{"id":1311,"date":"2018-01-05T21:41:37","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T21:41:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/?p=1311"},"modified":"2018-01-05T21:41:37","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T21:41:37","slug":"trumps-belligerence-toward-pakistan-isnt-unreasonable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/2018\/01\/05\/trumps-belligerence-toward-pakistan-isnt-unreasonable\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s Belligerence Toward Pakistan Isn’t Unreasonable"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Atlantic<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Trump administration officials joined the president to criticize Pakistan\u2019s commitment to Afghanistan\u2019s stability, accusing Islamabad of playing \u201ca double game for years.\u201d<\/p>\n

The comments by\u00a0Nikki Haley<\/a>, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations,\u00a0\u00a0H.R. McMaster<\/a>, the national-security-adviser, and\u00a0Sarah Huckabee Sanders<\/a>, the White House spokesperson, are likely to increase the pressure on Pakistan, which is still smarting over the president\u2019s first tweet of the year:<\/p>\n

The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!<\/span><\/p>\n

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While the topic of U.S. assistance for Pakistan may seem an odd one for Trump\u2019s first tweet of the year, he\u2019s long signaled his intention to get Pakistan to adhere to U.S. interests in Afghanistan. Those interests don\u2019t always align with Pakistan\u2019s own interests in the region. Pakistan has worked with the U.S. at times, Haley said, but it also \u201charbor[s] the terrorists that attack our troops in Afghanistan.\u201d McMaster told VOA that Pakistan \u201cgoes after terrorist and insurgent groups very selectively and uses others as an arm of their foreign policy.\u201d While the U.S. has long urged Pakistan to do more to curb militancy in Afghanistan, it has never explicitly appeared to link aid to cooperation, as Trump did in his New Year\u2019s day tweet. But that missive was a long time coming.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

Trump criticized Islamabad\u2019s policy toward Kabul in his Afghan strategy speech\u00a0last August<\/a>. He also doubled-down on the U.S. military presence in the country, accused Pakistan of sheltering \u201cthe same organizations that try every single day to kill our people,\u201d and, perhaps worse from Pakistan\u2019s view, called on India \u201cto help us more with Afghanistan, especially in the area of economic assistance and development.\u201d Then in December, while\u00a0announcing<\/a>\u00a0his national-security strategy, the president said the U.S. wants a \u201ccontinued partnership\u201d with Pakistan, but that \u201cwe must see decisive action against terrorist groups operating on their territory.\u201d\u00a0 Vice President Mike Pence\u00a0repeated<\/a>\u00a0those accusations in remarks to U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Other\u00a0U.S. officials<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Pentagon<\/a>\u00a0have also singled out Pakistan\u2019s role.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s tweet on Monday all but guaranteed that U.S. policy toward Pakistan will remain difficult in the year ahead. As I\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0last August after his speech, clues to what that policy could look like were outlined in a policy paper\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0last year by Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington who is now director for South and Central Asia at the Hudson Institute, and Lisa Curtis, then a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation who is now a deputy assistant to Trump and senior director for South and Central Asia at National Security Council. I wrote:<\/p>\n

Among other things, the paper\u2014A New U.S. Approach to Pakistan: Enforcing Aid Conditions without Cutting Ties\u2014<\/em>argues that the U.S. should stop giving Pakistan additional aid or military equipment; that it should consider, in the long term, the option of designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism; and that it should threaten its status as a major non-NATO ally, a designation that gives Pakistan access to military spare parts and privileged access to some U.S. defense programs. All this, if Pakistan fails to halt its support for terrorists and militant groups active in Afghanistan and across the region.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The president\u2019s tweet and remarks by his Cabinet officials suggest we may be at the start of this pressure campaign. Relations between the U.S. and Pakistan, historically close during the Cold War, have worsened since last year\u2014and not just because the U.S. has grown closer to India, Pakistan\u2019s nemesis.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

Even apparent military successes have resulted in disagreements. One example: In October, Pakistani forces\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0they freed a Canadian-American family who were abducted in 2012 by the Haqqani network, a militant group linked to the Taliban. That operation, they said, also resulted in the capture of a militant linked to the network. U.S. authorities,\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0last week, sought access to the militant, but Pakistan rejected those requests. In response, the U.S. delayed sending $255 million in aid to Pakistan, leading to Haley\u2019s comment that there were \u201cclear reasons\u201d for why money was being withheld.<\/p>\n

Officials in Pakistan have been indignant. Khawaja Asif, the country\u2019s foreign minister,\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0on Twitter that Pakistan\u2019s coming response\u00a0\u201c<\/strong>will let the world know the \u2026 difference between facts & fiction.\u201d He\u00a0added<\/a>: \u201cTrump quoted figure of $33billion given to PAK over last 15yrs, he can hire a US based Audit firm on our expense to verify this figure & let the world know who is lying & deceiving.\u201d On Monday, David Hale, the U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, was summoned to the foreign ministry to explain the president\u2019s remarks. Following a three-hour meeting held by Pakistan\u2019s National Security Committee over Trump\u2019s tweet, the committee\u00a0released<\/a>\u00a0a statement calling the allegations \u201ccompletely incomprehensible as they\u00a0<\/b>contradicted facts manifestly, struck with great insensitivity at the trust between [the] two nations built over generations, and negated the decades of sacrifices made by the Pakistani nation.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

Pakistan, for its part, maintains that it has moved against militants whenever the U.S. has provided it with relevant intelligence. But the killing by U.S. Navy SEALs of Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, in a military garrison town in 2011, and the presence of other known militants on Pakistani soil has resulted in some skepticism about that assertion. Pakistan also points out it has suffered disproportionately at the hands of terrorist groups. It says it has little control over the porous border that divides its territory from Afghanistan\u2019s, allowing militants to travel back and forth easily. It\u2019s unclear whether this is due to Pakistan\u2019s inability to stop the flow, or its unwillingness to do so.<\/p>\n

What is perhaps most significant is that Pakistan views the Taliban as an ally, and is believed to provide safe haven to many of its senior leaders. The U.S., which ousted the Taliban regime during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, has been trying to bring stability to the country for the past 16 years. Yet the group now controls more of Afghanistan than at any point since the U.S.-led invasion. Its fighters have continued to wage a military campaign, attacking U.S. and Afghan troops, foreign embassies, government facilities, and civilians. Any lasting political stability in Afghanistan depends on either the defeat of the Taliban\u2014unlikely at this point\u2014or its integration into the political process. But Pakistan\u2019s support of the group all but ensures that it will have little incentive to join talks with the Afghan government.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, as far as the Taliban is concerned, Washington and Islamabad have competing interests. Pakistan is not interested in being sandwiched between two unfriendly nations\u2014Afghanistan and India. The Taliban gives Pakistan enough leverage inside Afghanistan to maintain its regional interests. It is this difference in how the Taliban is viewed\u2014detrimental to Afghan stability versus pivotal to Pakistan\u2019s regional interests\u2014that underlie the misunderstanding between the U.S. and Pakistan.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump is disappointed at the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan,\u201d Asif, the foreign minister,\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0GEO TV, \u201cand that is the only reason he is flinging accusations at Pakistan.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Atlantic On Tuesday, Trump administration officials joined the president to criticize Pakistan\u2019s commitment to Afghanistan\u2019s stability, accusing Islamabad of playing \u201ca double game for years.\u201d The comments by\u00a0Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations,\u00a0\u00a0H.R. McMaster, the national-security-adviser, and\u00a0Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House spokesperson, are likely to increase the pressure on Pakistan, which is still smarting over… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1311"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1312,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311\/revisions\/1312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/southandcentralasiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}