Ambassador Cameron Munter on Pakistan Tuesday, September 25, 2012 Washington, D.C. Welcome/Moderator: Frederic Grare Director and Senior Associate of South Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Speaker: U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter Transcript by Federal News Service Washington, D.C. FREDERIC GRARE: Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and welcome to this talk on prospects for Pakistan and the United States. My name is Frederic Grare, and I’m the new director of the South Asia program. We do have the privilege to welcome this morning Ambassador Cameron Munter, who has just returned from Pakistan, what, a couple of weeks ago? Yeah. Ambassador Munter, you have had a long and distinguished career, a long diplomatic career. You did serve in a number of eminent, Europe-related positions in the National Security Council with the State Department as well as in Europe itself. This Europe specialty, in a way, ended at least for some time in 2006, when you led the first provincial reconstruction team not in Afghanistan, but in Mosul, Iraq. You then became Ambassador to Belgrade right before returning to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Finally, in 2010, you were sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan. I understand that after you retire, you’ll be going as visiting fellow to Columbia School of Law, and then followed up with some other academic affiliations. So sir, welcome back to the world of academia. You were the U.S. representative in Pakistan during a challenging time, and your tenure was exactly not an easy one. You had to mend relations between the two countries after the quite unprecedented series of crises of 2001 in particular, Raymond Davis, the raid against bin Laden, Salala and the cutoff of the lines of supply; 2011 was indeed an uneasy year for the Middle East, for Pakistan-U.S. relations. [00:01:54] Re-establishing – resuming the links was indeed no small achievement. But crises are also moments of truth, and I suppose we are all keen to know was three crises, very different in nature – I’ve told you about Pakistan, about the U.S. and about the relationship between the two countries. Will the relation ever be the same? That’s the question mark that a lot of people have in mind. How is it likely to evolve? What are the challenges that are ahead? These are some of the questions – I guess there will be many more in the Q & A session, and we – in which we’re are all impatient to listen to you. I understand that you intend to also replay that in the larger context of the evolution of the relation with Pakistan, in particular since 2008, and this is really something we will welcome as well. Ambassador Munter, we are most honored to have you, and we are very honored that you’ve chosen Carnegie for your first public event since returning from Islamabad. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in extending warm welcome to Ambassador Munter. (Applause.) [00:03:07] AMBASSADOR CAMERON MUNTER: It’s great to see a number of friends today, and I thank you all for being here. I had actually hoped to come to you next week, because I retire from the foreign service at the end of this month, and I thought, OK, I can, you know, retire, they can’t get me anymore – (laughter) – I can say what I want. But having had enough of Washington, I’m actually getting out of town next week, so this was my opportunity – even before I’m out the door – to try to have discussion with you, the people who I respect most, on this issue, about Pakistan and comment a little about my tenure there and the prospects for the future. So I’d like to speak for a little while, but I – really, I’d like to have a conversation with you, and I think we have time for that. Frederic will be – will be moderating for us. Yeah, and those of you who have studied Pakistan, those of you who have lived Pakistan know that the guiding principle is the principle of narratives, that there is basically two narratives: our narrative, their narrative, and by our, I really do mean, you know, despite differences of ideology on the American side, despite differences of ideology on the Pakistani side, I’ve found that it’s a remarkable consistency in the set of you can say, narratives or you can say prejudices, if you choose – with which the two countries approach each other. First of all, they’re focused heavily on bilateral relations, as if there’s nothing else other than the bilateral tie. And there’s a bit of obsessiveness that comes into, I think, not only the discussion, but the literature about this, about bilateralness – and I’ll get to that towards the end – why I think it’s important to break out of that. You all know that the American – the Pakistani notion of America is America uses Pakistan and then leaves. There is a – (inaudible) –a kind of a back and forth of positive relations, negative relations, a kind of a pattern. And this pattern, which developed, whether you want to look back to 1971, whether you want to look back to 1989, whether you want to look to 2001, it’s a very easy and warm and comfortable pattern for Pakistanis to accept, that there is a way by which America uses Pakistan for its own needs and then discards Pakistan. And having discovered this and repeated it ad nauseam to generations of young, impressionable diplomats like myself, but others, what has been known as a descriptive method becomes prescriptive; that is, it is not only descriptive that this is what happened, it is prescriptive that that is in the DNA of the United States. They will do this to you; they want to do this to you. America likes to desert Pakistan. It’s the way America works. So this is, very crudely put, the Pakistani narrative. [00:05:50] The American narrative is similarly crude, but similarly useful, in the sense that, we give these guys tons of money, and every time, they betray us, you know. They lie to us, they don’t do what they say they’re going to do, and yet we, the suckers, the needy superpower, keep coming back to them in times of need. We give them more money, and to quote Randy Newman, that great philosopher, we give them money, but are they grateful? No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful, this kind of thing. (Laughter.) And it is emotional on both sides, because this is not just a question of an analysis of the way different countries work, it’s a question of betrayal of people who you want to love, and you want them to love you, and this goes – those of you who have studied this, whether diplomatic or in cultural elements, deep down I think you would agree that there is this desire for more than just a relationship, there’s a desire for something – not just a one-night stand, we want marriage, you know, and then the disappointment that comes from that. [00:06:52] So with those two narratives, it’s my contention that in 2008, not for the first time – maybe not for the last time – with the end of the Musharraf – you can call it a dictatorship, an era, whatever – there was a concerted effort by people, I think, in both parties here in Washington, but certainly led as the Democrats came in by such people as Biden and Lugar and Kerry and Richard Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton – there was this effort to say, we’re going to break out of this narrative. We are going to break out of this seeming straitjacket of the up and down of the relationship, and we’re going to put our money where our mouth is, and because we’re Washington, we measure things – the tool we use to try to show that we’re serious is money, and that money was the Kerry-Lugar- Berman legislation, which promised $7.5 billion in civilian aid over five years at the beginning of the Obama administration. And if I understand it correctly – I wasn’t working; I was busy dodging other kinds of projectiles in Iraq at the time – but if I understand this correctly, this was a deeply idealistic effort to try to say, we are not only going to give money, we are not only going to have an impact with a fairly large civilian assistance program to balance, if you will, our ongoing military commitment to Pakistan, but we’re also going to set up a structure or a relationship through what was generally called the strategic partnership to try to make – to break out of that pattern. And after 2008, 2009, those of you who knew Richard Holbrooke knew that, you know, Hurricane Holbrooke hit Pakistan and there was a set of very ambitious, all-of-government, if you will, goals and structures that were put in to try to build a long-term commitment to Pakistan, and I use “long-term” advisedly. [00:08:53] There had been a feeling that the American focus on the counterterrorism effort post-9/11, by its very nature, by almost the epistemological element of the way people understand CT, was, by its nature, short-term, that you needed to get results, you needed to kill bad guys, et cetera. This was to balance that short-term set of needs: American safety, the safety of our troops in Afghanistan, the safety of the Pakistani people, to balance that with a commitment to the long-term stability, and a vision, if you will – a common vision with Pakistan of the long-term stability of Pakistan. It seems naïve now, after we’ve gone through the ensuing years, but I do believe that was done in good faith from the American side, and in fact, there were many on the Pakistani side who gambled that it was going to work. Those were the people – you could put Zardari in that category, but also people like Shah Mehmood Qureshi and others. Whatever you think of their ability as statesmen, whatever you think of their governance qualities, there was an element – a true – I believe, a true attempt to try to forge a new relationship, a strategic partnership. That even went over to the – to the traditional element of our relationship, the military and ISI, where, I think, the relationship between the ISI and the military – if you measure it by how many visas they gave or how they tried to work together on various, counter terrorism projects – actually, there was a real effort to try to make that bloom after 2008. [00:10:30] Those of you who know the details of the period here know that I’m eliding over some of this, but I’m trying to show kind of a direction. I believe that that – that effort has failed, and one of the reasons for the failure of that effort on the Pakistani side was the inability of the Pakistani state to be the vehicle of this assistance – and more than just the money and the assistance, but the commitment. It was not strong enough or able enough to do what the Americans had hoped it could do. Those of you who follow the assistance program know that there was an attempt to have 50 percent of the Kerry-Lugar-Berman money work through what they call G-to-G, government-to- government programs, so that, for example, if you’re working in infrastructure projects, if you’re working in education, the goal was not just to build a dam, not just to build a school, but to improve the capacity, to build the capacity of the provincial and central government in the process. When you talk to diaspora Pakistanis, when you talk to most Pakistanis, they say, are you nuts? You’re giving money to who? The government of this province? You know, but we were saying no, it’s worth it. We were trying to say, as partners, we will work not only with NGOs, not only with beltway bandits, but with the government of Pakistan, and the government of Pakistan is going to show itself capable of working with us. And I would argue that that’s a failure, and part of it was simply the capacity of the government. Now when I say failure, not a total failure. I think our assistance program has really gotten some results and continues to get some results, but it was a failure in the vision that we were going to build the kind of partnership with Pakistan with a capable Pakistan that we wanted. [00:12:26] Those of you who’ve read Anatol Lieven’s book – those of you who haven’t shouldn’t be in this room, but those of you who read Anatol Lieven’s book, you know, will understand and will buy that premise, which I do, that with a very weak state and a very strong society, the problem of putting all of your commitment into that weak state is perhaps flawed; that is, that the premise is perhaps flawed, that if, in fact, there are not very many beggars in Pakistan, if that’s not because of a wonderful welfare system but because of social and tribal and local structures, it’s worth paying attention to the fact that that is perhaps the way Pakistan is governed, and that investing in the prospects for a strong state with a state in that – in that kind of situation is fraught with risk, and that risk happened. OK, so that’s – that’s one flaw, I think, in what happened after 2008. We – it’s as if we drove a train over a trestle, and the trestle, which was the Pakistani government, that was simply too weak. It was not able to absorb the money or to deal with our commitment, whether, again, assistance or strategic partnership, to address the issues of energy, to address the issues. You know, I can’t tell you how many beautiful studies of the energy problem we’ve given Pakistan that have simply gone onto a shelf. You know, and so it was not able to respond. So that’s the Pakistani failure. In a certain sense the U.S. failure, I would argue, was our inability to look past counterterrorism or our tendency to see the problems of counterterrorism as the defining element of the relationship, or as I would put it, when you look at Pakistan through the telescope of Afghanistan, you see only one thing, and that’s the Haqqani network; that is to say, if you insist, in policy discussions in Washington, on seeing the counterterrorism issue focused on the immediate needs – very real needs, very important needs, life and death needs of the American effort in Afghanistan and the American effort to break the back of al-Qaida, you run the risk of losing track of those longer-term goals that people like Richard Holbrooke, that people like Hillary Clinton et cetera articulated, the Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation articulated back in 2008. [00:14:55] So that the – the American problem was that we were unable, I believe, to sort out, in an effective way, how we did both. Now, when Richard Holbrooke asked me to take this job, he made it quite clear that, you know, those of you who know Richard Holbrooke – humble – you know, Richard Holbrooke basically created a system, or it was created for Richard Holbrooke – a system at the State Department where he was the sun – not even in the State Department, to the whole Washington bureaucracy – he was the sun and all of us were the planets going around him, right? And then the sun went out, and those of you who know Holbrooke know that he was unbearable, et cetera, et cetera, but – no, I missed him every day in Pakistan after he died, because his commitment and his vision was something that – and just the power of his personality was something we really needed, and especially because bureaucratically, we had created not just the usual State Department geographical bureau system, we had created the Holbrooke solar system, and when the light went out, we were a bunch of rocks spinning around in the dark and space. Now that makes us sound more pathetic than I’d like to think we really were, but it was very, very difficult. And after that time, that – we struggled to try to figure out how Af-Pak could work. Marc Grossman, who took Richard Holbrooke’s place, did a fabulous job of focusing – you know, Holbrooke was famously not a focused man, and Marc did a fabulous – and continues to do a great job of focusing that effort on the Afghan peace, et cetera. But what happened at that point was that the edifice that was built – that Richard Holbrooke sought, and I’ll use him as a – as a – as a proxy for those other people of good will who sought this – became much more difficult. And even if Holbrooke had lived, the events of 2011 might have made it difficult anyway for us to sustain this balance between the long-term and the short-term efforts that we sought to build in 2008. [00:17:06] So we can look at 2011 and go through those – and just a few of those items, those events and see where that imbalance came. One event just – exactly at the beginning of 2011, the assassination of Salmaan Taseer and the inability of the Pakistani government, the secular elements of the Pakistani government to rally against those people – against the forces of intolerance threw a chill I think, through the mainstream, open-minded elements in Pakistan, which I believe there are many – the progressive people of Pakistan who seem to be in retreat. You know, well, look at Ahmed Rashid’s books, and flames on the fronts and the titles are always things like “Descent into Chaos,” or “on the Brink,” and, you know, I think that while Ahmed is correct, he does tend to make things look much more dire than they actually are, right? Pakistan is not a – living in Islamabad is not living in Mogadishu, but there is that perception that that’s the case. Partly, I would argue, the perception is that way because at times, like the assassination of Salmaan Taseer, it was incumbent on the leadership of Pakistan to make strong statements, and they did not. It may have been that they calculated they weren’t strong enough to do that. If that’s the case, then that’s even more disturbing. Then came, of course, the Raymond Davis case – the Raymond Davis case, in which a CIA contractor was set upon by street thugs – and they were street thugs – and killed them, and I got a crash course in Sharia law, and spent the next seven weeks trying to get him out of jail, but this then showed to the Pakistanis a certain sense of, wait a minute, we have opened up to you, and all of our worst fears about America doing things behind our back have been realized. So it was a psychological moment when Raymond Davis was – that case took place, both for those people who oppose us in Pakistan – you see that Raymond Davis is – around every corner – I still had people, to the end of my time in Pakistan telling me that there thousands of Raymond Davises, you know, just all over Pakistan. [00:19:23] But worse was the impact on those people who had committed to us, those people who believed, and had said at the dinner parties or – not the dinner parties, but you know, at the – at whatever meeting to the Jamaat Islami or others, and said, no the Americans mean it this time. After 2008, there’s a commitment. We can build the – get away from the trust deficit. This hurt those people who had committed most to us in the sense that, hey, what is going on here? Here is this guy who was arrested with illegal weapons, what was he doing? So this hurt the trust very badly. We had just recovered from that when, of course, we had the Osama bin Laden raid on the 2nd of May. I’m convinced, as I think most people who looked at the evidence are convinced, that top leadership, you know, the military and the intelligence but also civilians did not know that Osama bin Laden was in – was in Abbottabad. When Marc Grossman and I visited Pasha and Kayani on May 2nd, all of us were exhausted from staying up the whole night so it was kind of a punch drunk meeting, but the first thing they said was congratulations because they realized that someone who they were against, someone who they wanted to see gone was gone. It was only in the next days after that that that they realized that the political price that the institution, the military was paying – that that became manifest. When, you know, public American commentators said, you are either complicit or incompetent. It happened to be true, but it also happened to be something that put them very much on the spot. And this response by those Pakistanis, especially in the military and especially in the intelligence world who had committed to working with us, who had committed to the post-2008 effort to break out of the narrative, they were the ones who suffered the most as the result of the bin Laden raid. [00:21:24] We knew that there would be fallout from the bin Laden raid. And that’s what it is. So that into the summer of 2011 we – for example, General Kayani decided he would ask us to take away the 150 training – trainers, the special ops forces we had in the FATA who were training the Pakistani military in counterinsurgency operations. We – I personally went to General Kayani and said: Are you aware that under American law when you ask these people to leave – and I know you’re doing this because you want to show that you’re not in the Americans’ pocket, that the Americans have done a terrible thing to you or however you want to describe this – we have to take with us the material – the actual assistance, the night vision goggles, the computers, everything else – we have to take that out too. If you get rid of the boys, you get rid of the toys, right? And Kayani looked me in the eye and said, I know. I said, General Kayani, are you aware that that could mean that in the fight in the FATA – where you’ve lost more soldiers in the past two years than the entire NATO contingent has lost in Afghanistan in the last decade – that you’re making it more likely that your soldiers are going to die? And he says, yes. I mean, that was just the political tradeoff that he had to make. [00:22:44] So those people – and I would argue Kayani was one – who had, after 2008, looked cautiously but tried to go along with this new picture, were the ones who had to load up the C-17s in Peshawar and send all the equipment home along with – you know, with the soldiers. So that was made even deeper, I think, by the comments that took place in September in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, when Admiral Mullen referred to the Haqqani network as a veritable arm of the ISI, which I think further upset, as you might imagine, the Pakistanis. But the real clincher was, of course, the Salala incident of November in which 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed in a cross-border incident. And I would maintain, as we have maintained throughout, that that was an accident. It was not something done on purpose. But as a – as a result of the appreciation of these events that had taken place, that had undercut the trust, that those people who were most inclined to want to work with us felt that the trust was eroding. [00:23:56] We really did have senior members of the corps commanders telling us: You obviously did this on purpose to teach us a lesson. You don’t come in with an AC-130 gunship – and I don’t know if you’re military people, but an AC-130 gunship fires not bullets but projectiles so that when you’re hit by an AC-130 gunship there’s nothing left of you. That is to say, when they – when Pakistanis said, in November of 2011 – when the Pakistanis said this was something that was – the word escapes me – not – it was over the top, it was too much. There’s a term of art that escapes me. What they were saying was you don’t do something the way you did and say it was an accident. In my mind, it was an accident. It was a terrible accident. But we had gotten to the point at the end of 2011 where those attempts to try to build the trust and to build the relationship had basically come to the bottom. Now, throughout my time in 2011, I kept thinking, OK, when do we hit bottom? And I realized this idea of hitting bottom, like a submarine, was the wrong – it was the wrong metaphor – it was the wrong metaphor. The metaphor was like rolling down the side of a ravine where, you know, you hit the cactus and you hit the rocks and then you just keep going. And that’s really what 2011 was. And for someone like me who prides himself, as a foreign service officer, on having worked on strategic planning and being able to look three months, six months, 12 months out – well, I got a lesson on looking, you know, to the next day. And that’s the way 2011 was. But it was also that way, of course, for the Pakistanis. So after that event when the NATO supply lines were closed, we hit that point that everyone, I think, acknowledged in early 2012, where there was kind of a timeout. And it’s an interesting problem because this goes away a little bit from the bilateral relationship, but within Pakistan there was an effort just to say, take a breath and say, what else – what else can we do? How do we assess this? What do we do? The Pakistanis ran off to China and said: If we kick out the Americans, can you come in? And the Chinese say, are you crazy? Of course not. [00:26:20] There were other kinds of elements in the – in the Pakistani government to try to think, OK, what do we do now that we have seen that the Americans don’t seem to be able to do what we want them to do? We, for our part, were saying, you guys, look, we have a fight. You’re kicking out the people who are there to help you in this fight – this existential fight in the FATA. Whether or not you meant to, you had bin Laden in your country for five years, right – et cetera, et cetera. I mean, we had our angry building as well. So by the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, there was a bit of a timeout. And there was, in my opinion, the unfortunate decision by the Pakistani government to try to abdicate from its strong position of – well, consistent opinion of being pro-American to throw this to the parliament. And the parliament, in my opinion, didn’t cover itself with glory and took a long time to try to assess how it would look at the bilateral relationship. And this, then again, underscored just how much the rhetoric of that relationship had been tied into Pakistani-American, to the – to the exclusion of everything else. [00:27:35] Thanks to the brilliance of various people on both sides – and I think there’s a great New York Times article that described this actual process and how outside the chain of diplomatic channels they were able to solve the NATO supply line issue. Tom Nides will always be the hero for the work that he did on that and Hafiz Sheikh as well. Thanks to that, we got some breathing room about middle of this – of this – of this year. We had some breathing room in the sense that it was possible that we’d begin to reassess. But I would argue that the expectations on both sides have become very measured, much more modest, and rightfully so. And that at this point the efforts to try answer the question that was raised here, can relations ever get back to where they were – I would argue that’s the wrong question. The attempt to try to build the strategic partnership as it was conceived in 2008, 2009, 2010, is not the right way to go about this because whether or not we meant to, we looked within the confines of the two narratives to try to define how we were going to fix things in 2008. What we were trying to do is to say, here’s the narrative, how are we going to change it? How are we going to deny it? Sadder but wiser, I would like to argue, that there is not a way to change this narrative. If anything the narrative has become – the narratives on both sides have become strengthened. It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone can get a vote in an American election by being nice to Pakistan. It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone could get a vote in Pakistan by being nice to the Americans. So that this bilateral relationship, this bilateral focus is not the way to go. Then, if that’s the case, what do you do about it? There are two things that I think are important in looking ahead. One is that there are – there is the opportunity – with the situation that we’ve gotten into – there’s the opportunity to look at many of the questions that, say, the strategic partnership looked at in a different context. And those contexts are mainly regional contexts. If the year 2011 was a lousy year for me, and it was, it was not such a lousy year for India-Pakistan issues, it was not such a lousy year for various elements of the Pakistani economy. [00:30:06] That is if, again, we go back to our good friend Anatol Lieven and we focus on those elements of Pakistan which are the most dynamic elements, they’re not necessarily the elements at the state who we used as our partners after 2008. The most dynamic partners that American can have are the business people, media, some of the people from the universities – it’s uneven – but some of the people in the universities, the women’s groups, the NGOs. That is that say, I’m not trying to talk about this rosy, friendly civil society in the sense that those of us who worked in the revolutions of 1989 looked to civil society. It is infinitely more complex and infinitely more varied and difficult than the Euro-centric notions would have it. But this is the part of Pakistan where, if you talk to Pakistanis who are furious with the United States – if you talk to them about what they want from the United States, this is where it all turns into we want this badly, we want to the hope, we want the opportunity and we want that kind of social link that we’ve always felt with – the affinity with the United States. It would be wise for us to think about helping those parts of society to build ties with the United States, depending if we can – that not that we’re not going to work with the state institutions, but to put a lot more of our concentration into society where the face of America is not the face of Raymond Davis, but it’s the face of your neighbor, an engineer who works on a Punjab ditch, the face of a student, the face of your child who’s come to America, et cetera. So one would be a shift in our focus on what Pakistan is. I’m not sure that’s going to be possible in the next two years. And this is my second point. One is who you deal with – and I’ll get back to the international in a moment – who you deal with in Pakistan but also when you deal with them. I think that it is right for us to make sure that we focus, even though I was – I was critical about the question of the dominance of the counterterrorism and the counterinsurgency issues that we have with Afghanistan. We have to deal with that correctly. We have to deal with al-Qaida. We have to deal with international terrorism. [00:32:32] And until 2014, it is unlikely, in my mind, that we can have any major change. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do our homework, doesn’t mean that we can’t get, for example, the dynamic, philanthropic sector of Pakistan to work with the very dynamic, philanthropic sector in the United States which, in recent years, has not happened very much. We can reassert the ties between our institutions. I mean, the Faisalabad Agricultural University and the University of California at Riverside probably know between them more about civics groups than any of us. So what’s the government doing in the middle of this? Building these kinds of ties so that after 2014, when there is a new kind of American focus on the region – and I’d like to think if all goes as well that we hope it will go in Afghanistan, and that’s big if – that it will be somewhat less militarized and somewhat more focused on maintaining the peace in Pakistan and investing in Pakistan’s long-term future in its society a little bit more than in the – in its – in its politics. [00:33:44] Similarly, to expect that American assistance or even ties between philanthropies and ties between universities and all this is going to alter Pakistan is not realistic. And I don’t mean to imply that we can make, as many people would like, Pakistan into Switzerland in a few years by just sending the Carnegie Endowment over there to fix them up. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Nor is it right for us to even think that that’s a worthy goal. The right way to approach this, in my mind, would be to see that if we can do what we can to help the efforts to internationalize Pakistan – it is an inward-looking country. Again, that’s part of the attraction that Pakistan has, I think, for this bilateral narrative and bilateral focus, that sadly when you talk to Pakistanis and they talk about seeing the taillights of South Korea and the taillights of Turkey and the taillights of Indonesia, even Bangladesh, receding in the distance ahead of them. Countries that sent – you know, Koreans sent teams to Pakistan in the 1960s to find out what Pakistan had done right and how they could learn from them. The Chinese sent teams in the late ’70s. And I met the Chinese ambassador – introduced me to one of these professors – actually, a businessman, who had come in 1979 or something from – Deng Xiaoping had sent these people. And he said, I came here in the ’70s when we wanted to be like Pakistan. And he says, and the place just hasn’t changed.