What we have witnessed is a perverse turn of events. The US began its military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 ostensibly to reduce the risk of terrorist attacks on America. Today, al-Qaeda has largely moved on from Afghanistan, and US troops there are engaged primarily in counterinsurgency operations, not counterterrorism. Counterinsurgency is also the main objective of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
But these drone attacks may well be undermining counterterrorism efforts in Pakistan itself. And this matters greatly because extremists in Pakistan pose a threat to Pakistan, to its neighbors, and to other countries, including the US. The threat is especially pronounced for the people of Pakistan, where some forty thousand have already died in a dozen years of terrorist and counterterrorist violence.
Pakistan is far too big for outsiders to police. At 180 million, its population is almost three times that of the combined total of Afghanistan and Iraq, countries where recent foreign military interventions have proved less than successful. Also, Pakistan, notwithstanding its continuing corruption and manipulation of votes, has a democratically elected government, over one hundred nuclear weapons, and an army of six hundred thousand soldiers. The country must be responsible for dealing with its own extremist groups.
Fortunately, despite its frequent inclusion on lists of failing states, Pakistan is not a basket case. It has well-established political parties, noisy private media, and an independent-minded supreme court. It ranks among the largest global producers of cotton, milk, and wheat, and has over one hundred million users of mobile phones. Between 1952 and 2012, its annual GDP growth averaged 5 percent.
The main steps Pakistan needs to take in order to improve its situation seem clear: it should strive for a lasting peace with both India and Afghanistan; confront the extremist groups who kill foreigners abroad and Pakistanis at home, including Baloch, Ahmadi, Christian, Hindu, and Shia Pakistanis; and bring about a shift in spending from defense to investment in economically productive areas such as education and infrastructure (including water and electricity, which are both severely inadequate).
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FREQUENTLY INVOKED as an explanation for the lack of progress in Pakistan is the intransigence of what is called a “deep state”—a secret, security-obsessed alliance between the Pakistani military, especially military intelligence, and militants such as the Taliban, along with extremist mullahs. Yet there are encouraging signs that the Pakistani armed forces may be changing. They recently adopted a new Army Doctrine that, for the first time, describes homegrown militancy, rather than India, as the “biggest threat” to national security. The document calls for a shift in training toward preparing for “sub-conventional” warfare against such groups instead of battling conventional armies.
Pakistani politicians, too, are showing increasing maturity. An elected government has unprecedentedly served out its five-year term, and new elections will be held in May. Despite a rocky economy and failures to improve security, parties from all the major factions have refused to back calls for a behind-the-scenes “soft coup” of the variety that has often derailed democracy in the past. Moreover, there has been improvement in relations with Afghanistan, where a groundbreaking deal for Pakistan to help train the Afghan army is being discussed, and with India, where the planned liberalization of trade and visa policies will hopefully still take place despite recent tensions between the militaries of the two countries in Kashmir.
Still, it is undeniable that Pakistan has not yet done enough to counter the extremist groups on its soil, whether the Taliban or others. To understand why, it is worth tuning in to the country’s popular prime-time talk shows. There a reflexive blaming of, variously, the US, India, Israel, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or Iran — anybody but Pakistan — for Pakistan’s ills is unfortunately common. The result is a self-image of Pakistan as a pawn in someone else’s game. To turn on one’s TV in Pakistan is to find oneself entering a world permeated with conspiracy theories, an almost mythical space in which a refusal to accept that Pakistan can take the lead in solving its various crises seems not misguided but commonsensical.
The problem, for those who wish Pakistan to take more responsibility for itself, is that these conspiracy theories are not necessarily false. Indeed, many have elements of truth. India likely is striving to exacerbate the violent discontent in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province, to the south of the tribal areas. (That discontent is rooted in the Pakistani state’s long-term mistreatment of the province’s local population.) Afghanistan has in fact refused to accept the territorial integrity of Pakistan. Saudi Arabia and Iran do back Sunni and Shia militant proxies in the country. The US has used a vaccination campaign as cover for an intelligence operation on Pakistani soil.
Conspiracy theorists have numerous examples they can cite in support of their positions. But perhaps none is as emotionally potent as the claim that flying robots from an alien power regularly strike down from the skies and kill Pakistani citizens. In the US, such a claim would be science fiction or paranoid survivor cultism of the furthest fringe-dwelling kind. In Pakistan, it is real. And constantly, wrenchingly, in the news.
Among the most pernicious aspects of the US drone campaign in Pakistan is therefore this: that it facilitates the refusal of the Pakistani state and Pakistani society to do more to confront the problem of extremists who threaten Pakistanis and non-Pakistanis alike. Pakistani politicians find it far easier to blame highly unpopular drone strikes for Pakistan’s problems with extremism than to articulate concrete measures against specific extremist groups. President Asif Ali Zardari, whose government has endured heavy criticism for not preventing drone strikes from occurring, has said that “continuing drone attacks on our country, which result in loss of precious lives or property, are counterproductive and difficult to explain by a democratically elected government. It is creating a credibility gap.”
Shahbaz Sharif, a powerful opposition politician, has driven his rhetorical dagger into this gap, claiming that Zardari’s government, despite its denials, is actually helping US drone attacks. The popular cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, also lambasting the government for not stopping the drones, has taken an even stronger line. “These strikes have not reduced militancy,” he has said, in views widely echoed by the Pakistani media; “in fact [they] have been a major stimulant to terrorism.”
There was, of course, virulent extremism in Pakistan before US drone attacks began. There would be virulent extremism if US drone attacks ceased. But halting the attacks could quickly accomplish two things: end the obfuscating claim that drones are the cause of terrorism in the country, and make it less difficult for Pakistani politicians to advocate meaningful antiterrorism policies (rather than antidrone policies) without being branded lackeys of an America that regularly violates Pakistan’s sovereignty.
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WHEN FOREIGNERS intervene militarily in a region with disregard for sophisticated understandings of its internal dynamics, they tend, as recent history has shown, to fail horribly. The prevailing discourse in the West about Afghanistan and Pakistan is “simplistic, inaccurate, and alarmingly dehumanizing,” to quote the editors, Shahzad Bashir and Robert D. Crews, in their introduction to the essay collection Under the Drones. The consequences, they find, have been tragic; and the chapters that follow make it difficult to disagree with them.
An essay by Amin Tarzi, director of Middle East Studies at Marine Corps University, reminds us of the many ways in which leaders in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have used the permeable and uncertain nature of the border between their countries to undermine the state on the other side. The Pakistani security establishment, he writes, has long considered that it is an advantage to have a weak, divided, and pliable Afghanistan. It has been tragically willing to back blood-soaked proxies, such as the Taliban, to that end. Less well known, perhaps, is that, since Pakistani independence, Afghan governments have refused to accept the location of the border. They have continued to maintain claims to Pakistan’s territory west of the Indus — i.e., half of present-day Pakistan — and stoked Pashtun nationalism inside Pakistan by appearing to support the creation of “Pashtunistan,” an independent homeland for Pashtuns.