The study examines how the United States has come to deal with Afghanistan-Pakistan, a key foreign policy challenge for the Obama administration. It focuses on President Obama's new policy known as AfPak, the Kerry-Lugar Act, and other U.S. initiatives adopted since 2009 in order to help stabilize the situation in South Asia. The author concludes by arguing that the new initiatives will not substantially improve the situation in Pakistan, because they fail to address Pakistan's core problem: lack of strong democratic institutions.
Pakistan has many internal weaknesses undermining its ability to operate as a normal state. The global jihadi network seems to operate from the Pakistani city of Quetta, and increasing portions of Pakistani territory are coming under the control of militants, both Islamist and tribal in nature. As a result, Pakistan has been experiencing a wave of terrorist attacks in its urban center, unparalleled in Pakistani history. This has had direct bearing on the Obama administration's foreign policy, which, like previous administrations, recognizes Pakistan's importance for maintaining international peace and security.
Since 2009, a litany of reports and studies have called for greater focus to be placed on Pakistan, seeing it as more important than Afghanistan and arguing that only by solving the problem in Pakistan could stability develop in Afghanistan, since Pakistan has served as a safe-haven to Afghan militants and al-Qa'ida activists. There has thus been a greater international commitment to the area with more troops sent to Afghanistan and improved cross-border cooperation, as seen with Operation Panchai Palang (Panther's Claw) in Helmand Province. The operation saw U.S., British, and Afghan forces taking action against the Taliban while the Pakistani military sought to prevent insurgents from escaping across the border.
The focus of this article is the political challenge faced by the United States in respect to Pakistan. The author argues that the American approach to Pakistan is fundamentally erroneous, as lack of political stability in Pakistan severely undermines the effectiveness of the military campaign against the Islamists and jihadists that operate within Pakistan and along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Pakistani terror groups may differ in their interests, base of operations, and so on, but they are united in their hatred of the United States and the Pakistani government, which they view as an "American puppet."
A key challenge for American decisionmakers concerning Pakistan is the topsy-turvy nature of Pakistani politics, where the police and the courts operate as tools of politicians' ambitions while the state system remains praetorian in nature, leading to chronic instability. Thus, although the "kill-ratio" (the number of insurgents killed on a daily and weekly basis) is rising, as drone attacks become more effective, what the international community fails to understand is that the more money it invests in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the more unstable these countries become. There is evidence that foreign aid ends up being used for unnecessary projects and programs, with the money rarely reaching the people and areas that need it the most. British journalist Jason Burke recounts that in the late 1990s, one could travel in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Khyber Agency, something that is no longer possible without an armed escort. Apparent to Burke as he travelled throughout the area, were the dire conditions of the inhabitants, treated by Islamabad as second-class citizens in Burke's eyes.
Thus, in many ways a key challenge in removing the Pakistani Taliban threat from FATA and other areas along the Pakistan-Afghan border is to make the indigenous community feel that it is part of Pakistan; yet considering that the local population tends to identify with its ethnic, Pashtun background, this is not an easy task. Second, experience has shown that at times of political upheaval and instability, the Pakistani army tends to step in and impose order, which raises the specter of a fourth military intervention (the three previous military rulers were: Ayub Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, and Pervez Musharraf). Another military takeover would deal a deadly blow to any democratic hopes that Pakistan might have, not to mention furnish Islamists with more ammunition in pointing to Western hypocrisy, as seen with Pervez Musharraf. The Taliban knows that the international community would not stay in the region indefinitely--made clear by President Obama in his West Point speech on December 1, 2009. The Afghan Taliban can therefore afford to wait. Thus, sending more troops and money to South Asia without dealing with the political situation in Pakistan means wasting valuable resources at a time when the United States and the international community can ill-afford such profligacy.