News
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Trying to win Pakistani trust, one flight at a time* US army brigadier rejects notion US aid relief about boosting America’s approval rating
SWAT: Floodwaters have mostly receded from the Swat Valley, leaving behind a vast swath of silt in the remains of houses, roads, and bridges.
Above it, there is the incongruous sight of lumbering US Army Chinook helicopters, like twin-rotored flying trucks, ferrying refugees in one direction, and cement, rice and other relief supplies in the other.
Aboard the flight is US Army Brigadier Michael Nagata, second in command of the US military mission to Pakistan. “I tell my people, we are ruthlessly focused on being here for the people of Pakistan,” said Nagata. He had rejected any notion that US aid relief had been about boosting US approval rating in Pakistan, which is somewhere in the 17 percent range.
The Chinooks – together with a fleet of smaller Black Hawks – could well be a visual symbol for the almost schizophrenic military and diplomatic relationship between the US and Pakistan. Here, US pilots work closely and quietly with the Pakistan Army on flood relief, in what is almost a model for cooperating with a host country instead of putting US boots on the ground, at great cost in money and lives. Yet in recent weeks, US pilots in armed helicopters have also strayed or fired into Pakistan’s tribal territories, killing three Pakistani border guards while pursuing terrorists. Pakistan shut its Torkham border crossing to US truck shipments to Afghanistan for almost two weeks in retaliation, before opening it again.
However, throughout that tense period, the flood relief mission continued. Nagata flies every other day, a quiet presence listening on a headset to the US pilots talking with their Pakistani co-pilot, and surveying the choreography of loading and unloading at each stop. He manages the US part of the operation from the top-secret Ghazi Air Base.
That daily cooperation helped keep lines of communication open during the border controversy. Despite some harsh rhetoric aimed at the US in public, Pakistani officials said they did not consider suspending military or intelligence cooperation.
The root causes of the conflict remain, however – the tension between what the US wants Pakistan to do and Pakistan’s reluctance to do it. The White House had pressed Pakistan to put more resources into fighting terrorist groups based in Pakistan that are attacking US and Afghan troops next door – including the violent Haqqani tribe.
Pakistani officials said they had around 30,000 troops in North Waziristan, but they insisted that a full campaign must wait until around 70,000 troops, now devoted to flood relief could join the fight.
But US officials are known to consider Pakistan’s efforts lacking. That criticism echoed a recent White House report to congress, which gave Pakistan mediocre marks for its terrorist crackdown.
A US official in Washington said Pakistan’s refusal to attack the Haqqanis is “proof the Pakistanis are playing the long game in Afghanistan” by planning to use the Haqqani tribe as a hedge against the weak Afghan government.
It is tensions like these that Nagata and his boss, Vice Admiral Michael LeFever, had spent nearly two years trying to diffuse, at least on the ground.
The American officers in Pakistan are not only fighting current history, but also the legacy of a roughly 12-year hiatus in Pakistani-US military relations, due to the US Congress’s Pressler Amendment.
The act banned most US military and economic aid to Pakistan as punishment over its nuclear weapons programme. Senior US officers speak of a “lost generation” of Pakistani officers they are trying to get to know – officers who would have come to the US through educational exchange programmes, or would have gotten to know American officers visiting Pakistan to train local forces. “I myself was a casualty of the Pressler Amendment,” says General Athar Abbas, the Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations. He was supposed to go to Ft Leavenworth, in Kansas, but went to a Malaysian military academy instead.
Before the recent controversy over airstrikes, LeFever said the overall relationship had been on an upswing. The US had been trying to get out of a “transactional relationship” where it would only offer something when it wanted something, LeFever said.
Part of the US outreach included spending up to $5 million this year to take Pakistani military officers to the states, or bring US military trainers to Pakistan, to share skills and forge relationships. LeFever said between 60 to 120 US special operations trainers – from US Army Green Berets to Navy SEALs to Marine Special Operations units – work with groups such as the Frontier Corps and its elite Special Service Group on everything from how to use night vision goggles to sniper training.
The US military shares intelligence with Pakistani security forces, from US drone feeds to satellite surveillance, via intelligence “fusion” centres in Peshawar, Quetta and Landikotal.
The US had also been helping the Pakistanis build their own high-tech forensic lab to analyse improvised explosive devices that are increasingly used against troops.
Pakistani military and intelligence officials praise US help on the ground, but say much of the goodwill is negated by the steady drumbeat of comments from US officials in Washington, threatening unilateral action if Pakistan does not pick up the anti-terrorist pace.
As one Pakistani officer put it – we will do a lot for you, if you do not make us look bad and you do not constantly remind us that you have the upper hand. ap
Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk