International they will refrain from using assertive nationalism as a way to maintain political support. The Politic: The media have recently focused on an apparent crisis in U.S.-Pakistan relations. Are relations really that much worse than they have ever been? Was this inevitable?
“South Asia is very complicated and U.S. politicians don’t know much about it, yet they feel they have to say something when asked. So they say, ‘India is a democracy, we ought to team up with them.’ You can’t get in trouble for saying that.” GP: U.S.-Pakistan relations are very troubled now. Underlying this is Pakistan’s deep internal crisis. I just published an essay on this, Stop Enabling Pakistan’s Dangerous Dysfunction, which explains how Pakistan has gotten to this alarming point, and how the U.S. has in many ways enabled it, the way a friend can enable another person’s self-destructive tendencies. Basically, Pakistan has never established and supported institutions that have a chance of healing the countries many internal conflicts and patterns of injustice. The Army has been the country’s dominant institution, and armies generally are not best suited to structure and encourage the kinds of political processes necessary to reconcile conflicting aspirations of ethnic groups, competing ideologies, and parties, economic interests and so on. What the Pakistan Army has done is obsess on India. It projects India as an unrelenting threat that the country must concentrate its attention on. This justifies the Army’s dominant position of course, but it also has led the country into four wars with India and the cultivation of violent extremist groups (jihadis or terrorists, depending on how you look at it) who have brought violence to India and Afghanistan and are now threatening Pakistan itself. There is no evidence that the U.S. can give the Pakistani Army enough money or punishment to change its mindset. So I think the only hope is to do more to encourage those Pakistanis who want to take political responsibility away from the Army and put it into representative institutions. I’m not optimistic about this at all, but I think it’s the only chance that things can begin to be turned around in Pakistan. 40
THE POLITIC
The Politic: Politicians like Senator Mark Kirk have recently called for a strategic “tilt toward India.” How do you think U.S. relationships in the region will substantially change as we decrease our military footprint? GP: It’s easy to call for a tilt toward India, and India has much to admire. But India has plenty of its own problems and will not agree with many things that the U.S. says and does. Nor can India solve any of Pakistan’s major problems, or help the U.S. structure a more constructive relationship with Pakistan. I’ve written about some things India could do that would help progressive Pakistanis counter the Army’s narrative about the Indian menace, but those things will not change the Army’s obsessions. So when Senator Kirk or Governor Perry and others talk as if tilting toward India constitutes a new and improved strategy they simply reveal their ignorance of reality in the region. That’s not as harsh as it sounds – South Asia is very complicated and U.S. politicians don’t know much about it, yet they feel they have to say something when asked. So they say, “India is a democracy, we ought to team up with them.” You can’t get in trouble for saying that. As long as the U.S. has such a big military footprint in Afghanistan and acts as if Afghanistan is the most important venue in the region, we won’t be able to get at the more fundamental problem, which is Pakistan. Retrenching from Afghanistan will leave a real mess. There is no happy ending to be had there. But staying at the level that we have been operating will only postpone the years of reckoning through which factions in Afghanistan and the countries that surround it will have to struggle in order to find a tolerable equilibrium. The situation in and around Afghanistan resembles that of Vietnam in the 1970s and beyond. The Politic: You study one of the most volatile areas of the world. What (if anything) keeps you up at night? GP: My greatest worry is that terrorist groups with some relationship to Pakistan will conduct another major attack in India and this time India’s leadership will not be able to resist the temptation to strike back militarily. And if India acts to militarily punish Pakistan, however understandable the motivation would be, I think there is a real risk that Pakistan would escalate and use nuclear weapons. Then it is hard to know whether and how escalation could be contained short of a major nuclear war. The world has never experienced a nuclear war. I think its consequences would be horrendous for the people of Pakistan and India. The Politic: What are you working on now and what kind of research would you like to work on in the coming years? GP: I’m exploring how the theory and practice of nuclear