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

families and the CIA agreed to revise the rules by which it was operating in Pakistan. 6 By the time Davis was released on March 16, ties between Islamabad and Washington were severely strained, and it did not help that the very next day a massive drone strike hit a tribal gathering at Datta Khel in North Waziristan. Taliban commanders and fighters were killed, but also dozens of civilians. Then, at the beginning of May, helicopter-borne U.S. commandos flew from Afghanistan into Pakistan under conditions of utmost secrecy on a mission, launched and executed with no warning to Pakistan, to capture or kill bin Laden. They found him at a compound in the city of Abbottabad located in shockingly close proximity to the Pakistan Military Academy and the homes of numerous retired officers. The coup de grace came in November when American forces chasing Taliban fighters killed twenty-four Pakistani border guards in a botched firefight. Relations between the two countries went into deep freeze, and a real rupture, for the first time since Pakistan’s creation in 1947, became a distinct possibility.
    Mistrust was thus already profound when Admiral Mullen spoke to the Senate in September, accusing Pakistan outright of involvement in attacks on U.S. targets in Afghanistan.
    Ever since Pakistan was created out of portions of British India in 1947, America’s relations with the country have traveled a winding androcky road. There have been periods of intense friendship followed by long bouts of neglect and even alienation. 7 Over time, the two sides have developed an unhealthy distrust of each other. Americans fear and resent Pakistan, and Pakistanis think American friendship is fickle and transient. Americans think Pakistan promised not to build nuclear weapons, and then went ahead and built them. Then it promised not to test more warheads, and broke that promise, too. That Pakistan deliberately cultivates Islamic extremism as the cornerstone of its regional policy has done little to assuage concerns over its nuclear arsenal. Nowadays it is quite clear that America’s favor lies with Pakistan’s neighbor and nemesis, India, and at times it seems as if Pakistan is reacting to that uncomfortable fact by embodying all the anti-American anger and angst that have washed over the Muslim world in the past few decades.
    The relationship has been in a new and critical phase since 9/11. Experts well knew that Pakistan had been complicit in the creation of the Taliban and turned a blind eye to its support for al-Qaeda. But the Bush administration decided that conflict with Pakistan was not a good choice, and that buying Pakistan’s cooperation would be the better option. Pakistan’s military ruler quickly embraced the idea and aligned his country—for public consumption, at least—with the United States.
    A cozy relationship soon took shape. Bush liked General Musharraf, who loved to talk a “moderate Muslim” game, and frequently complimented him as a staunch ally in the battle against terror as well as a reformer who would bring “enlightened and liberal Islam” to Pakistan. Evidence of Pakistani double-dealing was ignored as the emphasis was placed on the positive: the periodic nabbing of a terrorist (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, was captured with Pakistani help in Karachi in March 2003), Musharraf’s tough antiterror rhetoric, and his promise of changing Pakistan into a forward-looking democracy. Posing as a hero of counterterrorism required a degree of chutzpah bordering on performance art, and Musharraf proved a master at it.
    Somewhere along the line, to my shock, it became clear that the Bush administration had started to believe the act. One day in 2006 I was giving a talk on the latest developments in Pakistan to a group of U.S. government analysts whose job was to keep up with, and make sense of, what was happening on the ground so they could inform theirhigher-ups and provide options for possible action. As we