Rethinking Our Assumptions

It’s amazing that we still supply about $2 billion per year to the Pakistan military, even though most of the military is anti-American, elements of the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence agency) actively support the militants, Osama Bin Laden turns out to be hiding in the middle of the Pakistani military establishment, and twice in recent weeks we have shared intelligence with Pakistan about militant bomb factories, only to see them (from overhead intelligence) vacate the premises within 24 hours of the time we share the intelligence.

And in response to the embarrassment of finding Bin Laden in their midst, and our (understandable) unwillingness to trust them with advance information about our raid, the Pakistani military and the ISI have become even more publically anti-America and uncooperative. So why are we continuing to treat them as an ally?

The argument is that, bad a partner as Pakistan is, we need them as much as they need us, so we ought to keep trying and sending them billions. Perhaps this is an initial assumption we ought to revisit.

Certainly we aren’t going to ”solve” the Afghanistan problem without cooperation from Pakistan, but (a) we clearly aren’t getting that cooperation, and (b) even if we got the cooperation, there appears to be little likelihood we would change the centuries-old deeply-embedded tribal culture in the badlands that supports the militants – a tribal culture that even the Pakistani government itself can’t control or suppress.

Suppose we simply got out of Pakistan and Afghanistan (and Iraq) and left them to sort things out for themselves, since our decades-long involvement, expensive as it has been in lives and dollars, doesn’t really seem to have made much difference (despite the repeated upbeat claims by the administration)?

No doubt there would be civil unrest, even civil war, and lots of bloodshed if/when we left the field. Unfortunate, but is there really anything we can do about it without simply occupying these nations with American troops for decades?

No doubt militant elements would arise again in these badlands, but they can’t really do us much harm from there. We (and Europe) need to defend our own borders better anyway, and if we did that we would minimize the damage any illiterate Kalashnikov-toting tribesmen from the badlands could do to us. Its not even clear they care much about American soil – mostly they seem to care about killing strangers (like American troops) in their own valleys.

In any case, the militants that have thus far successfully attacked America and Europe have all been better-educated people who grew up in Europe or America or some of the more civilized nations of the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia. The 9/11 attack wasn’t carried out by backwater tribesmen from Waziristan. Afghanistan provided a temporary haven for the 9/11 planners, but neither the operational smarts that planned the attack nor the street soldiers that carried it out came from there. Those came from (our ally?) Saudi Arabia.

So perhaps it is time to go back and re-examine our original assumptions that (a) we Americans with our money and military power can significantly change the existing culture in Af-Pak (and Iraq), and (b) that we need to do so. Perhaps neither of these initial assumptions is true.

Perhaps like the old cold-war “domino theory” we have been seduced by a plausible but ultimately fallacious assumption.