WASHINGTON: Long-term US strategic interests in Pakistan dwarf those in Afghanistan, argues a former CIA station chief in Islamabad, Robert L. Grenier, while urging both countries “to agree to disagree’’.
In his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr Grenier, who now heads a US think-tank, ERG Partners, advised the US lawmakers that too much focus on Afghanistan could hurt US interests in Pakistan.
“Long-term US strategic interests in Pakistan in fact dwarf those in Afghanistan. Arguably, we have allowed the tail to wag the dog for too long, and it is time to reorient our policy,” he said. “As the US navigates this shift it will have to accept that in many areas, Pakistan and the US will simply have to agree to disagree.”
Mr Grenier, who served as the CIA chief in Pakistan and Iraq and also headed the agency’s counterterrorism centre, explained why the US and Pakistan needed to find a way to continue their partnership despite differences.
Pakistan, he said, was now engaged in “a long, complicated, twilight struggle” against extremism, both internally and across its borders.
“Given Pakistan’s importance in global counterterrorism policy, its status as a nuclear-armed state, its troubled relations with India, and its location at the heart of a highly important but politically unstable region of the world, the US has a considerable stake in the outcome of this struggle, and would be well advised to maintain a constructive engagement with Pakistan at multiple levels,” said the CIA expert.
“Pakistan has clung stubbornly to its own perceptions of national interest, and has generally refused to compromise those perceived interests, even when their pursuit has seemed irrational or self-defeating to US eyes,” he said.
The US expert identified those interests as Pakistan’s nuclear weapons doctrine, its assessment of the threat from India, and its calculus of both foreign and domestic militant groups.
“Pakistani adherence to its perceived interests, in fact, has persisted, irrespective of US-administered punishments or inducements,” he noted. “This has generated considerable outrage and frustration on the US side, particularly in recent times on counterterrorism.”
Pakistan fears that militants might unite against it and that’s why it insists on “making at times overdrawn and wishful distinctions among militant groups’’, he said.
“To the US, the struggle against violent extremism is a moral imperative — a view which Pakistan, used to making practical compromises with militancy in the context of both foreign and domestic politics, simply does not share in the same way,” said the US expert, showing how this difference of perception leads to US charges of double-dealing, particularly when the US believes it is paying the bill.
US frustration is mirrored on the Pakistani side by its perception of the US as “a fickle and inconstant partner,” which does not recognise Pakistan’s heavy sacrifices in a violent struggle against Pakistan-based extremists, Mr Grenier said.
Pakistan also believes that it is being targeted by the militants for supporting the US counterterrorism policy, he added. “That assertion may sound jarring to American ears … but it is a view firmly held by the extremists” as well.
The Pakistani resentment of America was driven by the perception that the US would never be satisfied by what it does, said the former CIA chief in Pakistan. “And given the serious underlying differences between the two, the Pakistanis are right, the US is unlikely ever to be satisfied, and perhaps justifiably so.”
But Mr Grenier also noted that there had been a qualitative change in the nature and aims of the US involvement in Afghanistan. “And the dynamic of US-Pakistan relations needs to change with it,” he added.
‘‘Indeed, I would argue that much of the current frustration in US-Pakistan relations is driven by backward-looking desires and concerns which simply no longer apply.”
Mr Grenier noted how the US military posture in Afghanistan was now a small fraction of what it once was and how Washington no longer aimed to defeat the Taliban. Instead, the US was only interested in preventing the collapse of the Kabul regime.
“With US ends and means having changed so drastically in Afghanistan, it is highly unrealistic to suppose that Pakistan is going to make up the difference,” warns the former CIA official.
“Pakistan cannot succeed in bringing the Afghan Taliban to heel where 150,000 US troops and hundreds of billions of US dollars have failed, and what’s more, they’re not going to try,” he said.
Mr Grenier argued that Pakistani influence in Afghanistan, despite long-standing legend to the contrary, was distinctly limited.http://www.dawn.com/news/1283454/us-long-term-interests-in-pakistan-dwarf-those-in-afghanistan-says-expert
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