There is one other troubling feature to figure 10.2. Other parts of the model’s output tell us that al-Qaeda and the Taliban will try to negotiate an arrangement with the PPP and the PML-N. Sharif’s PML-N is modestly more open to such talks than is Zardari’s PPP. Both prefer to live with the existing status quo vis-a-vis the militant groups while trying to consolidate their own hold on power. In the meantime, the Pakistani military sees itself slowly but steadily losing influence. Such a circumstance raises the prospect that they will try to stem the tide against them by launching a coup to take control of the government. The optimal period for them to take such a step is projected to be between February 2009 and July 2009. Earlier than that they see no need, and later may be too late for them. Pakistan’s fragile democracy appears likely to be under assault from the militants who would establish a nondemocratic fundamentalist regime on one side, and from the army that would establish a military government on the other.
What does this mean about Pakistan’s contribution to the war on terror? Will they make a more vigorous effort to pursue militants and stamp them out, or will the Pakistani government succumb to the projected growing influence of al-Qaeda and the Taliban? I think you can guess the answer. But just in case you can’t, figure 10.3 tells that story.
The status quo commitment to go after al-Qaeda and the Taliban back when my students began their project was at 40 on their issue scale. A value of 40 meant some real efforts to contain the militants but falling well short of trying to stamp them out as the United States wanted. That was equivalent to a score of 100 on the scale. The status quo, with some erosion, was close to the policy predicted to hold, more or less, until the summer of 2008. A position of 0—al-Qaeda’s position (not shown)—meant “Do nothing against the militants.” With that in mind, let’s see what we predict for the future.
FIG. 10.3. Who Will Urge Pakistan’s Pursuit of Internal Militant Groups?
The dashed line and the dotted line in figure 10.3 show the predicted positions of Zardari’s PPP and Sharif’s PML-N, respectively. After June 2008, their approach is projected to be little more than rhetorical opposition to the militants with almost no serious commitment to go after them. Talk about a balloon bursting. The air just pours out of the antimilitant effort. That puts responsibility for going after the militants squarely in the United States’ corner.
Throughout the remainder of his term, President Bush is adamant (but ineffective) in his commitment to persuade the Pakistani government to go after the hard-liners. After the summer of 2008 even he pretty much gives up on this strategy. Instead, my students found that the U.S. approach will shift ground. The United States’ two- pronged strategy of clandestine American pursuit and open Pakistani pursuit of militants will be replaced by a much greater emphasis on the (perhaps clandestine) use of the American military directly within Pakistan. Even that commitment, the student projections indicate, will collapse shortly after the American presidential election. The new president is not likely to do much of anything about the rise of terrorist influence within Pakistan at least through the end of 2009, when the student projection ends. It seems that after a new president is inaugurated—of course, we now know that the president is Barack Obama, but back in the spring of 2008, neither my students nor the model made assumptions about the American election—the war on terror will not be effectively focused within Pakistan.
We just had a brief sketch of the major findings regarding Pakistan. There is much more detail that could be discussed about how and why these results arise, but the more interesting question is “What is to be done?” Recall that my students also studied U.S. foreign aid to Pakistan and its likely impact on Pakistani policy. They estimated the current level of U.S. economic assistance to Pakistan in fiscal 2008 as $700 million. That was an approximation, but probably a reasonable one. (The true amount is surely a mix of public and secret information.) They then looked at how congressional and presidential support for that number would change over time, taking into account domestic pressures and the pressures within Pakistan. Here is what they found.
The analysis shows that substantial domestic political pressure is likely to push for cuts in American aid to Pakistan. President Bush and the Democratic Congress are predicted to move apart at least through the summer of 2008 (remember, the data are from January of that year). Indeed, by early summer, the projection was that the president would be pressing for Congress to increase annual aid to Pakistan from $700 million to around $900 million to $1 billion. Did he? Bush proposed shifting an additional $230 million in counterterrorism funds during the summer of 2008. The model predicted that Congress would hold the line on aid during that same period, and they did. Congress has complained in actuality about the amount of aid the United States is giving to Pakistan, but more on that in a moment. After the summer of 2008 the analysis reports that while the president continues to advocate greater aid than Congress supports, the two begin to converge slowly. Both conclude that aid just isn’t buying the policy compliance the U.S. government wants.
Put bluntly, American foreign aid is supposed to pay the Pakistani government to go after the militants. It is failing. Indeed, by June 2008 the public discussion coming out of Congress alleged that Pakistan was misusing U.S. aid funds. Money was being spent on items like air defense with Bush’s support even though al-Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan are not known to have any air capability. Air defense might be helpful for Pakistan against a threat from, say, India. So, while administration officials countered that the impact of aid on Pakistan’s antiterrorist efforts was being underestimated, Congress made the case that the money was being thrown down a rathole.
It is not hard to see that, as projected by my students’ analysis, President Obama will face real pressure to support less aid for Pakistan. My students worked through the implications of their assessment and they despaired. Their analysis convinced them that al-Qaeda and the Taliban were getting stronger and that U.S. reluctance to increase aid was more likely to reinforce that trend than reverse it. It was clear from their investigation that the United States cared deeply about getting Pakistan’s help in tracking down and neutralizing militants and terrorists operating within Pakistan’s borders. It was equally clear that Pakistan’s government leaders (the PPP, Sharif and his PML-N, and Musharraf’s backers in the military) wanted much more U.S. aid than they were receiving. They could see that the then current U.S. policy did not provide either a sufficient carrot or a painful enough stick to convince Pakistani leaders to put themselves at risk by going after the militants.
With these observations in hand, my students began to think about how they might go beyond predicting developments to trying to shape them (or at least simulate doing so). And so they initiated a search for a strategy that might get Pakistan’s leaders to make a more serious effort to rein in the militants. They looked at the possibility of trading aid dollars for policy concessions. Seeing that the Pakistanis want more money and the United States wants greater efforts to track down militants, they wondered whether an aid-for-pursuit deal might not improve the situation from the American and the Pakistani perspectives.
Using foreign aid to secure policy compliance is a time-honored use of such funds even if, at the assumed $700 million in economic aid, it did not seem to be working in Pakistan. Looking at their assessments, my students could see why Pakistan’s leaders were not aggressively pursuing militants despite the then U.S. aid program for Pakistan. They could see that the leadership (Musharraf, the PPP, and the PML-N) expected to take too much political heat from al-Qaeda and the Taliban for it to be in their interest at the prevailing foreign aid level. And so my students set out to analyze how that might change if the United States gave significantly more aid than their analysis indicated was going to be the case. Figures 10.4A and 10.4B show the same projections through the end of President Bush’s term, but then they diverge. Figure 10.4A continues to forecast the relative influence of the U.S. government and the militants in Pakistan through the end of 2009 if President Obama follows the foreign aid course pursued by the
