Christine Fair

The Trump era in the United States may mark a turning point in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. Top officials like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have been upfront about the new U.S. preference for India and frustration with what Washington sees as Pakistan’s continued inaction on terrorism. Meanwhile, Pakistan seems increasingly willing to defy the United States thanks to a newly-deepened partnership with China. These trends were underway during the Obama administration, but seem set to come to a head under Trump.

For a deeper dive into the state of U.S.-Pakistan and China-Pakistan relations, as well as Pakistan’s domestic situation, The Diplomat spoke with C. Christine Fair, a Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in the Peace and Security Studies Program within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.

The Trump administration's Afghanistan strategy unveiling in August 2017 didn't mince words in condemning Pakistan for fostering militant groups on its soil. Do you anticipate this administration will succeed in prompting Pakistan's military to change its behavior and priorities where previous administrations have failed? What would it need to do to succeed?

Trump will not succeed in prompting Pakistan to change its noxious behavior. In fact, we have already witnessed a serious retrenchment from that “harsh rhetoric.” For example, the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress removed the provision from the National Defense Authorization Act 2018 that previously required the secretary of defense to certify that Pakistan has taken steps to “significantly disrupt” the activities of both the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba. The new legislation states that Pakistan must show progress only in managing the Haqqanis. This is an outrageous retrenchment given that LeT continues to operate in India and Afghanistan and that the terrorist group has even fielded a new political party, the Milli Muslim League, with the explicit support of the Pakistan army. If this Republican-led Congress is willing to water down this requirement, what else is it willing to do? Remember, it is the Congress that writes checks — not the White House. I see no reason to believe that Trump’s bluster will yield success where the past two presidents have failed.

And there is a basic reason for this: we still need access to a port to resupply the Afghan National Security Forces. Geography over-determines America’s options. Russia dominates the countries involved in the so-called Northern Distribution route. The Americans were never permitted to move lethal goods through that corridor and at the height of its use, it carried no more than 20 percent of cargo supplying the American- and NATO-led efforts in Afghanistan.

There is another neighbor of Afghanistan that has a port: Iran. Indeed the JCPOA (the so-called nuclear agreement with Iran) opened up the possibility of moving supplies from the port in Chabahar, which was built with Indian assistance. I am sure once Trump bothered grappling with logistics and looking at a map, reality sunk in. The administration cannot both vilify Pakistan and Iran. So the administration has made the same choice as Bush and Obama: keep working with Pakistan even though Pakistan is far more dangerous than Iran is. Whereas Iran is a regional threat, Pakistan is a global threat.

You've written extensively on the perennial challenge of balancing civil-military relations in Pakistan. How do you assess the significance of the recent removal of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from office by the Supreme Court insofar as the Pakistani military's political role is concerned?

Since 2008, when democracy was formally restored after Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s nine-year dictatorship ended, the army’s generals have feared that significant democratization of Pakistan’s governance will undermine their ability to run and ruin the country at their whim. Thus they developed new tools to prevent democracy from sinking its roots too deeply. While the army has had general concerns about democratization of national politics, it was particularly discomfited by Sharif. The army did not forget that Sharif had previously exercised his constitutional prerogative to replace the army chief, General Jehangir Karamat, in 1998 with Musharraf. (This was surely not Sharif’s best idea, as history demonstrated.) Nor would it forget that Sharif tried — but failed — to oust Musharraf in turn after he orchestrated the 1999 Kargil War with India, which ended in ignominy for Pakistan. Sharif did so while Musharraf was in Sri Lanka and refused to let his plane land in Pakistan with virtually no fuel and nowhere else to land. The military understood this to be an attempt on Musharraf’s life and put the coup into motion. Sharif was lucky: Musharraf did not have him hanged. He just exiled him to Saudi Arabia.

Sharif too has a long memory and an axe to grind. When democracy returned, Sharif demanded that Musharraf be tried only for the 2007 suspension of the constitution. Oddly, he did not press to try him for the 1999 coup itself. This sent the army into a swivet: this would not be a trial of Musharraf but rather of the entire institution and its presumptions about its proper role in the governance of the country. The trial never actually happened — thanks to unrelenting army pressure — and Musharraf still lives in luxurious “exile” in Dubai and London.

While the army had been gunning for Sharif since he returned to power in 2013, it was constrained in its options. Sharif won an outright parliamentary majority. There was no coalition that the military could cajole into proroguing the government. The constitutional provision that the Pakistani army had previously relied on to unseat governments was also no longer available after then-President Zardari signed the 18th Amendment, returning Pakistan to a more traditional parliamentary democracy.

Without its trusty cudgel, the army needed to develop new ways of bringing democracy to heel, which is why, soon after Musharraf’s departure, the military began cultivating Pakistan’s Supreme Court. The judicial farce that resulted in Sharif’s most recent ouster demonstrates that the courts remain tools for the generals to clip democracy’s wings.

One year into his tenure, what do you make of Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa as compared with his predecessor, General Raheel Sharif?

In my view, Bajwa’s appointment reflects the shared views of the civilian and military leadership about the current threats facing Pakistan: namely the importance of making progress on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and managing increasingly fraught ties with India as India explores options to punish Pakistan for its persistent use of terrorism in India. Bajwa has extensive experience in managing Kashmir affairs as well as Gilgit-Baltistan as he had served thrice in Pakistan’s X Corps, which is responsible for the area along the Line of Control with India. The X Corps also includes the Force Command Northern Areas-Gilgit. His experience in confronting India in this terrain will be a natural benefit given India’s recent increased assertiveness in the wake of [the 2016 terrorist attack near] Uri.

Moreover, since CPEC is anchored in the north with ground lines of communication connecting Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan with Kashgar in China, his experience is doubly important because residents of Gilgit-Baltistan are not enthusiastic about CPEC. They fear displacement from the planned projects as well as environmental degradation. Additionally, under Chinese pressure, Pakistan is considering making the area a normal province and dispensing with its special constitutional status. In August 2016, angry locals protested the planned CPEC-related activities and the state responded by arresting some 500 men. The army and civilian government alike are vested in CPEC fructifying. Thus Bajwa’s expertise in managing dissent in Gilgit-Baltistan is desirable to both parties.

Bajwa also has experience in Balochistan, which is important because CPEC is anchored in the south of Pakistan to the Gwadar port project in Balochistan and the associated development initiatives there. Since 2005, Balochistan has been in a state of renewed insurgency and much of Baloch ire is derived from the developments at Gwadar and the exclusion of Balochs from the benefits thereof. Moreover, Balochs fear that as the state continues to bring in Punjabis and non-Balochs to work on the Balochistan projects, the Baloch will become an ethnic minority in their “own province” (my own surveys of Balochistan suggest that this may already be the case). Baloch insurgents have attacked Chinese personnel in the province and have sabotaged gas pipelines, attacked security forces, and targeted so-called “settlers,” which usually refers to Punjabis who have moved to the province.

Bajwa was commissioned in the 16 Baloch Regiment and worked as an instructor at the Command and Staff college in Quetta. Presumably, he will be better positioned to manage the security challenges that threaten CPEC at these two important anchors in the north and south. Given this background, one should expect Bajwa to aggressively work to ensure CPEC’s success even if it results in greater brutalities against its opponents in Gilgit-Baltistan and in Balochistan. And we should expect him to continue taking an aggressive posture on India and Kashmir as well.

How is the massive influx of Chinese investment, tied to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, impacting the U.S.-Pakistan relationship?

Pakistani and Chinese officials boast that CPEC will help address Pakistan’s electricity generation problem, bolster its road and rail networks, and shore up the economy through the construction of special economic zones. But these benefits are highly unlikely to materialize. The project is more inclined to leave Pakistan burdened with unserviceable debt while further exposing the fissures in its internal security. Pakistan is hoping that it can leverage China’s largesse against an ostensibly more hostile United States. This gambit isn’t working because Americans see CPEC for what it is: a scheme to colonize Pakistan to enrich China. Why is that the case? It’s simple math.

Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership alike have told Pakistanis that CPEC will solve the country’s chronic electricity shortages, improve an aging road and rail infrastructure, provide a fillip to Pakistan’s economy, knit an increasingly pariah state to a new Chinese-led geopolitical order, and diminish the role of the much-reviled United States in the region. CPEC has the bonus of irritating the Indians because it strengthens Pakistan’s hold on territory in Jammu and Kashmir that it snatched in the 1947-48 war as well as portions of that territory that Pakistan subsequently ceded to China in 1963 as a part of the Sino-Pakistan boundary agreement.

Despite the bold claims made by China and Pakistan, there are many reasons to be dubious about the purported promises of CPEC. There’s already violence all along the corridor stretching from Gilgit-Baltistan in the north to Pakistan’s insurgency-riven Balochistan province, where the famed Gwadar port is located. There’s also the stubborn problem of economic competitiveness. For CPEC to be more competitive than the North-South Corridor that is rooted to the Iranian port of Chabahar, Gwadar needs to offer a safer and shorter route from the Arabian Sea to Central Asia. For that to happen, Gwadar needs to be connected by road to the Afghan Ring Road in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, which is under sustained attacks by the Afghan Taliban. Alternatively, a new route could connect Gwadar with the border crossing at Torkham (near Peshawar) by traveling up Balochistan, with its own active ethnic insurgency, through or adjacent to Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which is the epicenter of Islamist terrorism and insurgency throughout Pakistan. It takes great faith — or idiocy, or greed, or all of the above — to believe that this is possible.

Pakistani citizens also have no way to know what CPEC will cost them. Pakistanis should be worried about the way CPEC is shaping up. If it is even partially executed, Pakistan would be indebted to China as never before. And unlike Pakistan’s other traditional allies, such as the United States, China will probably use its leverage to obtain greater compliance from its problematic client. Pakistan should take a hard look at Chinese investments in Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port because they look very similar: China saddled Sri Lanka with an unprofitable, outrageously overpriced asset. (The exorbitant price was due in considerable measure to the kickbacks shared among Sri Lanka’s elites.) With Sri Lanka defaulting on its loan payments, China asked for the land instead. This is a new form of colonialism.

The Trump administration has shown a strong inclination to deepen its partnership with India, particularly when it comes to shoring up Afghan security. Can Washington forge closer ties with India without a corresponding freeze in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship?

As noted above, the United States requires a port. The administration could have moved more meaningfully with India had Trump not chosen to undermine JCPOA with Iran at the behest of Israel and Saudi Arabia. (After all, Saudi Arabia continues to support the Taliban and other extremists in Afghanistan and elsewhere and Israel contributes nothing to international efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.) However, as I already described, India has built a port in Chabahar in Iran and the two countries have connected the port to the Afghan Ring Road through road and rail links. India has already begun moving large amounts of wheat into Afghanistan through that port.

Had the administration decided to build up and strengthen the JCPOA, one of the natural consequences could have been strengthened U.S.-Indian cooperation in Afghanistan by outsourcing to Indian private sector clients the shipment of the goods to supply the Afghan National Security Forces through Iran’s port at Chabahar. Critically, this would’ve given the United States the kind of leverage it needs to take a harder position on Pakistan’s recalcitrant support for Islamist proxies, who are responsible for the vast majority of Afghan deaths and those of America and its allies. President Trump – or more precisely, his advisers – have learned the hard way: logistics matter and, in Afghanistan, there are only two options – Iran or Pakistan.

As I already described above, the Northern Distribution route has been and will remain largely irrelevant to this problem set. Turning to India, the Indians are not entirely sure about how far they want to go either in Afghanistan. The Indians also resented Trump’s assertion that India has an obligation to do more based upon the trade surplus with the United States. So this ball is not entirely in the Trump administration’s court. The Indians need to figure out what their interests are and India’s turbulent democratic processes is not amenable to quick or easy answers, much less receptive to bullying by an American president.

So far, the United States has mostly steered clear of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. Do you think this administration will continue that trend?

I hope so. But Pakistan will certainly try to gin up support by taking advantage of a novice administration. Having knowledgeable people like Lisa Curtis on the NSC [National Security Council] will mitigate Pakistan’s success in this domain.

To understand why it’s so imperative that the United States demur from getting mired in this dispute, you need to understand why Pakistan engages in so much terrorism in India. Pakistan hopes that after every such attack, the United States will once again declare “Kashmir to be the most dangerous place on earth” and encourage “both sides to resolve their disputes peacefully.

However, there is no territorial dispute in which Pakistan has any defensible equities. Neither the Indian Independence Act of 1947 nor the Radcliffe Boundary Commission accord Pakistan any claim to Kashmir. The Indian Independence Act of 1947 averred that the sovereigns of princely states could choose which state to join. As is well-known, Maharaja of Kashmir Hari Singh only acceded to India after Pakistan dispatched irregular forces to seize the terrain by force. In fact, Pakistan makes this claim based upon the Two Nation Theory, its communally bigoted founding ideology.

When the United States opines about Kashmir and the “dispute,” Washington unwittingly rewards Pakistan for its various terrorist outrages.