Pakistan and Trump Clash

So far, 2018 is shaping up as potentially the worst year in U.S.-Pakistan ties since 2011 – the year the United States covertly staged an operation to kill Osama bin Laden, who was hiding out just a stone's throw from the Pakistani military academy in Abbottabad. Early in the new year, U.S. President Donald Trump took to Twitter to issue an unequivocal broadside against Pakistan. “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools,” Trump tweeted. “They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”

A little over a year ago, long before that tweet, Trump had gotten on the phone to speak with then-Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was disqualified from office in 2017 after the Pakistani Supreme Court ruled against him on corruption allegations stemming from the release of the so-called Panama Papers detailing his family's offshore wealth. In what may seem now like distant memory, the call between the then-prime minister and the U.S. president-elect resulted in a remarkable – almost farcical – Pakistani readout. The Pakistani prime minister's office put words in Trump's mouth: “I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long [sic],” the readout noted. “Your country is amazing with tremendous opportunities,” it added.

Those days are long gone. The U.S.-Pakistan relationship, which is often described erroneously as an alliance, has gone through multiple boom and bust cycles. 2018 appears to be the latest bust, posing the Trump administration with a challenge that has been a familiar rite of passage for every U.S. president since Dwight Eisenhower: How can the United States condition and control Pakistan's behavior?

Instead of reckoning with the implications of the sharply divergent national interests of the United States and Pakistan in South Asia, successive administration in Washington have turned to the power of the purse to punish Pakistan. The Trump administration, somewhat unoriginally, announced in January 2018, days after Trump's tweet, that it would suspend more than $1 billion in U.S. financial assistance to Pakistan. Specifically, it would suspend a $255 million tranche of foreign military financing (FMF) payments and another $900 billion in coalition support fund (CSF) reimbursements (an arrangement that would see Pakistan partially compensated for the capital its military has expended in fighting domestic terrorists).

Like previous administrations, the Trump administration got the diagnosis right, but the treatment wrong. The Obama administration, too, withheld financial assistance – specifically CSF reimbursement tranches – from Pakistan. While U.S. lawmakers authorized $1 billion in CSF reimbursements, a $300 million tranche would be contingent on the United States certifying that Pakistan had taken sufficient action against the cutthroat militants affiliated with the Haqqani Network and even Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terror group that masterminded the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.

Throughout the Obama administration, the United States had a fairly simple desired end-state with Pakistan: it wanted the Pakistani military to take the fight to the terrorists, to stop differentiating between so-called “good” and “bad” terrorists – i.e., between those militants that could serve the ends of the Pakistani state in South Asia and those that would simply destabilize Pakistan internally – and, above all, to cease the use of terror as an instrument of state policy.

The Trump administration picked up this basic logic and appears to be intent on extending it forcefully. The current senior director at the National Security Council for South and Central Asia at the White House is Lisa Curtis, formerly of the right-leaning Hudson Institute, who has long been vocally insistent on applying pressure on the Pakistani military to bring its preferences in line with those of the United States. Before her appointment, Curtis authored a paper along with Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, that argued that the United States, above all, had to stop viewing Pakistan as an ally. “The new U.S. administration should recognize that Pakistan is not an American ally. It has engaged in supporting the Afghan Taliban, who have killed American troops and their allies in Afghanistan,” Curtis and Haqqani wrote in February 2016.

Trump echoed this idea during his August 2017 speech on Afghanistan strategy, which, like Obama's 2009 speech, included several condemnations of Pakistan. “It is time for Pakistan to demonstrate its commitment to civilization, order, and peace,” Trump noted, calling on Islamabad to take action against designated terror groups. For a moment in late 2017, it appeared that Islamabad was putting in at least a performative effort to placate the U.S. president. The Pakistani military pulled off a daring rescue operation to secure Caitlan Coleman, an American citizen, and her Canadian husband, Joshua Boyle, from Taliban custody in Pakistan's Kurram Agency. Even though the Trump White House listed the Coleman-Boyle rescue on its list of major foreign policy achievements in 2017, it wasn't enough to spare Pakistan from a tightening of the aid faucet.

There’s little telling how the relationship between Islamabad and Washington will progress through the rest of the year. Many of us who've kept up with the history of the U.S.-Pakistan bilateral relationship know that this may very well end up being an unfortunate case of deja vu: a new administration enters office and lashes out at Pakistan, which lashes back in turn, but in the end, the difficult partnership persists. Pakistan, after all, has a number of levers to make life difficult for the United States. As the Trump administration surges troops in Afghanistan, Pakistan could limit port access to Karachi for inbound U.S. logistics and supplies, forcing the United States to use alternative routes that would be considerably more of a headache to operationalize (and far costlier). Pakistan can also take smaller steps to chip away at American influence in Pakistan; on January 19, Pakistan's Interior Ministry shut down a Pashto-language broadcaster backed by U.S. funding, following a recommendation from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

One of the more serious determinants of the trajectory of this relationship in 2018 will be if the United States will dig further into its policy toolkit in attempting to condition Pakistan's behavior. For example, will the Trump administration dare to impose targeted sanctions against individual officers in the ISI and the Pakistan military who have known ties to terror groups? A spokesperson for Trump's National Security Council hinted at the idea, suggesting that it remains on the table. Moreover, the United States could lobby against Pakistan at international economic forums, including the International Monetary Fund. These steps haven't been taken in the past with good reason: the United States has, at one point or another, come to realize that the costs to its interests should the relationship with Pakistan fall off a cliff are simply too unpredictable. If any administration is poised to cast aside conventional wisdom, throw caution to the wind, and proceed anyway, it’ll be the Trump administration. We’ll find out soon enough if that is the case.