Confronting the Pakistan riddle

The closer one looks at the U.S. fight against the Taliban and al-Qaida, the more one appreciates the gap between intentions hatched in Washington and the realities on the ground. We have been hearing for years about the complex web of loyalties that crisscross and interconnect these two nations; now, as President Barack Obama looks to refocus U.S. strategy, we're seeing once again how the same native forces that often frustrated the Bush administration's efforts can do the same for a new White House security team.

As was the case during the Bush years, Pakistan remains perhaps the greatest frustration. Without Pakistan's help, there's no way to fight Islamic extremists in the region. But when we enlist the aid of Pakistan, we are asking for the help of the nation that created the Taliban and whose intelligence service is widely believed to maintain ties to it and related insurgent groups in the region.

Solving the riddle that is Pakistan has become ever more urgent, as the U.S. and NATO military presence in Afghanistan during the past eight years has pushed Taliban forces over the porous border between these two countries. Our force levels in Afghanistan are rising, but in Pakistan we must continue to rely primarily on the desultory efforts of the Pakistani military, supplemented by covert CIA and U.S. military efforts.

If getting military aid from Pakistan has so far been a frustrating experience, so has the U.S. experience with giving aid to Pakistan. During the waning years of the Bush administration, numerous questions were raised about whether military and other aid money given to Pakistan was going to where the U.S. intended — to the fight against the Taliban — or whether it was instead being used to defend against India, which Pakistan regards as its greatest enemy and threat.

These questions have been given renewed urgency by a New York Times report last week examining Pakistan's bolstering of its nuclear arsenal, and by questions raised in the Senate about whether continued aid to Pakistan would be spent on nuclear arms rather than on fighting the Taliban. Several senators have called for putting constraints and conditions on proposed aid, but one might consider that money is fungible; the money the U.S. gives to augment Pakistan's fight against the Taliban could just as easily end up replacing Pakistan's share, freeing its government to spend elsewhere.

That Pakistan might be using U.S. aid dollars, even indirectly, to expand its nuclear forces is of special concern, given the surmounting worry that Pakistan's nuclear weapons could fall into terrorist hands.

This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced an aid package that, by channeling money through the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations rather than Pakistan's government, seems to acknowledge and attempt to get around this problem. But the aid in question is largely humanitarian relief directed at refugees from the fighting between Pakistan and insurgent forces in Pakistan's Swat Valley; military aid, which Pakistan will continue to request and which we will no doubt feel we need to supply, will by necessity have to flow through Islamabad — and from there, who can say where it will go?

Such are the pitfalls of having to wage war through a proxy — much less a proxy that, in the case of Pakistan, we are asking to fight against its own former proxy, the Taliban. We are operating in a part of the world where allegiances have less to do with nationality than with tribal and other less-detectable affiliations, and where little is as it seems.