The US & others working with Pakistan

[jcustis]

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.

[carl]

jcustis:

That well answered my question. I can well understand the outlook of the guys on the line who have other things to thing about. What concerns me greatly is the attitude of the ones you currently work with.

I must put this in the right way. I don't want to jump on you for giving me a frank opinion of what you see. That said, it seems to me the people you work with are letting professional sympathy get in the way of a frank assessment of the Pak Army/ISI, its structure and its actions. When you say people in the building understand the situation Pakistan is in, what I hear is those people have bought the Pak Army/ISI line despite the huge amount of open source information available making it clear that they are a straight up enemy. Now maybe I am wrong about that but I'll stand by it. When you say that fighting professionals upon whom we depend upon for our protection from the beasts that stalk the world can't see what the Pak Army/ISI is and has been after 13 years and seeing the dead that come from that, that scares me. It makes me think there is something wrong with the ability of at least a segment of the American military to see things straight. We can get away with that in Afghanistan, sort of, but we won't get away with that if we have to go up against Red China some day. It's scary.

Again I thank you for providing an honest opinion. It is of great value because I can more understand that actions of the multi-stars may not be wholly because of a lack of moral character, those actions seem also to reflect a serious flaw in our military's ability to perceive things that are.

All of this is my honest opinion and I hope you don't hold it against me.

[jcustis]

Don't worry; everyone has things straight.

There are elements of things going on that I'm never going to talk about, and you'll likely never hear about. Balanced against the menagerie of things which constitute a foreign policy (and security cooperation/assistance strategy is just one bit managed by the .mil side), the goings on in my realm are probably the last thing to focus on.

I imagine, for example, that development strategies and other civilian-led pillars of COIN have a lot more relevance in Pakistan at the moment.

[ganulv]

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.

After the May, 2011, raid on the Mehran naval station there was some talk that there was an inside job element to the attack. That seemed a little out there to me. I asked a Pakistani friend of mine, a Political Science professor, what she thought. I was expecting she would tell me something about the nature of rumors and paranoia in the Pakistani media, so I was quite surprised when she told me she thought it was perfectly plausible and that it was her impression that there was more than a little factionalization in the Pakistani military and paramilitary forces.

Now, as far as I know there ended up being no evidence that the Mehran attack was an inside job in any way. And my friend was not claiming to have any inside track information on that event in particular or the situation in general.* But I did come away from the conversation with the notion that it is probably worth considering that while the Pakistani security professionals might all be on the same team that they might not all be reading from the same playbook. (Of course there are a variety of opinions within any institution, but I mean something beyond minor differences of opinion.)

*She does have family members who have served as officers in the Pakistani military, though of course many Pakistanis of her class and status do.

[omarali50]

Unfortunately this is in Urdu, but i am sure there are a few people in the US who can understand Urdu. They should take a look at this video. It is the unadulterated Paknationalist viewpoint, not what is put out for American consumption. This is NOT the consensus view of the establishment. The establishment has other views within it. But this view is by no means a joke, nor is it as "fringe' as many people seem to think. It is worth paying attention to...especially the question of why it is being promoted at this point; today, not 5 or 10 years ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvkYjpCZwq0#t=74

[carl]

After the May, 2011, raid on the Mehran naval station there was some talk that there was an inside job element to the attack. That seemed a little out there to me. I asked a Pakistani friend of mine, a Political Science professor, what she thought. I was expecting she would tell me something about the nature of rumors and paranoia in the Pakistani media, so I was quite surprised when she told me she thought it was perfectly plausible and that it was her impression that there was more than a little factionalization in the Pakistani military and paramilitary forces.

Now, as far as I know there ended up being no evidence that the Mehran attack was an inside job in any way. And my friend was not claiming to have any inside track information on that event in particular or the situation in general.* But I did come away from the conversation with the notion that it is probably worth considering that while the Pakistani security professionals might all be on the same team that they might not all be reading from the same playbook. (Of course there are a variety of opinions within any institution, but I mean something beyond minor differences of opinion.)

*She does have family members who have served as officers in the Pakistani military, though of course many Pakistanis of her class and status do.

Did they ever get the whole story on that attack?

[davidbfpo]

Carl asked:

Did they ever get the whole story on that attack?

IIRC the official Pakistani report was "leaked" and is within this thread. It was quite damming. Obviously I maybe mistaken.

[ganulv]

Did they ever get the whole story on that attack?

I am assuming they did. I am also assuming we never will.

[davidbfpo]

A succinct explanatory comment on WoTR; which ends with:

Ultimately, the point here is not to legitimize Pakistani conspiracy theories. Rather, it is to highlight how U.S. policies in Pakistan often strengthen—and validate—anti-American narratives that Washington would much prefer to undercut.

Link:http://warontherocks.com/2014/03/fou...an-youd-think/

[omarali50]

LOL. I wonder if Mr Kugelman has been picked up by paknationalist psyops yet? His work will be much cited in the days to come. If national security types get credit for citations, this will transform his ratings completely.
I do realize that he means well, but I am not sure what the meaning is supposed to be? what is the lesson here?

Not that it matters. We are about to win a strategic victory (probably with US support as Kerry and company arrange an honorable exit). But as I asked in 2011, what then? What if we win?

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksd...if-we-win.html

[ganulv]

LOL. I wonder if Mr Kugelman has been picked up by paknationalist psyops yet? His work will be much cited in the days to come.

And? If not his, someone else’s.

I do realize that he means well, but I am not sure what the meaning is supposed to be? what is the lesson here?

One lesson would be to keep things in perspective. Don’t sacrifice big picture, long term success at the altar of the crisis of the moment. Anyone who thinks endangering the closing round of decades of work towards eradication of polio from our planet was worth the risk if it meant getting a DNA sample from OBL (talk about risk aversion; were there not multiple lines of evidence that lead the U.S. Intelligence Community to that compound? why the need to nail it down that tightly?) is ignorant or a moron. But this is a nurse’s son speaking here.