Unedited version of "The issue of apologies" the Op Ed that ran in the Pakistan Express Tribune
http://tribune.com.pk/story/405852/the-issue-of-apologies/
C. Christine Fair
Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton uttered something vaguely resembling the much demanded apology as a quid quo pro for Pakistan’s reopening the ground supply routes to Afghanistan. The civilian drama followed back-stage haggling among Pakistan and US military brass where the real work was done. However, for many Pakistanis, Clinton’s vague utterance did not constitute an apology. Meanwhile in the United States, many Americans are waiting for some apologies from Pakistan.
The diplomatic word crafting fooled no one. Even if the two countries found a temporary workaround to open the ground routes, none of the fundamental differences in the countries’ strategic priorities have been addressed. Given the divergent goals of the state, the next crises looms around every corner.
The immediate precipitant of the closure was the November 25, 2011 US attack on Pakistani military outpost in Salala in Pakistan’s Mohmand Agency. After the nearly two-hour, multi-phased assault, twenty-four Pakistani soldiers were dead. While President Obama and Ambassador Munter offered condolences, Washington steadfastly refused to forthrightly apologize and accept culpability for the attack even though US military actions were largely at fault. Pushing aside major US blunders such as sending Pakistan erroneous GPS coordinate for the positions from which US and NATO forces were taking fire, Americans argued strenuously that the tragedy happened because of Pakistan’s long-standing support for Afghan insurgents attacking US and allied troops in Afghanistan. This, they argued, precluded US forces from following standing operating procedures established to prevent such mishaps. For example, US and NATO forces resist notifying Pakistanis across the border for fear that they will provide advance notice of the operation enabling the adversaries to abscond.
For many Americans, the Pakistani military got what it had deserved after some eleven years of perfidious support to those groups attacking US and allied troops occupying Afghanistan. This sense of accumulated outrage decreased any appetite for apologies. That this is an election year further compounded the Obama administration’s considerations. Americans were—and are-- fed up with Pakistan’s support to the Haqqani Network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, various elements of the Afghan Taliban who are responsible for thousands of US, NATO and Afghan military casualties and many more Afghan civilian casualties. There is no more appetite for continued engagement of Pakistan among an increasingly broke and war-weary public.
Prior to Salala, Americans were incensed by the revelation that Osama Bin Laden had been living in relative security a short distance from the Pakistan Military Academy. Bin Laden was living in such peace and security that his assortment of wives accompanied him and they proceeded to build an enormous family under the army’s nose in Abbottabad.
While some analysts concede that there is no hard proof that the ISI or other senior leadership knew about Bin Laden’s presence (including this author), other Americans find this hard to believe. Pakistan has done little assuage their incredulity. For example, it has shown no interest in discerning who helped Bin Laden remain in Pakistan undetected for years where he built a massive family with many wives and numerous children. Instead, Pakistan has focused singularly upon a hapless physician who helped bring down Bin Laden. Former Pakistan Ambassador Husain Haqqani was berated in Pakistan’s media, Supreme Court, Khaki circles and the parliament for allegedly selling Pakistan’s sovereignty by issuing visas to the various CIA agents who brought down Bin Laden. No one has bothered to discern who sold out Pakistan’s sovereignty by aiding and abetting Bin Laden’s tenure in the country. Americans find this exceedingly difficult to understand—even those who want to.
All of this has accumulated in a simmering sense among Americans that it is Pakistan who owes the Americans some apologies. Having taken more than $22 billion in US taxpayers’ money since 9/11, many Americans believe that Pakistan is more intent on helping our enemies than helping us to defeat them.
Many Pakistanis rubbish these contentions. Unfortunately, Pakistanis share the American proclivity to be ignorant of their own history. Pakistan’s school curriculum and media exhibit no better exposition of historical events. Consequently far too many Pakistanis recite absurd untruths and partial truths to account the events that have happened in Pakistan and in the region.
For example, many Pakistanis cling to the canard that it was the United States that foisted jihad upon Pakistan during the 1980s when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan. Few seem to know that Pakistan’s Afghan policy took shape in the mid-1970s under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. When Zia seized power, he was unable to persuade then US President Carter to support Pakistan’s preferred means of managing the Russians in Afghanistan: jihad. Zia was wary of supporting an ethno nationalist insurgency for fears that such an approach would rile and motivate Pakistan’s own restless Pashtuns. Not only did Carter refuse to budge, his administration imposed nuclear proliferation-related sanctions in April of 1979 which precluded security assistance to Pakistan. These were waived with the invasion by the Soviets on Christmas Day in 1979. This began a decade of American subordination of its nonproliferation goals to its Afghan policy, which required it to find ways of funneling aid to Pakistan. Few Pakistanis acknowledge that the Saudis matched every US dollar in this effort. Many Pakistanis also seem to believe that the CIA “created” Osama bin Laden. Any ISI officer can attest that Bin Laden came to Pakistan on his family’s dime. Bin Laden did not return to the region until 1996 when he was kicked out the Sudan where he went after Saudi Arabia expelled him in 1991.
When the United States withdrew in 1990, Pakistan continued supporting Islamist militants in Afghanistan in hopes of undermining the communist Najibullah government. Pakistan supported Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pashtun Islamist, who battled Ahmad Shah Masood and his Northern Alliance. While the Russians never destroyed Kabul, these dueling warlords did. When Hekmatyar failed, the Pakistan shifted its support to the Taliban. The Taliban emerged from an archipelago of Deobandi madrassahs. Indeed, they come from the same madrassahs as several Deobandi militants tied to Pakistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi/Sipha-e-Sahaba-e-Pakistan, Jaish-e-Mohammad and so forth. Not only did Pakistan continue to be involved in Afghan policy throughout the 1990s—when the US was completely absent from the region—it also supported a slew of militant organizations that also operated in Kashmir.
Pakistanis are very quick to blame the jihadis that have rampaged across Pakistan upon the Americans. Unfortunately, this is shoddy history and it is disempowering because it suggests that Pakistan has had no control over the questionable destiny it has charted for itself.
Many Pakistanis also blame the United States for the deaths of some 35,000 Pakistanis who have died since 9/11. The war in Afghanistan and Pakistan military operations against Al Qaeda who had ensconced themselves with fellow travelers motivated assorted Deobandi rogue elements to coalesce against the state under the banner of the Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan. However, there would be no TTP had there been no Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and other assorted Deobandi militants. Pakistanis need to hold the ISI to account even while they rightly criticize sequentially failed US policies in Afghanistan for this horrific bloodshed.
With such starkly different accounts of history and responsibility, the deal that has been tentatively inked is doomed. The apology never should have been linked to an opening of the ground lines of control. As I wrote in December, President Obama should have apologized immediately. Obama should have used the apology to begin a frank conversation about the very real divergent goals that Pakistan and the United States have in and for the region. Unless these differences could be narrowed and unless—at a minimum—Pakistan immediately ceased support for the very groups killing US, NATO and Afghan troops and civilians, there should have been no deal.
The closure forced Washington to sustain the war without Pakistan. The alternative routes that relied upon air and Central Asian ground routes cost the Americans about $140 million per month over and beyond the previous arrangement according to which they paid a meager $250 for each sea container that moved from Pakistan’s port in Karachi through Pakistani territory and into Afghanistan either through Chaman in Balochistan or Torkham at the Khyber Pass. With Pakistan’s continued commitment to the use of militants as tools of foreign policy, the United States cannot even marginally succeed in Afghanistan by any meager metric of success. Thus it would have behooved Washington to continue forging an Afghan policy that was independent of Pakistan.
Given Pakistan’s commitment to the very groups that the United States labels as enemies, terrorists and rogues, the United States needs to learn how to sustain an Afghan presence without Pakistan indefinitely. Moreover, the higher cost of moving supplies via the alternative routes could have been compensated by denying Pakistan arrearage of Coalition Support Funds that range between $1.3 and $3 billion—depending upon whose math you trust—and foregoing other assistance. After all, the entire logic of Coalition Support Funds is that Pakistan is to support the coalition. Ample evidence is available that Pakistan had done just the opposite
For better or for worse, such an arrangement would suit many Pakistanis just as well as it would many Americans.
C. Christine Fair is an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program within the
Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service
