US-Pakistan Relations Tense Amid Chicago Trial

Bruce Riedel (Photo courtesy: Brookings Institution)

Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer currently at the Brookings Institution, about continuing tensions in the US-Pakistan relationship.

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Lisa Mullins: As the United States and Europe consider their next steps in Afghanistan they’re keeping a weary eye on neighboring Pakistan.  U.S.-Pakistan relations are strained right now.  Tensions rose sharply after the U.S. raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.  The raid fed suspicion that the Pakistani officials may be collaborating with Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Those suspicions are also now being fed by a trial underway in Chicago.  The accused is Tahawwur Rana.  He’s a businessman accused of helping to plan the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.  160 people were killed in those attacks. The government’s star witness in the case is David Coleman Headley.  Headley is an American who has admitted to helping plot the attacks, and he’s testified that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI directed his scouting of targets in Mumbai, and even helped choose a landing site for the militants by boat. Bruce Riedel is a former CIA officer who chaired the Obama administration’s review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009.  He says the trial in Chicago is shining a bright spotlight on Pakistan’s alleged covert actions.

Bruce Riedel: What it’s doing is unmasking Pakistan’s support for terrorists.  And what this means for U.S.-Pakistani relations is that the veils are off.  We now can see very explicitly how the ISI was involved in the Mumbai operation.  And we’re seeing it put out in a courtroom in America in a very dramatic way.  And that elevates this in the standing it didn’t have previously.

Mullins: So does this have any kind of dramatic knock- on effect for U.S.-Pakistani relations, which are quite unstable right now?

Riedel: They’re very unstable and they’re deteriorating at an alarming rate.  This has been a bad year for U.S.-Pakistani relations and it’s likely to get even worse.  I think the administration will try to draw distinction between Pakistan’s collected civilian government, which almost certainly was out of the loop on this; and the Pakistani army and the Pakistani ISI. The army functions as a state within a state, and the ISI to a certain extent function as a state within a state within a state.  They don’t have civilian oversight, but I think that distinction is harder and harder for most Americans to make, and very hard for people in  congress to make.  It requires understanding that Pakistan is an extraordinarily complex country and in many ways a contradictory country. I think that the net effect of Abbottabad, of the other deteriorations in this relationship is it’s gonna be harder and harder to convince the congress of the United States to continue to provide Pakistan with somewhere between $2-3 billion in economic and military assistance every year.

Mullins: Does the congress though really have a choice? Because doesn’t the U.S. have to, in some form, keep working Pakistan no matter what?

Riedel: Well, Bob Gates said something very much along those lines yesterday.  He said, and rightly so, Pakistan is too important not to talk to.  This is a country with the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world.  It will soon be the fifth largest country in the world.  It’s the second largest Muslim country in the world and on track to become the largest Muslim country in the world. It’s got all kinds of superlatives and it’s got all kinds of problems.  We can’t neglect it, but I think it’s an increasingly frustrating relationship for both sides.

Mullins: It poses a difficult, many difficult questions for the United States, in part because hasn’t the administration, haven’t subsequent administrations here counted on the ISI, the military in Pakistan to keep extreme Islam from taking the reigns of the presidency?

Riedel: The complexity of Pakistan can be summed up in this fact that relates to what you just said — Pakistan is our most important ally in the war against Al-Qaeda and our most difficult ally in the war against Al-Qaeda.  More Al-Qaeda senior operatives have been captured in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world.  But more senior Al-Qaeda operatives are in Pakistan that anywhere else in the world.  And it’s the complexities of these relationships which are so difficult to grasp and understand, and to get to the bottom of. The Pakistani military created a Jihadist Frankenstein that let’s be frank, it did it with American and British support in the 1980s in the war against the Soviet Union, and it’s never let go of that Jihadist Frankenstein, and it doesn’t seem inclined to let go of it to this day.

Mullins: Bruce Riedel, former CIA officer now at the Brookings Institution.  His latest book is called Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of Global Jihad.  Thank you.

Riedel: My pleasure, thank you.

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