Free The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat by Vali Nasr

Then he waxed lyrical about all the dangers that Pakistan faced and in turn would pose for the West were it to fail. Surely, he indicated, all this was self-evident to Washington.
    Holbrooke smiled through these conversations. He agreed that Pakistan was too important to ignore and that, whether we liked it or not, the United States had an abiding interest in its stability. But he thought Zardari’s attitude betrayed a disturbing dependence on America, and even worse, a sense of entitlement in spite of failure. Holbrooke didn’t like the image of Pakistan holding a gun to its own head as it shook down America for aid. We should help Pakistan, but Pakistan too should pull itself up by its bootstraps, getting its political house in order and attending to development.
    That said, Holbrooke agreed with Zardari that Pakistan was more important than Washington seemed to realize at that moment. Not only in the long run because it was a nuclear-armed country of 180 million, infested with extremists and teetering on the verge of collapse, but more immediately because it mattered to the outcome in Afghanistan. We could not afford for Pakistan to fail, and that meant we could not leave Pakistan to its own fate. We had to improve ties with Pakistan—however difficult that might turn out to be.
    Over the next two years, Holbrooke pressed for a strategy of engaging Pakistan. He thought engagement would get the most out of not only Zardari but also the generals who wielded real power in the country, and help promote stability there, too, which also matters (or should matter) to America. The White House tolerated Holbrooke’s approach for a while, but in the end decided that a policy of coercion and confrontation would better achieve our goals in Pakistan. That approach failed. The more America and Pakistan drifted apart, the less America got from Pakistan, and the less influence we now have in shaping the future of a dangerous and troublesome country that is only growing more so. 1
    When it comes to Pakistan, the country where the SEALs found and killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the mood in America has turneddark. High officials and average Americans alike are understandably wary of the place. But perhaps more important still, they are tired of trying to change its perverse ways. Political scientist Stephen Krasner captured this mood well when he wrote in the January/February 2012 issue of
Foreign Affairs
that after decades of efforts to buy Pakistan’s cooperation with generous U.S. aid, plenty of public praise, and outsized amounts of face time for its leaders, the country still supports extremist organizations. These groups, as then–Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on September 22, 2011, “serving as proxies for the government of Pakistan are attacking Afghan troops and civilians as well as U.S. soldiers.” Mullen called the Haqqani network—a particularly vicious and brutish outfit that is an autonomous part of the Taliban—“in many ways, a strategic arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.” When he first became America’s top military officer, Admiral Mullen had called Pakistan “a steadfast and historic ally.” 2 Now he was expressing a different sentiment, the one that the
Atlantic
magazine captured in a cover story titled “The Ally from Hell.” 3
    Such observations, Krasner argued, should lead us to treat Pakistan much the same way we treat Iran and North Korea—as a hostile power. Rather than assist, praise, and coddle Pakistan, we should think of how to contain it. 4 We can fight terrorism without Pakistan’s help, the argument goes, since stepped-up drone attacks will do the job. And indeed, there is a growing sense that we are well on our way to confrontation with Pakistan.
    However, what these critics don’t say is how drones can get the job done if we lose access to the timely, ground-level intelligence that currently provides