Pakistan - America Relations

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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Re: Pakistan - America Relations

Personally I dont think that Pak Army will break their relations with America, what ever they are trying to do is for public consumption, first it used to be the government now the army is also doing the same, any ways interesting article!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/world/asia/13pakistan.html?_r=1&hp

Pakistan Army Chief Balks at U.S. Demands to Cooperate
By JANE PERLEZ

**Published: May 12, 2011 **

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Despite mounting pressure from the United States since the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, seems unlikely to respond to American demands to root out other militant leaders, according to people who have met with him in the last 10 days.

**While the general does not want to abandon the alliance completely, he is more likely to pursue a strategy of decreasing Pakistan’s reliance on the United States, and continuing to offer just enough cooperation to keep the billions of dollars in American aid flowing, said a confidant of the general who has spoken with him recently. **

**Such a response is certain to test American officials, who are more mistrustful of Pakistan than ever. **

Emboldened by the May 2 raid that killed Bin Laden in Pakistan, American officials say they now have greater leverage to force Pakistani cooperation in hunting down Taliban and Qaeda leaders so the United States can end the war in Afghanistan.

The United States will now push harder than ever for General Kayani to break relations with other militant leaders who American officials believe are hiding in Pakistan, with the support of the military and intelligence service, a senior American official said.

These leaders include Mullah Muhammad Omar, the spiritual leader of the Afghan Taliban; the allied militant network of Sirajuddin Haqqani; and Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that the United States holds responsible for the terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, in 2008, the American official said.

**Pakistani officials, meanwhile, are anxiously waiting to see if any new intelligence about Al Qaeda](Times Topics - The New York Times) in Pakistan spills from the American raid that could be used to exert more pressure on them, and what form that pressure might take. **

**But those who have spoken with General Kayani recently said that demands to break with top militant leaders were likely to be too much for the military chief, who is scheduled to address an unusual, closed-door joint session of Parliament on Friday to salvage his reputation and explain the military’s lapses surrounding the American raid. **

The American wish list is tantamount to an overnight transformation of Pakistan’s long held strategic posture that calls for using the militant groups as proxies against Pakistan’s neighbors, they said. It comes as General Kayani faces mounting anti-American pressure from hard-line generals in his top command, two of the people who met with him said.

**Many in the lower ranks of the military have greater sympathy for the militant groups than for the United States. **

**To take out the leadership of these groups — longtime assets of the Pakistani Army and intelligence services — would result in such a severe backlash from the militants that a “civil war” in Pakistan would result, said a former senior Pakistani official who was consulted by General Kayani in the aftermath of the Bin Laden raid. **

The general, who has been courted for nearly three years by the United States’ most senior military officers in an effort to persuade him to launch an attack against the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, was even more unlikely to do so now, the Pakistani said.

While increasingly frustrated with Pakistan, American officials would also like to avoid a complete rupture of relations with a nuclear-armed state that is essential to ending the war in neighboring Afghanistan.

With the United States eager to wind down in Afghanistan, Washington needs Pakistan more than ever, a factor that would play into the general’s next moves, said Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi, a former director general of Pakistan’s chief spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, who met with General Kayani recently.

“Without Pakistani support, the United States cannot win the battle in Afghanistan,” he said. “Now the Americans are saying, please bring the Taliban to the table.”

The army chief was described as angered that the Obama administration failed to trust him enough to tell him before the raid, asserting that in keeping him in the dark the United States had alienated Pakistan’s best friend, General Qazi said.

**General Kayani cannot ignore the sentiment of his soldiers, said Riaz Khokhar, a former ambassador to the United States, who met with General Kayani. **
**“There is a feeling in the rank and file of the army from A to Z that the United States is a most untrustworthy ally,” Mr. Khokhar said. **

**“We don’t want to be an enemy of the United States, but the experience of friendship with the United States has not been a pleasant experience, so we have to find a middle road,” he said. **

**General Qazi said hard questions were being asked about whether the American financial support to the Pakistani military was “worth the lives we have lost” in fighting Islamic militants. **

Since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has granted more than $20 billion in military and development assistance, an amount that does not include covert aid, according to K. Alan Kronstadt , the South Asian Affairs specialist at the Congressional Research Service.

Cutting ties would be extremely costly for the Pakistani military, said Shuja Nawaz , head of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington.
Anti-Pakistan sentiment was hardening in Congress as Pakistan waited for approval of payment arrears for its costs in fighting insurgents, Mr. Nawaz said.
In the short term, however, General Kayani seemed to be more concerned with the blow to the morale of his troops than with further damage to the already eroded relationship with the United States, according to the accounts from those who met him.

**General Kayani visited six army garrisons this week in an effort to dispel doubts about the army and his leadership. **

During his appearances, according to soldiers interviewed afterward, General Kayani acknowledged an intelligence failure in not knowing that Bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad. But he added that this did not mean that Pakistan was to be “blamed for everything.”

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Re: Pakistan - America Relations

another drone attack today (second in two days), i think the army is waiting for a mutiny in the army or the people of fata revolting against Pakistan then they will wake up from their slumber...

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http://www.dawn.com/2011/05/14/be-a-‘real’-ally-in-war-against-terror-kerry-tells-pakistan.html

Be a ‘real’ ally in war against terror, Kerry tells Pakistan

**MAZAR-I-SHARIF: The United States wants Pakistan to be a “real” ally in combating militants inside its borders but serious questions remain in relations between the countries after the killing of Osama bin Laden, US Senator John Kerry said on Saturday. **

Kerry, who is visiting Afghanistan ahead of a trip to Pakistan to discuss strained bilateral ties, said Islamabad needed to improve efforts in fighting extremism, but the death of bin Laden provided a critical chance to move forward.

“We obviously want a Pakistan that is prepared to respect the interests of Afghanistan, and to be a real ally in our efforts to combat terrorism,” Kerry told reporters in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

“We believe there are things that can be done better. And there are serious questions that need to be answered in that relationship. But we’re not trying to find a way to break the relationship apart, we’re trying to find a way to build it.”

US lawmakers have questioned whether Pakistan is serious about fighting militants in the region after bin Laden was found living in Pakistan. Some have even called for a suspension in US aid to Islamabad.
Pakistan has rejected allegations the killing showed incompetence or complicity in hiding the al Qaeda leader.

Kerry, a Democrat close to the Obama administration and who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said last week it was “extraordinarily hard to believe” bin Laden could have survived in Pakistan for so long without any knowledge.

Current and former US officials, in private, say the United States repeatedly told Pakistan that Washington would send American forces into that country if it had evidence bin Laden was hiding there.

Asked if the United States would conduct a similar raid inside Pakistan to kill Mullah Omar, the reclusive leader of the Afghan Taliban, if they knew his whereabouts, Kerry said Washington would consider all its options.

“The United States government will always reserve all of its options to be able to protect our people. Other plots have been conducted and organised and planned out of Pakistan. It is really critical that we talk with the Pakistanis as friends,” Kerry said.

US officials have long maintained Omar fled to Pakistan after the Taliban government was overthrown in late 2001 by US-backed Afghan forces and is still in hiding there.

Islamabad has denied reports he is in Pakistan.

Kerry said Pakistan itself was a victim of extremism and faced its own tough decisions but that the killing of bin Laden provided a new opportunity.

“Sometimes those choices can be very difficult for people to make because of the pressures that they’re under and the violence that occurs,” he said.

“We respect and understand that, but this is the time, this is a critical time to find a better way forward and we hope that we’re going to be able to do that.”

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-administration-remains-divided-over-future-of-us-pakistan-relationship/2011/05/13/AFOJcj3G_story_2.html

Obama administration is divided over future of U.S.-Pakistan relationship

By Karen DeYoung and Karin Brulliard, Sunday, May 15, 8:44 AM

Two weeks after the death of Osama bin Laden, the Obama administration remains uncertain and divided over the future of its relationship with Pakistan, according to senior U.S. officials.

The discovery of the al-Qaeda leader in a city near Pakistan’s capital has pushed many in the administration beyond any willingness to tolerate Pakistan’s ambiguous connections with extremist groups. After years of ineffective American warnings, many U.S. officials are concluding that a change in policy is long overdue.

Those warnings are detailed in a series of contemporaneous written accounts, obtained by The Washington Post, chronicling three years of often-contentious meetings involving top officials of both countries. Confirmed by U.S. and Pakistani participants, the exchanges portray a circular debate in which the United States repeatedly said it had irrefutable proof of ties between Pakistani military and intelligence officials and the Afghan Taliban and other insurgents, and warned that Pakistani refusal to act against them would exact a cost.

U.S. officials have said they have no evidence top Pakistani military or civilian leaders were aware of bin Laden’s location or authorized any official support, but his residence within shouting distance of Pakistani military installations has brought relations to a crisis point.

Some officials, particularly in the White House, have advocated strong reprisals, especially if Pakistan continues to refuse access to materials left behind by U.S. commandos who scooped up all the paper and computer drives they could carry during their deadly 40-minute raid on bin Laden’s compound.

“You can’t continue business as usual,” said one of several senior administration officials who discussed the sensitive issue only on the condition of anonymity. “You have to somehow convey to the Pakistanis that they’ve arrived at a big choice.”

“People who were prepared to listen to [Pakistan’s] story for a long time are no longer prepared to listen,” the official said.

But few officials are eager to contemplate the alternatives if Pakistan makes the wrong choice. No one inside the administration, the official said, “wants to make a fast, wrong decision.”

Every available option — from limiting U.S. aid and official contacts, to unleashing more unilateral ground attacks against terrorist targets — jeopardizes existing Pakistani help, however undependable, in keeping U.S. enemies at bay. Military success and an eventual negotiated settlement of the Afghanistan war are seen as virtually impossible without some level of Pakistani buy-in.

“The fact of the matter is that we’ve been able to kill more terrorists on Pakistani soil than just about anyplace else,” President Obama said last week on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “We could not have done that without Pakistani cooperation.”

For now, the administration is in limbo, awaiting Pakistan’s response to immediate questions about bin Laden and hoping it will engage in a more solid counterterrorism partnership in the future.

That outcome seems increasingly in doubt. In Pakistan, officials’ pledges following the bin Laden raid that Pakistan would never let its territory be used for terrorist strikes against another country have turned to heated accusations of betrayal by the United States.

There have been few high-level contacts with the Pakistanis since the raid. Telephone calls last weekend to Pakistan’s military chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani by White House national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were said to be inconclusive at best.

Top administration national security officials have held several meetings on Pakistan in the White House Situation Room, and more are scheduled this week. No decision has been made on whether Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will make a previously scheduled trip to Pakistan later this month.

“This is supposed to be a continuation of the strategic dialogue” Clinton started with Pakistan last year, said a senior Pakistani official who expressed rising disappointment that the civilian government has echoed the bellicose military response.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who has served as go-between for the administration during previous clashes with Islamabad, traveled to the region late last week with a message of urgency from the White House and warnings about the unsettled “mood of Congress,” one U.S. official said.

While U.S. lawmakers call for reconsideration of $3.2 billion in annual U.S. aid, public outrage has grown in Pakistan as more details have emerged about the raid. Months in the planning, CIA Director Leon Panetta said it was conducted without informing Pakistan for fear of leaks or interference. Humiliated and angry, Pakistan’s powerful army and intelligence service have warned that they will “resist” any future such operations and reexamine the broad range of bilateral cooperation.

In an emotional, closed-door session of Parliament on Friday, intelligence chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, head of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), offered to resign after apologizing for what he said had been an intelligence lapse. It was unclear whether he was referring to the failure to intercept U.S. raiders or the discovery of bin Laden’s years-long presence near a military garrison in the city of Abbottabad.

**According to U.S. and Pakistani officials, talk has resurfaced in Islamabad of ejecting up to 80 percent of the approximately 120 U.S. Special Forces troops engaged in training Pakistan’s Frontier Corps soldiers. The issue was first raised earlier this year after a CIA employee with a U.S. diplomatic passport shot and killed two Pakistanis in Lahore.

ISI control over visas issued to U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials, eased as a gesture of cooperation last year, has been reimposed, officials said.**

**The feeling among senior military officers is that “these Americans have let us down, they’re after us,” and involvement with the United States has “ruined our army and . . . our country,” one retired senior officer said. The military view, he said, is that “We were a very noble country before we got involved in this stupid, so-called Bush war” in Afghanistan.
**
According to the internal accounts, **the Americans tried time and time again to convince the Pakistanis to change what former CIA official Bruce Riedel, who authored Obama’s first Afghanistan-Pakistan policy review in early 2009, called their “strategic calculus” that ties with the Pakistan-based Afghan Taliban were the only way they could maintain their strategic influence in neighboring Afghanistan.

But the accounts show consistent Pakistani suspicion that the Americans would ultimately betray them in Afghanistan, leaving Pakistan surrounded by an unfriendly government on their western border, allied with India, their historical adversary to the east.**

A July 29, 2008, Washington meeting between Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani and his national security adviser, Mahmud Ali Durrani, and then-CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, his deputy Stephen R. Kappes and Anne W. Patterson, then the U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, illustrates the wariness on both sides.

The previous day, a U.S. drone-launched missile had killed Abu Khabab al-Masri, described as al-Qaeda’s chief bomb-maker and chemical weapons expert, in South Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal region along the Afghanistan border.

Hayden apologized for collateral damage (news reports said three civilians were killed), and the strike had occurred during Gillani’s visit to the United States. The CIA director noted that the ISI had not contributed any targeting information.

**Both sides referred to repeated Pakistani requests that the United States place Baitullah Mehsud, a leader of Pakistan’s increasingly lethal domestic insurgency, at the top of the hit list.

Kappes agreed that Mehsud was a legitimate target, but said that Sirajuddin Haqqani, a North Waziristan-based Afghan whose insurgent network regularly attacked U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, was a far higher U.S. priority.**

Pakistan’s insistence that it had no intelligence on Haqqani’s whereabouts was disingenuous, Patterson said during the meeting. The ISI was in “constant touch” with him, and the madrassa where he conducted business was clearly visible from the Pakistani army garrison in North Waziristan. (Mehsud was killed in an August 2009 drone strike. Haqqani remains high on the U.S. target list.)

In a series of December 2008 meetings following the terrorist attack in Mumbai that left nearly 200 people dead — including six Americans — top Bush administration officials told Pakistan there was “irrefutable” intelligence proof that the Pakistani group Lashkar-i-Taiba was responsible.

A written communication delivered to Pakistan said that “it is clear to us that [Lashkar-i-Taiba] is responsible . . . we know that it continues to receive support, including operational support, from the Pakistani military intelligence service.”

As the Obama administration continued efforts to persuade Pakistan — while escalating the number of drone strikes — Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, as well as Durrani and other officials, were repeatedly told that the United States would reach a breaking point.

In a November 2009 letter to President Asif Ali Zardari, Obama offered a new level of partnership — later buttressed with increased military and economic assistance. But he warned that the existing state of affairs, with Pakistan seeing insurgent groups as proxies for influence in Afghanistan, could not continue.

The following May, a Pakistani immigrant, the son of an army officer, allegedly tried to explode a car bomb in New York’s Times Square. Subsequent investigations traced his training to Pakistani insurgent camps.

In October, Obama dropped in on a high-level White House meeting between his national security team and Kayani. Referring to the Times Square bombing attempt, Obama warned that if a successful attack in this country were traced to Pakistan, his hands would be tied in terms of the future U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

In an interview last week in Pakistan, Durrani said he was not surprised at the unilateral U.S. attack on bin Laden. “The Americans had made it clear long ago that if they find a high-value target of this level, wherever in the world [they would] go after it,” he said.

What surprised him, Durrani said, was that “it made me look stupid” after years of talks with U.S. officials in which “I kept on trumpeting at the top of my voice, ‘Osama bin Laden cannot be here.’ ”

Brulliard reported from Islamabad.

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Pakistan gives visas to 67 CIA Agents

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Terrorist Sanctuaries in Pakistan will not be tolerated - Obama

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Re: Pakistan - America Relations

Pakistan relation with America is the main reason between all the troubles we are having today even people who do bomb blast are using the same reason to kill innocent people we should end cooperation with America

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And who is going to pay Pakistans bills, u?

And when terrorists hiding in pak or afganistan decide to attack the US again, your going to save pakistan from becoming a global pariah?

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Re: Pakistan - America Relations

We can get help from Muslim Countries and sir most of the aid is given as money but in the form of Equipment for the Armed very few money is spent on the welfare of the people so even now this aid has not done anything good to Pakistan and we have not got more than 20 billion dollars in past 10 years but has lost 70 Billion Dollars in the so called war on terror

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kick the shaitan americans out! who making easy for these kuffar to kill our people the zardaris and nawaz sharifs of the world may allah(swt) curse these agents!

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We should kick Americans out as well as their agents in our country

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Along with them we should also kick the terrorist who are killing innocent muslims in the name of religion. They are bigger shaitans than those we are blaming. They are the biggest nasoor and should be cleansed from our society.

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And what about these terrorist. How easy to dismiss that they kill because of this and that. No cause allows you to kill and murder innocent people and these animals do it with pleasure. May they burn in hell for bringing misery to innocent people. To top it all they use religion to justify their disgusting acts. Lanta hai inn per.

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Sir they are doing this because your government has become slave of the America so first end the reason for these people than talk as many of them as you can and stop cooperation with USA do something and bigger nasoor are the secular people who always try their best to malign Islam

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I am sorry and really sad that you are condoning the killing of innocent people by these animals. Nothing but nothing justifies their acts of voilence. Go and fight the Americans if they want to. Hitting soft targets in Pakistan is the cowards way out and that is what they are good at. Spreading terror and frightening the poor innocent people. Do you condemn this sensless voilence or not. What has the common person going about his daily work routine got to do with the policy ofthe government and murdering them is not going to change anything. Would you still be supporting them if one of your own family member falls victim to these animals (God forbid)

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Where I said killing innocents is correct sir but remember innocents are also being killed in tribal areas stop those killings than say why are innocents being killed sir stop their massacre sir

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A good read

[The Road From Abbottabad Leads to Lame Analysis | HuffPost The World Post

The Road From Abbottabad Leads to Lame Analysis](The Road From Abbottabad Leads to Lame Analysis | HuffPost The World Post)

Enough fresh ink has been spilled about the harrowing straits through which the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is passing. While cooler heads such as Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are seeking to explain to audiences at home and abroad the importance of the relationship, the genuine challenges that inhere in the bilateral partnership, and imagine a workable path forward; many other commentators have taken the recent events in Pakistan as an opportunity to stoke further anger and mistrust between the wary governments and their peoples.

While the Pakistani press is rife with caricatures of U.S. policy, distorted versions of history, and outright falsehoods, American journalists are capable of equal chicanery. Mr. Christopher Hitchens’ latest offering in Vanity Fair, “From Abbottabad to Worse,” is an appalling example of American commentary that undermines the efforts of saner voices in this critical debate.

His piece commences with a dramatic reference to rape – not as a crime but as a punishment – and honor killing. The former refers to the rare, horrific instances where women and girls are subject to sexual assault by, in the words of the author, “tribal and religious kangaroo courts.” The latter refers to killing women (and sometimes men) in the name of honor. In this paragraph a complex polity of 180 million – most of whom condemn both practices – are essentialized as a barbarous people who embrace the notion that “moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.” This literary amuse bouche foretells the absurdities, fallacies and dubious assertions in the rest of his troubling account of Pakistan’s malaise.

He next characterizes President Asif Zardari as a man who "cringes daily in front of the forces who[sic] openly murdered his wife… A man so lacking in pride – indeed lacking in manliness – will seek desperately to compensate in other ways. Swelling his puny chest even more, he promises to resist the mighty United States, and to defend Pakistan’s holy “sovereignty.” This offensive passage reveals more about the psychology of the author than it does about that of President Zardari.

What are these “forces” that killed Benazir Bhutto? Mr. Hitchens wants the bravado of casting aspersions upon the Pakistani government. After all, only the government would have the authority to “contemptuously” order the crime scene to be “cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation.” (Regrettably, all crime scenes – big and small --are handled in this way in Pakistan.) However, there is no evidence that the government of Pakistan – then under President Musharraf – ordered her death. However, Mr. Hitchens here and throughout takes refuge in the pusillanimity of the passive tense by which he can intimate all the outlandish claims he wants without the responsibility of employing the active tense which requires him to name the agent of the action suggested. In fact, the U.S. government has consistently claimed that elements of the Pakistan Taliban ordered her death.

President Musharraf suffered considerably from her murder. Those with even a 4-year recollection of politics in Pakistan would remember that the United States had brokered a bizarre condominium by which Pervez Musharraf would remain president while Ms. Bhutto would become the Prime Minister following elections which were scheduled for late 2007. Musharraf had become politically isolated following a series of horrendous missteps and abuses of power. However, Washington was unwilling to let Musharraf slink into oblivion. So it devised a compact by which Mr. Musharraf could be laundered through the electoral legitimacy of Ms. Bhutto. With her demise – and even public suspicion that he or his government had her killed – Mr. Musharraf’s political life in Pakistan was finished. He now lives in London with various legal woes awaiting him in Pakistan.

**Mr. Hitchens’ answer to “Why do they hate us” is no less preposterous and misleading. He contends that Pakistanis dislike the United States because they “owe us, and are dependent upon us.” This is simply a mathematical canard. According to the USAID Green Book, in 2009, total economic assistance to Pakistan came to $1.35 billion and military assistance totaled $0.429 (for a grand sum of $1.78 billion). In 2009, Pakistan’s gross domestic product was $162 billion. Calling this is a dependency is an obvious stretch. (In fairness, I too have been guilty of lapsing into this idiom until I crunched the numbers.)

By way of contrast, the United States gave Israel $2.43 billion in total economic and military assistance in 2009. Israel’s GDP was $204 billion. As a percentage of GDP, U.S. total assistance to both countries are nearly the same (around 1 percent). Between 1962 and 2009, total economic and military assistance to Israel totaled $178 billion in constant 2009 U.S. dollars. In the same period, U.S. military and economic aid to Pakistan comes to $37 billion in constant 2009 U.S. dollars. But would Mr. Hitchens describe Israel as being dependent upon Washington? **By his own argumentation, he would have to answer in the affirmative.

However, from the optic of the American legislator and citizen alike, U.S. assistance to Pakistan appears to be a relatively large sum that should prompt positive feelings for America, or at least dampen raging anti-U.S. sentiment, among Pakistanis. And Americans do expect their funds will be used to a good end rather than be gobbled up by corruption in the host nation and by their own national contractors who are often first-tier executors of U.S. projects. Americans also expect their economic assistance to buy them some sway with Pakistan due to other larger economic factors such as the U.S. role in the International Monetary Fund and other multi-lateral actors which has helped Pakistan considerably. Other forms of assistance such as debt relief are also important beyond the sum it totals. And the United States has been the biggest investor in Pakistan’s human development, trumping Saudi Arabia and China long embraced as Pakistan’s enduring friends. Mr. Hitchens characterization of Pakistan as “our goddam [sic] lapdog” is out of line.

However, the circus of inaccuracy is far from over. Mr. Hitchens then proceeds to announce that “Everybody knew that al-Qaeda forces were being sheltered in the Pakistani frontier town of Quetta…” Mr. Hitchens of course takes refuge again in the passive voice to avoid saying precisely who sheltered al Qaeda. It would appear that the author has confused al Qaeda (an international terrorist organization) and the Afghan Taliban (a regressive Pashtun-dominated Deobandi insurgent organization presently focused upon the international occupation of Afghanistan). The former has not been harbored by the Pakistani state while the latter has been a long-standing client.

**He continues to distort the entire record of Pakistan when it comes to al Qaeda. Pakistan has been a critical partner in capturing al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan. In fact, had it not been for this baseline cooperation, the United States would not have even been a position to kill bin Laden in the first instance.

There is at least one practical reason for Pakistan’s cooperation: al Qaeda has targeted Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership for years. In 2009, al Zawahiri denounced Pakistan’s constitution as un-Islamic.** Al Qaeda’s sectarian allies such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipha-e-Sahaba-e-Pakistan has killed or maimed tens of thousands of Pakistanis since 2004. Al Qaeda is not an asset for Pakistan as the author suggests.

Pakistan’s record on al Qaeda has been evident and positive even while Pakistan sustains ties with the Afghan Taliban and groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba. While these groups are foes of the United States, neither the Afghan Taliban nor Lashkar-e-Taiba has targeted Pakistan nor have they embraced the Pakistani Taliban. This has been an invariant truth since the onset of the Global War on Terror in 2001. The United States and Pakistan have an ever-more restricted overlap of foes which makes future cooperation seem increasingly unproductive if not counterproductive to both nations’ aims.

**Hitchens next describes his own shock that “Osama bin Laden himself would be given a villa in a Pakistani garrison town on Islamabad’s periphery.” Dodging again behind the passive tense, he offers no evidence for this reckless and dangerous assertion. In contrast to Mr. Hitchens, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said that he had seen evidence that suggested Pakistan’s senior officials were unaware of bin Laden’s whereabouts. Hitchens’ claim that the state sheltered Pakistan is feckless journalism that encourages further ignorant speculation among publics who have no real understanding of the other and their governments.

And, for the record, Abbottabad is not on the periphery of Islamabad unless one redefines the word periphery. The word is defined as “the edge or outskirts, as of a city or urban area.” While the distance between the two cities, as a crow would fly, is about 67 miles, because Abbottabad is “hill station” resort town, the road is windy, indirect and covers an altitude climb of about 2,500 feet. Periphery implies a jaunt to the suburbs. But the drive is about 2.5 hours depending upon conditions and the quality of your car. Describing Abbottabad as in the periphery of Islamabad is either geographically obtuse or a deliberate attempt to make it sound as if bin Laden was pacing back and forth in a suburb of the nation’s capital. Someone should introduce Mr. Hitchens to Google Earth and if not him, then Vanity Fair’s fact checker --should there be one.**

**Hitchens is correct in noting that Pakistanis of all strata are deeply outraged that U.S. Navy SEALS came into Abbottabad – a garrison-town – to catch bin Laden without hindrance and with impunity. However, his outrage at Pakistani outrage is misplaced. Of course, Pakistanis should feel so violated because they were. As an American, I support the raid that eliminated this terrorist. However, from the optic of many Pakistanis, they first had to contend with the notion that bin Laden was in their country and second that the United States stormed their airspace, conducted a firefight for 40 minutes in a garrison town and then escaped with its dead quarry all before the Pakistanis could even scramble their F-16s.

Pakistanis themselves began wondering whether their military could protect them from India and whether the United States could act with equal ease to eliminate their nuclear program. Needless to say, all of this came on the back of years of drone attacks against terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas. While the facts about the drone program in Pakistan are grotesquely distorted and obscured by Pakistani and American officials, ultimately perception matters more than reality. Pakistanis, especially beyond FATA, loathe them as weekly assaults upon their nation’s sovereignty. The bin Laden raid was just the latest and most brazen of assaults on the country and demonstrated the incapacity or will of the military or intelligence agencies to stop the United States. Who would not be demoralized and outraged by these events?**

Pakistanis – more than Mr. Hitchens – understand the limits of their country’s ability to extend rule of law throughout the land, to protect them from the ravages of terrorists and proxies gone wild alike, to grow the economy fast enough to accommodate Pakistan’s burgeoning population, among other challenges.

**Similarly the American hysteria over Pakistan’s capture and detention of Pakistanis who collaborated on the raid – while understandable – is unfair. Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, knows full well that the CIA is operating against the organization perhaps as much if not more than it cooperates with it. The Pakistanis who assisted the raid were traitors to Pakistan by law because they aided and abetted a foreign intelligence agency. This is what domestic law enforcement and intelligence agencies do: ferret out and capture traitors. The United States does the same thing when their citizens help foreign spy organizations. **Americans and Pakistanis alike hope that Pakistan will show equal diligence to determining who knew about bin Laden and who was involved in giving the mass murderer succor. Time will tell if this is the case.

Navigating this strained relationship under the pressures of reality is hard enough. However, accounts like that of Hitchens and others here and in Pakistan, dims the prospects for salvaging a relationship that is extremely important for the United States if not for Pakistan. And one has to wonder if that’s not the very goal of such fact-free musings.

C. Christine Fair is an assistant professor at Georgetown University, Center for Peace and Security Studies and the author of the political cookbook, Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States and Pakistan’s Madrassah Challenge: Militancy and Religious Education in Pakistan. She can be followed on Twitter cchristinefair.

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Re: Pakistan - America Relations

I condemn the killing of innocents anywhere in Pakistan and my heart goes out to everyone of them. However how does killing of an innocent in one part of the country justify the killing of another one in another part. Pakistan has lost nearly 30,000 dead in the last few years and overwhelming of these have been at the hand of these so called Muslims. We have to stop these animals who are a blot of shame on the name of the country and the religion.

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Re: Pakistan - America Relations

Yes, like the Muslim countries your refering to were falling all over themselves to help Pakistan when it nearly went bankrupt in 2008.

Pakistan has to take loans from the IMF. IMF's biggest contributor, and most influential is the US. If Pakistan becomes a pariah state, no one will be willing to lend it any money.

Pakistan is doing this bad now, imagine what it will do when it has no access to international loans.

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Re: Pakistan - America Relations

who are these animals you talk of? you have had cia, US military xe and blackwater all operating in pakistan you had raymond davies caught red handed killing people so who is really doing the bombs and killing of the innocents? is it all muslims killing muslims you can say that even after the experience of what happened in Iraq when we saw the america actions of divide and rule for ourselves?