With friends like Pakistan, the U.S. doesn’t need enemies

Pakistan is helping insurgents. Could that be seen as an act of war?

The United States has never directly attacked Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), despite the ISI’s long-standing ties to Islamist militias and terrorist groups opposed to the U.S. and its allies. Yet Pakistani spies occasionally still die from American bombs.

In 1998, the Clinton administration launched cruise missiles at jihadist training camps in Afghanistan in retaliation for al-Qaeda’s bombing of two American embassies in East Africa. The missiles missed Osama bin Laden but killed a team of ISI agents training militants at the camps.

In November 2001, as many as 1,000 ISI agents and Pakistani soldiers from the Frontier Corps found themselves trapped in the Afghan city of Kunduz—along with their Taliban allies and members of al-Qaeda and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The Pakistanis had been ordered to leave Afghanistan after 9/11 and had had two months to do so, but they decided to stay and fight with the Taliban instead. The Pakistanis might have reasonably expected to share the fate of their compatriots who died as collateral damage in the American cruise missile attacks three years earlier. Instead, Pakistan asked for and received U.S. permission to send rescue planes. Along with the airlifted ISI agents and Pakistani soldiers were Taliban commanders and international jihadists, including al-Qaeda.

And earlier this year, the Pakistani government loudly condemned an American drone attack on a market in the village of Datta Khel, in North Waziristan. The Pakistanis said innocent tribal elders had been killed. An American official offered New Yorker reporter Dexter Filkins another explanation: “It turns out there were some ISI guys who were there with the insurgent leaders. We killed them, too.”

What all this history means is that when Admiral Mike Mullen, who retired last month as America’s top military officer, accused the ISI of backing insurgents who attacked the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, his comments were surprising more for their candour than content.

And the Pakistanis have leverage. They could shut down NATO supply routes through Pakistan to Afghanistan. And they may shift away from America and still closer toward the Chinese. “They will probably move in a different direction strategically. Relations with the Americans will plummet. And over the long run it will cause them to be even more firm in their belief that they need to back Afghan groups from Pakistani soil,” says Jones. “I’m not saying any of this says don’t take action in Baluchistan. You just have to think carefully about what they’re going to shut down.”

Pakistan’s greatest leverage may be its fragility, says Cohen. “Mullen and others can imagine what a failed Pakistan would look like: a nuclear weapons state with the capability of producing terrorists roaming around the world. People are afraid of that. Pakistan is too nuclear to fail. And nobody wants to see Pakistan fail. And that’s a great asset for Pakistan. Pakistan can threaten to fail.”

This means that the United States, when confronted with a supposed friend whose spies nurture and protect those killing its soldiers, has limited and unpalatable options. “There are no good policies and no good outcomes,” says Cohen. “At least we could face them honestly.”