The World's Jeb Sharp has an update on U.S. policy toward Pakistan -- at a time when President Obama is reviewing U.S. strategy there and in neighboring Afghanistan.
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LISA MULLINS: The Obama administration is trying to learn more on the diplomatic front. This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton plans to meet in Washington with the foreign ministers of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet, as the administration is reviewing U.S. policy in those countries -- it's stepping up military activities in both countries. The World's Jeb Sharp has more.
JEB SHARP: Americans are familiar with President Obama's promises to pull out of Iraq and concentrate on Afghanistan, but they are less familiar with U.S. policy inside Pakistan. Karin von Hippel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says there are two main initiatives.
KARIN VON HIPPEL: The first are these unmanned Predator drone strikes that are targeting militants, mostly foreign militants, in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and of course this is causing outrage amongst the Pakistani public, because they seem to be in violation of Pakistani sovereignty. The second activity is it appears that the U.S. military is working with some in the Pakistani military to carry out attacks of suspects basically in the tribal areas.
SHARP: Von Hippel worries that the United States risks provoking resentment when it apologizes for civilian casualties in Afghanistan, but stays quiet about the deaths on the Pakistani side of the border.
VON HIPPEL: I'm not a fan of drone attacks on their own, and you don't need them if you have much better intelligence and better security on the ground. It's really rare that a drone attack is not going to kill civilians, and anytime you kill a civilian you're going to increase the animosity for the United States, and you're going to potentially cause more young men to want to join these different militia groups and fight the United States, so in the long term it's probably counterproductive.
SHARP: Dan Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations defends some of the CIA drone attacks, but not all of them.
DAN MARKEY: I think that some of the Predator strikes are absolutely necessary and it's very difficult sitting outside of the government to assess precisely which ones are valuable and which ones are not, but to the extent that any of these attacks might be hitting sort of second-tier targets, that's absolutely something that should end. It's probably counterproductive, except in the most extreme cases where you really have a top leader, a top terrorist, in your sights.
SHARP: Markey points out that while much of the focus and debate right now is on these drone strikes and covert operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, there's a lot more to U.S. policy in Pakistan than the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan.
MARKEY: Let's remember that most of the 170 million people in Pakistan don't live there, and many of the groups that are exceedingly dangerous, including the one that apparently perpetrated the attack in Mumbai last November, are not located there. They're not located along the tribal belt; they're in the rest of Pakistan, in settled Pakistan, where we also have deep problems of extremism, of poverty, lack of opportunity, alienation and weak state.
SHARP: There's legislation under consideration in Washington that would triple non-military aid to Pakistan. Markey says smart development projects like roads, power plants and irrigation canals could go a long way toward winning the trust of the Pakistani people. But he advocates investing in the Pakistani military and police as well, so they are better able to fight militants. Karin von Hippel of CSIS says what's needed is a fundamental realignment of U.S. policy toward Pakistan.
VON HIPPEL; The U.S.-Pakistani relationship has really been unidimensional. It was a Bush-Musharraf relationship for a long time. Most of our aid money went to support the military, and much of that military support was not actually used for counterterrorism or counterinsurgency activities, but rather to bolster the Pakistani army in case there's an attack against India, or a war with India, which is not what they need to do right now.
SHARP: It's not clear whether that fundamental policy realignment will happen under President Obama. His administration is still reviewing its options for Pakistan. For The World, I'm Jeb Sharp.
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