In recent weeks, STRATFOR has
explored how the U.S. government has been seeing its interests
in the Middle East and South Asia shift. When it comes down to
it, the United States is interested in stability at the highest
level — a sort of cold equilibrium among the region’s major
players that prevents any one of them, or a coalition of them —
from overpowering the others and projecting power outward.
One of al Qaeda’s goals when it attacked the United States in
2001 was bringing about exactly what the United States most
wants to avoid. The group hoped to provoke Washington into
blundering into the region, enraging populations living under
what al Qaeda saw as Western puppet regimes to the extent that
they would rise up and unite into a single, continent-spanning
Islamic power. The United States so blundered, but the people
did not so rise. A transcontinental Islamic caliphate simply was
never realistic, no matter how bad the U.S. provocation.
Subsequent military campaigns have since gutted al Qaeda’s
ability to plot extraregional attacks. Al Qaeda’s franchises
remain dangerous, but the core group is not particularly
threatening beyond its hideouts in the Afghan-Pakistani border
region.
As for the region, nine years of war have left it much
disrupted. When the United States launched its military at the
region, there were three balances of power that kept the place
stable (or at least self-contained) from the American point of
view. All these balances are now faltering. We have already
addressed the Iran-Iraq balance of power, which was completely
destroyed following the American invasion in 2003. We will
address the Israeli-Arab balance of power in the future. This
week, we shall dive into the region’s third balance, one that
closely borders what will soon be the single largest contingent
of U.S. military forces overseas: the Indo-Pakistani balance of
power.
Pakistan and the
Evolution of U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan
U.S. strategy in Afghanistan has changed dramatically since
2001. The war began in the early morning hours — Pakistan time —
after the Sept. 11 attacks. Then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin
Powell called up then-Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf
to inform him that he would be assisting the United States
against al Qaeda, and if necessary, the Taliban. The key word
there is “inform.” The White House had already spoken with — and
obtained buy-in from — the leaders of Russia, the United
Kingdom, France, China, Israel and, most notably, India.
Musharraf was not given a choice in the matter. It was made
clear that if he refused assistance, the Americans would
consider Pakistan part of the problem rather than part of the
solution — all with the blessings of the international
community.
Islamabad was terrified — and with good reason; comply or
refuse, the demise of Pakistan was an all-too-real potential
outcome. The geography of Pakistan is extremely hostile. It is a
desert country. What rain the country benefits from falls in the
northern Indo-Pakistani border region, where the Himalayas wring
moisture out of the monsoons. Those rains form the five rivers
of the Greater Indus Valley, and irrigation works from those
rivers turn dry areas green.
Accordingly, Pakistan is geographically and geopolitically
doomed to perpetual struggle with poverty, instability and
authoritarianism. This is because irrigated agriculture is far
more expensive and labor-intensive than rain-fed agriculture.
Irrigation drains the Indus’ tributaries such that the river is
not navigable above Hyderabad, near the coast — drastically
raising transport costs and inhibiting economic development.
Reasonably well-watered mountains in the northwest guarantee an
ethnically distinct population in those regions (the Pashtun), a
resilient people prone to resisting the political power of the
Punjabis in the Indus Basin. This, combined with the
overpowering Indian military, results in a country with
remarkably few options for generating capital even as it has
remarkably high capital demands.
Islamabad’s one means of acquiring breathing room has involved
co-opting the Pashtun population living in the mountainous
northwestern periphery of the country. Governments before
Musharraf had used Islamism to forge a common identity for these
people, which not only included them as part of the Pakistani
state (and so reduced their likelihood of rebellion) but also
employed many of them as tools of foreign and military policy.
Indeed, managing relationships with these disparate and
peripheral ethnic populations allowed Pakistan to stabilize its
own peripheral territory and to become the dominant outside
power in Afghanistan as the Taliban (trained and equipped by
Pakistan) took power after the Soviet withdrawal.
Thus, the Americans were ordering the Pakistanis on Sept. 12,
2001, to throw out the one strategy that allowed Pakistan to
function. Pakistan complied not just out of fears of the
Americans, but also out of fears of a potentially devastating
U.S.-Indian alignment against Pakistan over the issue of
Islamist terrorism in the wake of the Kashmiri militant attacks
on the Indian parliament that almost led India and Pakistan to
war in mid-2002. The Musharraf government hence complied, but
only as much as it dared, given its own delicate position.
From the Pakistani point of view, things went downhill from
there. Musharraf faced mounting opposition to his relationship
with the Americans from the Pakistani public at large, from the
army and intelligence staff who had forged relations with the
militants and, of course, from the militants themselves.
Pakistan’s halfhearted assistance to the Americans meant
militants of all stripes — Afghan, Pakistani, Arab and others —
were able to seek succor on the Pakistani side of the border,
and then launch attacks against U.S. forces on the Afghan side
of the border. The result was even more intense American
political pressure on Pakistan to police its own militants and
foreign militants seeking shelter there. Meanwhile, what
assistance Pakistan did provide to the Americans led to the rise
of a new batch of homegrown militants — the Pakistani Taliban —
who sought to wreck the U.S.-Pakistani relationship by bringing
down the government in Islamabad.
The Indian Perspective
The period between the Soviet collapse and the rise of the
Taliban — the 1990s — saw India at a historical ebb in the power
balance with Pakistan. The American reaction to the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks changed all that. The U.S. military had eliminated
Pakistan’s proxy government in Afghanistan, and ongoing American
pressure was buckling the support structures that allowed
Pakistan to function. So long as matters continued on this
trajectory, New Delhi saw itself on track for a historically
unprecedented dominance of the subcontinent.
But the American commitment to Afghanistan is not without its
limits, and American pressure was not sustainable. At its heart,
Afghanistan is a landlocked knot of arid mountains without the
sort of sheltered, arable geography that is likely to give rise
to a stable — much less economically viable — state. Any
military reality that the Americans imposed would last only so
long as U.S. forces remained in the country.
The alternative now being pursued is the current effort at
Vietnamization of the conflict as a means of facilitating a full
U.S. withdrawal. In order to keep the country from returning to
the sort of anarchy that gave rise to al Qaeda, the United
States needed a local power to oversee matters in Afghanistan.
The only viable alternative — though the Americans had been
berating it for years — was Pakistan.
If U.S. and Pakistan interests could be aligned, matters could
fall into place rather quickly — and so they did once Islamabad
realized the breadth and dangerous implications of its domestic
insurgency. The five-year, $7.5 billion U.S. aid package to
Pakistan approved in 2009 not only helped secure the
arrangement, it likely reflects it. An unprecedented
counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaign conducted by the
Pakistani military continues in the country’s tribal belt. While
it has not focused on all the individuals and entities
Washington might like, it has created real pressure on the
Pakistani side of the border that has facilitated efforts on the
Afghan side. For example, Islamabad has found a dramatic
increase in American unmanned aerial vehicle strikes tolerable
because at least some of those strikes are hitting Pakistani
Taliban targets, as opposed to Afghan Taliban targets. The
message is that certain rules cannot be broken without
consequences.
Ultimately, with long experience bleeding the Soviets in
Afghanistan, the United States was inherently wary of becoming
involved in Afghanistan. In recent years, it has become all too
clear how distant the prospect of a stable Afghanistan is. A
tribal-ethnic balance of power overseen by Pakistan is another
matter entirely, however. The great irony is that such a success
could make the region look remarkably like it did on Sept. 10,
2001.
This would represent a reversal of India’s recent fortunes. In
10 years, India has gone from a historic low in the power
balance with Pakistan to a historic high, watching U.S. support
for Pakistan shift to pressure on Islamabad to do the kinds of
things (if not the precise actions) India had long clamored for.
But now, U.S. and Pakistani interests not only appear aligned
again, the two countries appear to be laying groundwork for the
incorporation of elements of the Taliban into the Afghan state.
The Indians are concerned that with American underwriting, the
Pakistanis not only may be about to re-emerge as a major check
on Indian ambitions, but in a form eerily familiar to the sort
of state-militant partnership that so effectively limited Indian
power in the past. They are right. The Indians also are
concerned that Pakistani promises to the Americans about what
sort of behavior militants in Afghanistan will be allowed to
engage in will not sufficiently limit the militants’ activities
— and in any event will do little to nothing to address the
Kashmiri militant issue. Here, too, the Indians are probably
right. The Americans want to leave — and if the price of
departure is leaving behind an emboldened Pakistan supporting a
militant structure that can target India, the Americans seem
fine with making India pay that price.
