US-Pakistan Relations under severe stress

The New York Times, January 28, 2006
Editorial: Straight Talk Needed on Pakistan

Pakistan's prime minister came to the White House this week and pretended that the people of Pakistan highly value their country's current close military relationship with the United States. President Bush reciprocated by pretending in his public comments that the American airstrikes that killed 18 Pakistani civilians earlier this month were not Topic A in that relationship. Even diplomacy requires more direct talk than this.

Those strikes were legitimately aimed at top fugitive leaders of Al Qaeda, but hit innocent women and children. Pakistan's people deserve a good explanation, and since they haven't heard one from their leaders, Mr. Bush should have provided it.

Washington needs a strong and healthy partnership with Pakistan if it is to have any chance of eliminating Qaeda's leaders, defeating a resurgent Taliban and turning back nuclear weapons proliferation. But strong and healthy partnerships are not built around political charades. And that is the only way to describe the events in Washington last week.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz is a decent, intelligent man. But real prime ministers, including the ones Pakistan had in the 1990's, come out of democratically elected parliaments. Mr. Aziz was appointed by a military dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who has yet to permit the democratic elections he has repeatedly promised since his coup more than six years ago.

That makes it awkward for Mr. Aziz to deliver messages about how highly the Pakistani people value their ties with Washington, particularly when just about every poll and street demonstration suggest just how unpopular those ties have become. One crucial reason General Musharraf gets so little pressure from the Bush administration about restoring democracy is the almost universal assumption in Washington that only a dictator can deliver Pakistani military cooperation.

That had better not be true because Washington will need support from Pakistan for a long time, and General Musharraf, who has already survived several assassination attempts and again faces serious challenges, cannot stay in power indefinitely. He has also proved to be unable, or unwilling, to close down the sanctuaries that three different groups of terrorists — Qaeda, Taliban and Kashmiri — have established along three Pakistani borders.

The most important of these to the United States are the safe zones that fugitive Qaeda leaders established after fleeing the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan four years ago. It is inexcusable that a Pentagon already looking ahead to Iraq did not pour in enough American troops to block the escape of Osama bin Laden and his top deputies, the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks. Attacking them in wartime Afghanistan would have been far simpler, militarily and politically, than trying to catch up with them in tribal areas that even the Pakistani Army can't control. But that is where they are now, and where America's war against them must be fought.

It is not enough for Mr. Bush to exchange periodic pleasantries with General Musharraf and Mr. Aziz. He needs to address the concerns of the Pakistani people as well. A franker public discussion of the airstrikes would have been a good place to start.