The Pakistani Traitor and the CIA: A Strange Parable

The government of Pakistan is currently holding in custody Dr. Shakeel Afridi, a physician accused of treason, and is threatening to try and execute him. The action for which the treason is alleged is the assistance that Dr. Afridi provided to the CIA in its successful efforts to locate, target, and assassinate Usama bin Laden, who was hiding, more or less openly, in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad.

The pretext on which Dr. Afridi was operating was what the Los Angeles Times, among other sources, labeled a “phony vaccination campaign” that had the apparent purpose of innoculating Pakistanis against various diseases but which was more focused on obtaining a DNA sample of bin Laden to confirm his identity. Dr. Afridi was the physician who was conducting these vaccinations as a ruse and was instrumental in pinpointing the location of bin Laden. As such, he was clearly acting as the agent of a foreign intelligence agency (the CIA), which constitutes espionage but not necessarily treason, particularly as alleged by the government of Pakistan. Definitions of treason–and more specifically high treason–which the Pakistani government specifies against Dr. Afridi, normally includes “betrayal” of one’s own country and consciously working with the government’s enemies to harm or overthrow the government. Working for the CIA could be considered betrayal of the country if one assumes that the United States is the enemy of Pakistan; it is hard to understand how this allegation can be leveled against someone working for an ally of Pakistan, which the United States presumably is supposed to be. Moreover, it is hard to make the intellectual leap to this collusion and some action intended to harm or overthrow the government of Pakistan, unless bin Laden is somehow an important part of that government, which he was not. Something, as the old saying goes, is rotten in Denmark.

The case of the vaccimation doctor is, in fact, a parable, and yes, a strange one, of U.S.-Pakistani relations generally. The United States and Pakistan are allegedly partners, have even been formal allies, and are supposedly united in the common quest to act in unison against terrorists and those who would destabilize and overthrow Afghanisan’s regime. Yet the Pakistani government treats the United States virtually as an enemy when it comes to the execution of actions designed to carry out their joint mission, such as assassinating bin Laden.

There are, of course, good reasons for the apparent anomaly represented by this situation that act as a parable for the future of the U.S.-Pakistani relationship. One can accept the idea that Dr. Afridi did in fact violate Pakistani laws in working for the CIA and that Pakistan has a right to try and punish transgressors. It is also true that the harshness of the charges and possible consequences of a trial for treason are harsh, arguably excessive, and that they will further alienate a U.S. government that has been less than delighted with Pakistani attitudes about the bin Laden operation all along. Try to find someone in the U.S. government, for instance, who believes nobody in the Pak government knew absolutely anything about where bin Laden was hiding “in plain sight” in the home of Pakistan’s military service academy. You won’t find many takers.

Presumably, Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Servcie Intelligence (ISI) is up to its neck in all this. ISI acts as a lone ranger in carrying out what it believes to be Pakistan’s best interests, and these often conflict with those of the United States. ISI created the Taliban, after all, and is not going to abandon them, since it believes they are a counterweight to Indian influence in Afghanistan. ISI is also up to its ears in terrorism, including the training and dispatch of Kashmiri “freedome fighters” and others in the badlands provinces of Pakistan (NW Province, FATA, etc.) along the Afghan border. Their self-perceived interests and hose of the United States could scarcely be farther apart, and that is not a condition likely to change anytime soon.

The upshot is that the United States and Pakistan are at effective odds on a range of mutual interests that their papered over comity cannot hide. Pakistanis complain consistently about US intrusion in their country through missions against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by American drones and the like. The Pakistanis complain these are violations of Pakistani sovereignty, which they are, but mostly it is posturing for the purpose of impressing anti-American sentiment against Americans. Americans, for their part, wonder why the United States continues to funnel assistance to a regime and people who not only do not like us much, but who also oppose our objectives in the region. There are no simple and compelling answers to that dilemma.

The parable becomes more and more relevant as the United States moves inexorably toward disengagement in Afghanistan. What the United States and Pakistan see as the future of a post-American Afghanistan are not, to put it mildly, identical. Pakistan wants a weak, pro-Pakistani government in Kabul, one that will pose no threat to Islamabad, and this means a government that is also anti-Indian. The Indians, unsurprisingly, want and are working toward the opposite outcome: a pro-Indian, anti-Pakistani Afghanistan that will help in the encirclement of Pakistan. The Paks thus want a postwar Afghanistan where the Pashtuns–and especially those with some affiliation with the Taliban–are well placed, whereas the Indians prefer that power effectively reside with non-Pashtuns. The United States wants a stable postwar Afghanistan that is resistant to terrorist reimposition, thereby reinforcing the notion the U.S. has actually accomplished something positive in the country. What the Afghans want is largely beside the point.

As the American involvement starts to wind down in Afghanistan and the players begin to jostle for position, the contradictions in what the outsiders want in Afghanistan will become more apparent, and one prominent aspect of that posturing that will be a victim is the fiction that the United States and Pakistan see eye-to-eye on these matters. Just ask Dr. Afridi, if you can find the prison cell in which he is apparently being held largely incognito by our allies.

The Arab Spring: Libya and Syria

Libya and Syria have become the poster children for the varied impacts that the so-called Arab Spring have had on the Islamic Middle East. They are not the most important countries to have undergone changes (Egypt, the outcome of whose upheaval remains a work in progress, can claim that distinction), but they do represent the most polar outcomes that the popular uprisings have produced to date. In Libya, the rebels–with the generous and probably critical assistance of Western militaries–have succeeded in dislodging long-time ruler Muammar Gaddafi, whose whereabouts remain a mystery of the Carmen San Diego variety at this point. In Syria, the regime of Bashar al-Assad remains in power in the face of worldwide condemnation but little effective action, and seems likely to remain so for the foreseaable future.

The countries and their situations are a study in similarities and contrasts. Both are, of course, majority Sunni countries (as are most Muslim states), both have a diverse population that is tied together by common religion, both have long-standing traditions since achieving statehood of authoritarian rule in which the military has played a prominent role, and both have ties (admittedly of different varieties) to international terrorism. On the face of it, Syria is in many ways the more important country by virtue of size (71,500 square miles of territory to Libya’s 43,000 square miles), population (22 million to 6.5 million) and strategic location: Syria has long borders with Iraq and Turkey and less lengthy borders with Lebanon, Jordan and Israel, whereas Libya borders six North African countries, the only one of which that has strategic significance being Egypt.

There is, of course, one very significant difference between the two which explains the highly differential way the international community has reacted to demands for political change in the two countries. That difference, of course, is that Libya has a large amount of very desirable petroleum, and Syria does not. The contrast is enormous. Using CIA World Factbook figures, Libya exports approximately 1.5 million barrels a day (15th largest in the world), while Syria exports 155,000 barrels a day, about one-tenth of the Libyan figure and 56th in the world. Known Libyan reserves stand at 47 billion barrels, comparecto 2.5 billion for the Syrians. Moreover, Libyan oil is relatively cheap to extract and is particularly “sweet” (low-sulfur content), a particularly important factor for Europeans who have geared their refineries to processing sweet crude and can only deal with other oil with considerably more difficulty and expense.

Oil production has driven the economies of the two countries in opposite directions. Libyan GDP per capita, for instance, is about $14,800 (84th in the world), and while it is distributed in an unequitable manner of which the Tea Party would be proud and Ayn Rand disciples envious, it is considerably higher than in Syria, with a per capita GDP of $4,800, 151st the in the world. Prior to the revolution, Libya was a classic “petrolist” state (to borrow Thomas L. Friedman’s term), where huge oil revenues (95 percent of export earnings, 80 percent of government revenues) were used to buy off the population and blunt its democratic urges. Petrolist success took a hit with the success of the revolution in Libya.

Libya has succeeded in throwing off its shackles for the moment, and Syria has not. The outcome in Libya is far from ordained, and could vary from a total democracy to the rise of a new dictator: prudence suggests somewhere in between, whatever that may mean. The al-Assads cling to power, and despite universal pleas for them to cease their repression and to step down, Bashar al-Assad shows no indication he will do either. Nobody wants to talk about his success in holding power, but it is not unlikely, at least in the short run.

The key element in Libyan success and Syrian failure is outside pressure. Put simply, it is highly unlikely that the Libyan rebels would have succeeded without the covering air power of NATO to suppress government forces (attacking them directly, preventing their forays against rebel units in the field intent on their destruction). These rebels, it must be remembered, were a pretty woebegone, rag-tag coalition when they began, and the early prognosis for them was not good until NATO airpower shifted the balance of power. There has, to put it mildly, been nothing like that in support of Syrian dissidents who are, as best one can piece together from media reports, been treated much more harshly than the Libyan government treated its citizenry. Why the difference?

The answers, of course, are pretty obvious. The first and overwhelmingly most important is that Libya has something the outside world wants (oil), and Syria does not. This makes Syria, despite its geography and demographics, much less important to the world–and specifically to the countries that can militarily interfere–than Libya. The fact that Libya is a short and undefended flight across the Mediterranean Sea from Libya and that effective assistance did not include putting boots on the ground (sand?) and thus creating the possibility of many casualties, added to the ease of making the decision to help Libya but not Syria. Any actions against Syria are likely to have to come from neighbors, who show neither the interest nor capability to tangle with the regime in Damascus. Human rights violations alone are simply not enough.

The other element has been that the coercive capacity of the Syrian government has proven more capable and resilient than that of Libya. On the face of it, the Libyans has the wherewithal to expunge the rebels but could not. Part of the reason was geographic (target cities were fairly far away), and traversing the terrain meant crossing open territory and being left vulnerable to NATO air power. Partly, however, the Libyans seemed less capable (ruthless, blood thirsty)than Syrian forces). For the time being, Syrian brutality has succeeded; it may not in the longer run, but for the moment, the Syrians have held the line.

None of this suggests how the revolutions in either country or the region will come out. There are simply too many variables, someforeseeable and others not, that could influence the ultimate outcomes. Roughly nine months after the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia and spread through the region, however, the experiences in Libya and Syria do suggest the range of possible outcomes.

The U.S. and Pakistan after Bin Laden

As the details of the stunning American Navy SEALS raid that killed Usama bin Laden last Sunday filter into the public view, one controversy seems to be brewing much more obviously and openly than any other. That concern is the role of Pakistan in providing the sanctuary in which bin Laden apparently existed for upwards of six years. What, excatly, did the government of Pakistan know about all this? And why did they keep secret what they did know?

As is well known by now, bin Laden lived in a walled compound in what is now referred to as the Islamabad “suburb” of Abbottabad, which was also where a number of retired Pakistani military officers resided. Although it is not clear that bin Laden ventured outside the high walls surrounding the several structures that constituted the compound, the dead terrorist was a tall, striking figure, and there have been reports that a number of people saw someone fitting bin Laden’s physical description wandering the grounds off and on. Someone, it seems, must have been suspicious enough to alert officials, but apparently nobody did (exactly how the United States first got wind of his location remains a carefully guarded secret). The simple fact, however, is that it strains credulity to maintain that no one anywhere within the Pakistani governmental structure had any idea that the world’s most wanted criminal was hiding rather openly under their noses, especially given Pakistan’s well-known penchant for security.

It is important to the future of U.S.-Pakistani relations tow determine who knew what in all this. Pakistan is not unimportant to the United States. It is a big country(the world’s six most populous), it has nuclear weapons and a history of conflict with nuclear-armed neighbor India (with whom it is engaged in a covert semi-war over Kashmir), it has been an ally in the “war” on terror, and it has been a partner of sorts with the United States on matters surrounding Afghanistan. None of these are inconsequential concerns, especially since they occur in a highly unstable Pakistani political system that has relied partially on assistance from the United States for its well-being. The relationship is, in other words, a two-way street.

All of this relationship is endangered by uncertainty about Pakistani complicity in bin Laden’s exile residence in their country. If hiding and protecting him was a matter of official Pakistani policy, the repercussions could be extensive: no American administration could openly condone close relations with a country that performed such perfidy. At the same time, concern about Pakistani sensibilities because of American violation of sovereign Pakistani air space to attack Taliban and Al Qaeda within Pakistan would vanish if the Pakistanis prove to be unworthy partners. An abrupt rupture of U.S. support for Pakistan internationally (in its relationship with India) or internally could further destabilize a Pakistan that already sits perilously close to the boundary between stable and failed states in the world. It is probably a good idea to look before we leap.

To say “Pakistan” must have known about bin Laden’s hideaway is not very helpful in assessing the situation. Pakistani politics have always been extraordinarily complex, compartmented, and adversarial. The Pakistani military has always had considerable influence and control (critics say excessively so), and they are at constant odds with and suspicious of basically secular democratic influences, such as that represented in the current Zardari government. For their part, those who support popular civilian government have been no great shakes, among other things being masters at the art of political corruption. The military distrusts the civilians, the civilians distrust the military, and both sides have ample justifications for their qualms.

The wild card in all this is Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). This organization, which was configured in something like its present configuration by President Ayub Khan, is an aggregate of various domestic and foreign intelligence elements within the government. It is quite extensive, and it plays a number of roles, including serving as a conduit to Islamic radicals seeking to annex Kashmir to India. It is widely identified as having sired the Taliban as a way to keep Afghanistan weak and thus to maximize Pakistani influence in that country. It served as an instrument to help funnel foreign assistance to the mujahadin groups fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and its first associations with bin Laden probably date to that period, when bin Laden served as a recruiter of foregn fighters into Afghanistan. The exact relationship between the ISI and bin Laden after he formed Al Qaeda is a bit murky, but it is fair to say the two organizations knew one another. Further, the ISI has been active within Pakistan’s Pashtun minority community, and it has served as a trainer for what many consider terrorists going into Kashmir.

If any one part of the Pakistani government almost certainly knew about bin Laden’s whereabouts, it was almost certainly the ISI. In turn, however, the ISI has been cooperating with American intelligence in the effort to identify and take out Taliban and Al Qaeda assets in Pakistan. Exactly what kind of “double game” the ISI was playing in all this requires the imagination of the late Robert Ludlum to unravel, but if there are not ISI fingerprints on the situation when all is said and done, it would be one of the world’s great surprises.

The problem is how the United States should proceed with Pakistan. Almost certainly, there will be pressure on the administration for some kinds of sanctions against the Pakistani government to “fess up” to their involvement, but embarassing the civilian regime might well be counterproductive. If those who were complicit in hiding bin Laden are to be found and dealt with, it will take the mutual efforts of the civilians and the professional military bringing the ISI to heel, and that will be a monumental task that will not be assisted by American indignation, however well based, that Pakistan must have played a role in keeping bin Laden safe for so long. Pressure behind the scenes is certainly appropriate and is no doubt being applied “as we speak.” Beyond that, maybe the best thing for Americans to do is simply to bask in the satisfaction that bin Laden is dead, that Al Qaeda is now in the throes of a process to determine his successor that will likely leave it further diminished, and that the SEALS performed a job well done.

Hyper-Partisanship, Non-Consensus, and Libya

President Obama has received a great deal of criticism over the past several weeks about how his administration has handled the American reaction to the revolution in Libya. This criticism has covered the gamut of possible actions and solutions. George Bush-like, some have lambasted him for timidity, suggesting that the United States come much more forcefully to the aid of Libyan rebels in the form of a no-fly zone or more; John McCain and Joe Lieberman respresent this strand of opinion; at the other end of the GOP spectrum, Richard Lugar of Indiana has broken with Obama for getting at all involved. Within his own party, most of the criticism has come from the left, which wants no US involvement militarily in Libya (or Afghanistan or Iraq, one might add). At the same time, a few remind Obama about a potential Rwanda-style humanitarian disaster (an analogy almost certainly overblown) unless the United States does something about Colonel Qadhafi.

The merits of the situation are at best murky, thereby allowing advocacy of a broad range of options without any danger of bumping too closely into the facts. Two things, however, seem clear to me at this point. One is that the loose coalition of anti-Qadhafi factions cannot possibly win (i.e. overthrow Qadhafi) without outside assistance; indeed, it is not at all certain that this “revolution” can persist without outsiders suppressing the government’s attempts to destroy them, as events showed last week. The balance of power is not on the rebels’ side. Qadhafi has the guns, and the absence of meaningful uprisings in the western part of the country (notably Tripoli) indicates either that the rebellion lacks comprehensive support or that pro-government supporters are capable of suppressing the rebels. In either case, it looks like the only way the rebellion can succeed is with a great deal of outside help–something like a massive intervention against the Libyan government. Such an action is problematical in principle (these things often do not work at all, and even when they do, the outcomes are rarely what one hoped they might be). No one seems to be advocating such an intervention, but the logic dictates that eventually it will have to be contemplated when stalemate proves not to be enough.

That leads to the second clear point: we still do not have a good handle on who exactly the rebels are. Certainly the foot soldiers are non-radical citizens who are simply sick of Qadhafi and want to see him gone. Most outsiders share that sentiment,which is why there is more support for active moves than there might otherwise be. But is that all the leadership wants? What do we know about these people–who are they? where do they come from? what is their politics? It is becoming clear that there is no single leadership cadre; that instead there are alternative aspirants to post-Qadhafi leadership. Before one becomes too involved in replacing one leadership with another, it is always nice to know what the replacement will be like. Do we know this? For that matter, do the Libyans themselves know this?

If my assessment is at all sanguine, the situation on the ground in Libya would seem to counsel a slow, measured approach to involvement on the ground, which is pretty much what the White House is pursuing. Yet, the hounds continue to bay. Why?

Let me suggest two reasons that are stated in the title of this post. The first is the hyper-partisanship that has infected all American politics and, increasingly American foreign policy. The basic dynamic is that all aspects of political life are now framed in increasingly strident ideological language, mostly along partisan party lines, and politics has become a zero-sum game in which one side succeeds at the other side’s expense. Democrats blame Republicans for everything that happens and everything the GOP does in response, and vice versa. As this phenomenon has become more pervasive, its effect has been to paralyze (or “gridlock”) the political system: the battle over keeping the government going is the most obvious example. In times past, foreign policy was exempt from much of this sniping (“politics ends at the water’s edge”). It no longer is, unfortunately. (This theme is developed more fully in a book Pat Haney and I are co-authoring, American Foreign Policy in a New Era, due out in January 2012).

The other problem is a lack of consensus on guiding first principles that inform foreign policy. If one side or another was communist (the Cold War), the response would be easy. Immediately after 9/11, the charge that one side was composed of terrorists would also serve as an activator. Col. Qadhafi has tried that one, accusing the opposition of being Al Qaeda dupes, but it has not worked. Anti-terrorism is still a theme of American policy, but it is not longer a supreme first principle. In the current situation, we have no real guiding grand strategy, and so part of our bickering reflects a disagreement on what should activate the United States in a place like Libya that is based on first premises on which there is no depth of agreement.

This leaves the president tip-toeing through a minefield, where any step he takes will set off another explosion. His response, it seems to me, has been to activate what used to be revered as a highly desirable leadership trait: pragmatism (the approach of dealing with problems on their individual merits rather than in conformance with some pre-existing ideological framework). That approach is not much in vogue today, attacked from both sides as being unprincipled–wishy-washy in Charlier Brown language. Yet, pragmatism in this situation probably argues for caution before we know the answers to the kinds of questions raised above, and it is hard for me to understand how anyone could disagree about that. But then, someone will probably disagree about when we can disagree as well.

Occupations and Terrorism

A couple of articles appeared this week that caught my eye, because they both expressed a view of the terrorism problem that I have suspected for sometime has merit but which has never quite achieved manstream traction. The article were an op-ed column by Bob Herbert in the New York Times and a Foreign Policy online article by Robert Pape. Each expressed the hypothesis that the major motivation for terrorists attacking the United States may be a reaction to the continuing American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, rather than the more conventionally held and “respectable” argument that the cause of anti-American and anti-Western terrorism is a fundamental jihadist trait of fundamentalist Islam that arises out of Islamic tradition and/or what Gorge W. Bush liked to see as their basic envy of Western life and prosperity.

The two articles are substantively quite different. Herbert’s article, unsurprisingly given he is a political columnist, is based on his personal analysis and what he views as the commonsensical reasoning that people generally resent military overlordship and are reacting in the only effective manner they have at their disposal, which happens to be terrorism. Pape’s argument is somewhat narrower and is based in his ongoing (and generally heralded) research on suicide terrorism. In his own words, “More than 95 percent of all suicide attacks are in response to foreign occupation.”

Both men reach a similar conclusion, which is that a major element in eliminating or reducing the current terrorism problem is to end the military occupations in which the United States is now involved, thereby undercutting the rationale for and appeal of terrorism directed against Americans.

I personally find this a not unreasonable argument and conclusion, although it is a hypothesis, not a scientific fact. The evidence in support of the hypothesis is only partly empirical: the strongest thread comes from what terrorists say. Bin Laden’s famous mid-1990s “Epistles” (in which he lays out the rationale for Al Qaeda’s campaign against the United States) begins from the grievance of a continuing military presence of the United States in the “holy lands”  (i.e. Saudi Arabia), a complaint he later augmented with a similar entreaty against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Further, proponents of this interpretation maintain that their contention simply stands to reason–nobody appreciates being militarily occupied, oppressed, and humiliated, and they will strike back in any way they can. How would we feel in similar circumstances?

This intepretation has always had a certain resonance with me as at the very least a plausible alternative to the demonization of terrorists implicit in the alternative argument, which is that terrorism is simply a part of global jihad imbedded in some Islamic thought that can only be combatted by harsh military methods. This interpretation also may be correct, although its adherents offer no more convincing empirical evidence than do those who argue against occupation. The primary supportive argument of those who oppose the occupation hypothesis essentially argument that terrorist-generated carnage and destruction makes their case. This evidence, of course, is tangible, but it is also a dependent variable (or consequence) of terrorism, the cause of which can support either view.

The Pape article has produced an absolute firestorm of angry responses on both sides of the issue. The attacks are especially vitriolic and arise, in most cases, from accepting the implications of the arguments for Israel, which has a long history now of both foreign occupation (as an occupier) and suicide terrorism against it. The implications of Pape’s analysis would seem to be that the antidote to suicide terrorism is to end military occupation of the West Bank (although he is talking directly about Afghanistan). Such an implication, of course, strikes at the heart of current Israeli policy regarding the West Bank, some of which (the fence separating the West Bank from Israel, for instance) has direct terrorist motivation and some of which is not so clearly based in the terrorist threat (e.g. the Israeli settlements on the West Bank).

The debate about these things reflects an important reality about current national security thinking both in Washington and Tel Aviv. One can make a plausible case for either hypothesis about the terrorist motivation, but which one is chosen has important policy differences. Accepting the jihadist argument means that current policy is the correct one, even if it has not produced a clear “solution” to the problem. What it has done, however, is keep the lid on a problem which, if it is correct, could and would become much worse if a change away from its policy consequences is tried. Since “worse” in this case means the possibility of considerably more violence, there is a natural tendency not to chance it. Accepting the occupation alternative, on the other hand, suggests major change, and while the outcome could be considerably superior to the ongoing situation, it could also be considerably worse if it is incorrect. Once, again, the possible negative outcomes militate toward not rocking the boat. Regardless of the merits, the odds are on the side of those who resist change.

All that said, the war on terrorism, if it is working at all, is doing so at a tremendous financial and physical cost. From an American vantage point, ending the occupation has greater attraction (and less potential negative consequences) than a similar act by the Israelis. Afghanistan, after all, is thousands of miles from the United States; the West Bank is adjacent to Israel. The U.S. is therefore in a much better place to try the experiment: if it fails, the likely consequences for us are not great. If it does work, however, the pressures for Israel to follow suit would certainly mount.

I happen to favor the occupation-as-cause argument, but unlike those who oppose it, I know that I may be right or wrong. The current policy in Afghanistan, in my view, is so flawed and certain of ultimate failure that I don’t see how ending the occupation (while reserving the right to attack Al Qaeda should it return from the air or possibly with special forces) can make matters worse. My perspective (and those of Mssrs. Herbert and Pape) may be wrong, but they certainly deserve a more dignified and thoughtful analysis than I read from the commentators to the Pape piece.