Trading Af-Pak for India

This is the third in an occasional series of alternative analyses at The Compendium. Read parts 1 and 2 here.

As you might have gleaned from the headlines, the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is in trouble. Early this month, President Obama ordered a raid deep inside Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, after years of Pakistani officials claiming the arch-terrorist was in Afghanistan. With rampant speculation that OBL was staying in Abbottabad courtesy of official (or semi-official) cover by the ISI, a defensive Pakistan is demanding the U.S. back out of its internal affairs.

Matters took a turn for the worse when Pakistani media released the name of the CIA station chief in Islamabad. The leak, almost certainly coming from the ISI, marks the second time in the last six months that this has happened. Add this incident to the Davis Affair and lingering concerns on both sides about the Kerry-Lugar aid package and we have ourselves a doozy of a strategic partnership.

Pakistan is an impossible ally. The very reason we are allied with them is because they foster the wellbeing of our enemies, and therefore they are the only ones with leverage to bear against those enemies. They use that leverage sometimes, and other times not — enough to receive American aid money, but not so much that the reason for the aid money will disappear.

The aid money, over $12 billion since 2001, has been horribly mismanaged in Pakistan. The country’s institutions are corrupted from top to bottom, making aid delivery extraordinarily complicated and slow — and reinforcing the unreliability to average Pakistanis of both their government and the U.S. What’s worse, much of our military aid in years past was actually used to build up the Eastern border, across from India, rather than the Western, Pashtun-dominated tribal areas. American attempts to manage the aid more carefully have led to cries of foreign manipulation.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and Pakistan (by proxy of the Afghan Taliban) continue to fight in Afghanistan. An endgame is not yet in sight, but a number of developments could be pushing toward some sort of resolution in the not-too-distant future. First is the killing of bin Laden, which simultaneously makes militant leaders appear more vulnerable while making the U.S. army more formidable. Second is what the Pentagon insists is a real blunting of Taliban momentum in Southern Afghanistan. And third is the upcoming withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, which will begin (slowly) in July 2011.

With the U.S. feeling a bit buoyant from the bin Laden operation, Pakistan looking for a way to re-establish some credibility, and the Taliban perhaps not eager to see if American momentum is indeed pushing them back, there’s an opening for a grand settlement in Afghanistan. One important condition created by the U.S. — that the Taliban renounce ties to al Qaeda — is made much easier now that the don of the family has been taken out.

Such a grand bargain would need to accompany a series of understandings between the U.S. and Pakistan regarding relations between the two states. Such understandings would include the role of Pakistan in Afghan politics, security guarantees of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and continued American interest in de-escalating tensions on the subcontinent. We would also be well-served to continue disbursing development aid to Pakistan, even as we decrease our military aid.

With our divorce process beginning in Pakistan, the U.S. is freer to develop a much-sought strategic partnership with India. The Indians distrust us because we have historically supported the Pakistanis, but an opening exists for ties to strengthen — and we ought to take it. (To give you an idea of how bizarre our alliance with Pakistan makes the region, our current calculations make good relations between India and Afghanistan a bad thing.)

India would provide a much more valuable long-term strategic ally than Pakistan would for a number of reasons. First, India’s democratic and stable system of governance allows American political goals to reflect things other than regime security. Second, the large upside of the Indian economy bodes well for future trade, unlike the hapless Pakistani economy. Third, the relatively transparent Indian bureaucracy and dedicated counterterror commitments of the government ensure that our aid money would not wind up in the hands of terror groups. Fourth, good ties with India will be important as its geopolitical stature in Asia rises.

The two potential dangers of the above approach are that Pakistan might treat the U.S. as hostile and more actively foster terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba as proxies, and that Pakistan would develop a more robust strategic partnership with China. In the case of the first one, we can avoid that eventuality by carefully managing the divorce and leaving in place our development aid to signal that we don’t want conflict. In the case of the second, it’s probably unavoidable yet limited in scope anyway. (China doesn’t want to develop a reputation for befriending only “problem” countries like Iran, North Korea, Burma, and Pakistan. Nor can it afford to empower its Muslim separatists in Xinjiang.)