The United States is once again ratcheting up the pressure on Pakistan to fall in line with U.S. policy in Afghanistan by ending the Afghan Taliban's enjoyment of safe haven. Unsurprisingly, Pakistan is once again pushing back. Amid the mistrust, mutual recrimination, and stale narratives that have increasingly characterized the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in recent years, there is one Pakistani talking point I have heard routinely from officials that should be taken at face value: Pakistan does not intend to fight the Afghan war on Pakistani soil. Although the reality of the situation is dissatisfying, the United States needs a strategy in Afghanistan and policy toward Pakistan based on the best Pakistani behavior it can have, not the Pakistani behavior it wants to have.
The current military-centric U.S. strategy for Afghanistan—largely a bet on continuity, with a modest escalation—depends for ultimate success on reversing Pakistan's practice of helping enable the Taliban to sustain its insurgency by, among other things, permitting its leadership to operate from Pakistan and facilitating activities of the Taliban's especially deadly Haqqani element. Although Pakistan also has enabled the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan—in part by serving as the main supply route for U.S. and NATO forces—it does not judge its security interests to be served by going all-in to back a U.S. military strategy that it does not believe will succeed and an Afghan government whose durability it doubts. Pakistan is also unwilling to add the Taliban to its long list of militant adversaries.
The United States has long found logical fault with Pakistan's calculations, but has proven unable to change Pakistan's perceptions of its own national interests in its own neighborhood—and not for lack of offering carrots, applying sticks, and taking matters into its own hands. (See the unilateral U.S. takedown of Osama bin Laden and drone strike on Taliban chief Mullah Mansur, both done on Pakistani soil.) One of the constraints on American persuasiveness is the deeply entrenched Pakistani narrative that the United States left Pakistan with a mess next door in the 1990s and cannot be relied upon not to do the same again.
U.S. policy debates during the Obama administration and into the Trump administration have centered on the dilemma that the United States is pursuing a strategy in Afghanistan that both impels it to penalize Pakistan for failing to act in concert with that strategy and limits how far the United States can rationally go in imposing penalties. The United States insists that Pakistani cooperation is essential; if that's true, then the policy imperative must be to elicit more, not less, cooperation. But the more punitive the American approach to Pakistan, and the more humiliating (from a Pakistani perspective) the rhetoric of demands, the less cooperation is likely. Pakistan would undoubtedly prefer to maintain already dwindling U.S. civilian and security assistance, but it isn't dependent upon it, and Pakistan's so-called “all-weather friendship” with China could help it ride out a storm blowing from Washington.
Pakistan is not behaving as it does vis-à-vis the Taliban because that behavior pits it against the United States, but, rather, despite that effect. Consequently, Pakistan should be seen as having already weighed the risks to its relationship with the United States and found them more tolerable than the costs of definitively taking sides in what it views as a civil war in a fragmented society in which the Taliban represents one of the main fragments—and one that is a bulwark against Indian influence in Afghanistan…
The remainder of this commentary is available at www.nationalinterest.org.
Laurel Miller is a senior foreign policy expert at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. From June 2013 to June 2017 she was deputy and then acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the U.S. Department of State.
This commentary originally appeared on The National Interest on January 15, 2018. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.
