How Pakistan Is Playing Washington—Again

BY MICHAEL HIRSH, LARA SELIGMAN

Trump thinks he can get Imran Khan to help as he exits Afghanistan. History suggests otherwise.

 This week, U.S. President Donald Trump held out extravagant hopes to Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, suggesting he wanted to resume security aid, multiply bilateral trade many times over, and even try to mediate the decades-old Kashmir issue with India (claiming, falsely, that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked him for help).

Trump’s friendly display represented a major presidential entreaty with a singular goal: to induce Pakistan “to help us out to extricate ourselves” from neighboring Afghanistan, as the president put it.

To many experts and former U.S. officials dealing with Pakistan, Trump’s pleas had a familiar ring and promised similar results: Islamabad will smile and say yes to most things, and then go on with its close relationship with the Taliban—including welcoming the radical Islamist forces as they retake Kabul following a U.S. withdrawal.

“They are so good at this game—literally rope a dope,” said Vipin Narang, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Their incentive is to bait and bleed the United States and extract as many goodies (at one point a nuclear arsenal) out of us as they can. And we have been baited and bled for 40 years. This is the most profitable franchise in Pakistani history.”Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker, who has said he experienced Pakistani duplicity firsthand when the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was attacked—allegedly by what Crocker called “Pakistan-based insurgents”—said he views Trump’s outreach as part of an awkward departure plan that all sides will see through.“I have had this sense from the start that by going into talks with the Taliban, without the Afghan government being there, we’ve effectively been saying, ‘We surrender.’ I see this as a pretty clumsily managed part of that overall endeavor,” Crocker told Foreign Policy.

Pakistan, Crocker added, may well induce the Taliban—who will be willing to go along—to accede to U.S. demands that the militants no longer attack U.S. forces, but that will only be a ruse to accelerate an American departure. And no matter what Khan might promise Trump, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency and military will continue to oversee their active support of the Taliban, he said.

“They will look forward to the Taliban taking over the country,” Crocker said. “That’s been behind their almost two-decade refusal to clamp down on the [Taliban] leadership.” Still, some experts said any effort to bring the troops home from Afghanistan requires Pakistan’s help.

“Trump might well be getting played, but Trump’s clumsy lies might still usefully support what [U.S. envoy Zalmay] Khalilzad is doing with the Taliban and Kabul,” said James Schwemlein, a nonresident scholar in the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referring to Washington’s special envoy to Afghanistan.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/24/how-pakistan-is-playing-washington-again/