US scholar expects more Pakistan-backed terror in Afghanistan, calls for stick

A US scholar and Pakistan expert has predicted Pakistan proxies may stage more attacks in Afghanistan as cooperation with Pakistan becomes even more challenging. 

"American diplomats and journalists operating in Pakistan may be subject to increased harassment. Notably, Radio Mashaal, the Pashto-language service of Radio Free Europe, had its branch in Pakistan abruptly closed on January 19, accused by the Interior Ministry of working on behalf of “hostile foreign intelligence agencies.” Jeff M. Smith is a research fellow in Heritage's Asian Studies Center, focusing on South Asia and the author of "Cold Peace: China-India Rivalry in the 21st Century" told the Asia and pacific subcommittee of the US Foreign Affairs Committee. 

Smith cited former Pakistani Ambassador to the U.S. Husain Haqqani, author of the Magnificent Delusions, as saying U.S. aid “makes hardliners in Pakistan believe they are too important to the U.S., and they can do anything they please.”

Smith heaved a sigh of relief members in Congress began to recognize Haqqani's plea years ago and their frustration has been reflected in a steady decline of aid over the past three years. "The request for appropriations and military reimbursements to Pakistan fell from $2.6 billion in 2013, to $1.6 billion in 2015, to roughly $350 million for fiscal year 2018," Smith said

He said while it was not the first to do so, the Trump Administration signaled very early in its tenure that business as usual with Pakistan was coming to an end. “We’re out to change [Pakistan’s] behavior and do it very firmly,” Defense Secretary Mattis insisted last year.

“This is a conditions-based approach and our relationship with Pakistan will also be conditions-based; based on whether they take action,” added Secretary Rex Tillerson. On the ground, the Administration authorized an increase in drone strikes in Pakistan, including a strike in Kohat that represents the “deepest that American drones have penetrated into Pakistan’s airspace.”

The Trump administration also placed Pakistan on a Special Watch List for religious freedom violations. Its December 2017 National Security Strategy insists “no partnership can survive a country’s support for militants and terrorists who target a partner’s own service members and officials.”

As longtime Pakistan watchers predicted, the Administration’s warnings fell on deaf ears. “No, I haven't seen any change yet in [Pakistan's] behavior,” General John Nicholson, America’s top military commander in Afghanistan, admitted in November 2017. 

Instead, Pakistan returned to a familiar playbook of deflection, denial, conspiracy, and outright military threats. If President Trump “wants Pakistan to become a graveyard for U.S. troops, let him do so,” the chairman of Pakistan’s senate warned last August.

After U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley insisted Pakistan’s “game is not acceptable to this administration,” a Pakistani military spokesman explained that Haley is of Indian origin and the “current misunderstanding between Pakistan and the U.S. is created by India.”

In this context, President Trump’s January 1 announcement of a suspension of U.S. aid to Pakistan was not only merited but long overdue. The time has come to rewrite the terms of the U.S.–Pakistan relationship. 

The contours of a more effective, equitable, and, where necessary, punitive Pakistan strategy have been evident for years. Such an approach was outlined in an excellent 2017 paper, “A New U.S. Approach to Pakistan: Enforcing Aid Conditions Without Cutting Ties,” co-authored by the Hudson Institute’s Husain Haqqani and Lisa Curtis, then at The Heritage Foundation.

Among their recommendations: · Reducing U.S. aid; · Prioritizing engagement with Pakistan’s civilian leadership; · Working with international partners to diplomatically isolate Pakistan; · Increasing unilateral drone strikes inside Pakistan; · Sanctioning Pakistani military and ISI officials known to have facilitated acts of terrorism, including travel bans; and · Consideration of designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism and suspending Pakistan’s non-NATO-ally status.

The Trump Administration has already begun adopting some elements of this strategy, including increasing drone strikes, reducing U.S. aid, and diplomatically isolating Pakistan. Moving forward it is important the Administration present a clear schedule of demands linked to specific timetables and a specific set of intensifying consequences should Pakistan fail to act on those demands.

Balochistan, FATA, Gilgit-Baltistan & Mohajirs

For too long the U.S. has turned a blind eye to what is by all accounts a deeply troubling human rights situation in Pakistan. Women, Christians, Shi’ites, ethnic minorities like the Baloch, the forgotten people of Gilgit-Baltistan, and Islamic sects like the Ahmadis, are regularly subjected to violence, persecution, discrimination, and state-supported repression. Journalists critical of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services routinely “disappear.” 

Nearly two dozen people are on death row as a result of Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws and hundreds more have been convicted or killed simply for being accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammed or Islam. 

As Amnesty International notes, in recent years Pakistan’s security forces perpetrated human rights violations such as arbitrary arrests, torture and other ill-treatment, and extrajudicial executions. Security laws and practices, and the absence of any independent mechanisms to investigate the security forces and hold them accountable, allowed government forces to commit such violations with near-total impunity.

State and non-state  actors continue to harass, threaten, detain and kill human rights defenders, especially in Balochistan, FATA and Karachi.19 Mohajirs, immigrants that migrated to Pakistan from India after the 1947 Partition, have also complained of mass-scale human rights violations at the hands of Pakistan’s security forces as well as economic, political, and social injustices.

Based mostly in Karachi, the Mohajirs are one of the few communities in Pakistan to publicly condemn the government’s support for extremism and the Talibanization of society—and in recent years have paid a heavy price for it. The era of excessive deference to Pakistan’s sensitivities on the subject of human rights and religious freedom abuses should come to an end.

Some key points of Jeff M. Smith testimony

General Jack Keane (ret.), while  examining Pakistan’s “double game” in Afghanistan. Came to a dour conclusion: “The evidence is unequivocal that the government of Pakistan and the military leadership of Pakistan aids and abets [militant] sanctuaries…That is the absolute facts of it. Some of them are—actually receive training from Pakistan forces.”

The then-Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair delivered his own frustrating conclusion to Congress: “No improvement in Afghanistan is possible without Pakistan taking control of its border areas.”

Afghan Taliban and Haqqani Network, by the account of every interested intelligence agency and objective analyst in the world,  have received varying levels of support and safe haven from the Pakistani military and its notorious spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI). AccordingThe Haqqani Network, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, said “acts a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency,” Haqqani group was almost certainly responsible for the December 30, 2009, bombing of a CIA agency outpost in Khost, Afghanistan, that killed seven officers—the single deadliest attack on the agency in its storied history. 

The Haqqani Network was also linked to the September 2011 attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul that resulted in seven deaths and 15 injuries. Most recently, a U.S. military spokesman said he was “very confident” the Haqqani Network was behind a January 28 attack on a hotel in Kabul that killed more than 100 people, including several U.S. citizens.5 3

Whereas Washington, Kabul, and most of the international community have strived to build a peaceful, stable, democratic Afghanistan, Pakistan’s ideal objective is an Afghan government that is pliable, submissive, and hostile to India. The reason why Islamabad sponsors bloodshed and chaos is its fears a stable Afghan government might be tempted to: (1) stir unrest among Pakistan’s restive Pashtun population; (2) invite a greater role for India, which Pakistan believes is determined to encircle and dismember it; and (3) challenge the legitimacy of the Durand Line, the Afghanistan–Pakistan border that no Afghan government has recognized, including the Taliban government of the 1990s.

Pakistan’s paranoid obsession with India has proven particularly ruinous. Only if Pakistan is under omnipresent threat from India, the U.S., Afghanistan, and other phantom menaces can the Pakistani military justify its generous budget and its tight grip on power.