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PAKISTAN blipped briefly into view here in Washington D.C. this week as Sartaj Aziz and Khawaja Asif did the circuit in another round of the Strategic Dialogue. In a visit less than 72 hours long, they met with the secretary of state and gave a press conference. Then came meetings with the CIA chief, the secretaries of energy and defence, and a two-hour long intense session with National Security Adviser Susan Rice.
The president of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (Opic) and Rajiv Shah, administrator of USAID also managed to get a word in edgewise in a dialogue that is otherwise all about Afghanistan.
Along the way they managed a stop at the Atlantic Council where adviser Sartaj Aziz spoke about “his vision for regional peace”.
The talk focused mostly on why regional cooperation is the key to economic development, as well as overcoming the menace of terrorism. A few throwaway caveats by adviser Aziz pointed to the supposedly toughening attitudes towards terrorism back in Islamabad — reference to the “so-called Mujahideen” of the 1980s, for instance.
But the adviser also showed a nuanced view of the menace of terror. The threat operates on three layers he said: sectarian, ethnic and ideological. In different places, at different times, these three levels combine in varying ways to produce a multifaceted danger that will take skill as well as force to eliminate.
Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Centre and host of the event, cut to the chase in the question-answer period, where he opened with this question: are the people of Pakistan and the various institutions of state behind you in this fight?
“There is a broad spectrum of opinion in Pakistan regarding the question of terrorism and how to deal with it,” replied Aziz, and went on to talk about the role that conspiracy theories have played in muddying the discourse. “But democracy is about building consensus,” he reassured the audience, and that his government was comfortable it would be able to go into any operation with a consensus.
Alan Kronstadt — the lead researcher on Pakistan at the Congressional Research Service — was the first to speak from the floor. America has given billions of dollars over the years to Pakistan as counterinsurgency support. Where has all this money gone?
“Those funds were not wasted,” countered the adviser. They were used to build forces that can be used in the fight, but these forces now need better coordination, particularly intelligence cooperation. Those forces are now dispersed across the provinces, and across the various services. “We need to pull together the scattered elements of our experience,” he said, to fashion an effective response with all the tools that those billions have created.
The advisor was careful to remind his audience that America needs to think about more than just its own interests when departing. “We hope Pakistan’s concerns can also be kept in mind, unlike in the early 1990s when our concerns were not kept in mind when that war drew to a close.”
What role will Pakistan play in Afghanistan following America’s departure? The adviser sought to put such anxieties at ease by pointing out that he himself has had three separate meetings with Karzai since the new government came to power in Pakistan, following which the stream of negative comments about Pakistan subsided.
“In his own meeting, Prime Minister Sharif managed to convince Karzai that Pakistan sees Afghanistan’s stability as important to its own stability.” Sure, but how deep does that reassurance run? Between Pindi and Kabul might yet be a bad place to find yourself in a few years’ time.
But here’s what’s on my mind when I look at post-withdrawal Afghanistan: central to securing Afghanistan’s stability is the Afghan National Army. And the ANA is wholly dependent on foreign funding to pay its expenses. In 2013, the US pumped close to $12 billion into the ANA, but its annual expense is estimated at just above $6bn post departure, assuming costs don’t spiral out of control.
Thus far the US has had little success finding partners willing to help foot this bill in any meaningful amount. An army without a fiscal apparatus behind it is like a car without fuel. And a car that runs out of fuel in a bad neighbourhood usually gets stripped down and sold for parts. The vision for regional peace and development that adviser Sartaj Aziz laid out before us was one that is widely accepted, and stays within the bounds agreed on in Istanbul 2011: trade, particularly in natural gas, can tie the region together in mutually beneficial partnerships. The massive energy surpluses of Central Asia and Iran can feed the growing energy hunger of South Asia for decades to come, and create transit rents along the way, enough to give the ANA maybe half of a fiscal framework.
But governments in Pakistan have been talking about this agenda for almost a decade now. Some progress towards regional integration has indeed been made over this time, and it would be unfair to doubt the adviser’s wisdom in urging his government to adopt this course, as well as the latter’s sincerity in pursuing it. But as Aziz Sahib himself pointed out, not everything that needs to happen to realise this vision is under the control of the government of Pakistan.
The writer is a business journalist and 2013-2014 Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington D.C.
Twitter: @khurramhusain
