Pakistan, Then and Now – 4/18/18

[Music] good evening and welcome my name is noah rauch i am the senior vice president for education and public programs here at the 9 11 memorial and museum it's my pleasure to welcome all of you to tonight's program as always i'd like to extend a special thank you and welcome to our museum members and those tuning in to our live web broadcast at nine nanolovememorial.org live tonight we are joined by see christine fair for a conversation examining the tenuous and fraught relationship between the united states and pakistan christine is a provost distinguished associate professor in the peace and securities program in georgetown university's edmond a walsh school of foreign service she was previously a senior political scientist with the rand corporation a political officer with united nations assistance mission to afghanistan a senior researcher at the united states institute of peace center for conflict analysis and prevention as well as a senior fellow at west point's combating terrorism center christine's research focuses on political and military affairs in south asia she has authored co-authored and co-edited several books and is an active contributing writer for the atlantic foreign policy and foreign affairs christine's extensive knowledge of pakistan and the larger region makes her a sought after voice on this topic and we are especially fortunate to have her with us here tonight we'd like to thank christine for sharing her time and insights with us we are also deeply grateful to the david berg foundation for their support of the museum's 2017-2018 public program season please join me in welcoming see christine fair in conversation with executive vice president and deputy director of museum programs clifford shannon thank you noah and welcome everybody it's nice to see you this evening thank you so much professor fair for coming here um thank you for having me great let's be very clear to talk about pakistan in this building it's uh it's it i hate to overuse that word surreal but it really is well let's let's let's you know we have as a country been at war for many years we were uh we were and have been at war in afghanistan and in iraq other places as well but pakistan has not specifically been a field of combat but it looms over so much of what has happened in these recent years and of course going back before 9 11 there is a very long history of intense involvement and then complete estrangement and then back after 9 11. and so describe if you can the contours of this relationship between the united states and pakistan going back to and you have to go back a ways i realized so i'll ask you to not make it you know the lecture that you could otherwise give but um you know what's that what are the ups and downs of this have have they been and where are we now so let me say that perhaps one of the best books on this is written by ambassador hussain akane called magnificent delusions and i think the title pretty much summarizes it for a briefer version i recommend a book called writing the roller coaster written by tarasita and her husband who's now deceased howard schaefer that's a 100 page version of the same story versus a 700 page but in some ways our relationship bilaterally begins in the late 50s pakistan had been soliciting u.s support literally from the time it became independent in 1947 part of the reason is when the british left the subcontinent and divided up the subcontinent into india and pakistan pakistan was really the loser of partition and again i could elaborate upon this for hours but pakistan's entire governance apparatus was shambolic and while the army had no complete units it was the least shambolic of the others and the first thing that pakistan did was it went to war with india and it's a fairly brazen move right because even after partition india still was uh militarily much more um least conventionally superior to pakistan so pakistan began saying things that we we would really kind of laugh at if you were to see it you know in text but they would say things like you know our army could be yours if you just give us the money and they were asking for extraordinary sums of money and you have to remember at this time the united states was very much involved in the reconstruction of europe but they were asking for a sum of money in excess for example of what we're paying out in the marshall plan i mean it the distance between where we were as a country and where pakistan wanted us to be could not have been further and what changed this was actually the korean war when we realized that we have to have our own asia policy that it was no longer adequate to just outsource our policy to the british so we began a series of alignments um with uh the beg dag treaty and then when baghdad um throughout withdrew um it changed names and then we also had cedo which was the southeast asia treaty organization but the pakistanis wanted to be a member of these treaty organizations because they really wanted money and military assistance to rebuild their military and we really wanted them to be a part of a coalition against communism and in some sense this is where our relationship goes wrong but very few people appreciate that we were engaging and arming them and training them so they could become counter insurgents with us but when you read pakistan's military journals at the time they were actually learning from us how to be insurgents so this relationship went under false pretenses until the 1965 war we cut pakistan and india 19. the 1965 return tax on india we cut both countries off it affected pakistan more because it was more dependent upon our systems and pakistan remained cut off um another fabulous book is called the blood telegram by gary bass and he tells the story of how nixon um illegally armed pakistan in that 1971 war which freed bangladesh but apart from those illegal efforts in the nixon administration we didn't have relationship with pakistan really until after the soviet union invaded in fact we had sanctioned pakistan in april of 1979 because of advances in its nuclear program and what was happening in the late 70s pakistan on its own time in its own dime began a jihad policy in afghanistan and you know the united states after the soviets invaded we had to figure out how to undo those sanctions um and it was very difficult to do so we don't get the sanctions undone until reagan is in office and congress uh relieves those sanctions in 1982 and this relationship continues until it doesn't anymore and we reinvoke sanctions that had been previously suspended um and that happens in 1990 and then we are estranged again until 9 11 happens in fact not only are we estranged we are heavily sanctioning pakistan and so what happens after 9 11 is that i think the bush administration uh suffered from the fact that after the cold war had had ended we got rid of all of our south asia analysts and people just didn't understand this country anymore all that expertise was from the government and the intelligence community the state department and so on yeah and i think they misunderstood um what was so important to pakistan and some of the very early assurances that musharraf sought like do not let the northern alliance take kabul we failed to understand we being the government um and that really sowed the seeds for pakistan to very aggressively begin undermining us and so i think it's i think carlotta gaul's book uh the wrong enemy summarizes the situation perfectly well we've been fighting a war in afghanistan but it's really pakistan that's been that's been killing us you you say um pakistan has been undermining us and i'm assuming you're thinking of the more recent times and the campaign um in afghanistan let me ask you to be more specific about what you mean by pakistan undermining the u.s effort in afghanistan so to put a very fine point on it from 2004 if not earlier pakistan began actively re-supporting the taliban so for many people who who are not south asianists and weren't following the ins and outs of this conflict by 2004 we thought we had won afghanistan we thought we had defeated the taliban but all we really did was route them and so we came in through the north with the northern alliance and we pushed them south and they went into pakistan where they along with al qaeda took sanctuary is as well is as well known right let me just interrupt and ask if we can bring up the map of the region the political um i think the map of the region they'll get it um there you go so as we're talking about this you can see afghanistan there at the top center driving them south into pakistan is what the result of the u.s invasion was so i think perhaps a better map will be slide number six okay because this actually so do you see that color in pink that looks like a smear of salmon locks you know i'm sure they use that reference all the time in pakistan as well that's true that wasn't a very uh halal reference but so that's called the federally administered tribal areas and we came down to the north of afghanistan so afghanistan you see that little thumb here we came through the north with the northern alliance and we pushed the taliban and their al-qaeda associates south and they went to that area first which is this this pink area the tribal areas and this is an area where pakistan law doesn't hold but the most important guys didn't stay there and i'm sorry women al qaeda is a sexist organization there are no senior female members in their leadership um and so the the senior leadership didn't stay there it's really hard to run a global terror organization from this backwater tribal area so most of the al qaeda leadership that were caught with pakistan's help by the way and that's an interesting question are in pakistan's major cities but we have thought that we've defeated the taliban and that we have wrapped up end of major military operations but many of the things that that we did really disconcerted president musharraf and we can talk about whether musharraf would have undone the assistance had these things not happened or not so for example the indo-us nuclear deal was something that really infuriated musharraf we know by 2004 the pakistanis are completely involved in re-arming training the taliban launched themselves as an insurgency in 2005. and just like what we saw with the iraq war the u.s and nato forces in afghanistan were very slow to pick up that they were actually confronting an insurgency by 2007 they're still debating this um by 2008 it's really clear what's going on but the problem that we have and no matter what president trump the you know the twitter troll in chief says he confronts the exact same problem that presidents obama and bush faced and this is summarized in a map um i think the best map is if we go to slide four the basic problem is logistics and i don't know if any of you in here have a military logistics background military logistics will trump strategy anytime and if you look at afghanistan it's a landlocked country we have to have what's called g-locks ground lines of communication to stay engaged in afghanistan and if you look at this map and look at the middle map you see afghanistan is the darker green pakistan is the lighter green what we have largely been doing and to the left you'll see the the ground lines of movement that we have been traditionally using so how do you put pressure on the country that's literally taking our money with one hand and giving it to the taliban with the other and let's be really clear our people were not being killed by al qaeda in afghanistan were largely being killed by the taliban which is pakistan's proxy and their allied fighters so i was an opponent of the surge not because i am a you know a tree-hugging you know peacenik but rather because we were losing because of pakistan and the surge made us more dependent upon pakistan now so let me let me just yeah the so the flow of supplies to our troops in afghanistan as things are now runs through pakistan and they have at times threatened to and even slowed down that pipeline so the current situation is that so in 2011 after a series of events including mr bin laden's demise the pakistanis closed down these what's called g-locks and so we began resupplying our presence largely through pakistani airspace they're called the a-locks the airlines of communication we still use pakistani ground routes to resupply the afghans now if you look at this map and this is why i provide this this chaos on the right this was called the northern distribution route this was supposed to be our alternative to pakistan and if you actually go and you were to look at this at this map you'll see how absolutely preposterous this is the northern distribution route was never workable it still is not workable so this means that we are fighting a war in afghanistan we are being undermined by pakistan and yet if the pakistanis close down access to their airspace or their ground space we would not be able to either sustain our presence or sustain our commitment to the afghans let me ask this what is the rationale for the pakistanis to side i understand the financial incentive to maintain relationships with the united states but um what is their incentive for rebuilding the taliban as you describe and maintaining that as a viable organization that is more than viable is actually gaining strength yeah so to understand that you have to look at that second map so there is another route into afghanistan and that's iran right and in fact the indians have been building a port and you see that little dotted line that goes from india to iran that's the port in chabahar and so you see there's this very nice alternative ground route that the indians the iranians have built obama with the jcpoa created an opportunity and the nuclear deal the iran nuclear deal um created an opportunity uh that we could have outsourced some of this logistics to the indians say the indians private sector contractors just as we do pakistani private sector contractors get this stuff into afghanistan because that's what we do with pakistan it's not government suppliers these are private sector contractors and obviously the trump administration doesn't understand that you if you're going to stay in this country in afghanistan and you want to win you have to decide which one of these two countries is less evil from pakistan and by the way i i will say very clearly it's pakistan pakistan is a global menace um iran on the best day aspires to be a nuclear proliferating state sponsor of terror that pakistan is i mean iran is like in the junior leagues compared to pakistan right but to go to your question it's not just about india but a lot of it does derive from india they are afraid of indian encirclement and the fact is india the pakistanis are so if you look at that map the indians are much closer to the iranians than they are pakistan the iranians the afghans and the indians are very close to the indians in fact the afghans can't stand the pakistanis because of the destruction that they on their own have commenced in that country since 1974 and the central asian countries are closer to india so pakistan's worst fears are that um a government that's stable in afghanistan in afghanistan that pakistan has no control over will simply hand over their space to the indians to support that western border with afghanistan which historically the afghans have not made their own lives remotely easier by rejecting that border at different points and times supporting the different insurgencies in pakistan along that border and then there's also evidence at different points in time of the indians working through the afghans supporting those insurgencies so this is really about pakistan feeling surrounded and feeling that the only thing they can count on are these islamists who will be beholden to pakistan now this hasn't worked out right because some of the taliban hate the pakistanis as much as us but that's in in a complicated geographical way why pakistan is so committed to making afghanistan a client you know in a strange way the situation you're describing puts the u.s war in afghanistan as almost a secondary consideration for all the other actors that is to say we want what we want but that doesn't seem to rise to the top of the list for any of the other countries that you've mentioned here so yes and no i mean i think our allies so it's been a long war right so i mean at this point the war can have a driver's license pretty soon it'll be old enough to vote um so at different points in time the neighbors wanted different things so initially iran was very supportive right because in fact they were also supportive of the invasion of iraq because they hated the taliban they hated saddam hussein we did iran an enormously large service and actually iran was very supportive of the afghan effort they were very helpful to the americans at bonn and they got rewarded for this cooperation by being branded part of the axis of evil so over time iran has that time facilitated al-qaeda movements particularly where you see iran sharing a border with afghanistan they've provided ieds you know improvised explosive device apparatus so tactical support to the taliban even though strategically um they're not interested in them india has benefited from our military presence because under our security umbrella it's been able to reestablish its traditional presence in consulates and embassies the chinese have really benefited um you know as a colleague of mine used to say we're going to fight to the last marine to make afghanistan safe for chinese exploitation but the security situation in afghanistan is so dire that even the chinese don't want to exploit it so at different points in time these different neighbors have have wanted different things and i think right now their biggest concern and the biggest question mark is really what is president trump going to do and this conflict that part of our government has with china with with china and russia really complicates the hedging strategy that all of these countries around afghanistan are undertaking now at the beginning of this year the president announced suspension of aid to pakistan now as you've written in a number of places there's all kinds of aid coming from all kinds of different american programs some of his economic support some of his military support some of it is state building support essentially and that the threat to cut off aid or in fact the actual cutting off of aid is not the recourse uniquely of the trump administration it has happened in the past the obama administration the bush administration you mentioned earlier the various embargoes and boycotts by the us government pakistan yet one we don't seem actually to stop the flow of aid and two it doesn't whatever we do cut doesn't seem to stop anything from happening the way we don't want it to happen so that's really true um so the other thing you have to look at is what was the purpose of those sanctions so when we imposed sanctions on the pakistanis in 1979 within a matter of a few years and by 1982 those sanctions are lifted because we need to figure out a way of moving money through pakistan because of the the soviet invasion but what people don't appreciate is that pakistan actually had developed a nuclear weapon we know from pakistani sources as early as 1984. so we impose nuclear-related sanctions in 1990 a little bit like you know using birth control after you're pregnant um and so we have a so there's this attribution error right we will say well sanctions didn't work well of course sanctions couldn't work in 1990 because they were not terror related they were nuclear proliferation related and they had already proliferated but your the general question is once you understand that this is one of pakistan's most significant national security interests we have an asymmetry of interest pakistan wants to do this more than we have tools to punish it it's a really nuclear development well well that for sure the nuclear development by the way is what enables pakistan to continue using terrorists in afghanistan and india right because the americans are afraid of walking away and taking our checkbook because we are coerced by this this idea that if somehow we're not there writing checks pakistan's going to fall and then the terrorists get the nuclear weapon so let me let me come to this piece you wrote for foreign policy i'm going to read you a quote from it and get you to elaborate further why is it that the united states continues to make huge payouts to pakistan even though it's widely recognized that the country continues to fund the very organizations that are killing us troops and allies in afghanistan first pakistan has the fastest growing nuclear program in the world you actually refer to battlefield that small size and perhaps looser kinds of weapons america and its allies are rightly concerned that any instability in pakistan may result in terrorists getting their hands on pakistan's nuclear technology fissile material or a nuclear device second related to the first the united states worries about pakistan's solvency pakistan has essentially developed its bargaining power by threatening its own demise with any economic collapse of pakistan washington again fears that the specter of a nuclear-armed terrorist group rising up from pakistan will materialize now this is not a fanciful scenario even in a relatively stable pakistan so i actually think this pakistan is more stable than people think i call it a stable instability so this idea that pakistan is going to crumble it's a bargaining power of stop me before i shoot myself i usually say pull the trigger because you're not going to do it um they are much more stable than people appreciate and this is actually the beauty of pakistan i often am accused of being anti-pakistan i'm actually anti-terrorism and anti-isi which is the intelligence agency that orchestrates it but if you actually spend time in pakistan during a crisis you see something totally profound so i was there during the 2010 flood when about a third to a fifth depending on how you classify the population was affected these floods were biblical in scale and it was these are tens of millions of people you're talking about the the tragedy that beset pakistan and those floods made haiti look like a cakewalk and pakistan got a fraction of the funds that haiti got haiti today is still debilitated by um by its earthquake you see no signs of this in pakistan and to see this up close is to actually see what makes pakistanis so extraordinary they're some of the most resilient people you'll ever meet so what immediately happened at the village and sub village level people just began gathering resources people began rescuing people folks began donating whatever they could and this is not very well documented because people are not interested in the times when pakistan does something extraordinary but i kind of think of that these local activities is the triage that happens on a battlefield you know we now have that stuff that you sprinkle in your wound or you stick a tampon in your wound and that stabilizes you until until you get to a medical facility and that local aid that happened immediately is what kept that country going until the big aid started and so there are so many things that pakistan has experienced like this losing half of its population in 1971 and with a few years it's still able to challenge india right so there is a resilience to pakistan that's really quite there's no other word for it it's it's moving and it's not something that we tend to see on cnn and so what i think will happen if we actually do what we need to do which is really to cut them off when we cut them off i also think that pakistan will undertake reforms so we this aid is killing pakistan we are actually undermining our own interests and we're undermining pakistani democracy by this aid and we're doing this in two ways and americans don't like to appreciate this but the fundament of democracy is taxes we pay our taxes and the scoundrels have to be accountable or we vote the scoundrels out pakistan is a rentier state in much the same way that saudi arabia is right people don't pay taxes right they get money from the outside and therefore there's no accountability and uh we have essentially been putting lubricant into a system that would ordinarily demand change ordinarily people would be furious that an army that has never won a war and it's never won a war except his own democracy and has started every single one of them also is projected as the savior of the country and gets to eat whatever piece of the pie it wants leaving the rest of the country to beg to the international community no in no place would be this be sustainable if it weren't for this infusion of outside funds at the imf and elsewhere then there is this china thing and pakistanis love to dangle well we're just going to go to china and i say you know what you do that because the chinese aren't going to be as forgiving as we have been the chinese are engaging in a very extensive loan program to pakistan and like chinese adventures elsewhere there's no opacity the chinese basically set the price the pakistanis get the bill they bring their own employees in they'll bring their own resources in and then pakistan gets the variable quality infrastructure at a price it cannot service so this is an interesting moral hazard problem if we don't cut pakistan off at the imf the american taxpayer is going to be subsidizing pakistan's loan servicing to the chinese right i mean this is really perverse and then this the the americans unfortunately we don't have a national security elite right now that thinks about national security but what we see happening um in sri lanka where the chinese also did this in this useless port at hambantota the loan servicing is is more than the then the port can ever generate a profit what the chinese basically said was fine give us the port so the chinese essentially have a sovereign port in sri lanka and they're doing this in burma they're doing this in bangladesh although the bangladeshis are are a little bit more wary of them and so then we have so with respect to uh this port that the chinese are building in pakistan the americans are really again at horns of another dilemma do we basically keep the pakistanis from defaulting and having to give the chinese access to this port a la hambantota or do we encourage pakistan to engage in fiscal irresponsibility by continuing to support them at the imf which will ultimately mean that we're going to be funding their payouts to the chinese there are no good options for pakistan in in the united states there just aren't any and and trump can tweet all he wants he he's he assure you his national security team is no better than previous national security teams um so it's it's uh it's really hard to be optimistic either for pakistanis or for us let me ask that for afghans actually the worst victims you know you you talk about this nuclear risk and it it is real um and you talk about some of the loose handling of the of these weapons i mean let's hear a little bit about that so that does the risk of unwanted proliferation unwanted even by the pakistanis uh does that exist even in spite of the controls the pakistanis claim over their own nuclear weapons so i i kind of call the bs flag on this for a couple of reasons what enables pakistan to be a rogue state with impunity and to continue getting our money is its nuclear assets right so pakistan has a very high incentive to keep control of these weapons right so at a structural point of view if there wasn't what we would call reliable commanding control the utility of this weapon from a pakistani point of view diminishes however from a rent seeking point of view they themselves are the ones that encourage people to be afraid right so amongst pakistanis the utility that it that it reassures them that they can do what they do with impunity is this belief that they have solid command and control they exploit us and our fears by encouraging doubts about their command and control so what are the real issues and um when they are in the barracks in their peacetime position i'm not terribly concerned about them i don't lose sleep over that i am concerned about a couple of situations one when a conflict begins they move these weapons out of their peace time locations for potential use because after all pakistan has a first use strategy this when they're out of their barracks they're more vulnerable to um theft the other thing that they do they're constantly moving these weapons around is a part of their deniability strategy and if we believe the news reports and i'm 50 50 on believing these news reports they move them in thin skinned normal vehicles like ambulances now the argument would go that these are not suspected of carrying nuclear materials and therefore they're at a less risk to being attacked but if they were attacked there's very little that could be done to protect those assets so i i put a big question mark around the reliability of that reportage but what we do know is they move them around um we also know that the pakistan army has been infiltrated we know this because we've seen these high-level attacks that have had insider information the attacks by pakistani military ostensibly on pakistani military bases well attacks by terrorists on pakistani bases with the help of insides and military yeah very very precise information about where certain units were so we know that there's insider problems the other thing with these tactical nuclear weapons is that this is the pakistanis are basically taking our doctrine from the 1950s right from cold war europe the problem is we don't know about the two-man rule we don't know commanding control once these things are deployed and that is that is an issue of concern and now the reason why i publicly and this is i know is public i in my writings i try to not be hysterical about this because they exploit that hysteria financially and i'm of the belief that if we turn this around and we say to them we're kind of tired of being blackmailed by you you say you're a responsible nuclear weapon state if you're and we know what your signature looks like the nuclear signature because of um the investigations in iraq um the libyans and because the pakistanis were the ones giving this nuclear technology and also because of the investigations of the iranians um we have an idea what their signature looks like i'm of the belief that we should simply say to them you are responsible for your materials and if it gets into the hands of non-state actors or if you use nuclear weapons and a first use against india we are going to respond to you appropriately per our doctrine and in other words instead of us trying to manage question marks about their command and control we simply make the costs of their screwing up inordinately high and that's that's an approach that unfortunately you'll find very few takers in washington because policymakers are risk averse right they'd rather see pakistan the example i give although youngsters don't know these things ever existed it's the parking meter remember in the old days we put a quarter in and maybe we're supposed to get 15 but we actually got like five because the thing was broken because like these things are a scam anyway but to a policy maker they would rather work with pakistan is a broken meter we put we're buying 15 but maybe maybe we're getting three but we're getting three consistently if we do something extraordinarily different we might get negative 15. right this is the sort of risk adverseness of policy makers right and look at our policy makers are crying out loud i mean they do like arm workouts but they don't do spine workouts so if we think that they're going to um be serious and provocative on pakistan when they can't be serious or provocative about anything else i'm not holding my breath but that's that's that's the complexity of it we're basically holding ourselves hostage to pakistan's tantrums so let me shift a little bit because you write as well in terms of the development of some of these different jihadist groups that pakistani supports but the spread of this and we go back to the political map i want to just show everybody bangladesh which is now a country where some of these issues have occurred so you see on the map you see where pakistan is and all the way on the other side of india in yellow you see bangladesh which used to be eastern pakistan and the war that you described was the separation of those two elements of pakistan and when you speak to pakistanis this is considered an ongoing national tragedy this was a terrible loss in their history and so on so it certainly conditioned them given india's role in supporting bangladesh and so on to have suspicions of the indians and bangladesh in its own development decided on a very different path at least ostensibly so so pick up the story for us of a state that in the early 1970s emerges from this war declares itself a secular state and more inclined to identify along ethnic rather than religious lines as pakistan has and yet the transformation in that country is feeding on many of the same currents that have created this radicalism in pakistan and afghanistan and so on and so forth raising the possibilities of new threats that are not at this point really being recognized so that's a really but that's there's a lot in that question because a very few people know about bangladesh um the pakistanis as you noted this is uh this is something that they continue to lugubriously repine but what the pakistanis do not themselves acknowledge publicly is that they lost east pakistan not because the indians intervened they actually lost east pakistan beginning in the 50s because they treated the ethnic bengalis in east pakistan execrably um i could i you know i at door time i do a whole hour lecture about the things that pakistan did from 47 to 1954 alone right so the pakistanis like to focus upon the indian intervention but they take no responsibility to the racism the um religious exclusive the religious exclusion policies that pakistan adopted remember or if you didn't remember now you'll know that when pakistan became independent about 25 of its population were not muslim most of them were hindus and most of that non-muslim population lived in bangladesh so pakistan early on adopted what's called the objectives resolution that says there's going to be no law that's repugnant to allah well that's a terrible law if you're not a muslim right i mean it's fair who would want to live in a situation like this and then um the bangladeshi the the bangladeshi muslim was uh frequently characterized in racial epithet terms they weren't considered to be real muslims because of their close proximity to hindu bengalis their language wasn't recognized as a national language so they were deprived access to government employment and because they weren't considered a martial race by the british nor were they in the military and so when pakistan had its first coup by ayub khan in the late 50s bangladeshis were literally excluded from all access to power um they were politically excluded they weren't in the military they couldn't work in the bureaucracy and so this had this was a long march and what the pakistanis did in 1970 was uh after the party that represented the bengalis and the east the iwami league won an outright majority the western pakistani elites didn't want to seat that government because they didn't want to be ruled by quote racial epithet racial epithet so this is and then that's really what made the independence ero irrevocable because the awami league figured out playing by the rules doesn't work you know we won fair and square we won probably the cleanest election in pakistan's history and they refused to seat the government and then as refugees began pouring into india um we we know that initially india was very hesitant to intervene because some of those folks were leftists at this time india was experiencing its own marxist insurgency india was very uh hesitant about this and they also didn't want the precedent because india also had insurgencies right they didn't want the precedent of an outside actor liberating a disgruntled group within their country but eventually we know what they did throughout the summer they began training the rebels the indian army began moving assets from the west to the east they began putting air assets into place and technically speaking the war began in uh the the war began when pakistan struck air assets indian era so technically pakistan did begin the war and the end was as we know it but many of the um instruments that the pakistani state used to oppress east pakistanis were islamists so jamaat islami had a couple of militias that did very brutal things and they were collaborators in the war crimes that the pakistan army committed and because of the islamism that the pakistani state was using to suppress ethnic tendencies the state became independent as an ethnic state really averse to islamism but what happened almost immediately because pakistan and bangladesh shared this shared history of coup making the very first military coup which happened very quickly because the first leader of bangladesh was himself very corrupt and authoritarian and really not a good dude the first coup happened and this begins the process of religionizing islamists and so bangladesh moves from being adamantly opposed to islamists to now that they are a bengali majority state they're reconsidering the place of islam in their society and also there were bengalis bangladeshis that went to the original afghan war so this is an incredibly complex story from the south in the 80s there were also rohingyas by the way the rohingya crisis is not new it's been ongoing ever since myanmar became independent in 1948 so many bangladeshi muslims found themselves caught up in these global jihad concepts and now you know we have isis in bangladesh and these are not poor terrorists these are some of some of bangladesh's most well-educated urbane youth um one of the fellows that went to fight in syria and was featured in dabek magazine um uh or was it one of the holy the holy bakery attackers i forget which one i apologize was actually a finalist in in the bangladeshi version of who's got talent right so these are not poor urchins for madras's bangladesh has a problem and this current government isn't helping that's another long discussion is this government tries to consolidate her authoritarian rule she's constricting space for legitimate islamist actors to participate that's never a good recipe take a look at turkey for example let me ask though you um you talk about the appeal of both al-qaeda and islamic state in bangladesh and you distinguish between the kinds of people who are recruited for each of them can you who's drawn to al-qaeda who's drawn to isis and what's the difference there so there is a there's a big ideological difference so in south asia and i can't speak to other parts of the world because i only study south asia al-qaeda is very closely associated with the taliban and a particular interpretive tradition called deobundism so the afghan taliban most of the militant groups in pakistan they're deo bundy interestingly enough and ironically dale bund is actually originating in india but these guys bear no resemblance to their indian deo bundy uh co-religionists so there has been this long-standing reliance of deo bundy militants upon mudresses and so the al-qaeda taliban folks you'll see many more people coming from madras's they're less well-educated isis in in contrast it is one of my my bangladeshi colleagues named ali briaz who you really have he's really superb on this stuff he described it's like why would you why would you have like an old nokia phone when you can get the newest iphone and that's the comparison between al qaeda and isis al qaeda is your father's terrorist group right isis is the new fresh terrorist group and and they're seen to have a very different set of goals and so they're they're very different in in terms of the kinds of attacks that they do in terms of the kind of um young men that they attract what are the different goals that are attributed to the each of them so al qaeda is no longer seen as this global terrorist organization right this idea of a global khalafa or i guess americans say fate and in fact you know bin laden never really spoke that way either bin laden had very specific goals and we know he had a huge falling out right with zarqawi and that's why iraq went in the sectarian way and this is al-qaeda central or al-qaeda indian subcontinent is not sectarian they're not into deciding who is the right muslim they're they don't support the killing of shia they don't support the killing of sufis isis is a very sectarian organization and they are they practice tak fear which is the idea that someone can declare you to be a coffer a non-believer and that they can kill you so doctrinally these two organizations are very different and so al-qaeda will talk about wanting bangladesh to be an islamic state isis will talk about wanting bangladesh to be part of a global khilafat and that latter aspiration you say is more appealing to a better educated higher quality recruit i mean what is that connection so i mean it's it's a puzzlement because we also see this in pakistan i i do a lot of survey work and then actually i'm analyzing data as we speak data in bangladesh about people who support different kinds of groups and why but in pakistan the data are really clear that the people that are most supportive of the nastiest of terrorist groups they are pakistan's cosmopolitan elites they are more likely to be educated they're more likely to not be wealthy and in fact the people that dislike them the most are in fact the urban poor and the reason is these terrorist groups they don't attack randomly within cities they don't attack wealthy neighborhoods right they attack the poorest of neighborhoods they attack sufi shrines where poor people live and so the negative externalities of that terrorism is born differentially by the urban poor now bangladesh is just a lot more complicated so in the survey data that i'm analyzing that we just collected a year ago about one in three bangladeshis who have heard of the three terrorist groups that we ask about support the goals of these groups a much smaller number one to three percent support the means and so but when you think of a country of roughly with 160 million muslims and a large number of non-muslims that small number is actually a very large number right it's a small percentage but a large number of people yeah it's a small percentage a large number of people and terrorism is really a small numbers game right you don't need to have in fact terrorism we don't think about it as a as a hire of labor right but terrorism as a profession is actually demand constrained so as long as they have more people that want to be a terrorist than they actually have the ability to absorb they can turn people away right which is one of the reasons why if we look at the 911 attackers in general if we look at attributes and i have a database of pakistani terrorists in general they're better educated than than the communities from which they draw i think part of that is because it's we a lot of groups can be more selective they can be they're hirers of labor i mean even mcdonald's you know doesn't take the worst candidate to be a burger steamer right um you used to flip when i was in school we actually flipped the burgers now they just steam them i didn't know that um really i you know this is you're coming from all directions here they do a lot of road trips in my dogs i love mcdonald's cheeseburgers i love them i'm not going to go anywhere near this uh you know i'm just we'll take some questions from the honest a bit but you know i'm so interested in the track i mean you've worked in government you've worked in policies i've never worked in government by the u.s piece but i mean yeah but you've been in the field with different government or quasi government agencies you've done analysis work for think tanks you're in the academy no doubt in various places and you've been in many of the places we're looking at on them repeatedly i mean you're crossing paths with people who are doing all kinds of work for the government and i'm curious as to how you see the development of those kinds of relationships and information flows i mean certainly i'm not now necessarily talking about a policy level but in the years since 9 11 the government and the supporting community of analysts and think tanks and so on has really built up this enormous knowledge base in fields that were essentially ignored before 9 11. and i'm wondering how you see the development of that infrastructure and how that does or doesn't connect with decisions that are made at a policy level so that is such a profoundly important question but let me say this um so i'm here by accident i will we invited you well no no yes but this wasn't the career i wanted this was not the career i wanted i i actually wanted to be um my phd is in south asian language and civilizations i wanted to be a professor of punjabi literature i wrote my dissertation on punjabi literature but like many women um i was just sexually harassed out of my phd program and um it's just because i am very cussed that i finished i finished it remotely working at rand my one of the most prestigious professors and i will say his name because i'm fearless to pest chakrabarthy you know who you are and you know what you said he asked me um as i'm handing in my final paper in my first year of graduate school are you looking for sexual pleasure the university of chicago we would have recognized this as and i've been very i've written about this i've talked there's this is this is this is no reveal this guy he's a serial predator and chicago um when i and i filed a complaint immediately after this went down and i was told that um in fact he had violated nothing that faculty were allowed to proposition students and had he not asked me how would he know if i wanted to have intercourse with him how could he possibly know and that moreover i would have to tell him that that was not desired if i wanted to ensure that he would not do it again it was just extraordinary and obviously you know i and i i had to literally ambush him at the international house to tell him that this was not wanted and you can imagine what that relationship was like um it was just unbearable to be at the university of chicago so um and i did not have parents and i was afraid of being unemployed and uh just like who isn't afraid of being unemployed so uh i did an m.a in public policy while i was doing my phd and i went to the rand corporation where i was working when 9 11 happened and um you know it's this is women in this business little did i know that i left one field because of sexual harassment to go to another field which is even worse you know it's like so now i tell my female students um gender discrimination it's like gravity you know it is what you make of it you can either rollerblade on gravity or you can fall down and you know smash your head it's not going to go away um i see the young women that are in my classroom they're dealing with the same stuff that i went through um me too is is a very limited phenomenon but in the academy the academy is a place that protects predators it full stops so gentlemen if you want to be a sexual harasser with job security get yourself tenure i'm telling you straight up and all totally and also women if you want to be a predator get tenure because women harass men at the university of chicago too horrible when god when she zilla crawls out of lake michigan i hope she stomps over to hyde park it just takes that place out um because it's still the same way and so to go to your question so how does no but but this is real i mean this is how i ended up here this wasn't the life i wanted i really do you think i want to go to a place like afghanistan where my friends were murdered i mean where i'm attacked in my hotel room this is like the reality of this kind of job and so it's very bittersweet for me because i wanted to be a professor of punjabi literature and not a professor of terrorism but i'm at the rand corporation um which was you know just i just followed like brownie in motion and then 9 11 happens and then oddly enough my entire life changes and um in a way that i could never have planned it i could not have planned it so i think what i've seen is that from the academy side and georgetown is very different i i think most of i would not be hireable in fact if you go and see what other people at other universities say about me they think i'm a baby killing warmonger right so in general academia is very hostile to this stuff in general government is hostile to this kind of stuff because they view us as being unsympathetic to what they're trying to do so there's a very small number of academics who move basically we're loathed optimally in both sides but for example certain government agencies wanted to hire me immediately after 9 11 because of my language skills and i'm not clearable by the cia because i had um intimate relations with with non-americans particularly you know gentlemen that weren't white the sexism of that hiring process again it's still in place so the people that they want and we've been investing in linguists we've got various programs like the critical language fellowship program inevitably when you go and spend time in a country you develop friendships with those people and it makes you unclearable right so what will happen at the cia inevitably and i've seen these people come and go we get these kids with clean passports clean relationships right nothing nothing funky no one was that a turban is he because he is he virtually because he's a sick or because he's a muslim no complicated question so you dated this guy named bob okay great perfect is bob from kansas too right so actually from my point of view i see a tremendous dysfunctionality right so let's take the pakistan embassy for example no one wants to go serve there because it's it's not a prestigious post it's not a family post and so we need our a team and we're getting our d team so it's it is definitely glass half full glass half empty but my argument would be well if it's a glass half full of cow piss it's still calpis you really want to drink that probably not so i i i don't think that that um interface is as good as you might think it is i think like the program i'm in at georgetown we're kind of an exception i've got bruce hoffman i've got dan baiman victor cha because georgetown is so close to dc we are an aberration but your regular academic wouldn't even want to work for the government because academia especially coming out of the um the vietnam war right this general hostility the human terrain team project is a really good example of a great idea that was absolutely sabotaged by academics idea of the human training team was that we were going to have anthropologists who speak these languages who are comfortable hanging out um but the american anthropological association basically said anyone who does this we're going to blackball you and i thought this was the most outrageous thing because all of us benefit from us government funds they they pay for our language skills um they subsidize our libraries and my view was if you if you're going to blackball someone who wants to work for the government then you should give back every single government cent you got right you can't have it both ways right we didn't invest in you because we wanted you to resurrect you know 15th century buddhist poetry that was inscribed on a piece of rock that's managed to survive weather right that's not why we did this so i i sort of i'm at this intersection where i'm equally curmudgeonly of both academics as well as government because it's we have so many resources but these resources are structurally unable to communicate with each other because of confirmation bias and other forms of bias let's see if we have a question and you can ask about confirmation bias if you're so inclined thank you there we go thank you uh this gentleman here please wait for a mic we'll be right with you hi there thanks for that that was really informative um i just have to share an anecdote with you i'm i'm from pakistan yes they're knocking soon after 9 11 a colleague of mine decided to join the cia because he thought this was his calling he's going to serve his country a few months later a gentleman from the cia came to my office asked my boss like you know we are doing some q a backgrounds check my boss sends this guy to me and he asked me all these questions about my colleague background question does he do drugs alcohol and i'm betting is he going to ask me that i'm from pakistan is he is he he never asked anything about me i was so disappointed yeah okay that by the way he hits upon a really interesting subject right who does these background investigations a bunch no offense to those if you're in the room who do it a bunch of retired goobers who are who i i i i can't even imagine that they're entrusted doing these background investigations it's not my professor i you know my students our program a lot of them are working government so i can't tell you how many of them have called me up um and the oh oh my goodness so the south asians you'll get a kick out of this so because i there was a time when i did a beltway bandit contracting and so you have to have a clearance and so after edward snowden like they're we're going to clean up our act we're going to get serious and we're going to find the problem people so my brother-in-law is a punjabi from the uk and he has a funny name even though he's british they said well you have to fill out the special form for your brother-in-law actually asked him what is his tribe i wrote manchester united like how preposterous is this i so i was like well we're going to have more snowdens if this is stepping up your game but no you this process the people it is like putting a pederas in charge of the playground we are having some of the most incompetent people do the most important job it is amazing to me i'm so glad you raised that because i i can't tell you know how many times i've had to i've been interviewed for my students and i'm like i can't believe you just asked me that question i it's just absurd but that's how this how that's how it rolls um that's how it is just go in the back there please hi so you raised so many interesting visuals [Laughter] one in particular particular really stands out though when you were talking about nuclear weapons in pakistan when you said that they they could move them you know they move them to a wartime um position they move them like in an ambulance or a truck when we see footage of north korea and the nuclear weapons they're showing these massive uh weapons with missile launches and you know i i personally have never seen a nuke but my guess is that a nuke would be pretty huge and and and it just can't it's not something you could throw over over the border right my guess is you need some type of launching equipment so how did they how is that you know because that seems pretty uh frightening when you say that they they could just move a nuke in the truck and worry about the nuke being kidnapped you know it's not like we're watching 24 or some uh uh television show so can you explain that a little bit okay so there is a debate in the scholarly literature so there's essentially three processes that happen so the first is that the cores the nuclear cores are mated with the warheads right then the warheads are mated with a delivery device then the delivery device is deployed right so if you if you looked at our doctrine our missiles are always good to go right it's a little bit like you know hefner back in the day he's always good to go so in those silos because it was part of our doctrine right if we saw if we picked up intelligence that the soviets were going to were were going to nuke us we weren't going to wait to see if that thing landed with a sud or not so our doctrine was always keep them good to go so in 2007 you may recall that we lost some nukes we had some nuclear warheads that were just flying around on a b-52 so we have what's called a nuclear triad right so we've got nuclear weapons that are in the possession of all of the services pakistan does not yet have a triad india is working on a triad so what is this what does this mean predominantly the pakistan army has command and control over over these assets and so the reason why they can move things around in a van is that they're not moving the mated they're they're not moving the mated warhead with the delivery vehicle so pakistan has a couple of delivery options one they're called tells their base trailer erector launched missiles and that's what when we see these military parades which apparently we're going to have too i'm looking forward to it i want to see some minutemen you know going down pennsylvania avenue so those those are called tells and you'll see the missiles put on they loved showing these things at parades i mean france apparently does this too um but pakistan can also uh drop ordnance from nuclear-capable aircraft like f-16 so that that's the long-assertive they're probably moving around the warheads i think my girlfriend farah john is she here you know this stuff harass her she knows this better than i do no no harassment no i mean i mean in a good way because she's smart as a tack and she knows this stuff oh you know i don't know what to do um let's take one on this side please hang on just wait for the mic please hi thank you i've been really entertained by your um sparkle i don't know how else to say it it's really the best panel discussion i have been to in years i appreciate you so much i have a question you said all kinds of interesting things you mentioned that the military um the pentagon was confused to label what was happening in afghanistan or an insurgency until late 2008 2009 but didn't george w bush sign an edict in 2002 saying the military wasn't in charge in afghanistan that it was the cia that was in charge in afghanistan so it if that's true i'm not saying it's true but i think i read it somewhere when did the cia cease to be in charge in afghanistan and the military take over and did that coincide with this realization all of a sudden that we were fighting an insurgency you see this is the magical question did you read carlotta gaul's book i didn't but i know her okay i love carlotta gaul love her okay so this is the magical question we actually were fighting two wars in afghanistan one was a counter-terrorism war that was being fought by largely cia and special operators these are the guys that go out slip float they do stuff that you don't want to do you don't want to see done and that that was um a very specific mission operation um enduring freedom was their mission then there was a second mission which was nato led right which was at the time called isaf the international i for now now i'm forgetting what isaf assistance force yes exactly menopause brain don't go through it um so you had these two very different functions and so what isaf was doing isaf was assisting afghanistan as the name suggests and they were training ansf the afghan national security forces whereas the counter-terrorism folks were specifically focusing upon al qaeda so this is why the united states for so long misunderstood the pakistani game if you were cia you loved pakistan now they don't by the way that's changed because whenever there was some you know yakity act going to pakistan there'd be some al-qaeda number three you know paul oh we just caught al qaeda number three by the way that had to be like the worst job description ever because you know al-qaeda number three because like they were constantly being nabbed and this and the pakistanis were turning them over so if you were cia what you saw from the pakistanis was cooperation on al qaeda because remember in this period we thought we had defeated the taliban it wasn't an issue for us but what was happening on the military side is that increasingly we began to see stuff like oh what is this the taliban they're fighting differently and by the way we weren't just seeing the taliban if you if you talk to um if you know anyone that served in afghanistan they'll tell you in some cases pakistani military the special services group were fighting with the taliban i want you to let that sink in we have given 34 billion dollars and counting to pakistan and they are sending the special services group embedded with the taliban who are killing us and i guarantee you as anyone who served in afghanistan they will tell you this and as a sister of soldiers nothing makes me more angry than that this is outrageous but we missed this because of this interagency focus so over time dod and our nato isaf partners are seeing the taliban emerge but the cia is not looking at this so you don't really begin the cia doesn't really start focusing on the taliban problem well into the obama administration and part of that issue is the bush administration really trusted musharraf i mean just they bush loved musharraf in fact the pakistanis used to call call the two men bouchard and and the pakistanis had a right to be angry because here we are saying we support democracy and yet here we are supporting this man who's undermining democracy and he's also demanding our undermining our interests ambassador crocker an honorable man otherwise is applauding mashariv as a contributor to pakistan's democracy while he's actually sending his goons to beat up actual activists for democracy right so this interagency story that you so presciently identified is actually part of this problem and the gao the government accounting office not an office that you think of as a hero in national security but they were they said the bush administration y'all have not done any assessment of this war like ever in the eight to seven years you've been in business so in the summer of 08 the bush administration began doing assessments and assessments and assessments and then obama the candidate hired bruce wright dell to do an assessment of the assessments so the i'm not making this up is actually the assessment of assessments and so that's why obama came in absolutely loathing pakistan obama didn't need to be taught that pakistan was taking our money and killing our troops he knew it but going back to this map issue what can you actually do and then obama finds himself pressured by mcchrystal for the surge i mean i know for a fact the obama administration was not interested in the search i had dinner with the vice president where he was supporting this idea of counter-terrorism plus but the military and this is where obama is to be faulted he did not lead the military the military led him and by the time we had invested in the surge it really became impossible to unscrew this i mean our military mission in afghanistan was and remains a football bat and but that's that's part of it is that so thank you for that's just an incredibly prescient question thank you well this has really been extraordinary i mean we've ranged from i mean the complexities of this are head spinning it's really yeah it is and you know and mcdonald's technique for cooking dirty so i don't know that we've done it all tonight but we've done an awful lot and i really i'd really like you to join me in thanking professor christine thank you thank you

Channel: 9/11 Memorial & Museum

Views: 340,507

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Id: MXJYgcaug00

Length: 73min 14sec (4394 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 20 2018