Securing Afghanistan Means Relying On Difficult U.S. Partner -- Pakistan's Army

WASHINGTON -- After their first official meeting earlier this month, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and President Barack Obama faced cameras together in the East Room of the White House. One man's country had once given Osama bin Laden safe haven to plan 9/11; the other's destroyed that refuge and propped up an entirely new government in Afghanistan, losing over 2,000 soldiers and spending over $1 trillion in the process. Standing side by side, Ghani and Obama sought to show that the U.S. investment in a secure Afghanistan would ultimately prove successful.

Optimism about U.S.-Afghan relations was high, with U.S. officials and analystsdescribing Ghani as just the ally the U.S. needed to stabilize Afghanistan and finally end the Taliban insurgency.

But the outcome of the U.S. effort will not depend only on leaders in Kabul and Washington. Afghanistan’s future also relies on a third player, a volatile actor that has interchangeably assisted and undermined Washington’s efforts in the region: Pakistan's army.

The U.S. and Afghanistan have known for years that peace will not be possible unless the Pakistani military wants to make it happen. The army command is almost solely responsible for the country’s national security, even though there is an elected civilian government in Islamabad. The military also holds the key to Afghan stability, since it would be the key interlocutor in any peace agreement between Ghani’s government and the Afghan Taliban, with whom the Pakistani army has maintained close ties.

The trouble is that no one is sure what the military will do. 

The Huffington Post interviewed a number of Pakistani politicians, retired military officials and analysts who suggested that the increasing focus on regional stability has allowed the military to exercise more dominance than it has at any point since 2008, when the last period of direct army rule ended. The army’s recent moves, these experts argue, show that it is keen to reassert its power, despite its insistence that it supports the civilian leadership.

For the U.S. and Afghanistan to rely more heavily on Pakistan’s army would affirm this creeping control. Moreover, the military is among the U.S.’s most controversial counterterror partners: For years, it has maintained that it is helping the U.S. fight extremists in Afghanistan, even while its ties to some of those very extremists are publicly known.   Read More at Huffingtonpost

Securing Afghanistan Means Relying On Difficult U.S. Partner -- Pakistan's Army