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The damndest problem

Somehow this invitation to a discussion of India/Pakistan relations prompts me to ask a different but related question:  how should the United States deal with Pakistan?

I confess to colossal ignorance when it comes to anything east and south of the Durand line.  All I really know is that Pakistan is populous (170 million), ethnically complex (Punjabis, Pashtuns, Sindhis and many others) and mostly poor (about $1000 per capita GNP).  It has nuclear weapons and an enduring existential fear of India.  The army plays an often outsized role, but civilian politics can be dauntingly agitated as well.

So why should this matter?  It is the nuclear weapons that really count to the United States–they are approaching 100 warheads.  Their main purpose seems to be to prevent an Indian attack, or to respond to one.  American concern is not only that Pakistan might use them, triggering an unpredictable but likely devastating series of events, but that they might fall into the hands of terrorists. Pakistan has a record of having exported nuclear technology to North Korea and elsewhere.

For at least as long as U.S. troops are in Afghanistan, there will be another concern:  terrorists harbored in the Pakistan’s border areas.  We can quarrel about whether the Pakistani government knew Osama Bin Laden was holed up in Abbottabad, but it is clear that at least some religious extremists have de facto permission from the Pakistani government to destabilize the southern and eastern provinces of Afghanistan, in order to gain “strategic depth” for Islamabad (that is, deny India a foothold in a stable Afghanistan).  Our many drone strikes inside Pakistan, with something like tacit permission from Islamabad, are the current stopgap in deal with this problem.

What are our options in dealing with Pakistan?

1.  Walk away.  Too complicated, too difficult, too far away.  We’ve tried this several times over the last few decades.  We always end up regretting it and going back, whether because of the nukes or the border with Afghanistan.

2.  Get engaged.  Pakistan has lots of problems:  political, economic, security.  We could try to engage more actively in resolving some of these.  Dick Holbrooke is said to have thought we needed to help resolve the India/Pakistan conflict, especially over Kashmir, if we wanted Pakistan to help us out more against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  But what makes us think we can have much impact on Pakistan’s internal political and economic problems, never mind its more than 60-year conflict with India?

3.  Get selectively engaged.  So some things are too hard.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ante up to get Pakistan to do the things we need done, like police its border with Afghanistan more effectively and guard its nuclear weapons more carefully.  This is pretty much current policy, plus the drone strikes.  We don’t know if the American assistance on guarding the nuclear weapons is effective, but we do know that the Pakistani military has been pocketing a lot of our assistance and doing very little in return.  So we’ve cut off some of that assistance and they are cozying up to the Chinese.

4.  Go with India and contain Pakistan.  India is Pakistan’s natural regional rival.  We could just throw in our lot with the Indians and use them as a counterbalance to Pakistan, which in turn would become a Chinese surrogate.  This kind of “offshore” balancing is much the rage these days among those who resist American intervention abroad but recognize the national security problems that motivate it.  But offshore balancing in this case amounts to putting our interests in the hands of New Delhi–does that sound wise?  And it might do nothing to prevent nuclear war or nuclear terrorism, and certainly nothing to prevent Pakistan from destabilizing Afghanistan, which are our main concerns.

5.  Go regional.  Rather than splitting Asia between American and Chinese spheres of influence, we could try to promote the kind of regional cooperation that has proved so effective in Europe and Latin America.  Freer trade and investment would eventually lead India and Pakistan to have a bigger stake in peace and stability that they would maintain themselves.  But at best this is a long-term bet, not one that produces results in the next year or two, or even five or ten.

Having trouble choosing your preferred option?  That’s what I said:  the damndest problem.