Responding to Pakistan's Civil War: Cut the Aid, Increase the Trade

Is Pakistan an unambiguous and unambivalent friend of America? No. But that does not mean it should be turned into an enemy.

Pakistan is a house divided, experiencing a civil war in politics, culture and religion. Many frustrated Americans and Indians feel the most cathartic option is to ostracize that nuclear-spotted nation of 180 million. Yet the U.S. and India can play a productive role in rehabilitating Pakistan. This is a time for productive engagement, not retaliation or schadenfreude.

Much of Pakistan's problems can be traced back to its tensions with its large and sometimes belligerent Indian sibling, something Washington has long failed to address. Pakistani paranoia is not all unjustified: Former Financial Times South Asia correspondent Edward Luce has observed that India has never come to terms with Pakistan's existence.

Many Indian nationalists even today make no secret of their desire for Pakistan to disappear. Yet it won't disappear: If it implodes, this nuclear-armed nation will suck India and other nations on its event horizon into a hole.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh walks a fine line between engaging Pakistan in trade and security matters while not outraging broad swaths of Indian nationalists who favor brute force over collaboration.

Pakistan is to blame for its many failures of leadership, but let us consider how it slid as a nation. Pakistanis revered America back in the day, as I would notice on visits there as a child in the 1970s. My family moved from the U.S. to Islamabad during the late 1970s and early 1980s, during a period when everything began to change.

Pakistanis by now had felt compelled to address rival India's nuclear-weapon making efforts. Recently deposed Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (whose daughter Benazir would later herself assume the role of prime minister) had said that Pakistanis would match rival India's capabilities even if they had to eat grass. The Carter Administration seemed determined that Pakistanis eat grass.

Carter's anti-authoritarian tendencies also kept him from supporting Pakistan's new military leader, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Pakistanis increasingly felt unrewarded for their Cold War alliance with Washington, even while India remained friendly with the Communist Bloc.

Meanwhile a popular uprising was underway in Iran against the despotic Shah. Washington decided to stop propping up a dictator there, hoping for the best -- but the Ayatollah Khomeini then raised America up as the Great Satan.

I was attending the International School of Islamabad, an American-run school. On November 21, 1979, the Ayatollah would incite Muslims with radio broadcasts accusing the United States of seizing the Ka'aba temple in Mecca (it was actually Saudi fanatics who seized it, but who's counting?). In Islamabad, outraged protesters promptly burned down the American embassy, then moved across town to attack our school.

Pakistan was on a fast track to becoming an American enemy -- until Soviet tanks rolled into nearby Kabul, Afghanistan. Detesting Zia but dreading communism's advance far more, the Carter Administration and Reagan Administrations would ally closely with him to fight the Soviets. Into a Pakistan that was widely marked by a free and tolerant Sufi-Sunni hybrid of Islam, Zia and the Americans would import a grim, intolerant strain of Saudi jihadism.

Meanwhile, Pakistan continued its nuclear weapons program, led by A.Q. Khan, whose daughters attended my school.

Once the Soviets had been defeated, it was time for America to become outraged again by Pakistan's nuclear program. And with the ending of the Cold War, Islamabad could sense that Washington preferred India's Abel to Pakistan's Cain.

If you break it, you buy it, Colin Powell said. Yet Pakistan's northwest frontier was overrun by millions of Afghan refugees, and its economy was strangled, all while Washington moved on to other issues.

Thus, when President Bush commanded Pakistan to ally itself again with America after 9/11, few Pakistani military leaders and even fewer citizens would believe that the alliance could be trusted. The much-discussed "Pakistani double game" ensued, in which agents within the military and within the spy agency secretly supported jihadists as a buffer against India.

While it is time for Pakistan to sort through its mess, (and I will be writing much more on key ways Pakistanis need to take greater responsibility for their decline) the world can offer proper incentives.

American military aid and even economic aid should probably be cut unless Pakistanis can offer a unified vision of what they want from the U.S. As Lawrence Wright noted in the New Yorker this week, many Pakistanis favor American "trade over aid" anyway.

If India and the U.S. move to expand economic ties with Pakistan, especially in areas such as textiles, ordinary Pakistanis will for the first time have a genuine investment in these nations' well being. And a divided house can be reunited.

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