Stepping Back from the Brink

For the past five years, Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas have been the site of a grueling, bloody, and brutal guerrilla war between the U.S.-backed Pakistani government and the Taliban. Three broken cease-fires and thousands of deaths later, the two sides are no closer to resolving their quarrel over control of the disputed territory. In the past year alone, Taliban fighters have attacked NATO supply convoys, the Sri Lankan cricket team on its visit to Lahore, and Pakistani outposts in the region.

While the conflict has always been something of a low-intensity guerrilla war, recent news reports from the region confirm that Taliban militants have begun to advance into a key region just 60 miles from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. A temporary peace agreement has stopped the worst of the fighting, but the insurgency is clearly an existential threat to the Pakistani government, which has been relatively cooperative with the U.S. to root out terrorists in the region. As such, given the critical security situation in Pakistan and the region as a whole—Islamabad also controls the only nuclear arsenal in the Muslim world—it is high time that the United States reconsider the nature of its alliance with the Islamic Republic.

After the September 11 attacks, the United States sought to forge a closer link to its former Cold War ally, pledging billions of dollars in military aid and equipment to Islamabad. But Pakistan’s anti-Taliban stance did not signal a genuine commitment to change its repressive domestic regime. Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, whom President George W. Bush praised as one of America’s strongest allies in the war on terror, was the fourth military dictator to seize power in that troubled nation’s six decades of existence. Last year, Musharraf was forced to resign by a democratically elected coalition government, but conditions on the ground have barely improved; Amnesty International USA continues to document hundreds of “disappearances” in Baluchistan.

While cutting off aid to Pakistan entirely would be a poor decision given the critical situation on the ground, it is important for the United States to reconsider its current policy of unconditional aid to the Pakistani government. In the 1980s, the George H.W. Bush administration wisely imposed arms-export controls on Islamabad, ending the export of nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets when confronted with evidence of Pakistan’s underground nuclear program. These restraints were tightened on President Clinton’s watch when Pakistan exploded its first nuclear bomb in May 1998. But, after the Musharraf government’s post-9/11 about-face, the American government resumed deliveries of the fighter jet. While we support a strong Pakistan that can fight terrorism, we wonder why a country that is unable to secure its own borders needs a multi-million-dollar fighter aircraft.

Current American policy suits neither our national interest nor our democratic values. Continued unrestricted high-value exports of sensitive military materiel will not help Pakistan to fight the Taliban insurgency on its northwest frontier. Similarly, our policy of no-strings-attached support for Pakistan’s government—which has resulted in a shameful lack of progress on the important issues of human rights and democracy—should instead be restructured in such a way that prioritizes concrete improvements in that government’s human-rights record while maintaining a strategic relationship of mutual benefit.

Of course, the conflict in Pakistan is intimately linked to our own battle against the Taliban in Afghanistan. As the Bush administration’s misguided and horrendously expensive war in Iraq winds down, we are happy to see that President Obama is redirecting our military and reconstruction efforts to bring peace and stability to that war-torn country and hope that, if the situation stabilizes in that country, the same will happen in Pakistan’s frontier areas.

Regardless of developments in Afghanistan, the Obama administration should seriously reevaluate our current security posture in South Asia and devise a comprehensive diplomatic agenda for the region that calls for the stabilization of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the eradication of the Taliban and the drug trade, and a positive role for India, a fellow democracy that has proven to be a reliable partner since the bilateral nuclear treaty of 2006. Only a comprehensive South Asian agenda that takes all of these complex variables into account has any chance of permanently resolving the core issues at stake.