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May 16, 2011
In this article in Foreign Policy Shuja Nawaz advises the US post the assassination of Osama bin Laden to treat the Pakistani military as a friend, despite the latter's Pakistan's duplicity in the face of terror--ie., its links to the Taliban and al Qaeda.
The reason? The overlap between Washington's and Islamabad's interests in the region, from a stable Afghanistan and Pakistan to normalization of Pakistan's relations with India. It's not that simple, given the strategic tensions in US-Pakistan relations.
George Friedman at Stratfor gives us the strategic background in U.S.-Pakistani Relations Beyond Bin Laden. He says that after 9/11: Washington demanded that the Pakistanis aid the United States in its war against al Qaeda and the Taliban.
For Pakistan, this represented a profound crisis. On the one hand, Pakistan badly needed the United States to support it against what it saw as its existential enemy, India. On the other hand, Islamabad found it difficult to rupture or control the intimate relationships, ideological and personal, that had developed between the ISI and the Taliban, and by extension with al Qaeda to some extent. In Pakistani thinking, breaking with the United States could lead to strategic disaster with India. However, accommodating the United States could lead to unrest, potential civil war and even collapse by energizing elements of the ISI and supporters of Taliban and radical Islamism in Pakistan.
The Pakistani solution was to appear to be doing everything possible to support the United States in Afghanistan, with a quiet limit on what that support would entail.
Friedman adds:
That limit on support set by Islamabad was largely defined as avoiding actions that would trigger a major uprising in Pakistan that could threaten the regime. Pakistanis were prepared to accept a degree of unrest in supporting the war but not to push things to the point of endangering the regime....The Americans were, of course, completely aware of the Pakistani limits and did not ultimately object to this arrangement. The United States did not want a coup in Islamabad, nor did it want massive civil unrest. The United States needed Pakistan on whatever terms the Pakistanis could provide help.
The Americans accepted the principle of Pakistani duplicity, but drew a line at al Qaeda.
The United States is now looking for an exit from Afghanistan and no withdrawal strategy is conceivable without a viable Pakistan helping to stabilize Afghanistan and to contain Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.
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Osama Bin Laden's death makes it easier for the Americans to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, even though the worsening security situation means that talking and fighting will proceed alongside each other for some time.
Talking means a political solution to the conflict. Would that be one led by Afghans? It looks as if we have entered the Afghan Endgame ---the 10-year-old Afghan war is definitely drawing to a close.