the September 11 attacks. Reading it was a gut-wrenching experience, with momentum building toward a climactic, dreadful outcome. ReadingDirectorate S is more like watching a slow-motion video of a truck going off a cliff, frame by agonizing frame. And no semblance of closure ever comes. Coll may have embarked on a full accounting of the war to its end, but history didn’t cooperate. Obama announced a plan in 2014 to conclude America’s combat operations in Afghanistan. By the time his tenure in the White House wound down, the generals had persuaded him to leave thousands of troops in the country indefinitely.Penguin Press
Within months of taking office, his successor—who had campaigned on scaling back America’s overseas adventures—accepted a Pentagon plan to add thousands more U.S. troops. In a speech announcing his strategy, Donald Trump ran through a familiar litany of complaints about Pakistan, capped by the demand that the country end its support for the very groups America is fighting in Afghanistan. He also called on India, Pakistan’s archenemy, to take a greater role in Afghanistan’s internal affairs—a threat evidently intended to scare Pakistani officials into backing off. Frustration mounted as the year turned, and an outraged presidential tweet denouncing years of “nothing but lies & deceit” was followed by a suspension of security assistance to Pakistan. What the repercussions might be was anybody’s guess.
Coll sums up the war as a “humbling case study in the limits of American power.” But a decade and a half after the first shots were fired, the U.S. president wasn’t exactly projecting humility, much less a newly coherent American policy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/the-pakistan-trap/550895/
