Shooting up Pakistan

How long did the Administration think the Pakistani government could or would let the Allies kill people in their country? True, most of the people we’re killing are as much or more of a threat to Pakistan than they are to the United States – we, after all, can leave – and plan to. So the Pakistani government offered tacit approval of anonymous drone strikes in the mountains and only complained when the “collateral damage” (read: civilian casualties) reached proportions that made the news. But last week’s NATO strike that killed three Pakistani soldiers couldn’t be ignored.

How long did the Administration think the Pakistani government could or would let the Allies kill people in their country? True, most of the people we’re killing are as much or more of a threat to Pakistan than they are to the United States – we, after all, can leave – and plan to. So the Pakistani government offered tacit approval of anonymous drone strikes in the mountains and only complained when the “collateral damage” (read: civilian casualties) reached proportions that made the news. But last week’s NATO strike that killed three Pakistani soldiers couldn’t be ignored. The government closed at least one supply road leading from Pakistan to Afghanistan and President Zardari met with CIA chief Leon Panetta to complain. Since then, NATO trucks have been attacked several times as they wait inside Pakistan for the border to reopen.

The Administration’s response is to complain that the Pakistani government is falling apart. “There’s a fair degree of disarray…The government can’t really handle the crisis of the flood, and there’s lots of political jockeying,” a senior Obama administration official told The Washington Post,”on the condition of anonymity.” Another anonymous source told the paper, “The best outcome here is that the instability will be taken advantage of by the military in ways that aren’t bad.”

Do anonymous but senior guys think undermining what is left of Pakistani sovereignty really helps?

The United States is fighting a war in Afghanistan against… well, against whom? Al Qaeda, we say, for the record, and oh, yes, the Taliban. The Taliban has bases, assets and relatives on both sides of the AfPak border and the Pakistani Taliban threatens the Pakistani government. While al Qaeda appears to have shifted some/much of its assets to Yemen and Africa, the Taliban is on its home territory – in both countries. (Another messy border left by the waning British Empire.) The Pakistani government was willing to let the allies bomb Taliban positions in its own interest, but the strong upturn in attacks, the attendant publicity and now the killing of Pakistani soldiers is something they cannot condone, at least in public.

So the government closed border crossings, the parliament unanimously condemned the strike and Pakistan’s ambassador to Brussels lodged a “strong protest” at NATO headquarters. The Interior Minister said, “We will have to see if we are allies or enemies.”

We’ll bet the Obama administration and Congress couldn’t answer that question any better than the Pakistanis.

In truth, we are not exactly either one; we have different goals, different timelines and different definitions of success. The United States says it wants to leave Afghanistan with a strong, stable government committed to preventing terrorists from harboring there. That, actually, is the definition of what we need to have in Pakistan. Afghanistan is troublesome, but Pakistan has nuclear weapons. A Taliban-ruled Afghanistan will be horrible for the people (particularly the women), but a jihadist-ruled Pakistan will be a jihadist nuclear state. Americans think the biggest problem facing Pakistan is our nuclear nightmare; they still think their own biggest problem is India.

The one thing that has become clear is that we cannot secure Pakistan from Afghanistan and we might not be able to secure Afghanistan at all. Hamid Karzai, like Zardari, is trying to figure out how to live with all of his countrymen for the long-term – the “long-term” being anything after July 2011. Along with an “exit strategy” from Afghanistan, the Pentagon should be tasked to provide a strategy for Pakistan that would secure its nuclear material, under both the circumstance that they invite us and that they don’t.

If that sounds like infringement on their sovereignty, we are infringing already in a manner most likely to anger their public without providing the benefits they need or the security we seek.