The National Interest

THE UNITED States has allowed what has become the Afghan-Pakistan war to slip from an apparent victory into a serious crisis and possible defeat. NATO is still winning tactical victories in Afghanistan, but they have been offset by a steady increase in the levels of violence, casualties, and Taliban influence and control in what now amounts to nearly half of Afghanistan. Our initial military victories have faded into a war of political attrition that has spread to Pakistan.

It is easy to focus on the very real failures of the Afghan and Pakistani governments and the shortcomings of our NATO/International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) allies, but we need to recognize that it is American mistakes that have brought the war to a point of stalemate and defeat. The Taliban, other Afghan jihadist movements, al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban remain relatively weak and unpopular. They are currently winning because for seven years the United States has failed. It has failed to deploy the forces that were needed in time to take a decisive initiative, failed to give proper priority and resources to building up Afghan forces, and failed to develop effective aid capabilities in the field. And they are winning because Pakistan still does not see the struggle as its war. Caught up in a series of inept and corrupt governments, Pakistan has made only episodic efforts to challenge growing al-Qaeda and Taliban forces on its soil.

Al-Qaeda and the Taliban now have de facto sanctuaries in the border areas of Pakistan that spread from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the east to the Baluchi areas in the south. This not only has made the Afghan War an Afghan-Pakistan conflict that must be won or lost in two countries, but it has also shifted the center of gravity in the conflict to Pakistan. If the reason for being at war is the threat of international terrorism—and not nation building in Afghanistan—al-Qaeda is in Pakistan, where there is only a small covert U.S. force and where there is no NATO/ISAF presence. Losing Afghanistan would mean creating a power vacuum that jihadists could exploit to create a new base for international terrorism. But losing Pakistan would give jihadists potential access to weapons that would pose a vast strategic threat to the region, the United States and the world.

ANY ASSESSMENT of the current situation in Pakistan must be balanced by an understanding that but for the U.S. failures in Afghanistan, the United States would not be facing a vital and difficult war in Pakistan. A military victory was not followed by effective stability operations or credible plans for nation building. The conditions this failure created have fostered the Pakistan problem.

In spite of the fact that Afghanistan is bigger than, has a larger population than and soon had more core enemy fighters with a sanctuary on foreign soil than Iraq, the United States didn’t give the country its budgetary just due. Work by Amy Belasco of the Congressional Research Service shows that the budget authority for the Afghan War totaled $171.1 billion for expenditures over eight fiscal years versus $653.1 billion for six fiscal years of the Iraq War. If one looks at State Department, Department of Defense and other estimates, the United States spent between four and five times more on the Iraq War than the Afghan conflict, provided five times more troops and contractors, and obtained far more outside foreign aid.

The United States wasted two critical years—2001 and 2002—by providing only token funds for foreign aid and diplomatic operations ($800 million each year). Given the fact that a start-up aid program takes at least a year to begin to be effective, often takes fourteen to eighteen months to go from authorization to action on the ground and then takes months to years to complete, this was a major failure. That meant the United States failed to use aid when it could have been most effective and helped create the conditions that allowed the Taliban to recover.

Counternarcotics efforts focused on eradication without creating adequate systems to avoid corruption and favoritism. Worse, this happened at a time when Afghan agriculture could not function; the collapse of irrigation systems, drought, a lack of roads and transport to markets, population pressure on the land and insecurity in rural areas made licit farming near impossible. Afghanistan also lacked both the aid workers and Afghan staffs to credibly test and administrate programs to create alternative crops. These problems were compounded by the growth of independent criminal networks, a mix of sharecropping and loan programs that tied farmers to narco-traffickers, and corruption in a country where police and officials are paid token salaries and so are easily bribed.

The counternarcotics effort also pushed poppy cultivation into southern Afghanistan and the areas influenced and controlled by the Taliban. The lack of central-government services, development and an effective rule of law allowed for the de facto return of local warlords. The limited legitimacy of elected officials was often lost at the provincial and district level by the failure of these officials to provide effective governance.

The United States then failed to resource its efforts against an increasingly serious insurgency as it developed from 2002 through 2006. The United States never committed anything even approaching the aid resources necessary to support a “win, hold, build” strategy. This was in spite of the fact that Afghanistan—unlike Iraq—did not have substantial funds left over from the previous regime or a major ongoing stream of income from oil exports.

Only limited efforts were made to create an effective Afghan army and national police. U.S. and NATO/ISAF forces were kept at low “peacekeeping” levels that were incapable of securing the countryside. So, beyond poor reconstruction efforts, the United States failed to establish basic long-term security. Security efforts in Afghanistan were divided into national zones, each headed by a given NATO/ISAF country and each administered in very different ways with varying degrees of effort and levels of security. The only area where significant forces were deployed within the U.S. zone was in the eastern border cities and provinces, especially in Nuristan, Panjshir, Asadabad, Mehtar Lam, Jalalabad, Ghazni and Khost. And here, our successes and failures in Afghanistan were intrinsically tied to our successes and failures in Pakistan. U.S. forces in the east were only strong enough to perform their mission if Pakistan made significant efforts to secure its border. The United States pressured Pakistan, but did not demand decisive Pakistani action, all in the name of supporting the Musharraf regime.

In addition, the United States failed to ensure that the more than $12 billion worth of aid it provided to Pakistan was tied either to Pakistani military action, or to building up the country’s weak counterinsurgency capabilities and forces in its border area, or to creating effective efforts to provide security, governance and development to win the support of the people. As the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported, the United States spent an average of close to $2 billion a year, with an average of $1.3 billion going to Pakistan’s military forces, some $30–40 million to the police and $300–700 million to economic development.

The GAO noted in February 2009 that:

Despite 6 years of U.S. and Pakistani government efforts, al Qaeda has regenerated its ability to attack the United States and continues to maintain a safe haven in Pakistan’s FATA. . . .
We found that there was no comprehensive plan that integrated the combined capabilities of Defense, State, USAID, the intelligence community, and others, and included key components we called for in our report to meet U.S. national security goals in Pakistan. As of January 2009, neither the National Security Council, the National Counterterrorism Center, nor Defense, State, or USAID, has produced . . . a comprehensive plan. . . .

It also found major problems in U.S. efforts to track what had happened to the money, and in critical program efforts like improving the Frontier Corps, a Pakistani paramilitary force operating along the border with Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and their jihadist allies were thus given four years in which to build up new centers of operation in the Pakistani border area, and to create a serious Pakistani form of the Taliban, arrange for foreign fighters to arrive in growing numbers and establish ties to Pakistani jihadist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (literally “Army of the Good”).

U.S. FAILURES helped create a power vacuum that allowed the Taliban to regroup inside the border areas of Pakistan and gave al-Qaeda a virtual sanctuary in the FATA. Here is the exacerbated situation the United States will face: the traditional Taliban reasserted itself in the southern Afghan-Pakistani border area under the leadership of Mullah Muhammad Omar, and two major groupings of Taliban forces also emerged in the eastern Afghan-Pakistani border area and the FATA. These Taliban fighters remain loyal to Mullah Omar but have come under growing influence from al-Qaeda.

Taliban forces were given the time to carry out better military training and obtain better equipment—with a mix of support from elements in Pakistan and Islamists outside the country—and other jihadist elements joined them. These included Pakistan-based forces under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar leads a group of Islamist extremist insurgents called the Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) based in the FATA in Pakistan and active in eastern Afghanistan. The other faction is headed by Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin, and sometimes is credited with introducing suicide bombing to Afghanistan. Haqqani has also established bases in the FATA, and is reported to have helped create a local group in Pakistan called the Islamic emirate of Waziristan that has several thousand Pakistani fighters.

Hekmatyar and Haqqani are officially loyal to Mullah Omar and the Taliban. U.S. intelligence officers believe that Hekmatyar and Haqqani often cooperate with the Taliban, but that there is no formal hierarchy or chain of command that binds them together. They also feel that the Taliban groups in the FATA, while being loyal to Omar, evolved in ways that allowed them to operate in an increasingly independent manner and thus adopt new tactics far more quickly.

All of these forces combined may still have a total of well-under twenty thousand core fighters. All of these movements rely heavily on part-time fighters in Afghanistan who are motivated as much by pay as by ethnic and tribal loyalties or a commitment to jihadist ideology. So far, the various factions have been armed largely with conventional small arms, antiaircraft guns and mortars, and a limited number of older man-portable surface-to-air weapons. They have not made extensive use of advanced improvised explosives with antiarmor capabilities, antitank guided weapons or effective light surface-to-air weaponry.

The problem was not that al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other jihadist movements grew so strong, but that the opposition remained so weak. The jihadists have been able to establish a presence in what UN maps show has grown to include nearly half of Afghanistan only because the United States and NATO/ISAF have been so slow to react to the shifts in their tactics and focused largely on the outcome of military clashes in Afghanistan.

At a nonmilitary or “hearts and minds” level, polls show that the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other jihadist movements remain deeply unpopular—although the United States and NATO/ISAF forces now score only marginally better. And yet, the jihadists have succeeded because the corruption, incompetence and inaction of the Afghan government left large areas outside the control of “Kabulistan.” They have succeeded because aid has tended to be localized where small NATO/ISAF Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) were colocated with NATO/ISAF forces and so large areas were left unprotected and unaided. This created opportunities that the growing insurgent factions based in Pakistan were quick to exploit.

The end result is that NATO still defeats the Taliban and other insurgent movements in virtually every clash in Afghanistan, although it relies heavily on airpower to substitute for its lack of ground troops. The fact remains, however, that the war keeps rising in intensity and jihadist influence keeps spreading in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

THIS HAS resulted in growing violence within Afghanistan, much of it flowing from the jihadist sanctuaries in Pakistan. There has been a particularly serious increase in violence in the Afghan-Pakistani border area. As reported in the Washington Post, there were 431 insurgent attacks in the Khyber border area from January to November 2007, and 625 during the same period in 2008—an increase of 45 percent.

The situation deteriorated further in late 2008 and early 2009, in part because the weather permitted more jihadist movement. Twice as many clashes and attacks took place in the first two months of 2009 as during the same period in 2008. They surged by 131 percent in the eastern province of Kunar relative to the same months in 2008, highlighting the growth of the threat in the east as well as in the south. This situation continued to deteriorate in March. U.S. forces reported that “kinetic activity”—activity in which force is used—in eastern Afghanistan increased by 68 percent this year compared to the same eighty-or-so-day span last year. In the two provinces bordering Pakistan’s Waziristan provinces, violence involving Western troops is up 90 percent, and attacks rose by 130 percent in the area across from the Mohmand and Bajaur tribal areas—where the Pakistani military claimed the Taliban had “lost.” Kabul has turned from a tourist city into one where U.S. and foreign compounds have become the equivalent of a “Green Zone.”

Last year, there was a 119 percent increase in the number of attacks on Afghan government personnel, and a 50 percent rise in kidnappings and assassinations. The lethality and skill of suicide attacks increased and so did estimates of the number of suicide bombers in training. The number of NATO/ISAF deaths rose by 35 percent and civilian deaths rose by 40–46 percent.

U.S. and UN intelligence maps that were issued or leaked from 2005 to 2007, and more recent NATO/ISAF maps issued in January 2009, show that the size of the high-risk areas inside Afghanistan has increased by 30 to 50 percent every year since 2005. The UN also rates nearly half of Afghanistan as unsafe for movement by aid workers not supported by troops.

In the last year a new threat has also developed to U.S. and NATO/ISAF lines of supply, as well as imports from Pakistan. This is critical because at least 60 percent of all supplies come from ports in Pakistan across the border in the Khyber area and the FATA.

It is clear that the Afghan-Pakistani border region has become the center of al-Qaeda operations. Along with their growing influence in Afghanistan, it seems apparent that near sanctuaries exist for two increasingly independent centers of Taliban activity as well as the Hekmatyar and Haqqani movements. While detailed maps that show the growth of the Taliban, Hekmatyar and Haqqani areas of influence in Afghanistan are classified, it is clear from unclassified briefings that these insurgent groups continue to expand their influence from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

THERE IS no question that Pakistan has been a reluctant partner at best. And that because the United States was willing to downplay or ignore the fact that Pakistan was anything but a true partner in the war, Pakistani forces were never consistently committed to the fight. It took a similar willingness to ignore the fact that elements of the Pakistani army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had ties to jihadist groups and were more interested in denying the border area to Afghanistan than in defeating al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The United States’ willingness to ignore Pakistan’s conduct was integral to the continued and increasing violence. The dysfunction of the domestic side of Pakistan will be one of America’s greatest obstacles.

Internal divisions in the Pakistani army and its intelligence services over whether Pakistan should fight al-Qaeda and Afghan jihadists or support them in an effort to win influence and control over Afghanistan and the Pashtuns in the border area have shaped the military’s actions. Corruption, Islamist penetration into the security services and struggles over internal political power have all been serious obstacles to getting Pakistani cooperation in the antiterrorism effort. So has the broad popular-political perception that the United States cannot be trusted, may not stay committed to the war and has forced a conflict on Pakistan that it did not need to fight. Pakistan’s military has also been driven by its security concerns with India and other internal-security needs like Baluchi separatism.

The Pakistani army and government have shown they cannot be trusted to provide honest reporting on any aspect of military operations. They have also never provided a meaningful assessment of threat. Whatever Pakistan’s military may have been, its steady politicization since the rule of “President” Mohammad Zia ul-Haq—from his coup in July 1977 to his death in August 1988—has left it largely an inept flatland army. It has become steadily more focused on internal control, and its finances and use of outside aid have become progressively more suspect.

The appointment of a more professional and less political chief of staff of Pakistan’s army, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, may eventually change this situation. So may the appointment of Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha as head of the ISI in September 2008, since he is reputed to be an army professional without Islamist sympathies or ties to jihadists. The disbanding (or claimed disbanding) of the ISI’s political unit might also give hope that corruption may eventually ebb; although the ISI’s “S” section—the group with the most links to the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups—may still be intact. The ISI is not a minor factor in the war. It is a structure headed by a three-star general and eight two-star generals. The ISI now controls the rest of military intelligence, and much of the police and internal-security intelligence efforts as well.

Any lasting improvement in the role of Pakistani military forces and intelligence, however, is far from clear. Every Pakistani military action seems to result in ambiguous results or a retreat. Tensions between the Pakistani government and the government of Afghanistan continue to rise. The military still finds it much easier to warn about U.S. interference and violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty than to take meaningful and sustained action. U.S. General David McKiernan, NATO’s commander in Afghanistan, has warned that there is still “a level of ISI complicity” in the militant areas of Pakistan and within organizations like the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In practice, the ISI also has ties to a number of purely Pakistani jihadist extremist groups which in turn have their own ties to the Taliban and al-Qaeda and to terrorist groups in Europe and India. Pakistan’s tolerance of internal terrorist movements has increasingly forced it to focus on threats from the Indian government and its role in terrorist attacks like the violence in Mumbai.

Separating the military from politics will also be increasingly difficult if Pakistan’s political parties continue to self-destruct along with the quality of its central government. The failures and subsequent implosion of Pervez Musharraf’s regime have been replaced by a weak and divided democratic government. At least to date, it is an open contest as to which of Pakistan’s key political leaders—Asif Ali Zardari (Mr. Ten Percent) or Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif—is more self-seeking, and which of its political factions cares less about the nation’s welfare versus its own power and control over the nation’s income. Pakistan is a living warning that elections are no substitute for effective governance, and that real-world political legitimacy is a function of how well politicians serve the people, not whether politicians are elected.

Adding to the instability, Pakistan’s economic growth has not provided broadly based benefits to its population, and the economy in the FATA and the Baluchi border areas has increasingly become a war economy—the population is steadily more dependent on jihadist and government spending.

Recent estimates by the Economist indicate that real GDP growth will slow from 6 percent in 2007–08 to 1.2 percent in 2008–09. The economy could slip into serious recession or even depression if the global crisis persists, and Pakistan has already had to accept a $7.6 billion emergency financing package from the IMF. This has forced it to place serious restraints on fiscal and monetary policy and to cut its budget and spending—although the Economist may well be far too optimistic in estimating that the budget deficit will be only 6.4 percent of GDP in the fiscal year from July 2008 to June 2009.

THERE ARE no good or easy options for the United States. Before we get to what can be done, we need to eliminate one of the most publicized and least workable proposed solutions.

Some experts advocate what is in effect an exit strategy. They would have U.S. forces focusing almost exclusively on the “international” threat posed by al-Qaeda. A few analysts have suggested that the al-Qaeda forces in Pakistan could be destroyed by a sudden surgical strike mixing special forces and airpower, allowing the United States a way out of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is no certain way to assess how practical such an attack would be without access to intelligence and contingency-planning data, but such proposals have always presented the problem that it is easy for their advocates to postulate success if everything goes right, and far harder to force the proponents to examine what can go wrong and the resulting complications.

The failed raid on the Son Tay prison camp in Vietnam and the botched Operation Eagle Claw hostage rescue in Iran are public cases in point. At a more sensitive level, high-risk operations have always presented a high risk of failure—hence the label. Betting a war on a wild card should be a desperate act of necessity, not a strategy.

It is also unclear that martyring bin Laden, or even the most successful one-time attack on al-Qaeda in Pakistan, will solve anything. It is difficult to see why destroying any element of the leadership of a highly distributed and parallel set of jihadist movements and networks can go from crippling or weakening a given movement for a limited period of time—important as that goal can be at a tactical level—to achieving a decisive result.

If such U.S. attacks further alienate Pakistan in the process, or can be exploited by jihadist movements over time, they may well have more negative than positive impact. Moreover, a one-shot attempt at victory that implies accepting defeat in Afghanistan and/or Pakistan and accepting that the United States and NATO/ISAF will then leave a power vacuum is the practical equivalent of awarding victory to the enemy. It means leaving a sanctuary behind and shifting to attempts at containment in other areas—a strategy that may alter the mix of risks but scarcely eliminates them.

Al-Qaeda or some equally dangerous jihadist movement is almost certain to be able to reconstitute itself and exploit the absence of U.S. and NATO/ISAF forces in Afghanistan, unless Pakistan can be led to adopt the equivalent of “win, hold, build” tactics. There is no military solution in Pakistan any more than there is one in Afghanistan. The only way to establish security is for the Pakistani government and forces to establish a lasting presence in the FATA and Baluchi areas, and provide the kind of security, governance, services and development aid that will provide a clear replacement to jihadist activity.

THE QUESTION is, then, what can the United States now change? U.S. efforts to date have been far more diplomatic than effective. The United States has intermittently sought to use political pressure, and military and economic aid, to make the Pakistani government take action against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Haqqani and Hekmatyar. But sporadic and indecisive efforts have only had sporadic and indecisive success.

Pakistani forces still do not conduct steady or systematic operations in the border areas. The Frontier Corps in the FATA, and local tribal security forces in both the FATA and Baluchi border areas, have been largely ineffective. Aside from the Pakistani equivalent of special forces—which have done a much-better job of cooperating with their U.S. counterparts than other Pakistani forces—the Pakistani army has often performed badly in counterinsurgency warfare.

Pakistani officials and the United States have talked about a “strategic partnership,” which senior officials reasserted during a regular session of the U.S.-Pakistan strategic dialogue in September 2008. In practice, Pakistan continues to oppose U.S. military action against any threat of force operating on Pakistani soil.

The end result is a legacy where the United States cannot “win” in a strategic sense unless it can defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan. It cannot secure Afghanistan in any reasonable amount of time unless Pakistan cooperates actively in securing its borders in the FATA and Baluchi areas. Any campaign that destabilizes Pakistan or shifts it toward a jihadist position will be a net defeat for the United States and NATO/ISAF regardless of the outcome of the fighting in Afghanistan. The challenge for the United States, hopefully with some support from its allies, is to define a better mix of carrots and sticks to deal with this situation. Awkward as it may sound, the goal now in this war is to find a better set of “least bad options.” There are several areas where more effective U.S. action is possible. A three-pronged “long war” strategy that focuses on public diplomacy, military aid and economic development is Washington’s best bet.

The first step is getting information about the gravity of the jihadist threat to the Pakistani people and heads of government. The United States could conduct a far more intense and systematic public-information campaign, focusing on Pakistani decision makers and media, that counters jihadist propaganda and provides a clear picture of the risks al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other movements present to Pakistan. Such a campaign would have to be sophisticated and honest, but it would at least provide a counterpoint to the jihadist message.

To date, the public side of U.S. information warfare has been far too oriented toward U.S. values and perceptions, and has treated Pakistan far too much like a willing partner with similar goals rather than a very different state with its own goals and values. The United States can, however, use declassified intelligence to make an excellent case that al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hekmatyar and Haqqani are all now growing threats to Pakistan. It can demonstrate that U.S. military activities will be advisory and supportive, and that the United States is prepared to provide aid in military training, intelligence and every aspect of the war where Pakistan needs support in shaping security forces that can “win” and “hold.”

The second step, then, would be to help build up Pakistan’s forces so they can “win” on their own. To do that, Washington will need to fully come to grips with the military dimension of the war in Pakistan. The regular Pakistani army has Islamist elements mixed with an officer corps far more interested in the next India-Pakistan war than the war Pakistan is actually fighting. Key paramilitary elements like the Frontier Corps, Northern Light Infantry and Pakistan Rangers are lacking in quality, motivation and loyalty. Empowering the Pakistani army through military aid and training can counter Pakistani fears that the United States will violate its sovereignty and/or make things worse and then leave. Washington can do this by showing it is committed to providing Pakistan with the military capabilities to win the battle on its own.

U.S. special forces have already shown that they can perform at least part of this mission if the Pakistani government permits them to carry out contingency plans that have now existed for at least four years, and if Washington provides the necessary resources—rather than “nickels and dimes” the Pakistani side of the war. Such a program will involve serious risks. Pakistani special-forces groups are now far too small and will take time to expand.

These efforts need to expand into the Baluchi areas in Pakistan as well as take on a decisive character in the FATA. They also need to mix Pakistani action with the full-scale deployment of the mix of Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) and intelligence assets that the United States brought to bear against al-Qaeda in Iraq, and to expand the use of UCAV strikes, Pakistani special forces, CIA personnel and U.S. special forces to hit the key al-Qaeda, jihadist and other Taliban cadres in both the FATA and Baluchi areas. For all of the protests about civilian casualties and U.S. interference, these strikes have had a major impact on jihadist cadres in the FATA even with relatively limited assets compared to those deployed in Iraq. A full-scale program—particularly with better human-intelligence (HUMINT) support from Pakistan—that attacked Mullah Omar and the traditional Taliban in the area around Quetta, as well as the jihadist movements in the FATA, could do much to weaken every element of the threat and end the near sanctuary that jihadists now have in the south. It also would have the mix of technical and HUMINT assets, and greater Pakistani support, necessary to defuse at least some of the charges that innocent civilians were being attacked and such strikes violated Pakistani sovereignty.

Such an option also will never succeed unless the United States offers Pakistan major new incentives as well as pressures to fight. It is going to require a U.S. advisory program to help Pakistan develop its counterinsurgency and paramilitary capabilities that may well take three to five years to implement even if the United States can persuade or press Pakistan to accept it. It is going to take a U.S. commitment to a major increase in military aid to act as an incentive, and one that is long-term enough to show Islamabad that Washington is truly committed to the war and to Pakistan. This may well cost in excess of $2 billion a year and perhaps as much as $3 billion.

It is also going to require that this aid effort is clearly tied to a detailed long-term plan with specific goals and milestones, which accounts for how the money is spent and is publicly transparent. The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2008 (S-3263) is a positive step, calling for “greater accountability on security assistance,” in an effort to tie U.S. military aid to Pakistani counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other jihadist groups. Yet neither U.S. nor Pakistani officers and officials have shown they can be trusted to manage aid programs without such public accountability. If any senior U.S. officer or official who has responsibility for aid spending fails to establish systems that account for and measure its effectiveness, he should be publicly fired and shamed. The present management and accountability of U.S. aid efforts is a national disgrace.

Establishing such “ties” to the proper use of military aid in meeting the jihadist threat is to some extent a “stick,” and raises obvious sensitivities. At the same time, much will depend on the level of military aid, and whether Pakistan’s political leadership, the chief of staff of the Pakistani army, the head of the ISI and the Pakistani people perceive that an effective Pakistani campaign is necessary. The “carrot” side of the equation can be reinforced by providing better access to U.S. intelligence, as well as to the release and provision of more advanced counterinsurgency equipment along with training aid from U.S. special forces. It also means, however, that Washington must walk a delicate line in increasing aid to Pakistan while seeking to improve its ties to India, and do so at a time when it is far easier to talk about regional solutions and “solving” Kashmir and Afghan-Pakistani border problems than to achieve any meaningful results.

The third prong involves supporting Pakistan’s societal development through economic aid so the country can become stable and self-sufficient. This economic aid should also be tied to the critical actions it must take to win the war. Even if Pakistani forces won every clash against al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other jihadists, they could still lose if they do not have the capability to “hold” and “build” as well as “win.” As in Afghanistan, military victory can only be the prelude to securing territory and winning hearts and minds.

In practical terms, the United States needs to take immediate action to revive the Biden-Lugar proposal to provide Pakistan $1.5 billion in annual economic aid, or $7.5 billion over five years, to be used for development purposes such as building schools, roads and medical clinics. It would provide funds that Pakistan could potentially use to implement some form of “win, hold, build.” This legislation does raise questions as to what combination of U.S. and Pakistani advisers and administrators could actually make it work in the field, but it offers a positive option that might help achieve a lasting strategic result. Moreover, if it cannot be staffed and implemented by some combination of Pakistani officials and U.S. advisers, Washington may have to seriously reconsider whether it can win the war, not just whether it can contain the consequences.

One thing is clear: a strategy of “sticks” cannot succeed, although more pressure—and more consistent pressure—on Pakistan will be necessary. Providing high levels of tied military and economic aid is the only incentive the United States really has, although showing Pakistan that Washington is committed to a sustained effort would help convince its government and military forces that the war can be won. At the same time, careful diplomacy could make it clear that should Pakistan not take action, the country would be isolated, with the United States increasingly tilting toward India and Afghanistan. Finally, offering Pakistan help during the global economic crisis may provide another mix of incentives and disincentives the United States can exploit.

WHILE SUCH options are scarcely an exercise in altruism, they may add up to a successful exercise in war. It is also time that the Obama administration, the United States Congress and those who shape American public opinion fully come to grips with the fact that the war does not care whether there is a global economic crisis or whether it is politically popular on the U.S. domestic front.

We also need to ask the same question about the strategic outcome of the Afghan-Pakistan war that General David Petraeus asked about Iraq: “Where does it end?” U.S. vital interests center on defeating the threat of international terrorism, not on shaping the future of Afghanistan. The central issue of the war is the future of al-Qaeda and any of its spin-offs or affiliates that present a serious threat in terms of international terrorism. These are not reasons to abandon Afghanistan, but they are reasons to demand that any U.S. strategy combine the capability to win in Afghanistan with the ability to win in Pakistan. No one should doubt that the success of such efforts is unpredictable and uncertain. Nevertheless, the strategic risks are simply too high for the United States not to try.

Anthony Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.