The Obama administration has gone down on its well-worn knees and said “it was sorry for the loss” of 24 Pakistani soldiers accidentally killed in a Predator drone strike last November. This, after seven months of saying it wasn’t going to happen — because both US and Afghan military officials swore the deadly attack was against positions, and possibly Pakistani soldiers, that had been firing on allied troops.
The apology means that the supply route to Afghanistan, which Pakistan had closed in protest, will reopen — until Islamabad finds another pretext to shut it.
The Obama team points out that it didn’t actually use the word apology, and that the Pakistanis aren’t going to charge us an extra $5,000 a truck, as they originally threatened.
But it still stands as an embarrassing stand-down for the Obama team, and raises two questions.
First: When are we going to get an apology from Pakistan for secretly harboring Osama bin Laden all those years?
Second, and more important: How did we reach this low point with a country that in the 1950s was one of our most steadfast and dependable Asian allies, and 30 years later helped us expel the Soviets from Afghanistan?
Step by step, that’s how. And this administration is only the latest to mangle our relations with Pakistan.
The Kennedy and Johnson administrations started the great US game of cutting off military aid to our biggest ally in South Asia as a gesture of disapproval for using US-supplied arms against India. Aid started up again in 1975, but President Jimmy Carter shut it down again when Pakistan started up a nuclear program to catch up with archrival India.
It took the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to get us back working with Islamabad. But the on-again/off-again arms embargos had destroyed any bond of trust. The days when US advisers trained Pakistani troops, and Pakistani officers attended American training schools, were over. Into the cultural vacuum came radical Islam, which spread like e-coli through the Pakistani army.
We cooperated with the new Islamicized Pakistani military to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But after that victory, Pakistan fostered the Taliban takeover.
Meanwhile came another aid embargo in 1991, as Pakistan’s nuclear program continued to advance. Islamabad responded by peddling its nuclear secrets to the highest bidders — including, as it turned out, Iran.
President George W. Bush restored aid again in 2002 in order to get Pakistan and its president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, on board with the War on Terror.
Musharraf proved an unreliable ally — but Bush’s decision to pressure him to give way to an elected civilian government gave us the current, ineffectual regime — which nearly succumbed to a terrorist takeover in 2009, and may well succumb again after we leave Afghanistan.
President Obama thought he could pacify Afghanistan by pressuring Pakistan to shut down terrorist havens and cut off cross-border raids into Afghan territory, while our Predator drone strikes took out the bad guys on both sides of the border in the meantime. That strategy has backfired.
The Pakistanis sees no reason to help us in Afghanistan — we’re plainly fleeing for the exit, and they’re intent on maximizing their future influence there.
They’ve also seen our mounting drone strikes bring “collateral damage” — dead civilians, including women and children — feeding the fires of hatred not only of the United States, but also of the government in Islamabad.
Publicly humiliating us, and undercutting our War on Terror, has now become the price of survival for that government. It’s done the former by arresting a major CIA operative in Pakistan in January 2011, as well as the doctor who helped us locate bin Laden. As for the latter, it’s given up on controlling the Afghan border — allowing raids like the one that prompted that disastrous 2011 drone strike — as well as periodically shutting down our supply convoys.
What’s the solution? The Obama team has clearly run out of ideas — so we’re stuck supplying aid to a country that now despises us.
The real answer is winning the war in Afghanistan, and showing Pakistan we mean to stay the course — and mean business in fighting radical Islam wherever it raises its murderous head. Until then, expect more trouble from the Pakistanis — and more needless bloodshed resulting from a policy built one misstep at a time.
Arthur Herman’s new book is “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War Two.”