Transcript of Christine Fair: Pakistan, the Taliban and Regional Security

It always helps to talk about Pakistan with some single malt. So, I mean, I don’t even know how to begin answering that question. I mean, one of the things that I find as an American to be most frustrating and also as a sister of two men in uniform is that on our dime, Pakistan has actually expanded its assets that undermine our interest considerably.

And what do I mean by that? What Pakistan does, for the most part in that region, cues off of its obsession with India. Now, it says that it focuses upon trying to change the territorial status quo with respect to Kashmir. And virtually every Pakistani civil, civilian or military leader will, in fact, go on and on and on about Kashmir in its quest to reverse the status quo with respect to Kashmir, Pakistan also has larger interests vis a vis India. That’s not Kashmir specific, and that is Pakistan, even though it has started three wars and failed to win any of them with India. And of course, the 1971 war is more complicated, but it also lost that war with India and in fact, lost half of its country in that War, Pakistan still sees itself as the only challenger to India’s rise.

So not only is Pakistan revisionist vis a vis the territorial disposition of Kashmir, it also is revisionist in the sense that it wants to turn back India’s ascendance in the region and beyond. The primary tools that Pakistan has developed to do this is jihadis under the expanding nuclear umbrella. And so going back to my opening remarks as Americans, I think the part that is most disconcerting for me is that in the last 13 years, when Pakistan’s been the recipient of some $30 billion, and that, by the way, is overt money, we have no idea what monies they’ve received covertly for, you know, capturing various number threes of Al Qaeda in various Pakistani cities, I’m sure that’s also quite lucrative.

But on our dime, they’ve been able to expand their nuclear program. Neil is in a position to speak to that. And at the same time, they’ve continued their commitment to a whole fleet of terrorist organizations and insurgent organizations that very much threaten not only our national interests, but also the interests of our partners. And to not, you know, to put a very fine point on this, in exchange for that $30 billion that we collectively have given the Pakistanis, they have taken that money with one hand and they filtered it through a variety of mechanisms with the other hand to the Afghan Taliban who are killing our troops.

And so I’ve become very much an outspoken critic of not only Pakistan, but quite frankly, the Americans. One has to ask, why is it that we continue to pursue this suite of policies that I think critically undermine our interests and in fact, make Pakistan more dangerous than it was on September 10, 2001.

Political Opposition and Military Influence

NEIL JOECK: Can we back up a little bit? There was a lot of opposition on the streets of Pakistan, of Islamabad last year. To what extent is this opposition real and to what extent does it challenge the current political leadership? And is it representative of a divergence of views within Pakistan that you identified in your research on your book?

CHRISTINE FAIR: All right, so for those of you who may have been watching some of the chicanery that was taking place in Islamabad, we had two fellows. One is Imran Khan. He is a lothario cricketer turned right of center politician. His critics, quite frankly, call him Taliban Khan. I see no compelling reason to disagree with that assertion. And the other fellow, his name is Tahir-ul-Qadri, he’s a cleric from Canada. And these two fellows were basically occupying Islamabad with a bunch of containers. And their end state was to bring down this government. Now, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this dynamic duo in action.

And so to sort of understand what this was about, we actually have to sort of step back and understand what’s going on with the army’s position vis a vis Pakistan. Pakistanis generally support their military. It generally scores better than any other institution with a few notable periods of time during Musharraf’s tenure. The Pakistan army after Musharraf is very attentive to the fact that Pakistanis do not want a direct military intervention. Again, they would prefer corrupt, incompetent politicians to the generals. And this is simply sustained by numerous polls.

And so the army knows that it simply just can’t come back in, in the way in which it did in the past. It in the past it also had in place a constitutional mechanism that allowed it to simply prorogue the government by conniving with the President. And some years ago one of the last things that President Zardari did, and you know he was, you know, he came in with the moniker of Mr. 10%, he left with the moniker of Mr. 110%. One of the last things that he did though was he devolved all of these expansive powers of the President to the Prime Minister. Now point of fact, he still controlled, for all intents and purposes, the party that he was the head of. But constitutionally he devolved those powers to the Prime Minister.

This means that this instrument that the army used to have, where the President could simply dismiss the government is gone. And so the army is really backed into a corner. It knows Pakistanis don’t want a coup and it knows it doesn’t have the constitutional leverage to do this. Most importantly, it doesn’t have an alternative to the PPP certainly, but even Nawaz Sharif, the PMLN.

So if they’re going to have a coup, they need to have a mechanism to have a coup. They need to be public support. But most importantly they need to have a blue eyed boy that’s going to do their bidding. And Imran Khan is sort of like a political IED. He’s great for like GEO Television. You can always count on him to say something preposterous. But what he’s not is actually a political leader.

So what the army is sort of left with doing is any margarita drinkers in the room making a margarita out of really lousy limes or actually even lemons. Right. Because the preferred citrus fruit is of course a lime. So they don’t have a lot of options. And so what they’re sort of left with is the Supreme Court. So the previous Supreme Court justice very much hated the PPP and was very sympathetic to the PMLN. And they could count on that Supreme Court to weaken the previous government, the PPP. This Supreme Court justice is not nearly as flamboyant as the previous one. He’s not nearly as interventionist. So that mechanism is off the table.

So what they’ve been able to do is basically use money, which is probably coming from our pockets, quite frankly, through the ISI, to basically whip up massive crowds. And the hope was that by literally shutting down Islamabad, they would get Nawaz Sharif to back down. Now, the other element of this playbook is that in the past, and by past, I mean previous governments, when they’ve been under fire from these kinds of political theatrics, they bring in the police and then the police overreact and they kill lots of people. And that’s actually the mechanism that brings the government down.

Nawaz Sharif, to his credit, has played this with a light hand. We would not tolerate the buffoonery in Washington, D.C. that we saw in Islamabad. We would not. So Nawaz Sharif has actually, in my view, played this very cleverly.

So now the question is, why is the army so incensed about Nawaz Sharif? Why? And I will say this, the Qadri-Imran Khan playbook was actually developed during the final years of the Zardari government because Zardari did very similar things that Nawaz Sharif did. He brought up economic normalization with India. Right. It was actually Zardari that wanted to introduce the most favored nation status, which, by the way, India gave Pakistan in the 90s.

Now, Nawaz Sharif not only wants to have economic normalization with India, he wanted to try Musharraf for treason. That’s a no go. And then finally, Nawaz Sharif wanted to have Afghanistan as a neighbor and not as a proxy. So these are three Rubicons that not only was Nawaz Sharif crossing, he was water skiing on them. And the army simply wasn’t going to tolerate this. And so thus the machination of Imran Khan and Qadri and the Islamabad theatrics.

Civil-Military Relations

NEIL JOECK: So it sounds like what you’re describing is a kind of draw in the most recent confrontation between civil leadership and the military leadership. What’s your sense for how the military is responding to this? Do they see themselves as having been set back by the cool hand that Nawaz Sharif played?

CHRISTINE FAIR: Well, I mean, so actually, in point of fact, they won. Right. So, I mean, Nawaz Sharif is still sitting there, that he, he’s weakened even though he won with the majority. He didn’t even need a coalition. And by the way, so I was an election observer for that election. So no one expected that he was going to come in as he did. Everyone sort of expected there was going to be a coalition. And coalitions are ideal because in a parliamentary democracy, all the ISI has to do is sort of knock out some coalition members. Right. And the government falls. No one was expecting him to come in with such a strong mandate.

NEIL JOECK: The ISI being the intelligence wing of the army.

CHRISTINE FAIR: Exactly. By the way, not a rogue actor in my view. It operates under army diktats. It’s not a rogue actor. This is an excuse that was, I think, conveniently developed decades ago. Actually, if I remember correctly, Ambassador Oakley, that’s what he told me at lunch is I came up with that excuse because how else do you justify to Americans how we give these clowns money while they do the things that they do? We had to have an excuse. They’re rogue.

But in a real sense, they got what they wanted. Right. Where is Musharraf these days? Musharraf is out prancing about wherever he wants. He’s giving all sorts of crazy speeches. No one is even the status of his treason trial doesn’t even matter. There is no more Kumbaya with India. Now, the army, of course, literally bombed the Kumbaya talk with India with the shelling that took place in September. And the current Indian government is not the previous Manmohan Singh government. This government’s not going to put up with it. And then of course, the army is still running the cards in Afghanistan. So for all intents and purposes, it got exactly what it wanted.

NEIL JOECK: Well, let’s go in that direction for a few minutes and just to inform people, we’ll talk for a few more minutes about these several topics covered Pakistan in part. We’ll talk a little bit about Taliban and then regional security and then turn to questions from you, but continue the conversation. But can you tell us a little bit more when we see the title Pakistan the Taliban and Regional Security, what does that mean? What does the Taliban represent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as you mentioned, and what other players are on the scene there that complicate that as we try and conduct policy in both countries?

Pakistan’s Militant Strategy

CHRISTINE FAIR: So let me try to give you sort of like a safari of the zoo of militants that Pakistan has cultivated. And some of the zoo animals have bolted from the zoo and they’re trying to wrestle them back in. But you know, some of them are pretty vicious.

One thing I really want to make very clear to you is that this is not new. Pakistan’s first foray with using non-state actors was actually in 1947. That was its first war with India when it mobilized what lushkers we would call them, a posse in American parlance, with various level of provincial as well as federal support to go and seize Kashmir. That’s a complicated story. So this is not new for them. They’ve been doing this since 1947. What’s actually kind of interesting is that it took so long for there to be an actual blowback to develop.

So Pakistan, you can sort of think about its jihad strategy as having two geographical foci. The first is in Afghanistan. And Pakistan’s concerns with Afghanistan were in some sense inherited by the British because the British built this security architecture that was to manage two imperial threats. To the north and the east was the China threat, and to the north and to the west was the Russian threat. And so most of the invaders that came into South Asia came through Afghanistan.

So the Pakistani military officers, who were trained of course, first in British institutions and then under British tutelage at the Indian Military Academy, inherited this threat perception. Afghanistan, immediately upon independence, rejected Pakistan’s admission to the UN. They laid irredentist claims to large swaths of Pakistani territory. And they even invaded Pakistan in the 50s in Bajor. So Pakistan has had a number of apprehensions that are very clearly Afghanistan specific without layering on the way in which India has interacted with Afghanistan.

So this goes back very early on. In the 50s, Pakistan began inserting Jamaat Islami into Afghanistan. And this of course, became the basis of the Mujahideen movement, the Mujahideen organizations that would form later in the 70s. Pakistan actually began its jihad policy in Afghanistan in 1974 under Zulfiqr Ali Bhutta, before any American dollar rolled up. In fact, before the Russians crossed the Ahmadarya in December of 79, the primary mujahideen groups were already formed. And this is important to know because Pakistan loves to say that we sucked Pakistan into our jihad. It was actually just the opposite.

So Pakistan has had a long game that they’ve been playing in Afghanistan. And the most recent militant group to serve in Pakistan’s behest is the Afghan Taliban. But they were certainly the most recent. They were not the only ones. Prior to that, there were a whole fleet of other organizations that Pakistan propped up. So that’s Afghanistan.

Understanding the Militant Groups

Now bear with me for a minute because it’s really important to get these groups straight. So in Islam, just like there is in Christianity or Judaism, there are many interpretive traditions. Most of the militants that we’re talking about come from one, and that’s called Deobundism. And it’s important to know this because all of the groups that are Deobundi have in common an ideological infrastructure of mosques, madrasas, and religious scholars that issue fatwas to justify what they do. And then these also become really important recruiting networks. And they also have ties to a Deobundi political party.

So the vast majority of the groups that we see operating certainly against our interests in the region are Deobundi. And this is important because in 2001, when we forced the Pakistanis to support our war in Afghanistan, many of the Taliban’s Deobandi allies turned against the Pakistani state, even though the state had been their patron. And think about this for a second. So in some sense, these fellows were training with the Taliban. They were in their camps in 1998 when we sent cruise missiles to go after Al Qaeda in Coast. We actually killed some of these Pakistani militant organizations.

So they felt as if the Taliban had finally achieved Asharia under their ideological umbrella. And now the state were being forced by the Americans to undermine this amazing accomplishment. So these Dayo Bundy organizations, some of whom stayed loyal to the ISI, many of them did not. And those groups began targeting the Pakistani state. And they began doing this actually as early as 2000, the end of 2001, early 2002. And this begins the emergence of what will, in 2007, operate under the banner of the Pakistani Taliban.

Now, Pakistani Taliban. Think about it as a kaleidoscope, right? This is the example I give in my class. You grab these little plastic flecks, you look at it, you flick it again, you see something else. In any given day, what the ISI is doing, they’re negotiating. They’re trying to buy off some of these elements. Can you please stop killing us and go kill Afghans? Can you go kill Americans? And sometimes they’re successful, sometimes they’re not. So sometimes they can buy off commanders, sometimes they can’t.

Now, the other jihad that ties into this Pakistani Taliban is the jihad in India. And again, Pakistan has cultivated a zoo of militants explicitly to kill Indians. Some of these are Deobandi. So going back to the Pakistani strategy of saying, well, how can you say we support terror and we’re a victim of terror? Well, their strategy is to take this TTP and sort of think of it as like a lumpy soup. They’re going to take parts of that soup and say, please, can you please go kill Americans and Afghans? And some of them will say, yes sir, we will just give us money and we’re on our way.

The other part of the strategy is to take those groups that used to be more focused on India and say, is there anything we can do to get you to go kill Indians? And one of the primary vehicles for this is this group called Jaish-e-Mohammed. And this ties into the shelling in the fall because they use the shelling to insert these terrorists.

So when Pakistan talks about their own Taliban, they will often simply call them Taliban to deliberately confuse you. And so what you really need to understand that these are different organizations. They have overlapping membership, they have overlapping ideology, but they are in many ways distinct in terms of what their goals are and what their areas of operation are.

NEIL JOECK: Clearly a very complicated.

CHRISTINE FAIR: Sorry, it’s not easy.

NEIL JOECK: A difficult target to understand, both for the Pakistanis and for ourselves. Let’s take a look at some of the regional consequences of this. As the United States moves toward the latter 18 months now or so, the Obama administration, one of the goals is to remove all US troops from Afghanistan. Can you comment on what consequences that might have for Afghanistan and for the relations between Pakistan and the new government under Ashraf Ghani in Kabul?

US Strategy and Afghanistan’s Future

CHRISTINE FAIR: All right, so the first thing I want to make very clear is that we lost this war the minute we fought this war with Pakistan. Right? There was no way we were ever going to achieve what we wanted to achieve in Afghanistan with Pakistan as our partner. Reason for that being is that what Pakistan wants in Afghanistan is a Taliban like organization. And the reason for that is they would rather have Afghanistan be in a chaos that they can manipulate than in Afghanistan where India has a firm footing.

And under our security aid presence, our security umbrella, the Indians were able to re-establish themselves. Now the Pakistanis will exaggerate. By that I also mean lie. The mushrooming consulates, that’s a fiction. But the Indians are not, you know, the Indians are not as benign as they say they are. And this, you know, from the Indian point of view, it’s a great investment because they don’t really have to do anything too terrible because the Pakistanis will perceive it as such. Simply having a consulate in Kandahar is enough to make the Pakistanis go ballistic.

So what the Pakistanis would much prefer is in Afghanistan that’s in a perpetual position of churn where they have, in fact, this is really important because of their own militancy. Because if Afghanistan were in a firmly Taliban controlled state or in a firmly controlled by the government state, there’d be very little incentive for Pakistan Taliban members to go to Afghanistan. They have to have some sense that there is hope that with just a little bit more ISI money, we can bring this government down. And so constantly having an opportunity structure that draws in fighters from the Pakistani Taliban to go back in Afghanistan is key to Pakistan’s strategy of minimizing its own internal security problems.

So I want to be very, very clear. When we went to war with Pakistan, we set ourselves up for failure. I was a huge opponent of the surge. And the reason is the surge was illogical. It was not devised from battlefield effects. If you took Petraeus own manual at face value, we needed 500,000 troops in Afghanistan, right? We were never at the height we had 145.

So what we did do with that surge is that we made ourselves more dependent upon Pakistan, right? Because they were the primary providers of the ground lines of control through which virtually all war materiel traveled. The northern distribution route was never going to work because Russia can’t stand NATO and they were not going to let lethal materials go through the northern distribution route. Oh, guess what, it’s a war. So we kind of need lethal stuff.

And there is this obvious partner that we could have partnered with. Anyone know Iran, Right. And I actually remember having congressional testimony. I was like, you know, dudes, there’s this port in Iran and the Iranians hate the Taliban as much as we do. And in fact, Khatami, Iran was very helpful after the invasion. And so people said, well, but Iran is a nuclear proliferator that supports terrorism. I mean, what in the world do you think Pakistan is? Iran aspires to be Pakistan.

Afghanistan’s Financial Sustainability

So going to the question that Neil posed, you know, we are basically trying to save face from a war that we could never win. But I also want to leave you with a different way of framing the puzzle. It doesn’t really matter how many troops are in Afghanistan and in what capacity they are. We have a bigger problem in Afghanistan and that is the place can’t pay its bills, right? We, the Americans, insisted upon building the biggest Afghan government that’s ever existed. It cannot even pay 25% of its recurring costs. Right? So in perpetuity, we have to pay these bills.

And the lesson that we draw is actually from Najibullah, who was the Russian ensconced leader of Afghanistan he was ensconced as the Russians withdrew across the AMU Darya. He didn’t have any Russian troops to back him. But as long as the Russians kept paying his bills, he was in power. And of course, the Soviet Union collapsed, and then Russia could not pay his bills. As soon as that money stopped, Najibullah’s gone. And eventually the Taliban gutted him like a fish, did all sorts of terrible things, drugged him behind a truck, and then hung him up from a light post in the UN compound.

Right. So the lesson that I draw from Najibullah is that we are asking the wrong questions about Afghanistan’s future. It’s not how many American troops are there. It’s like, when is this place going to be financially able to pay itself, pay for its own bills? And that, by the way, under the current scenario, is never right. So as soon as the last American check comes, the ANSF, the Afghan National Security Forces, and particularly Afghan national army, is going to devolve into the militias from which we aggregated them.

So the real issue is not the troops. The real issue is the money. And this goes to Ashraf Ghani. Ashraf Ghani has not, we expected him, former World bank official, former finance minister. He literally had a consulting business, saving failed states. I’m not sure if he actually saved any states that were failing. He knows this problem, but he has not exercised the political will and the wherewithal to do any of the things that Afghanistan needs to make itself fiscally sustainable, namely corruption.

I mean, we could go on at length about corruption, but ladies and gentlemen, it’s like your money is going into Afghanistan and it’s leaving on CAM air flights to Dubai. Now, they will declare that money at Dubai because the Emiratis don’t truck with people that are smuggling money. But it’s not illegal to take your money, apparently, and take it to Dubai. So we’ve got donor fatigue and we have an Afghan government that can’t get its act together. And that concerns me more than the issue of the troop withdrawal.

NEIL JOECK: So this puts an even greater burden on any negotiations for the post US involvement in Afghanistan. Have you looked at and what’s your assessment of the opportunities for the US to work with Pakistan in order to approach the Taliban to come up with some solution to the war in Afghanistan? Or do you see Pakistan as playing a difficult or duplicitous role as we try to resolve this regional crisis?

Pakistan’s Strategy with US Withdrawal

CHRISTINE FAIR: Oh, no, this is a great opportunity for the Pakistanis. Because they want to be defeated. The Pakistanis have no incentive to make our exit easy. They don’t. And oh by the way, when we actually leave, they lose money. Right now they’re howling at Congress. We are in a perpetual war of terror. You should keep the checks coming. This is a self-licking ice cream cone for the Pakistanis. If we think the Pakistanis are going to take our chestnuts out of the fire, we are mistaken. They’re going to roast them and they’re going to get every single billion that they can out of us.

The country that I think actually has the most leverage is the Chinese. The Chinese have been very silent players. They actually have been engaging the Taliban since the 90s. And the reason is that the Chinese have made massive investments in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. The maximum returns on which will not be realized unless there’s some modicum of security.

So they’ve built this port in Gwadar in Pakistan. The idea was that if you look at a map, Gwadar is in Balochistan, but it’s near Iran. So it’s a competitor with Chabahar. And so in an ideal world where there’s like a consortium of lunatics that would invest in this stuff would come off of Chabahar’s port and they would build a road through Balochistan, by the way, there’s an insurgency there. And it would go through Chuman and into Kandahar, which is like ground zero for the Taliban. And then it would go into the ring road where they’d be chased by the Taliban. And then it would travel up through Afghanistan and into Central Asia and so forth.

There’s a competitor line of transport corridor. The Indians have built Chabahar in Iran and then that stuff gets offloaded at Chabahar. The Indians with the Iranians have also connected that port through Zaranj and Delaram to the ring road in Afghanistan. So we could move things through Chabahar, through Herat, on the ring road and it’s a much safer route. And then of course Americans think Iran is the biggest, scariest place. But actually if you’re trying to move your products through, you’re not going to move it through Afghanistan. That’s a lunatics route. You’re actually going to move it through Iran because you get the stuff off of Chabahar. Iran is actually safe. It goes on rail or road, it goes up to the Caspian and it can go to Europe and it can go all over the place.

So this is an interesting question about Chinese Indian competition. I think the Chinese are actually in a better position than we are. And then also, as you know, when the Chinese tell the Pakistanis to do something, they actually do it and they do it in a way that’s kind of different. You know, basically they’ll say, well, you know, unless this happens, then we can’t do this. I’m more optimistic that the Chinese might be able to negotiate something, but I don’t think we can. I think the Pakistanis are just hoping to just nail us, to crucify us in Afghanistan.

NEIL JOECK: When the Russians left Afghanistan in 1989, there ensued a very vicious civil war that resulted finally in the Taliban, the group that Chris described earlier, taking responsibility and controlling the state from Kabul. And that ended, of course, in September 2001, with the attack on the United States and then the US Engagement responding to that war. Do you think we’re going to be facing then, given this mixed negotiating environment, at best, are we going to be facing in tandem with your description of the Afghan national army as almost certainly falling apart? Do you anticipate a return to civil war in Afghanistan and how does that affect US Relations both with Afghanistan and with Pakistan?

The Future of Afghanistan Post-US Withdrawal

CHRISTINE FAIR: I go back to my lessons from Najibullah. I mean, the Pakistanis hated Najibullah. They wanted an Islamist. From the Pakistanis point of view, it was Islamists that drove the Russians out and they were livid that Najibullah was there. They went after Najibullah with everything that they had. And as long as the money kept coming, his national security forces could actually keep them at bay. It’s when that money stopped coming.

So look, are the Afghan national army the greatest army in the world? No, but they don’t have to be. And in fact, when we’re no longer there drawing the ire of the Taliban because mostly they want to kill us, right? So basically we are still a very hard target. And so what militant groups do is they substitute softer targets. So even when they’ve tried to go after NATO convoys, they end up mostly killing Afghans in the end. And so we’ve seen them substitute from going after NATO to going after Afghan national security forces.

So my sense is as long as the money keeps coming, they’re going to be Afghan good enough. But the problem is no one wants to keep paying Afghanistan’s bills. We don’t. No one does. Our NATO partners, you know, these various traveling road shows where everyone makes commitments in perpetuity to pay Afghanistan’s bills. The most recent one, they didn’t even do that. Basically the organizers were asking, can you just please follow through on your previous promises? Because really the donors renege more often than they follow through.

So as long as the money keeps coming, I’m not worried about that. But when we no longer have troops in Afghanistan, will Congress have the incentive to keep writing checks? Will anyone have an incentive? I think the answer is no. And so this is where we need to actually turn to very difficult partners like China.

Now China to me is kind of interesting because from those of you who know, Pacific Command basically runs most of the world. So typically China is in the Pacific Command’s area of responsibility. Afghanistan and Pakistan is in Central Command’s area of responsibility. So most of what feeds into our government process about China comes from Pacific Command. And that is China is scary. It’s driven by naval concerns. They’re our big peer competitor. They do very nasty things.

But from a CENTCOM point of view, which is the point of view of what we see in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, China is actually very helpful and we have more in common than not. I mean, they’re very concerned about Islamist terrorism. From that point of view, Pakistan is a check that’s been cashed twice, maybe thrice, because the Chinese blame Pakistan for their Uyghur problem. So in this situation of CENTCOM, China is a more productive partner than not. But CENTCOM is not the agency, of course, the organization that is tasked with engaging China. So we have a big problem in how we engage China given the way in which information gets put into the policy sausage making machine.

The other country is India, right? We have basically discouraged the Indians from getting too involved in Afghanistan because we’re afraid of taking off the Pakistanis. I don’t see the benefit of this. It’s like basically we should have been encouraging the Indians to go big in Afghanistan. Nothing would make the Pakistanis more afraid than the Indians sending troops to Afghanistan because we’re going to go home. The Indians ain’t going home.

So we have to really consider this. And of course, India and China are very huge economies and they have a lot more skin in this game over the long term than we do. And also think about this, there are very few countries that have experience building railroads at high altitude and that’s China, right? Look at the Tibet railway that China’s built. Without the politics of it. I’m not going to get into the politics of Tibet. But what Afghanistan needs to get those minerals out of the ground and to market is a railway. And there’s also very few countries that will basically keep throwing their citizens to terrorists. Right, because China will. I mean, China will send its citizens. They don’t care that the terrorists are killing them because they’ll just keep sending other people in from China. So there are very few countries that have the intestinal fortitude to do what needs to be done in Afghanistan like the Chinese.

India-Pakistan Relations Under Modi

NEIL JOECK: Well, this takes us usefully to a question from one of the audience members with respect to India and moving then in regional analysis from Pakistan’s western border to the eastern border. And the question is as follows. Is there reason to expect that the new Modi government in India will bring even more conflict with Pakistan, given Modi’s personal history for supporting Hindus in apparent opposition to Muslims when he was governor of Gujarat? So what’s your assessment of the Modi government in India and more generally, Pakistan’s relationship with India?

CHRISTINE FAIR: So there’s two pieces of this puzzle. One is the India-Pakistan relationship. Now, under Manmohan Singh, Pakistan could pretty much do anything. And Manmohan Singh wasn’t going to act. I mean, Manmohan Singh just kept taking it and taking it and taking it. This government’s not going to do that. Ajit Doval, who is the national security advisor, I’m a personal fan of Ajit Doval. He’s actually from the spook side of things. He’s not a politician, he’s a spook. He’s a covert operator. He knows how these Pakistanis work. And the Pakistanis know who he is and they’re afraid of him. In fact, they’ve made this really fabulous film about Ajit Doval and they call him Ajit Devil.

So on the bilateral issue, Pakistan already got a taste of what this government’s not going to put up with. So when the shelling began in Kashmir, the Indians moved it south across the international border, which is a really important escalation. And the Indians just said, we’re not taking it. We’re just not going to take it. And they basically gave the Pakistanis what the Pakistanis had coming.

And so from a point of view of deterrence, this Pakistani government was certainly probing what this government was going to put up with even before Modi was inaugurated as the Prime Minister, they attacked the Indian consulate in Herat, which I viewed was a probing to see what were they going to do, what were they going to say. So I think it’s actually possible that the Pakistanis on a bilateral issue in terms of the India-Pakistan relationship might be less aggressive because this government’s not going to put up with it.

But here’s where Modi has a big problem. When Indians say our Muslims don’t participate in terrorism, that is flat out rubbish. There’s no other way of putting it. There is no delicate way of putting it. Lashkar-e-Taiba whoever operates in India requires Indian support. There is the Indian Mujahideen which is an indigenous group nurtured by Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba among others. And this is where Modi’s relationship with India’s Muslims is a problem because this does create recruiting opportunities for India’s domestic terrorist organizations.

And unlike a Lashkar-e-Taiba attack like we saw in 2008, where the return address was clearly ISI, when the Indian Mujahideen conduct an attack, there’s a lot more plausible deniability than there is with Lashkar-e-Taiba. And this then comes down to how will a Modi government choose to respond to an Indian Mujahideen attack? Will they choose to deal with it as a domestic issue or will they choose to make it a bilateral issue vis-a-vis Pakistan? And by the way, there are political opportunities of treating it as a bilateral issue.

I don’t know if you guys were paying attention. A few months ago there was a boat that was blown up and the Modi government said these were Pakistani terrorists. And we preempted another Mumbai and Praveen Swami said no, they’re just a bunch of dumb drug traffickers, not good dudes. But nonetheless, they weren’t terrorists. And so this government does have an incentive to over-interpret for political purposes more benign events.

NEIL JOECK: Now another question from the group is the recurring problem of Kashmir with respect to India-Pakistan relations. Any thoughts about that and how that’s being played out with the new Modi government?

Pakistan’s Position on Kashmir

CHRISTINE FAIR: Oh this is just brilliant. If you just watch the outcome of the Kashmir elections. I mean I don’t follow Indian elections enough to give you the kind of humorous read that this election actually requires. But let me just tell you my views on this Kashmir issue. The Americans need to stop calling it a Kashmir issue. The Pakistanis have no equities in Kashmir. They have none.

The Pakistanis will say, but madam, the plebiscite. And I say, you know, it’s usually a gentleman who says this because women don’t call me madam. I said, well, the plebiscite language comes from UN Security Council Resolution 48. And there are three things about this plebiscite. One, and this has followed the 47-48 war that I told you about. When Pakistan sent these tribal marauders, as they call them later, they were called Mujahideen into Kashmir.

Pakistan had to demilitarize Kashmir subject to the satisfaction of a UN body to be appointed. Additional after that happened, India was supposed to demilitarize Kashmir, but it was allowed to keep enough troops for defensive purposes. And once that happened, to the satisfaction of this UN appointed body, then a plebiscite was supposed to be held to judge the sense of the Kashmiris.

Pakistan violated the first necessary but insufficient condition. So there is nothing legally that entitled Pakistan to confidence. Kashmir, full stop, end of story. Any moral claim that it had to be defending Kashmiris that were being suppressed by Indians, I’ll be very clear. India’s track record, human rights and otherwise is appalling in Kashmir. I’m not justifying or exculpating the Indian government of wrongdoing over numerous decades in Kashmir. I’m simply saying Pakistan has no equities in this.

I think what we should really be doing as Americans is think about reframing this debate. This is not a bilateral issue. Pakistan has done nothing but support terrorism. It’s contributed nothing but problems for Kashmiris. In addition to which most Kashmiris prior to Pakistani involvement were Sufis. And the primary groups that Pakistan has inserted into Kashmir are Deobandis and Salafis. And you can see visually through the practices of naqab, which are even out in rural areas, not just the purview of middle class women in the cities. You can see visually the transformation that Kashmir is undergoing as a consequence of these Pakistani proxy involvement.

By taking Pakistan out of the picture, we should be silently encouraging the Indians to deal with their own Kashmiri population. In other words, reduce it from a bilateral problem to an internal problem. And if Pakistan wants to get obnoxious about it, we can also point out that its own governance record in so called Azad Kashmir is appalling. So I think Americans need to really be proactive in changing the narrative about what Kashmir is and what’s at stake. It’s best as two internal issues. Islamabad in Muzaffarabad on the Pakistan side and India and Srinagar on the other side. And in this, you know, Modi. Modi might actually be in a better position to do this than not.

NEIL JOECK: I hope so.

Modi’s Position and Potential

CHRISTINE FAIR: Well, so if Manmohan Singh did this, if Manmohan Singh were to be more open and engaging towards Kashmiris, everyone would say, oh, you know, he’s just pusillanimous. Because he’s Manmohan Singh. I mean, he was sort of viewed as this, you know, pusillanimous accidental prime minister that sort of like wandered into this role. But Modi isn’t perceived that way. So, you know, Modi might actually be able to make some hard choices on Kashmir.

Now, look, Modi also has another problem. If Modi wants to take his party away from its communal history, right there it is. I mean, his party is communal. The example I would give is the expense of irritating Indians. But I don’t really care because I feel very strongly about this. His party is a Hindu nationalist party. He had long standing ties with the RSS. From my point of view, it would be as if the Americans had elected as president a former lesser wizard of the KKK. Right? But there’s a big difference. The KKK is underground. It doesn’t have public standing at all levels of governance. So from my point of view, these Hindu nationalist organizations are very, very, very dangerous.

Modi has, throughout his campaign has signaled very, very hard that he’s trying to take his party away from this. And I guess the analogy I would be is that Democrats used to be the parties of slavery, right? The Republicans that were the opponents of slavery. So over time, parties can migrate away from their positions. And maybe it is the case that Modi is going to try to take the BJP away from being this communal party to one which is economically conservative and try to get out of this communal nonsense. He’s actually made some really important speeches in this regard.

But Modi has to be very careful because it seems like every month India has an election, right? Because there are so many states and they’re on a rotating basis. So he always has to gauge not only what’s happening at the center. He won outright. He doesn’t need a coalition at the center, but he does have to worry about what’s happening in these states. And so his ability to move the BJP away from this communal party to really one which is more like the Republican party in terms of its economic policies will always have to. He has to be playing constantly an electoral game about what’s happening in the next state election that’s coming up.

NEIL JOECK: The question about Kashmir and the whole issue of Kashmir takes us to another question that came from the audience, from a student in the audience who very simply was just saying the Lashkar-e-Taiba and JuD today, are they stronger or weaker? And this is also connected with another question. Given the fact that Hafiz Saeed has been going about to rallies in Pakistan despite the bounty on his head, do you expect that it’s going to be increasingly difficult to continue to aid Pakistan? So how does this dynamic of continued active militancy housed within Pakistan both affect Pakistan’s ability to connect with India if Modi reaches out but also our ability to connect with Pakistan and encourage Pakistan in the right directions through the provision of aid or alternatively simply through more robust diplomatic relations.

Pakistan’s Support for Terrorism

CHRISTINE FAIR: So I don’t think Modi is going to reach out to Pakistan. But reaching out to Kashmir is a different enterprise than reaching out to Pakistan. He knows exactly what the Pakistanis are about. The Pakistanis are about using terrorism under their nuclear umbrella. Why talk? And I actually support his position of not engaging the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis want to be engaged. They’re just like that four year old just nagging for attention and they don’t deserve it until I mean I think this government is absolutely right to say when you stop supporting terrorists then maybe we’ll talk about normalization. Why talk while you’re sending actively terrorists in to kill our citizens? I support this. And talking to Pakistan only legitimizes its alleged grievances in Kashmir. And it has no legitimate grievances in my view.

But going back to LeT, LeT is most certainly stronger than it was. And the reason for this is that—how do I put this delicately?—the state invests in it hugely under the name of Jamaat-ud-Dawa. It has basically become a civil society actor. And in Pakistan people will often get excited about, “Well there’s a very vibrant civil society.” Well sure, but the civil society isn’t frequently civil. Right. Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a part of civil society and it is not civil.

So that organization is much stronger than it’s ever been. Even though it’s been more restrained in terms of terrorist operations. What they basically did was they expanded these domestic operations. And this is important because I didn’t get in—remember the whole lengthy discussion about Deobandis? Well it’s the Deobandis that are killing Pakistanis and they have very different theology from Lashkar-e-Taiba. Lashkar-e-Taiba is opposed to any violence in the Pakistani state.

So the reason why the ISI is so interested—which is Pakistan’s intelligence—in continuing to invest in Jamaat-ud-Dawa/Lashkar-e-Taiba is that they’re actually ideological competitors to these Deobandis. So anyone that Lashkar-e-Taiba can snatch up is actually one less person that is going to be interested in killing Pakistanis. And so my next book, actually I have a very extensive document exploitation project looking at thousands of pages of Lashkar documents and they’re very clear that they are a pro-state organization.

Going to the other part of this about the Americans, you know, I don’t know what it will take to get Americans to take Pakistan off the dole. I mean, where was Osama Bin Laden caught, right? Just, you know, basically a short jog from the Pakistan Military Academy. $30 billion that they’ve taken from us and they’re killing our troops in Afghanistan. Lashkar-e-Taiba is killing our troops in Afghanistan.

And so whenever you have this discussion about scaling back American aid in Pakistan, the State Department and USAID and everyone else gets all freaky about it because they’ll say, well, you know, we’ll lose our access, right? And what’s the real concern in Pakistan is these nuclear weapons, right, which are expanding in number and they’re pursuing battlefield nuclear weapons. You know, tactical nuclear weapons is what we call them.

And so Pakistan is doing this deliberately, right, not only to coerce India, but also to coerce us, to make sure that we don’t just pick up and take our checkbook with us. So I don’t know what it would take to get the Americans to come to its senses and realize that we can’t fix Pakistan with our checkbook, we can’t fix Pakistan with F16s. We can fix Pakistan by actually taking it off the methadone. And not just our bilateral aid, but also most importantly through the IMF.

Because what we’re essentially doing is that we are lubricating the system. So any Pakistani that doesn’t want to live in an army dominated country that uses nuclear coercion and jihadis as primary tools of foreign policy, we’re basically lubricating that. And the only way we create friction is by making the Pakistan army defend what it does and its resources against other potential futures.

And so by constantly infusing money into that system, we preclude what I think would be a very natural conversation that would have to happen amongst Pakistanis about what they want to be when they’re no longer dominated by the military. And by our constant infusion of funds, we basically ensure the military is there to stay. And I don’t think that’s in our long term interests.

NEIL JOECK: Now you mentioned the nuclear issue a couple of times and one of the questions from the floor addresses that. Can you offer your assessment of both the US ability to monitor Pakistan’s capabilities but also what you see as Pakistan’s capabilities?

CHRISTINE FAIR: You should answer that question.

NEIL JOECK: Well, thank you for this is an opportunity for the assembled question from the crowd. Learn your views on this issue. Just parenthetically I have spent a lot of time looking at Pakistan’s nuclear issue.

But I can’t talk about it benefits. From the views of many people. So I turn it to you, Dr. Fair, but you worked at the Z Division and I’m talking in front of you. I can’t talk about this.

NEIL JOECK: I mean it’s the question does specifically say how effective is US intelligence in monitoring Pakistan’s nuclear weapon capabilities? Which I tried rather blunt ineptly to transfer over to Chris. Let’s move on to the next question, just leaving it saying that this is a source of considerable concern for the U.S. but the U.S. does continue to engage.

CHRISTINE FAIR: Let me say one thing about that.

NEIL JOECK: Constructively in monitoring these problems.

CHRISTINE FAIR: If you can comment on it, I’d be very grateful if this question had come up.

NEIL JOECK: It is an intelligence matter, so the answer is no.

Pakistan’s Nuclear Security Concerns

CHRISTINE FAIR: All right, so let me just share my unintelligent thoughts on this. When this question was posed 10 years ago, I didn’t lose any sleep over it because if the Islamists could get in and snatch their weapons, so could we, so could the Indians, so could the Israelis. By the way, that would be my definition of a good day. If the finally the Crusader Brahmanic Talmudic alliance could get its act together and snatch those weapons, that would be a great day.

Years ago I felt that when it came to unwanted proliferation, Pakistan’s incentives and our incentives were actually in alignment. Pakistan can only do what it does with its nuclear weapons. They are the crown jewels. So I do think that the military has invested in a lot of apparatus to keep these weapons safe.

Having said that, remember in 2007 we lost some nuclear weapons. Remember that? They were flying over the United States. We sacked our army chief for that. But we’ve been doing this for a long time and we still lost some nukes for actually several hours.

A couple things have begun to change that I am quite worried about. One, and I know Neil can’t talk about this, there were these really interesting reports that the Pakistanis are constantly moving their weapons around as part of basically protecting their assets. When those things are moving around, they’re not in garrison, I think they are more vulnerable.

The other component of this is that we’ve seen now since late 2001, many attacks on Pakistani military and intelligence facilities, all of which have required extensive infiltration. Some of the Musharraf attacks and others, I mean, people with the rank of major had enough information to facilitate these attacks.

So now, 10 years later, having seen the degree to which you have this infiltration problem, I am more worried. I’m not worried when they’re in garrison. I’m worried when these things are out. I don’t want to say I’m not worried. I’m less worried when they’re in garrison. When there’s an India-Pakistan conflict and the weapons are mated with their delivery mechanisms and they’re forward deployed, they’re vulnerable to theft.

Pakistan’s pursuit of tactical nuclear weapons obviously raises all sorts of issues. So 10 years ago, this was not something I lost a lot of sleep over. I’m worried and, no offense to American intelligence individuals, it’s a hard nut to crack. It’s a very hard nut to crack. And I’m going to leave it there before Neil hits me. He won’t. He’s a gentleman.

NEIL JOECK: Let me thank you. But also say there are always more questions than there is time. Let me conclude with a couple of questions that came in from Twitter that then connect back to your book.

So let me read the questions and then finish off with this question going back again to the research you did on your book. As Pakistan devolves into a hollow state, what is the prognosis for General headquarters and Pakistan’s military for the next 10 to 15 years? Second Twitter question is how to rein in Pakistan’s military. Do we discontinue aid, impose sanctions and so on?

But let me conclude with the thought that your book shows enormous research and very careful historical analysis of Pakistan’s military. Are there some key questions, conclusions, issues that you see coming from your book that you would like to share with us in conclusion, and that perhaps address these issues of the future of the military and the US ability to influence that future through either sanctions or aid?

Addressing Pakistan’s Future and US Policy Options

CHRISTINE FAIR: All right, so I’m going to go back to the point that I made about the methadone. If we really want to help Pakistan and in doing so, help ourselves, we need to stop bailing them out. And this bailing out doesn’t mostly happen through US bilateral aid. It mostly happens through the IMF.

The IMF would love to cut Pakistan off because basically Pakistan promises to expand its tax net, make fiscal reforms, and then it consistently fails or refuses actually to follow through. And usually right as the penultimate monies are being paid out, Pakistan says, “Oh no, Uncle, I can’t do this. Don’t pay us the last tranche. We’re not going to do it.” And they all know that five or six years later they’re going to have to go back to the IMF and the IMF, because Uncle Sam says, “Write the check, write the check.”

So if we want Pakistan to stop doing what it does, we need to engage in activities that incentivize a civilian transfer of power. By the way, the civilians are not necessarily any better than the military. There’s no reason to think that the civilians see the world differently. So I want to caveat that. But the elected civilians are at least accountable to the people who elect them, in an ideal world. But in Pakistan they’re not because of patronage politics.

Pakistan is basically a rentier state of a different sort than Saudi Arabia. But the voters really don’t matter in the big picture. So how do we make the voters matter and how do we make their preferences and their desires for different future matter? Well, by cutting off big aid. And by big aid, I mean the IMF as well as bilateral assistance.

The first thing that’s going to happen is the Army’s going to say, “I still need my money.” The Army’s not, under no circumstances, not going to get what it wants. So they’re going to have to basically make do. The rest of the country is just going to have to wither while the army basically eats up what it wants.

They will probably do what they always do when they need to get more revenue. They’ll do a general sales tax. General sales taxes are very regressive. They affect the poor more than not. Why is that? Because their politicians are even worse than ours in the sense they don’t want to tax their own elites and their own support base. So in Pakistan, there’s no industrial tax, there’s no agricultural tax. So they make our Congress look good by comparison.

But the GST will only be a stopgap measure. Eventually they’re going to have to expand the tax net. And actually, Americans, I don’t think appreciate how important taxes are. Taxes are what ties the government to the governed and makes the government responsible to the governed. We pay taxes and we demand a sensible use of our taxes. Otherwise we elect the clowns out.

Which is why Saudi Arabia is so great, right? There’s no taxes collected. They don’t have to do anything. They don’t care what Saudis think because there’s no tax that’s being collected.

So as the Pakistanis have to expand their tax net, this is how you create more obligations on behalf of the elected and the people doing the electing. This doesn’t happen in 10 years, it happens in 20 years. But what this will do is at least give space to other people in this policy process who might possibly want a different future from that of the army.

And this is also how we eventually, by encouraging parliamentary procedures and parliamentary oversight in strengthening the foundations of democracy, which is actually taxes, get Pakistan’s parliament to begin asking questions of the army. Right now, basically the army says this is how much money I want. You sirs and ladies are going to give it to me.

So if we want Pakistan to do things differently, which is not only in the interest of Pakistanis but ours ironically, we actually have to treat Pakistan like the state that it is, instead of trying to make it into an extraordinary state. So I will leave it with that.

NEIL JOECK: Chris, thank you for very provocative and insightful comments tonight. With those remarks, we have to conclude the program. Let me say, on behalf of the World Affairs Council, I’d like to ask you, the audience to join me now in thanking Dr. Fair for this very excellent discussion. Many thanks.

CHRISTINE FAIR: Thank you. Thank you.

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