Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
jcustis:

I have a question.

What is the general opinion amongst the guys you work with and deployed with about of the Pak Army/ISI in Afghanistan? Are they agnostic? Do they believe they are the enemy, they are a friend? Are they just resigned? What do they think?
I first need to put out the qualifier that there are no "general opinions" about the US-Pak relationship where I currently work. Everything supports (or certainly should support) the Theater Strategy, and folks tend to favor specific terms and phrases when you get into the security cooperation/assistance side of things.

Having said that, most I speak with recognize it is complex, delicate, and sensitive to a terribly wide range of things that can't be controlled all that easily, like public opinion. Trying to put things into a box and characterizing Pakistan as a friend or enemy is too simplistic, in my opinion.

I believe that military professionals tend to look on each other kindly, no matter the tensions between policymakers/politicians, and that is the reason why the US-Pak military relationship is stronger and both sided aim to increase cooperation to make it more efficient and certainly relevant to current threats.

Folks in the building understand the situation Pakistan faces, the balance the Pak military strives to achieve in the frontier between eradicating radicalism and insurgency while not creating more radicals. I don't know enough about the connections between the conventional military and the ISI to lump them together, but I do appreciate the claim that things turned upside down on 9/11 for both countries.

The US has the luxury of leaving. The Pak general or admiral who has attended our various war colleges or perhaps specialized courses, cannot say the same.

Some appreciate the complex Pak-Indian relationship and how it can be a predictor of Pakistani foreign policy behavior, but it tends to be overshadowed by other headlines, like an Abbottabad raid.

We seem to share the belief that we must find a way to get past this.

Now, things were very different when I was in Afghanistan. The Taliban were the enemy--the 50m target. At a battalion level, where things a tactically-focused, there just isn't a lot of time to think about the strategic relationships and dramas, even if they are known. I would say that if they did consider Pakistan an active supporter of insurgents who were in our neck of the woods, they were resigned to the fact that there wasn't anything they could do about it and there more immediate worries, like the daily patrolling effort and getting home in one piece. I don't recall having a conversation with the battalion commander about the topic, and it certainly never came up between me and the operations officer, even though we all stood barely 10 kms from the border during an Oct raid.

I have to qualify this by reminding that the lethal smuggling problem, mixed in with the narcotics smuggling across the porous southern border (in name only) was our focus. We faced the same in northern Iraq and had early on let go of any angst that the border was not better controlled on the Pak side.

I'd have to root through my posts in the '06-'09 era to see if I had a worry about the ISI-Haqqanni nexus claims, but I don't recall reading the "Godfather" article until perhaps early 2013? I had a sense of the accusations, and the wringing of hands over what to do, but I suppose that is because I hang out in spaces like the Council, rather than prepping for Fantasy Football Leauge season.

Make sense? I want to be sure I get to your question, so feel free to ask for clarification.