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This is one of the best articles I have read on the subject, but it is rather long so I will only excerpt a bit here:
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Even before the dust had settled on 9/11, U.S. policymakers were well aware that Pakistan was at the center of the world's worst Islamist terrorist networks. The Bush administration quickly moved to persuade once-sanctioned Islamabad to become an essential partner in the "global war on terror." But today, nearly six years after Secretary of State Colin Powell first announced that Washington and Islamabad stood "at the beginning of a strengthened relationship," the Taliban are still entrenched in the Afghan-Pakistani border region, al Qaeda's top leaders have found a secure hideout in Pakistan, and terrorist attacks within and beyond Pakistan's borders persist with deadly regularity.
Given these failures, it is no surprise that Americans are increasingly frustrated with the slow and uncertain progress in Pakistan. Many, including some members of the U.S. Congress and a number of serious Pakistan watchers, have begun to express fundamental doubts about the U.S. partnership with Islamabad. They question whether President Pervez Musharraf -- a general who took power after a coup in 1999 -- and his military are trustworthy allies willing and able to stand on the frontlines in defense of U.S. security. They allege that recent deals between the Pakistani government and tribal elders in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the border with Afghanistan look suspiciously like capitulation to the Taliban, orchestrated by Pakistani intelligence agencies with ties to known extremists. They charge, in short, that Musharraf and his allies in Islamabad have taken billions of dollars in U.S. aid while doing too little to advance -- and, in many ways, much to undermine -- the fight against terrorism.
These critics advocate a new approach to Pakistan. They press for tougher talk from Washington -- including threats of sanctions -- in order to pressure Islamabad into undertaking more aggressive counterterrorism operations. And they argue that the United States should cut off Musharraf and push for a transition to civilian democratic rule. Musharraf's military regime, they suggest, will never be a trustworthy partner capable of effectively fighting militancy and extremist ideologies.
It is true that Pakistan's government needs greater popular legitimacy -- won through the ballot box -- in order to advance both long- and short-term counterterrorism goals. But the critics' prescriptions for how to advance these goals risk throwing the United States, Pakistan, and the war on terrorism off course without offering a better alternative. If members of the Pakistani army and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) retain ties to militant groups, including Taliban sympathizers, they do so as a hedge against abandonment by Washington. The past six decades of on-again, off-again bilateral cooperation have undermined Pakistani confidence in long-term U.S. partnership. Washington, accordingly, should resist the appeal of the cathartic but counterproductive approach of confronting Islamabad with more sticks and fewer carrots. Any attempt to crack down on Pakistan will exacerbate distrust, resulting in increased Pakistani support for jihadists; coercive threats will undermine confidence without producing better results.
Nor is democracy a magic bullet. Pakistan's security services will not easily be cowed, sidelined, or circumvented, and the challenges facing democracy in Pakistan go far beyond rigged elections or exiled politicians. Weak civilian institutions and a history of dysfunctional civil-military relations mean that bringing democracy to Pakistan is less a matter of resuscitation than of reinvention.
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| quote: | By the fall of 2001, the influence of Islamist sympathizers in Pakistan's army, intelligence services, and government had reached a dangerously high level. Pakistan's support for jihadists in Kashmir and Afghanistan, the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan's nuclear black market, the steady growth of extremist mosques and madrasahs -- all were distressing signs that the country risked slipping into state failure or Islamist rule.
After 9/11, Musharraf made a momentous decision to join the war on terrorism. But this did not mean an immediate U-turn on all support to militant groups in Pakistan. As the White House correctly recognized, even if Musharraf was personally committed to this decision, he faced hard-line skeptics within his own army. The skeptics doubted the United States' staying power, lamented the costs of turning against longtime jihadi associates, and questioned the wisdom of picking fights with global terrorist outfits. Accordingly, Musharraf needed to calibrate his actions in order to avoid alienating a powerful and all-important constituency. And he needed U.S. assistance to bolster his political allies and win over the remaining fence sitters.
In order to build trust with the Musharraf regime, the Bush administration launched a robust engagement strategy, with total assistance to Pakistan estimated at more than $10 billion since 9/11. (Counting covert assistance, the overall figure could be far higher.) The vast majority of this assistance has gone to Pakistan's military. Washington has also worked through international financial institutions to ease Pakistan's debt burden, opening the door for economic growth of just under six percent for the past four years. And in June 2006, the Pentagon notified Congress of plans to sell up to 36 F-16 jets and associated high-tech weapons systems to Pakistan, a major reversal of U.S. policy dating from 1990, when such transactions fell victim to sanctions over Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. On the diplomatic side, meanwhile, top members of President George W. Bush's national security team have turned Pakistan into a regular destination, and the president himself made an unprecedented overnight stop in Islamabad last year. In 2005, the administration named Pakistan a "major non-NATO ally."
Washington's post-9/11 engagement with Islamabad has achieved notable successes. A number of al Qaeda leaders have been killed or captured in Pakistan, including Abu Zubaydah (2002), Ramzi bin al-Shibh (2002), Khalid Sheik Mohammad (2003), Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan (2004), and Abu Faraj al-Libbi (2005). Such achievements would not have been possible without extensive cooperation between Pakistani and U.S. intelligence agencies; they also netted extensive information on al Qaeda's tactics and future plans. The strategy of engagement has also paid dividends on Pakistan's eastern border with India. Following the almost nuclear "Twin Peaks" crisis of 2001-2, Washington's friendly ties with India and Pakistan and steady support for Indo-Pakistani rapprochement have helped ease the way toward dialogue, a cease-fire, and confidence building between the two countries.
But such successes must be qualified by the fact that the Taliban are still present in southern Afghanistan and in Pakistani's FATA and Baluchistan region and that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri apparently remain ensconced in the Afghan-Pakistani border region. Compounding these problems, Washington has focused too narrowly on Musharraf and his army as the United States' sole partners in Pakistan. So far, the administration has avoided the worst of nightmare scenarios in Pakistan -- state collapse or an Islamist takeover -- but failed to achieve its first-order goals in the war on terrorism or to bolster civilian governance.
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| quote: | Trying to force a rapid democratic transition in Pakistan would prove similarly counterproductive. The problem with betting on democracy in Pakistan is not, as the popular myth has it, that Islamists would win. The specter of an Islamist takeover is often invoked to defend Musharraf's resistance to democratic reform, but in fact, Musharraf's undemocratic rule has obscured the lack of widespread support for Islamist parties. Only ISI manipulation of the 2002 elections permitted the Muttahida Majilis-e-Amal, or MMA -- Pakistan's major Islamist coalition -- to win the votes it needed to become a significant factor in national politics. No Islamist group or political party currently possesses the organizational capacity or popular support necessary to seize power in Islamabad, and in legitimate elections the MMA would likely win only a small percentage of the vote (probably around five percent, the historical norm). A truly free and fair vote would more likely return power to the mainstream civilian parties -- with power being held by some combination of Bhutto's PPP and Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League.
The real problem with pushing for a rapid democratic transition is that genuine civilian democracy in Pakistan is an unrealistic aspiration in the near term. If the United States wants to work with Pakistan, one way or another it will have to work with the army -- Pakistan's strongest government institution and the only one that can possibly deal with immediate threats of violent militancy and terrorism. Almost all of Pakistan's other institutions have either fallen victim to neglect (the primary-education system, for example, has yielded a literacy rate of 30-50 percent -- and still, roughly 40 percent of the education budget goes unused because the bureaucracy is incapable of spending it) or been incorporated into the army's expanding sphere of influence. Even if a civilian regime gained power in Islamabad, it would make critical decisions only after considering the army's interests and depend on the army to get things done -- and so, by extension, would Washington.
Pakistan's postindependence history makes clear that even during periods of civilian rule, the army has usually called the shots. Throughout the 1990s, a period of nominal democracy, the army still held sway over critical national security and foreign policy portfolios, including the direction of Pakistan's nuclear program and the management of relations with jihadi outfits in Afghanistan and Kashmir. By most accounts, Bhutto was, for example, largely in the dark about the development of Pakistan's nuclear program until informed by U.S. officials. A decade of wrangling between civilian politicians and the army fueled instability and demonstrated that elections and constitutional provisions are inadequate guarantors of genuine civilian democracy in the face of a concerted military challenge.
Dislodging the army from the driver's seat in Islamabad would therefore require a civilian leader who was either extremely strong or sensitive to the army's institutional interests. By either measure, Pakistan's most prominent party leaders -- Bhutto and Sharif -- would be likely to fail. Both have been weakened by extended exiles and yet still generate a deep level of mistrust within the army. Neither can return to Islamabad without negotiating terms with Musharraf, and it is hard to imagine those terms would include stripping the army chief of his authority. Like it or not, Musharraf -- or a successor general -- will retain the lion's share of power in the near term, even if national elections install a new government in Islamabad this fall.
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http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070...n-pakistan.html
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