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A Fork in the Road of U.S.-Pakistani Ties

Barbara Slavin

WASHINGTON, May 3 2011 (IPS) - The U.S. discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden in a compound some 50 kilometres from Islamabad is a “defining moment” for a U.S.-Pakistan relationship fraught with duplicity and dashed expectations.

U.S. and Pakistani officials and foreign policy experts struggled Tuesday to find something positive to say about the relationship following bin Laden’s dramatic denouement. Some suggested that Pakistan would now have to be more forthcoming in rolling up remaining al Qaeda elements in the country and cutting back on sanctuary for Afghan militants.

Concerns mounted, however, that the fact that the al Qaeda leader had found sanctuary in Abbottabad for as long as six years would destroy what little trust remains between the two countries and dash hopes to forge a long-term relationship anchored by 7.5 billion dollars in U.S. economic aid over 10 years.

U.S. officials have not explicitly accused Pakistan of harbouring bin Laden but said that it strains credulity to believe that the Saudi fugitive – who had a 25-million-dollar price on his head – could have stayed in an Islamabad suburb that is also home to Pakistan’s most prestigious military academy and numerous military retirees without, as President Barack Obama’s intelligence adviser John Brennan put it Monday, “some kind of support system”.

On Tuesday, Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters, “It’s kind of hard to imagine the [Pakistani] military or police did not have ideas about what was going on inside [the compound].”

The president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, denied the allegations in a Washington Post op-ed, calling it “baseless speculation”. But given the historic power of the military and Pakistani intelligence services compared to elected civilian governments, it is possible, even likely, that Zardari and much of the rest of his cabinet had no knowledge of bin Laden’s whereabouts until U.S. Navy Seals entered his hiding place.

Shaukat Aziz, a former Pakistani prime minister, said Tuesday at a conference of the Atlantic Council in Washington that this is a “defining moment” for relations and that Pakistani officials must get to the bottom of the bin Laden affair and find out “what went right and what went wrong”.

He said the “trust deficit” between the U.S. and Pakistan was at “its highest level” since Pakistan’s independence in 1947 and that it was crucial to repair ties so that Pakistan could meet its enormous economic and political challenges.

Pakistan, with 100 million of its 170 million people under the age of 25, needs a growth rate of six to eight percent to provide jobs, Aziz said. Its current growth rate is only two to three percent and the country has suffered devastating floods as well as domestic terrorist attacks that have killed thousands of civilians, soldiers and police over the past few years.

The Obama administration has sought to bolster ties with a programme for long-term aid. However, Dov Zakheim, a former undersecretary of defence and comptroller of the Pentagon under the George W. Bush administration, warned Tuesday that unless Pakistan showed more cooperation in the fight against al Qaeda and in Afghanistan, “Congress will cut back on the money.”

“Congress has never really liked the Pakistanis,” Zakheim told the Center for the National Interest, a Washington think tank. By way of illustration, he described how, after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, he was told by then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to find a way to give funds to Pakistan, which the U.S. needed as a base to attack Afghanistan and topple the Taliban who had harboured the al Qaeda plotters.

Zakheim said he approached then Jordanian ambassador to Washington Marwan Muasher and asked if he could tie aid to Pakistan to legislation appropriating U.S. funds to Jordan, a much more popular recipient of U.S. largesse on Capitol Hill. Muasher agreed.

“I never would have gotten to first base with Pakistan [without tying aid to Jordan],” Zakheim said. Without better cooperation from Pakistan on terrorism, the U.S. Congress will decide that the Pakistanis “are totally part of the problem and you’ll see a real backlash there.”

Yet if Congress were to cut off aid to Pakistan, the United States would be repeating a pattern of engagement and abandonment that has helped make the relationship so dysfunctional. It would also be jeopardising its exit strategy from Afghanistan.

The U.S. was Pakistan’s major external ally after independence, providing military support to balance India, long a Soviet ally. The U.S. sided with Pakistan in a 1971 war with India that led to the loss of East Pakistan, which became the independent nation of Bangladesh. The U.S. cut back aid, however, when it became apparent that Pakistan was trying to match India and develop nuclear weapons.

In the 1980s, the U.S. reversed course to use Pakistan as a base to fund jihadists battling the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Sanctions were slapped back on after the Pakistanis followed India and tested a nuclear weapon in 1998 and then abruptly lifted again after 9-11.

Former Prime Minister Aziz called Pakistan “the most allied ally and the most sanctioned ally” of the United States.

Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst, said that while “there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about U.S.-Pakistani relations,” it might be possible to use the bin Laden discovery as leverage to gain fuller cooperation against remaining al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan – such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s presumed successor – and members of the Haqqani group of Afghan militants who have caused numerous U.S. casualties in Afghanistan.

“They owe us something,” Pillar said of the Pakistanis.

Pillar, a former national intelligence officer for the Middle East under the Bush administration, speculated that most Pakistani officials might not have known about bin Laden’s whereabouts because they chose not to know.

“My guess is that various layers of Pakistani officialdom were not wanting to know and not making efforts to find out,” he said.