Source: CERI Strategy Papers

Today, Pakistan is perhaps the hardest challenge for U.S. foreign policy. By comparison, a foreign policy challenge such as the U.S. relationship with China seems more straightforward. For starters, there is a broad understanding of what U.S. policy towards Beijing should be. While there are differences on the margins, U.S. policy towards China follows a certain course that is easy to appreciate, at least conceptually: it involves a balancing of competing security and economic interests. The United States seeks to preserve the gains arising from economic interdependence with China, while simultaneously deterring China from misusing the growing power arising from its economic ties with the wider world. Toward this end, the United States continues to engage China on one hand, while on the other hand maintaining a robust military capability and a strong network of allies and friends in the Indo-Pacific. Although implementing such a strategy is often challenging in practice, it is aided by the fact that there is a continuing demand for American presence on the part of the Asian states and, furthermore, because there is a certain equilibrium in the U.S.-China relationship. This equilibrium may not survive forever, but at least for the moment, it is on a reasonably even keel.

With Pakistan, in contrast, it is very difficult to understand what the best U.S. policy ought to be, even in a conceptual sense. This difficulty arises for three reasons. The first reason is that Pakistan’s problems are very deep-rooted, are quite comprehensive, and are viciously reinforcing. Every problem in Pakistan, unfortunately, is linked to every other problem in Pakistan, so policymakers often do not have the luxury of being able to separate out the problems and deal with each individually. If a policymaker seeks to remedy one problem, it soon becomes clear that there is another tightly linked problem beyond it, and yet another beyond that second problem as well. Consequently, Pakistan’s maladies are like Russian nesting dolls, with each apparent problem containing within it all the other problems, thus leading eventually to one enormous overall “problem of Pakistan.”

The second reason that Pakistan is such a policy challenge is because it is a state with a dual character. It has a civilian and a military arm, and each of these arms varies dramatically both in its motivations and in its capacity. A crude characterization of the problem might be that the civilian arm in Pakistan is better motivated than the military arm is to do the right things from the perspective of the nation’s long-term transformation, but it lacks the capacity to make the most important decisions that matter for Pakistan’s long-term interests. The military arm, in contrast, is much stronger than the civilian arm, but it is unfortunately fixated on maintaining a garrison state and a war economy because of its permanent obsession with India. Moreover, it has a history of repeatedly making the wrong decisions where Pakistan’s national interests are concerned. And, to this day, it persists in policies that, at least from the point of view of the United States, are counterproductive for Pakistani and American interests alike.

The third reason for the difficulty of dealing with Pakistan is that the United States is intimately involved in Pakistan’s political affairs and has been so since the founding of the Pakistani state. To be sure, the United States did not seek such a role, but it was nonetheless entrapped into internal Pakistani politics and the progressive disfigurement of the Pakistani state over time because of the Pakistani military’s enthusiasm for an alliance with Washington and Washington’s own willingness to integrate Pakistan into the larger alliance system intended to contain the Soviet Union. To complicate matters further, the United States today has a dependence on Pakistan that is matched only by its fears of Pakistan. American dependence arises from its extensive reliance on Pakistan for the success of its military operations in Afghanistan; consequently, it fears not engaging Pakistan because of the dangers that option embodies for the larger American counterterrorism campaign in Southern Asia. Between the two, the United States often ends up in a situation where it gets the worst of both worlds: a Pakistan that ruthlessly manipulates the United States at the strategic level even as Pakistan itself dangerously atrophies further domestically.

For these three reasons, the question of what to do about Pakistan turns out to be more difficult than many of the other foreign policy challenges facing the United States. The analysis that follows proceeds in two parts: first, elucidating U.S. interests in Pakistan along with a brief assessment of the leverage or opportunities the United States has to shape Pakistani decisions with respect to those interests; and second, examining the strategic options facing the United States in regard to Pakistan after taking into account the realities defining Pakistan’s condition.