On December 9th, the Washington Post published ‘The Afghanistan Papers’ a “confidential trove of government documents” that were “generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.”
While the focus is Afghanistan, the interviews and documents also discuss how the US should never have treated Pakistan as a friend. “In Lessons Learned interviews, other officials said the Bush administration compounded its early mistake with the Taliban by making another critical error — treating Pakistan as a friend. Pakistan’s military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, had given the Pentagon permission to use Pakistani airspace and let the CIA track al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistani territory. As a result, the Bush White House was slow to recognize that Pakistan was simultaneously giving covert support to the Taliban, according to the interviews.”
As The Afghanistan Papers point out: “Because of people’s personal confidence in Musharraf and because of things he was continuing to do in helping police up a bunch of the al-Qaeda in Pakistan. There was a failure to perceive the double game that he starts to play by late 2002, early 2003,” Marin Strmecki, a senior adviser to Rumsfeld, told government interviewers. “I think that the Afghans, and [President Hamid] Karzai himself, are bringing this up constantly even in the earlier parts of 2002,” Strmecki added. “They are meeting unsympathetic ears because of the belief that Pakistan was helping us so much on al-Qaeda. . . . There is never a full confronting of Pakistan in its role supporting the Taliban.”
Further, “In the Lessons Learned interviews, Obama officials acknowledged that they failed to resolve another strategic challenge that had dogged Bush — what to do about Pakistan. Washington kept giving Pakistan billions of dollars a year to help fight terrorism. Yet Pakistani military and intelligence leaders never stopped supporting the Afghan Taliban and giving sanctuary to its leaders. “The Obama administration just thought if you just hang in there Pakistan will see the light,” a former White House official told government interviewers in 2015. In a separate interview in 2015, another unnamed official complained that the Obama administration would not let U.S. troops attack Taliban camps on the Pakistani side of the border. “And still today we wonder what the problem is,” the official said. “I talked to General Petraeus and I was saying that if I were a general and a bullet came and hit my men I would follow it. And Petraeus said yeah well go talk to Washington.” Crocker, who also served as U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 2004 to 2007, told government interviewers that Pakistani leaders did not bother to hide their duplicity.”
Finally, “He recounted a conversation he had with Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, who was then Pakistan’s intelligence chief, in which he “was getting on him again” about the Taliban. “And he says, ‘You know, I know you think we’re hedging our bets. You’re right, we are, because one day you’ll be gone again, it’ll be like Afghanistan the first time, you’ll be done with us, but we’re still going to be here because we can’t actually move the country. And the last thing we want with all of our other problems is to have turned the Taliban into a mortal enemy, so, yes, we’re hedging our bets.’ ” In his December 2016 Lessons Learned interview, Crocker said the only way to force Pakistan to change would be for Trump to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely and give them the green light to hunt the Taliban on Pakistani territory. “It would allow him to say, ‘You worry about our reliability, you worry about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, I’m here to tell you that I’m going to keep troops there as long as I feel we need them, there is no calendar.’ “ ‘That’s the good news. The bad news for you is we’re going to kill Taliban leaders wherever we find them: Baluchistan, Punjab, downtown Islamabad. We’re going to go find them, so maybe you want to do a strategic recalculation.’ ”
