U.S. has trust deficit in Pakistan

In mid-February, America’s No. 1 military man, Mike Mullen, wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post about an unlikely subject: Trust.

Adm. Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs, was musing about the role of trust in defeating the Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He talked especially about the need to overcome “our trust deficit with Pakistan.”

Figuring out how to overcome this trust deficit — which runs both ways — is the key to resolving the most dangerous security threat we face. I refer, of course, to the danger posed by Islamist militants who are destabilizing the government and society of Pakistan, a country with nukes.

As for the trust deficit, it revolves around the way Pakistan is — or isn’t — fighting those militants.

Many in the U.S. military say they believe their Pakistani counterparts are too slow to grasp that the existential danger to their country is internal extremists, not India. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has sent troops to fight al-Qaida and Taliban sanctuaries in tribal areas. But U.S. officials suspect that elements of the Pakistani army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) see some militant groups as a hedge they can use against India in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

Fighting insurgents

And U.S. officials worry that the training Pakistan’s military needs to fight insurgents is different from the training required to fight a ground war against India. Pakistan’s top brass, on the other hand, resists any doctrinal shift.

One indication of the trust gap was apparent when President Obama’s special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, was asked recently on the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” whether Pakistan’s security forces were committed to rooting out terrorists. He replied bluntly: “I’ve rarely seen in my years in Washington an issue which is so hotly disputed internally by experts and intelligence officials.”

Yet the Obama administration knows that the U.S.-Pakistani relationship is too important to let the trust gap widen. So there have been some interesting recent developments aimed at narrowing the divide.

Mullen makes clear that he recognizes that Pakistani military officers also have grounds for mistrusting Americans. The cutoff of U.S. military aid in 1990 led to a whole generation of Pakistani military officers who have had no contact with Americans, and who suspect American motives.

To counter those suspicions, Mullen has made numerous visits to Pakistan to confer with top military officials, as has Gen. David Petraeus, now head of Central Command. Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the head of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, conferred with U.S. officials in Washington for three days last week.

Similarly, Holbrooke invited the defense and foreign ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan to Washington to give them input into Obama’s strategic review of the “Afpak” issue. (Such meetings now will be held regularly.)

Each side had plenty of complaints last week. U.S. officials are nervous about a Pakistani deal with “moderate” Islamists to allow Sharia law in the valley of Swat; they see the deal as a sign of the Pakistani army’s inability to curb hard-line insurgents.

Predator drone strikes

The Pakistanis are nervous about U.S. Predator drone strikes against al-Qaida and Taliban targets, which cause collateral damage and adversely affect public opinion. And they complain that the United States isn’t providing the equipment they need.

Yet there are some promising signs that, slowly, change is under way.

For one thing, the Pakistani army has agreed to accept more U.S. trainers (even while insisting that its troops have adequate skills). Now 70 U.S. military advisers are working in Pakistan to train Pakistani army and paramilitary forces to fight insurgents. Pakistan wants to double the number of U.S. advisers. And it may also send more officers to the United States for special training in order to avoid controversy at home. Those Pakistanis can in turn train others.

And yet, as Mullen points out, trust cannot be rebuilt quickly. Given the pressure that al-Qaida and the Taliban are putting on Pakistan’s institutions, the question is whether it can be rebuilt in time.

X Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.