Pakistan Hopes Premier's U.S. Visit Will Yield Funds, Forbearance
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 27, 2008.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani has a clear agenda for his inaugural visit to Washington this week: He wants more aid, more patience and less pressure from the United States as his four-month-old coalition government develops a strategy to combat Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in the tribal areas along his country's border with Afghanistan.
But while Gillani may leave town with more money -- targeted toward education, development and assistance to cope with skyrocketing food and fuel prices -- U.S. patience is likely to be in short supply, with the Bush administration publicly chastising the new Pakistani leadership for its reluctance to move aggressively against terrorist redoubts inside its territory.
"Pakistan is a friend; Pakistan is an ally," President Bush said this month, but the rise in cross-border infiltration "ought to be troubling" to its government.
Other officials were more blunt: "We need Pakistan to put more pressure on that border," Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen said last week, while on Friday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice echoed that Pakistan "need[s] to do more."
Congress, in rare bipartisan accord on foreign policy, has grown increasingly outspoken against Pakistan's preference for negotiating with tribal leaders. Current legislative proposals make any new U.S. counterterrorism aid -- the bulk of more than $10 billion Washington has provided Pakistan since 2001 -- conditional on demonstrated results.
"I'm not sure they're ready for what they're walking into," one U.S. official said in anticipation of a testy reception for Gillani from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Pakistani officials say they understand that the seven-year-old Afghan war is not going well for U.S. and NATO forces. But far from accepting blame for the worsening situation, the new government harbors its own suspicions about Washington's impatience. Some question whether the Bush administration was simply more comfortable dealing with Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who ruled Pakistan single-handedly for more than a decade, than it is with the admittedly messy democratic government that replaced him.
"The tendency in Washington is always to think about foreign rulers as 'ours' and 'not ours,' " said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador here. "Then, when one of 'ours' is weakened, people in D.C. tend to think, 'Oh, God, there goes our policy.' "
Reports that the United States and NATO are considering the deployment of ground forces across the border from Afghanistan to raid terrorist camps in Pakistan -- an effort denied by Western military leaders -- have increased tension on both sides. "If you keep saying, 'Let's do it together -- but if you won't, then we'll do it alone,' then what you're doing is undermining the spirit of working together to begin with," Haqqani said.
Daniel Markey, a Pakistan expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said: "We need to be very sensitive to the fact that Pakistan doesn't see the world exactly the same way we do. They don't see the threats the same way that we do."
Pakistan's worldview includes an ongoing threat from India, against which it has armed itself with nuclear weapons and a large conventional military force. Afghanistan, with close Indian ties, is seen more as an adversary than an ally. The Taliban, whose fighters are drawn from the Pashtun ethnic group that spans the Afghan-Pakistani border, came to life in the 1990s as an ally in keeping Pakistan's neighbors at bay.
Peace with the tribal leaders along the frontier -- where terrorist groups maintain headquarters and training facilities out of reach of U.S. and NATO forces -- has been kept by Islamabad for decades with a hands-off policy under which the tribes govern themselves. And while Musharraf may have been willing to bend those realities in exchange for massive aid and pressure from the United States, the new Pakistani leaders say they must tread more carefully. A misstep could lead to a collapse of the coalition or even a military coup.
Washington needs to recognize, they say, that Pakistan has at least as much to lose from terrorism as the United States does. "This is our own fight," Gillani told reporters before his departure yesterday. He recalled that his own Pakistan People's Party lost its leader, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, to a terrorist attack in December.
Gillani has "high hopes" that he can make Congress understand the "many interconnected and complex issues of India-Pakistan relations, Pakistan's internal civil-military relations and Pakistan's insecurities about its environment, its neighborhood and the intentions of its neighbors," Haqqani said. "It cannot simply be resolved within a matter of a few days or a few weeks."
U.S. legislators "should be patient with the new government for a year or so and see if it is able to translate its ideas into actions," he said.
But to an administration and Congress that expected a Pakistani military offensive months ago, waiting a year is unthinkable.
"We fully agree they need a multi-pronged strategy" combining economic assistance, negotiations and development of a stronger indigenous security force in the tribal regions, a senior administration official said. And the Bush administration welcomed a full-throated government pronouncement last month that expressed unwavering opposition to any terrorist activities launched from Pakistani soil.
"But you've got to be willing to do what's necessary when it comes to people who are trying to kill you," the administration official said. "We'd all be happy if you could do this by persuasion or development alone. But I think we all know that . . . in the end, you have to use force."
The administration has vacillated between pressuring Pakistan and concern that it might push too far. Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, has made four recent trips to Pakistan to try to ease tensions and develop a Western-Afghan-Pakistani strategy for the border area.
U.S. and NATO officials have their own suspicions about the anti-Taliban zeal of Pakistan's intelligence services. But NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer went out of his way during a visit to Kabul last week to take the onus off Islamabad and deflate Afghan President Hamid Karzai's charges that the intelligence service was behind recent attempts on Karzai's life.
"Only saying Pakistan is part of the problem or Pakistan is the problem might clear your conscience but will not help in solving the problem," de Hoop Scheffer said, calling for both countries to cooperate.
Hours after Gillani's departure for Washington yesterday, the government announced that he had ordered the army's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency placed under Interior Ministry control, a move some Pakistani observers said was an attempt to assert civilian control over the powerful spy organization. But Pakistan's governing coalition remains divided over a range of domestic issues far removed from Washington's concerns over terrorism. When the coalition partners met in Islamabad on Wednesday for a final military briefing before Gillani's departure, they concurred only on the need to come up with a long-term security strategy they could all support.
The direction and pace of their efforts, however, are unlikely to please the White House -- either the current administration or its replacement -- or Congress. The "main thrust" of a nationwide campaign against extremism should be political, rather than military, the coalition partners concurred, and they will instruct the Pakistani Parliament to begin discussing the issue.
In the meantime, a government news release said, the coalition reiterated that Pakistan's territory will not be used for terrorist attacks and that "attacks from external forces on Pakistan's sovereign soil" will not be tolerated.
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