For over six decades, the United States and Pakistan have suffered through a tormented and often tumultuous relationship, one defined at its apex by wartime alliance and at its nadir by stiff U.S. sanctions. In many ways, the period since 9/11 has mirrored that longer history, with expectations inflated and dashed, overblown rhetoric, and in the end, more frustration than satisfaction.
That frustration is now rekindling a congressional debate over U.S. assistance and arms sales to Pakistan that, if managed smartly, has the potential to set U.S. policy on a more effective and politically sustainable trajectory for at least the next several years. Managed poorly, the debate could send the U.S.-Pakistan relationship back into a period of estrangement in ways that would do little to advance U.S. goals and could quickly make a bad situation worse.
Today, critics of the U.S. relationship with Pakistan have an easy time pointing out the troubling contradictions at its core. Those contradictions begin in Afghanistan, where longstanding disputes are often boiled down to a disagreement over whether Pakistan is doing enough to target the Taliban-aligned Haqqani Network. They extend to the counterterrorism mission, where even though U.S. and Pakistani officials have worked together to kill and capture hundreds of international terrorists based in Pakistan, including some top al Qaeda leaders, many U.S. policymakers—including President Obama himself—clearly assume a high level of Pakistani duplicity. And U.S. suspicions carry over to Pakistan’s relations with India, where despite official Pakistani claims of commitment to severing the state’s ties to groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed, the cross-border violence persists.
Yet even with these contradictions, suspicions, and disagreements, U.S. policymakers are reluctant to pull the plug on relations with Pakistan. This is because they understand two things that outside critics tend to miss, or at least to underestimate.
First, Pakistan permits—and at times has enabled—the United States to wage its counterterror drone campaign and, even at times of deep bilateral discord, to continue flying personnel and arms across Pakistani airspace into Afghanistan. Neither side has been eager to publicize these areas of cooperation, but even American skeptics must admit their essential utility. Air corridors are readily closed, and drones are especially easy to shoot down, so if Pakistan had really wanted to end what in 2009 then-CIA Director Leon Panetta called the “only game in town in terms of confronting and trying to disrupt the al-Qaida leadership,” or to further complicate the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, it could have done so without breaking much of a sweat.
Second, U.S. policymakers know that inadequate cooperation with Pakistan is probably better than none at all, and that public whining about frustrations with Pakistan usually offers nothing more than temporary catharsis. It is not merely that U.S. policymakers tend to be risk averse when it comes to dealing with a nuclear-armed state, although they often are. But if we seriously expect them to implement a radical shift in U.S. policy, policymakers would need to perceive clearly how treating Pakistan as an enemy would make America’s strategic predicament any easier.
That said, the U.S. military drawdown in Afghanistan and the looming end of the Obama administration set the stage for restructuring U.S. assistance to Pakistan and, in the process, for resetting expectations in the years to come. I have written elsewhere about a general strategy for U.S. assistance to Pakistan. Here I will focus on some specifics.
With respect to civilian aid, the Obama administration should use the next nine months to undertake a comprehensive review of existing and planned projects in Pakistan, with a critical assessment of how each project can realistically contribute to Pakistan’s development and/or reform. That review will enable the next administration to reallocate resources in ways that better advance Pakistan’s long term political stability, economic growth, and security, bearing in mind that U.S. aid alone cannot solve most of Pakistan’s challenges and that the goal is to find areas where targeted investments of U.S. money or technical know-how can pay outsized or unique dividends.
Until that review is complete, civilian assistance levels should remain constant, at roughly $400 million, mainly in the form of flexible “Economic Support Funds,” implemented by USAID with guidance from the State Department. But the review should also assess whether that overall scale of civilian assistance is appropriate to the task at hand in Pakistan, or whether a fundamentally different approach—such as the Chinese are pursuing with concessional loans aimed at promoting infrastructure or other investments—would be smarter in the future.
The bulk of security-related assistance to Pakistan currently comes in two forms: Foreign Military Financing (FMF) administered through the State Department, of $265 million in FY2016, and Coalition Support Fund (CSF) “reimbursements” that totaled $900 million in FY 2016, of which $350 million were conditioned on Pakistan’s taking steps to combat the Haqqani network. In fiscal year 2016, the Obama administration requested another $71 million in counter-narcotics, disaster relief, and military education. An additional $100 million was made available for “stability activities” in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
In order to clarify U.S. goals in Pakistan and to better connect those goals with specific funding streams that can be conditioned on Pakistani actions, CSF and the “stability activities” funds should be restructured into three subcategories of reimbursements. The first would be up to $300 million for counter-terror cooperation, conditioned on Pakistan’s demonstrated effort in the fight against international terrorist groups on its soil, especially al-Qaida. The second, up to $200 million for stabilization efforts in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, conditioned on Pakistan’s progress with military and administrative efforts to clear and hold territories against domestic insurgent groups, especially the TTP. And the third would be up to $400 million for operations in support of the war in Afghanistan, conditioned on demonstrated progress in military and diplomatic efforts aimed at reducing threats to the Afghan government. For each of these subcategories, Congress’s certification requirements should clearly establish minimal requirements for funding, and as a reimbursement program, money would flow only after Pakistan takes the steps required.
The question of how to manage FMF is tightly tied to the contentious issue of F-16 aircraft sales. In the past, sales have been justified in the following five ways. First, the jets help Pakistan prosecute military offensives in the tribal areas against anti-state insurgent groups like the TTP. Second, sales foster a close working relationship between the Pakistani and American militaries, as U.S. trainers and technicians will work closely with Pakistani pilots and mechanics as long as the planes are in service. Third, F-16s enable Pakistan to address its “legitimate defense” needs, which during the Cold War, Americans took to mean securing Pakistan against Soviet encroachment, but in the present context could only mean to help Pakistan improve its air defenses against Indian attack. Fourth, sales build trust and improve Washington’s access and influence with Islamabad. And fifth, the sales amount to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of American manufacturing exports.
All of these justifications have flaws. Because Pakistan already has over seventy F-16s in service, it is difficult to argue that new sales are required to maintain U.S. engagement with Pakistan’s air force, or that they will provide significantly greater access or influence to corridors of power in Islamabad or Rawalpindi. Arming Pakistan against India has never been a high priority for Washington, and it is even less logical now that the United States and India are courting each other in strategic partnership. And although Lockheed Martin’s bottom line will matter a great deal to certain members of Congress, that is tough to characterize as a strategic goal for the United States.
Only the first justification—the fight against domestic insurgents—could have legs, but the trouble is that neither the Pakistani government nor the Pentagon (nor Lockheed Martin) has yet managed to convince U.S. lawmakers that F-16s are vital to the Pakistani fight, why F-16s are superior to other less costly and lower technology airpower options against guerilla fighters lacking their own air force or serious air defenses, and how Pakistan would deploy another eight (or eighteen) new F-16s after the ongoing military offensive in North Waziristan wraps up. In short, it is not hard to understand why U.S. Senators are skeptical about F-16 sales, and unless a stronger case can be made, it seems prudent to at least make Pakistan come up with its own national funds to purchase the planes, as Senator Bob Corker is demanding.
By undertaking a comprehensive review of civilian aid to Pakistan, restructuring military assistance, and pushing “pause” on F-16 sales, the Obama administration will gift its successor with a more transparent and politically defensible strategy, one that more clearly matches U.S. ends with means. This will provide a significant head start to the next administration, which—no matter who wins the election—is almost certain to undertake an even more sweeping strategic review of U.S. relations with Pakistan.
