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

drones with their targets, or what happens if Pakistan decides to start shooting down these low- and slow-flying pilotless planes. Drones are labor-intensive. They don’t need pilots, true, but they do require small armies of analysts and spies, including locals who are willing and able to attach homing chips to the people, vehicles, and buildings that drones are supposed to hit. For every one person on the ground that a jet-fighter mission needs, a drone mission needs ten. Pakistani authorities may not be able to stop U.S. drones from overflying their territory (though they can shoot them down), but they can cut thechain of intelligence gathering, analysis, and chip planting that makes drones effective. They can blind the drones and render them useless.
    For decades, America bought Pakistan’s cooperation through aid sweetened with public shows of friendship and support. In the ten years after 9/11, America poured $20 billion in civilian and military aid into the relationship. During its first two years in office, the Obama administration increased the flow of support and raised Pakistan’s profile as a vital ally even further. In return, we got intelligence cooperation—more agents, listening posts, and even visas for the deep-cover CIA operatives who found bin Laden. We got improved relations between Kabul and Islamabad, which, although not as warm as we would have liked, were nonetheless warm enough to help our counterinsurgency efforts. We got more distance between Pakistan and Iran. And we finally persuaded Islamabad to go to war (however reluctantly) against the Taliban on Pakistan’s own soil. Had the Pakistani military not taken on those Taliban forces, the fighting in Afghanistan certainly would have been worse. At least a measure of the battlefield success that the U.S. military has achieved in the Afghan theater—the success that has allowed President Obama to order troops home—can be ascribed to Pakistani cooperation.
    There is plenty in Pakistani behavior to anger America too. Many observers think that Pakistan’s regional interests are so far removed from those of the United States that no degree of aid and friendship can bridge the gap, making a collapse in the relationship inevitable all along. American ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson captured this sentiment best in a September 23, 2009, cable: “Money alone will not solve the problem of al-Qaeda or the Taliban operating in Pakistan. A grand bargain that promises development or military assistance in exchange for severing ties will be insufficient to wean Pakistan from policies that reflect accurately its most deep-seated fears. The Pakistani establishment, as we saw in 1998, with the nuclear test, does not view assistance—even sizable assistance to their own entities—as a trade-off for national security.” 5
    Indeed, Pakistan has long been a “frenemy.” But in dealing with frenemies, the question is always whether it makes more sense—in view of one’s own interests and circumstances—to stress the friend part or theenemy part. And one should also be ready to ask whether a frenemy relationship can be moved—ever so slowly—toward the “friend” column.
    The critical turning point in America’s relations with Pakistan was the annus horribilis of 2011. That was the year in which a series of unfortunate events, mishandled by both sides, put relations in a deep freeze. It was also the moment when America decided to experiment with a whole new way of managing Pakistan, as an adversary rather than a friend, substituting pressure for engagement.
    The twisted course of the year of horrors began with lethal gunplay on a traffic-packed Lahore thoroughfare. On January 27, 2011, an alleged undercover CIA agent named Raymond A. Davis shot and killed two Pakistani men on a motorbike, men he thought were going to rob him or, worse, abduct him. Pakistan put him in jail until the United States paid $2.4 million in compensation to the men’s