The great game: Stakes the US has in Af-Pak 

On 26 November, ten terrorists of the LeT came ashore the Indian city of Mumbai on a fishing vessel and proceeded to execute multiple attacks. They virtually held the city under siege for sixty hours and riveted the attention of the global media. They killed 164 people, including six Americans, and left over 350 injured. The audacity and sophistication of the attack marked it out from other acts of terrorism since 9/11.

When the ordeal ended, the Indian forces had captured one Pakistani terrorist alive. They pieced together an elaborate conspiracy planned over two years with considerable support from the ISI. This provoked a public clamour in India for retaliation against Pakistan. In its final days in office, the Bush administration scrambled to prevent another conflict in the subcontinent. Washington was particularly concerned that an Indian attack would lead the Pakistanis to switch their forces from the western borders with Afghanistan to the eastern ones with India.

So, while Washington offered to cooperate in the investigation, American officials took the line that they were unsure whether the higher command of the ISI and the Pakistan Army had known of the attack. The Mumbai attacks also posed the first foreign policy crisis for the incoming Obama administration.

Not surprisingly, President Obama ordered a strategic review of the United States’ policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan soon after his inauguration in January 2009. The review concluded that both the Al-Qaeda and the Taliban had staged remarkable comebacks.

Attacks on the US, NATO and Afghan forces were steadily increasing in frequency and lethality. The situation in Pakistan was even grimmer. The country with the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world was hosting a mind-boggling collection of terrorist organisations and was in the midst of a virtual civil war. Pakistan’s relations with India remained tense. Another Mumbai-like attack would invite certain retaliation from India with the attendant risks of escalation to war, one that could go nuclear. The scale of American commitment to the two countries was the subject of a lengthy debate in the administration.

The President had come to office vowing to get America out of Iraq and to focus on Afghanistan. But Obama also sought to avoid any open-ended commitment, especially in the context of the financial crisis of 2008. The United States had 50,000 troops in Afghanistan, and the military commander wanted to increase US presence by more than 30,000 troops.

Eventually the White House and the military settled on a figure of 17,000 troops with an additional 4000 trainers. In an address to the nation on 27 March, Obama outlined his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The President said he had ‘a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan’. Announcing the increase in troops to fight the Taliban in eastern and southern Afghanistan, he also called on the Congress to pass the Kerry-Lugar Bill which would provide Pakistan $1.5 billion a year for the next five years. The escalation of fighting that summer yet again brought to the fore the issue of American military commitment to Afghanistan.

The military wanted Obama to consider three options: send 10,000 trainers, or 40,000 troops, or a still larger increase of 85,000 troops. On 25 November 2009, Obama announced that he would send 30,000 more troops, but would start withdrawing them from July 2011, when a transition to Afghan forces would start. In military terms, Obama agreed to a counter-insurgency strategy of ‘clear, hold, build and transfer’, though he also embarked on a counter terrorism strategy involving the use of Special Forces and drones against targets inside Pakistan.

The use of drones did not begin under Obama, but he used them rather more extensively than Bush. Soon Obama was growing disenchanted with the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan. At bottom, his administration was never clear about its objective in Afghanistan: Was it merely to prevent the return of the Taliban or was it a more extensive nation building effort? In practice, the military did a bit of both, but the President increasingly veered towards the option of stopping the Taliban surge, hunting down the Al-Qaeda and bringing the troops back home.

The successful killing of Osama bin Laden in a Special Forces raid in May 2011 underlined the appeal of a narrower military strategy. A year later, Obama claimed during a visit to Afghanistan: ‘The goal I set to defeat Al Qaeda, and deny it a chance to rebuild is now within our reach.’ This masked a range of problems that were undermining the United States’ attempt to stabilise Afghanistan. For one thing, Obama’s relations with Afghan President Karzai were rocky from the start. Obama minced few words in criticising the corruption of the Karzai government and family. Karzai, for his part, was convinced that Washington wanted to get rid of him. The manner in which the Obama administration handled the Afghan presidential elections of 2009 lent some credence to his fears.

Personalities and paranoia aside, there was a structural problem. Although he was installed in power by the Americans, Karzai knew that in order to cement his standing amongst his own people, he needed to demonstrate his independence from time to time. This imperative was particularly strong when it came to condemning American military actions for causing civilian casualties. Washington, however, saw this as yet another instance of Karzai’s lack of gratitude.

By mid-2012, things had worsened to the extent that Karzai refused to sign a strategic partnership agreement with the United States. The agreement was to provide a framework for cooperation after the withdrawal of US troops in 2014. Eventually, it was concluded by Karzai’s successor, Ashraf Ghani. The second factor undermining US strategy was its relationship with Pakistan. Despite the increased aid under the Kerry-Lugar Bill, US-Pakistan ties nosedived over the years.

The American operation to execute bin Laden in his safe house in Abbottabad stunned the Pakistanis. The revelation that bin Laden had been living within walking distance of the Pakistan Military Academy left Islamabad’s claims of injured innocence in tatters. A couple of months later, following an attack by the Haqqani group on the US embassy in Kabul, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, told the Senate Armed Services Committee: ‘With ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy.’ They were also behind a string of other attacks in Afghanistan.

The Haqqani network, he said, ‘acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency’. This was the most forthright attempt to turn the spotlight on Pakistan’s continued support for terrorism. Thereafter the Pakistanis quietly acquiesced in an enlarged programme of drone strikes. But this was scarcely enough to rake out the labyrinth of terrorism inside Pakistan. Worse, the attacks killed many Pakistani civilians and stoked popular anger against America.

In the last years of the Obama administration, the United States threatened to withhold aid to Pakistan on the grounds that they were not doing enough. But Washington itself could do no more.

(The extract has been taken with permission from Penguin)