A More Radical Way for Trump to Confront Pakistan

By David Rohde

Last week, President Trump conducted an extraordinary week-long public rebuke of a country that he has previously ignored. At 7:12 a.m., on Monday, January 1st, Trump made Pakistan the focus of his first tweet of the New Year, accusing that nation’s leaders of giving the United States “nothing but lies & deceit” in return for thirty-three billion dollars in aid since 2001, and of providing “safe havens for the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan.” He added, “No more!” On Friday, at 11:19 p.m., he ended the week with a retweet of a proposal by Senator Rand Paul, calling on the United States to cut off all aid to Pakistan and to spend that money on building roads and bridges in this country. “Good idea Rand!” Trump wrote.

Between those two tweets, Administration officials rolled out elements of a new get-tough approach to Pakistan. These included a two-hundred-and-fifty-five-million-dollar cut in military aid, placing the country on a “special watch list” of nations that violate religious freedom, and suspending reimbursement payments to the Pakistani military for operations that it conducts to confront militants. For much of the week, the small community of American experts on Pakistan tried to determine if these were symbolic moves, designed to back up unplanned Trump declarations, or part of a comprehensive new strategy hatched by H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser. (A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.)

Whatever the genesis of Trump’s approach, he is right to assail Pakistan’s military, which has a long history of tacitly backing the Taliban and other militant groups. The question is whether his ever-shifting policy positions, clumsy statecraft, and disdain for diplomacy will doom his effort. More than likely, they will. Trump tweeted about Pakistan only once during the 2016 campaign, assailing a terrorist attack on Christians there, and stating, “I alone can solve.”

For the United States, Pakistan has been a foreign-policy Frankenstein’s monster for decades. A nuclear-armed nation of two hundred million people, it is beset by poverty, political division, and militancy, some of which is American in the making. During the nineteen-eighties, American, Saudi, and Pakistani intelligence operatives used Pakistan as a training ground for jihadists who were dispatched across the border to attack Russian soldiers in Afghanistan. After the 1989 Soviet withdrawal from that nation, Pakistan used militants as proxies against its long-term rival and vastly more powerful neighbor, India. After the U.S. drove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, following the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan’s military turned a blind eye to Taliban fighters who hid in Pakistan. As the American military effort in Afghanistan enters its sixteenth year, there is a broad consensus among American commanders, diplomats, and intelligence officials that it will never succeed as long as the Taliban continue to enjoy safe havens in Pakistan. (Nine years ago, the Taliban held me and two Afghan colleagues captive for seven months in one of those havens.)

Richard G. Olson, Jr., a career diplomat who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, from 2012 to 2015, and as the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, from 2015 to 2016, acknowledged what Trump is trying to achieve. “There’s no question that the Pakistanis have been playing a double game with us,” Olson told me. But Dan Feldman, who served from 2014 to 2015 as the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, predicted that Trump’s preferred tactic—tweet storms—would backfire. “What I don’t think will ever work is a public shaming of Pakistan and making them appear to be kowtowing to U.S. demands,” he told me. “Conducting this in public is the least effective way of exerting leverage. This is why diplomacy matters. Delivering hard messages in private, in a coördinated manner, is much more likely to bear fruit than public bullying or humiliation. They also have their domestic politics to consider.”

Michael Morell, who served as the deputy director of the C.I.A. during the Obama Administration, said that he, too, had run out of patience with Pakistan’s generals. “I’m not surprised that the Trump Administration is frustrated with them from a counterterrorism perspective. We were frustrated, too.” For two years, Morrell said, the Obama Administration tried to persuade the Pakistani military that religious extremism and tepid economic growth were the largest existential threats to the nation. Instead, the military continued to see India as its primary threat. Obama first boosted aid and then froze it, as Trump did last week. Neither tactic worked.

All three former officials warned that Trump’s diplomatic gun-slinging in Pakistan will end up benefitting China, as it has in other parts of the world. Islamabad and Beijing, already longtime allies against India, have grown increasingly close, as China has invested nearly sixty billion dollars in a series of land and sea development projects known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. (The project was recently scaled back, due to logistical problems.) Trump’s reduction of aid and influence in Pakistan, Feldman told me, “will just push the Pakistanis, whom we will continue to need on a range of critical national-security issues, out of our orbit, and hand another diplomatic tool to China.”

The most radical card that Trump could play would involve adding some coherence and diplomacy to his strategy. After promising, during the 2016 campaign, to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Trump announced last August that he would keep a small number of U.S. soldiers in the country and pursue a political settlement to the war. At current troop levels, Trump is waging a morally ambiguous halfway war in Afghanistan. There are enough U.S. and Afghan government troops to prevent the Taliban from winning, but not enough to defeat them. (Increasingly, Afghanistan is a bloodbath for Afghans, not Americans: six thousand Afghan soldiers and thirty-five hundred Afghan civilians died in the violence in 2016; during the same period, fourteen American service members perished. In Pakistan, hundreds of civilians die each year in militant attacks.) Olson thinks that Trump should mount a diplomatic initiative that involves a peace process with the Taliban, something that he said the Bush and Obama Administrations never seriously pursued. “The Trump Administration states that it sees the war ending in a political settlement,” he told me. “But political settlements don’t just happen. You have to pursue them with the same vigor that you pursue military campaigns.”

That vigor, however, is unlikely to come from an Administration that is establishing a de-facto travel ban against travellers from six predominantly Muslim countries, publicly scorns the value of diplomacy, and, to that end, is gutting the State Department. (The State Department office that Olson and Feldman formerly ran, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, no longer exists.) Discreet and determined diplomatic efforts may be the most effective way to end the fighting that is ravaging Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Trump’s attention and his tweets are already focussed elsewhere.