Pakistan: Now or Never?
Perspectives on Pakistan
Pakistan vs U.S. Dumbing down the drones debate
If there was one thing the United States might have learned in a decade of war is that military might alone cannot compensate for lack of knowledge about people and conditions on the ground. That was true in Afghanistan and Iraq, and may also turn out to be the case in Libya.
Yet the heated debate about using Predator drones to target militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan – triggered by the spy row between the CIA and the ISI – appears to be falling into a familiar pattern – keep bombing versus stop bombing. Not whether, when and how drones might be effective, based on specific conditions and knowledge of the ground, and when they are counter-productive.
Combined with that is a tendency to discuss the use of drones in isolation without taking account of the historical context (Pakistan and the United States have been rowing about this for several years – it is not new) or indeed the broader political context (a botched drone attack by the CIA is guaranteed to enrage all the more if it comes at a time when American diplomats are trying to convince Pakistan they want to improve relations.)
Consider, for example, the case of a tribesman with a performing monkey who gathered an audience of turban-clad, rifle-bearing men around him in a village in 2005. The U.S. controllers of the drone mistook the event for a weapons-training session or military briefing and dropped a missile, killing many in the audience. That story was recounted by General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, now head of the Pakistan Army, and quoted by Brian Cloughley in his book “War, Coups and Terror”. “This, said the General, was an example of lack of cultural understanding,” wrote Cloughley.
Then there was the botched drone attack on Damadola in Bajaur agency in 2006 – by some accounts it was intended to target al Qaeda deputy Ayman al Zawahiri. According to the Pakistani version, many women and children were among the victims of the strike, enraging the local population, driving them into the arms of local Taliban militants and fuelling a ferocious insurgency which took the Pakistan military several years to contain.
In language that could have been written today (and it has) the Guardian reported at the time that Pakistan had lodged a strong protest with the Americans over the attack and “the strained relation between Pakistan and the U.S. has been pushed to breaking point.” It blamed the botched attack on faulty intelligence on the ground.
Compare that, though, to the killing of Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), in a drone strike in 2009. His death was welcomed by Pakistani authorities, and indeed by many ordinary Pakistanis who blamed him for bomb attacks in Pakistan. Good intelligence. Specific target. And probably the high point of cooperation between the United States and Pakistan over the use of drones.
The “sound and fury” of U.S.-Pakistan ties
With the release of CIA contractor Raymond Davis, the United States and Pakistan have put behind them one of the more public rows of their up-and-down relationship. It was probably not the worst row — remember the furore over a raid by U.S. ground troops in Angor Adda in Waziristan in 2008, itself preceded by a deluge of leaks to the U.S. media about the alleged duplicity of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in its dealings on Afghanistan.
But it was certainly one which by its very nature was guaranteed to get the most attention – an American who shot dead two Pakistanis in what he said was an act of self-defence, denied diplomatic immunity and ultimately released only after the payment of blood money. Adding to the drama were two intelligence agencies battling behind the scenes.
It was also the first serious row since the Obama administration began to build what it promised would be a new strategic relationship with Pakistan.
As I wrote earlier this month, overall relations between the United States and Pakistan were rather better than they looked (or at least than they appeared at the height of the Davis row). Compared to two years ago, Pakistan is more likely to talk now about the need for stability in Afghanistan than strategic depth (the extent of this shift is open to debate). The United States has also moved closer towards meeting Pakistan’s calls for a political settlement in Afghanistan by holding direct talks with representatives of the Taliban, according to several official sources with knowledge of those contacts.
On the subject of Taliban talks, the New York Times noted that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, during a speech to the Asia Society last month, “appeared to recast longstanding preconditions for talks: that the insurgents lay down their arms, accept the Afghan Constitution and separate from Al Qaeda. Instead, she described them as ‘necessary outcomes’. ”
According to the NYT, “officially, the State Department played down the change in language, but a senior Western diplomat in Washington, who was familiar with the strategy behind Mrs. Clinton’s speech, said: ‘It was not intentional to explicitly make preconditions into outcomes. But the text now leaves room for interpretation, which opens doors.’”
The other half of that story is to look at who first suggested that the United States focus on outcomes rather than preconditions for talks – Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who wrote a detailed letter to President Barack Obama last year outlining how he saw the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
I guess you’re right. When other countries are hypocritical in adopting UN resolutions selectively, I guess abstaining was the right thing for India to do.
Regards,
Ganesh Prasad
Will S. Arabia broker a deal to repair Pakistan-US ties?
With the U.S.-Pakistan dispute over CIA contractor Raymond Davis stuck in Pakistani courts, newspapers are reporting that the two countries’ common ally, Saudi Arabia, may step in to defuse the deepening crisis between them.
The high court in Lahore, where Davis shot dead two people in what he said was an act of self-defence in January, on Monday declined to rule on whether he has diplomatic immunity. The court referred the question of immunity to a criminal court which is dealing with murder charges against him.
Given Pakistan’s cumbersome legal system which takes years to resolve disputes, something which both the United States and Pakistan would like to avoid, Pakistani newspapers say Saudi Arabia is playing a behind-the-scenes role to find an out of court settlement.
“All eyes on Saudi role in resolving Davis row,” read a headline in daily The News on March 9.
According to the report, the Saudi government would try to resolve the issue in line with Qisas — an Islamic injunction which allows the settlement of murder cases through payment of blood-money to the relatives.
The News said Marc Grossman, the new U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan who replaced Richard Holbrooke, discussed the issue of payment of Qisas with Saudi authorities on the sidelines of an international conference in Jeddah earlier this month.
“That the Indians have found Pakistan blog so attractive that by direct or indirect expect to have this space for their crusade is beyond me.”
***Crusade! lol
Oh boy
U.S.-Pakistan relations better than they look
Given the high-decibel volume of the row over Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis in Lahore in January, it would be tempting to assume that overall relations between Pakistan and the United States are the worst they have been in years.
At a strategic level, however, there’s actually rather greater convergence of views than there has been for a very long time.
In a speech last month, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took a step closer towards meeting Pakistan’s own call for a political settlement in Afghanistan through negotiations with Taliban insurgents which would force al Qaeda to leave the region. It was time, she said, “to get serious about a responsible reconciliation process, led by Afghans and supported by intense regional diplomacy and strong U.S.-backing.”
“Now, I know that reconciling with an adversary that can be as brutal as the Taliban sounds distasteful, even unimaginable. And diplomacy would be easy if we only had to talk to our friends. But that is not how one makes peace,” she said.
Her speech coincided with a report that the United States had begun secret face-to-face talks with representatives of the Taliban for the first time since the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
Clinton also acknowledged Pakistan’s concerns about Indian influence in Afghanistan. “We look to them – and all of Afghanistan’s neighbours – to respect Afghanistan’s sovereignty, which means agreeing not to play out their rivalries within its borders, and to support reconciliation and efforts to ensure that al-Qaida and the syndicate of terrorism is denied safe haven everywhere. Afghanistan, in turn, must not allow its territory to be used against others.” Her choice of language was unusual in that it equated both India and Pakistan — traditionally Islamabad has been condemned for unhelpful interference in Afghanistan, while New Delhi has insisted it is interested only in helping Afghan development.
Western officials also say they believe Pakistan, which once looked to use Afghanistan for “strategic depth” against India, has scaled back its ambitions into seeing stability there as an end itself. Pakistani officials have been saying for a while they would settle for a “stable” rather than “friendly” Afghanistan.
There is some merit in this analysis. However, there are at least two other aspects to consider:
1. The vulnerability of the relationship in case of further setbacks (e.g., another terror attack on US interests that is traceable to Pakistan). This new-found convergence of views could just as easily evaporate, and it isn’t possible to rule out such an event over the next few months.
2. The views of American players other than the administration (which usually tends to be pragmatic rather than idealistic), e.g., Congress and public opinion. There is a perceptible hardening of opinion against Pakistan in these circles, judging by articles, opinion pieces as well as comments from the general public.
If anything happens to Sherry Rehman or Aasia Bibi (God forbid), there will be a very strong negative reaction towards Pakistan in Western societies, including the US. Unfortunately, based on what I have been seeing of events in Pakistan, I would have to place a high probability on one or both of these occurring in the next few months. Public opinion would necessarily influence Congress, if not the administration.
Under such deteriorating circumstances, a congressperson could be expected to introduce a bill cutting funding to Pakistan or imposing conditions on US aid that are deemed humiliating by the Pakistani establishment and public.
I think it was Christine Fair who recently remarked that there is a push in some defence and intelligence circles in the US to just declare Pakistan the enemy and be done with it. There are contradictions and conflicts that are not easy to reconcile or paper over.
So while it’s interesting to propose a contrarian view to conventional wisdom, there is also sound reasoning behind conventional wisdom, and I don’t believe adequate justice has been done by way of analysing all factors that could impact the US-Pakistan relationship.
Regards,
Ganesh Prasad
Pakistan and Mullah Omar: who knows where he is?
The New York Times has an intriguing story about the sourcing for a report that did the rounds last week saying that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) rushed Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar to Karachi last week after he suffered a heart attack. (h/t Five Rupees)
To recap, the Washington Post said last week that a private intelligence network, the Eclipse Group, had reported that Mullah Omar had a heart attack on Jan. 7 and was treated for several days in a Karachi hospital with the help of the ISI.
It quoted the Eclipse Group as saying its source was a physician in the Karachi hospital, which was not identified in the report, who said he saw Mullah Omar struggling to recover from an operation to put a stent in his heart. “While I was not personally in the operating theater,” the physician reported, “my evaluation based on what I have heard and seeing the patient in the hospital is that Mullah Omar had a cardiac catheter complication resulting in either bleeding or a small cerebral vascular incident, or both.”
As is the way of these things, the story did the rounds of the Internet, blogosphere and Twitter until the original source of the report — an unnamed doctor in an unnamed Karachi hospital quoted by a private intelligence network — was obscured under the weight of repetition.
Mark Mazzetti at the New York Times, in an article titled “Former Spy with Agenda Operates a Private C.I.A”, has now profiled the man who runs the Eclipse Group, former CIA officer Duane R. Clarridge.
“Mr. Clarridge, 78, who was indicted on charges of lying to Congress in the Iran-contra scandal and later pardoned, is described by those who have worked with him as driven by the conviction that Washington is bloated with bureaucrats and lawyers who impede American troops in fighting adversaries and that leaders are overly reliant on mercurial allies,” Mazzetti writes.
“His dispatches — an amalgam of fact, rumor, analysis and uncorroborated reports — have been sent to military officials who, until last spring at least, found some credible enough to be used in planning strikes against militants in Afghanistan. They are also fed to conservative commentators, including Oliver L. North, a compatriot from the Iran-contra days and now a Fox News analyst, and Brad Thor, an author of military thrillers and a frequent guest of Glenn Beck.”
Forget Headley, forget Wikkileaks, forget the US court summons, forget all the telephone transcripts provided to Pakistan. Forget Afghan accusations. Indians of course will always lie about the ISI, so don’t even think about them.
Nothing is confirmed. No one has confessed. Everything is overstated. ISI influence is limited. No one has spotted a one eyed man in Quetta or Karachi, so he is not there.
ISI is pure as the driven snow.
QED
Pakistan:the unintended consequences of U.S. pressure
U.S. pressure on Pakistan has always led to deep resentment within the Pakistan Army, which has taken heavy casualties of its own fighting Pakistani Taliban militants on its side of the border with Afghanistan. But there are signs that this resentment is now spiralling in dangerously unpredictable ways.
The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency has denied it was responsible for revealing the name of a senior Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official in Pakistan, forcing him to flee the country after threats to his life. But the suspicion lingers that the ISI, which falls under the control of the Pakistan Army, is flexing its muscles in response to U.S. pressure.
In an article for Time magazine, former CIA officer Robert Baer said that even if you accepted the ISI denial, “what can’t be dismissed is a lawsuit filed by a Pakistani tribesman in which he accuses the CIA of murdering his brother and his son in a drone attack. According to press reports, none of which have been confirmed by the CIA, it was the appearance of the station chief’s name in a filing in this suit, along with unspecified threats, that caused him to be pulled. Regardless, the suit itself could be an ominous sign that the Pakistanis may be coming to the end of their rope in the ‘war on terror’.”
His assumption was that the ISI, which until now is believed to have given tacit support to the U.S. drone strikes, had supported the case by the Pakistani tribesman.
Even more alarming are Pakistani press reports suggesting that fake WikiLeaks cables planted in the Pakistan media were deliberately designed by Pakistani intelligence to whip up public opinion against U.S. pressure to “do more”. (h/t Five Rupees).
“The fake story is not an isolated incident,” Azhar Abbas, the managing director of GEO News, wrote. “Political and security observers believe a concerted effort is once again being made to encourage and promote a typical extremist mindset. Some analysts-cum-anchors have re-emerged from quasi-oblivion. Many journalists and analysts are briefed and encouraged to take an aggressively anti-West, especially anti-US, stance. Experts, who ‘preach’ extremism in disguise, are encouraged to participate in talk shows.”
Maintaining the support of the Pakistani people has been essential in Pakistan’s own battle against the Pakistani Taliban - a widely circulated video of a girl being flogged in the Swat valley rallied public opinion behind the army when it launched a military operation there last year to drive out militants from the region. The authenticity of that video is a subject of much debate in Pakistan. But be that as it may, if public opinion were to turn decisively against military operations, no amount of American pressure would be able to convince the Pakistan Army to launch a new ground assault to assert control of areas now held by militants, including North Waziristan.
@Rex: I realize that I was somewhat harsh on you, my apologies!
From Thuggees to fake WikiLeaks
The fall-out from the fake WikiLeaks cables in Pakistan continues to be far more interesting than the real WikiLeaks cables. To recap, several Pakistani newspapers retracted stories last week which quoted WikiLeaks cables ostensibly accusing India of stirring up trouble in Baluchistan and Waziristan, cited U.S. diplomats as ridiculing the Indian Army, and compared Kashmir to Bosnia in the 1990s. Since the anti-India narrative presented in the stories chimed with the views of Pakistani intelligence agencies, the alleged cables were then dismissed as fakes and most likely an intelligence plant.
However, just to complicate matters, some of the information in the “fake cables” is also in the “real cables”. For example, the real cables do contain allegations of Indian support for Baluch separatists, largely sourced to British intelligence, according to The Guardian. The British newspaper, which had advance access to the cables, also cited them as evidence that India practiced systematic torture in Kashmir.
So if the anti-India stories really were an intelligence plant, why did “the agencies” in Pakistan not use actual cables to bolster their allegations, rather than fake cables which could be easily discredited?
In a column in The Express Tribune headlined “Can’t they just be spies?”, journalist Aamer Khan blamed it on an inability to manage the media. Recalling a news agency he said was set up by Pakistani intelligence to spread the word about the Kashmir revolt, he said that eventually, ”the spooks running the operation went haywire and lost all perspective on what they had set out to achieve. As more and more newspapers started accepting its copy, the agency started reporting a dramatic increase in the number of Indian casualties at the hands of our fearless jihadis.”
The daily death toll rose at such a furious pace that several years later one Western analyst said if that agency were to be believed, jihadis must have killed all the Indian Army posted in the Kashmir Valley twice over by then. He concluded that the fake WikiLeaks story suggested nothing had changed in the last 20 years.
This implied inefficiency is intriguing. The Western media narrative ascribes a great deal of power to the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in its influence over the Afghan war, based on its alleged support for the Taliban. But bear in mind that an organisation sometimes believed capable of ending the Afghan war did not - if it was indeed responsible – manage to plant durably a WikiLeaks story even when it had real cables to back up its case.
Nadeem Paracha at Dawn, however, argued it did not matter that some newspapers retracted the story since enough papers and television channels carried it for it to be believed. He ascribed the fake WikiLeaks cables to an over-enthusiastic pro-military media eager to deflect attention from real cables which highlighted the role played by the Pakistan Army in the country’s politics as well as other awkward revelations about Pakistan’s ally Saudi Arabia.
@777
I think you are a comedian! I do not see anything from the lens of a religion.
You must be joking accusing me of supporting Burqa? You have even got a shadow called Mortal1 who is thinking loud with you. I do not believe we have anything further to exchange on wikileak!
Rex Minor
Pakistani papers retract WikiLeaks story on India
Leading Pakistani newspapers have retracted stories that appear to have partly depended on fake WikiLeaks cables to support long-standing Pakistani allegations against India, particularly in causing instability inside Pakistan. The stories also quoted U.S. diplomats as ridculing India and its army.
The News ran a story saying its report was inaccurate and had been picked up from a local news agency. The report had originated, it said, in websites “known for their close connections with certain intelligence agencies”.
The Express Tribune said that it “deeply regrets publishing this story without due verification and apologises profusely for any inconvenience caused to our valued readers.”
Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which had advance access to the cables, said that, “an extensive search of the WikiLeaks database by the Guardian by date, name and keyword failed to locate any of the incendiary allegations. It suggests this is the first case of WikiLeaks being exploited for propaganda purposes.”
As discussed in yesterday’s post, Pakistan being what it is, suspicion has fallen on its intelligence agencies for planting the story. If so, it was a fairly spectacular own goal, as it distracted attention from actual WikiLeak cables. These brought into the public domain for the first time a view by British intelligence that India was supporting separatists in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province – a long-standing complaint made by Islamabad and denied by New Delhi. According to the Guardian, “the real cables do contain allegations of Indian support for Baloch separatists, largely sourced to British intelligence assessments.”
Meanwhile, just to give a flavour of where the WikiLeaks debate is going in Pakistan itself, here is journalist Ahmed Quraishi - who says in this piece that allegations he is a mouthpiece of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency are “a conspiracy theory with no basis”.
Accusing the Guardian and New York Times of selectively publishing cables which served Western interests, he writes, “Just like the Guardian and NYT, the Pakistani media retains the right to manipulate and highlight WikiLeaks documents that serve our interest. This could involve some exaggeration in some parts of the media.”
Matrixx,
Everything else you said is fine with me, except,
“According to you all Pakistanis are mentally sick, then you are in big trouble.
Is it not right of a country to determine who is friend or enemy?”
We have been in big trouble for a long time. This is not new. I did not know countries suddenly choose to become enemies. That is very childish. Countries always strive to be friendly or stay away from each other. Enmity can be created and sustained by false propaganda, misperception, apprehension, paranoia and sheer contempt. In the case of Pakistan, all these have been used by those in power to sustain unnecessary enmity towards India. Even the recent Pakileaks have been driven with that motive – whatever can help widen the gap between India and Pakistan and can build more mistrust has been tried by vested groups holding on to indirect power. That is unfortunate.
India has not chosen to be an enemy of Pakistan or China. We’d like to co-exist. At least that has been the case for the past two decades. If we simply co-existed, we could focus more on progress. Everything else will take care of itself. In fact that is what India has done internally – co-exist and work on progress, A lot of differences have begun to disappear.
On WikiLeaks, Pakistan and Afghanistan; the tip of an old iceberg
I’ve been resisting diving into the WikiLeaks controversy, in part because the information contained in the documents – including allegations of Pakistani complicity with the Taliban - is not new. Yet at the same time you can’t entirely dismiss as old news something which has generated such a media feeding frenzy. So here are a few pointers to add to the discussion.
U.S. POLICY TOWARDS PAKISTAN
On the likely implications (or non-implications) for U.S. policy towards Pakistan, go back to 2009, and this piece in the National Interest by Bruce Riedel who conducted the first review of Afghan strategy for President Barack Obama. Having assessed all the evidence, including well-known American misgivings about the role of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, he concluded that Washington had no option but to stay the course in trying to build a long-term partnership with Pakistan.
American policy for the last 60 years, wrote Riedel, had oscillated wildly between love and hate. “What the U.S.-Pakistan relationship needs is constancy and consistency. We need to recognize that change in Pakistan will come when we engage reliably with the Pakistani people, support the democratic process and address Pakistan’s legitimate security concerns. Candor needs to be the hallmark of an enduring commitment to civilian rule in Pakistan.
“U.S.-aid levels should not be the product of temper tantrums on Capitol Hill … Our goal should be to convince Pakistanis that the existential threat to their liberty comes not from the CIA or India, but from al Qaeda.
“We also need to engage India constructively on how to reduce and then end the tensions, including in Kashmir, that have resulted from partition. Ironically, the Pakistanis and Indians have made great progress on this issue behind the scenes in the last decade … Quiet and subtle American diplomacy should now try to advance this further.”
“None of this will be easy. Pakistan is a complex and combustible society undergoing a severe crisis. America helped create that crisis over a long period of time. If we don’t help Pakistan now, we may have to deal with a jihadist Pakistan later. That should focus our attention.”
typo:
“Please avoid this topic no further and address it.”
should read
“Please do not avoid this top any longer and address it”
New report accuses Pakistan’s ISI of backing Afghan insurgents
According to a new report published by the London School of Economics, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency not only funds and trains Taliban fighters in Afghanistan but is officially represented on the movement’s leadership council, giving it significant influence over operations.
The ISI has long been accused of backing the Taliban – an accusation Pakistan denies, saying this would make no sense when it is already fighting a bloody campaign against Islamist militants at home. But the report is worth reading for its wealth of detail on the perceptions held by Taliban commanders interviewed in the field. You can see the Reuters story on the report here and the full document (pdf) here.
The report, based on interviews with Taliban commanders, former senior Taliban ministers and Western and Afghan security officials, says research strongly suggested support for the Taliban was the “official policy” of the ISI. ”Pakistan appears to be playing a double-game of astonishing magnitude,” it says. Interviews with Taliban commanders ”suggest that Pakistan continues to give extensive support to the insurgency in terms of funding, munitions and supplies.”
“These accounts were corroborated by former Taliban ministers, a Western analyst and a senior U.N. official based in Kabul, who said the Taliban largely depend on funding from the ISI and groups in Gulf countries,” the report, which was dismissed by Pakistani officials as spurious and unfounded, says.
Almost all of the Taliban commanders interviewed in the report believed the ISI was represented on the Quetta Shura, the Taliban’s supreme leadership council which Washington says is based in Pakistan. “Interviews strongly suggest that the ISI has representatives on the (Quetta) Shura, either as participants or observers, and the agency is thus involved at the highest level of the movement.”
“Pakistan’s apparent involvement in a double-game of this scale could have major geopolitical implications and could even provoke US counter-measures. However, the powerful role of the ISI, and parts of the Pakistani military, suggests that progress against the Afghan insurgency, or towards political engagement, requires their support. The only sure way to secure such cooperation is to address the fundamental causes of Pakistan’s insecurity, especially its latent and enduring conflict with India,” it says.
As discussed many times on this blog, most recently here, Pakistan is unlikely to act decisively against the Afghan Taliban without reassurances of a scaling back of India’s presence in Afghanistan. It may have some ability to convince Afghan Taliban leaders to join peace talks by leaning on those who are based in Pakistan, or whose families live there, as and when it judges the timing is right.
Well I do not agree with these things, not like that, ISI behind these things is that,, Pakistan’s defense forces including army, air force and navy personal have been killed by martyred by the terrorists.Over 5000 of our security personal have been killed by terrorists.Important military installations including GHQ have been targeted. Compounds belonging to our intelligence agencies have been bombed in many major cites across the country. Let us not forget the FC and other law enforcement’s agencies personal who laid down their lives in this fight.
Bludde: “The United States should simply divorce itself from the region and depart… they have no business in “Muslim” lands…”
The US is in some Muslim lands due to oil. It is in some Muslim lands to save its allies like Israel. It is in some Muslim lands like Af-Pak because of being hurt by Islamic terrorists. They abandoned Af-Pak after defeating the USSR. This was one of the major complaints by many Pakistanis. They wouldn’t have come back here if not for the terrorists who hit them hard. They could care less if anyone else existed.
“and let the chips fall where they may.. undoubtedly Pakistan will default since The Saudi King despises President Zardari and Ghadafi is in no position to assist with money, his oil fields shut and funds frozen.. but then again, reading the above, maybe “dove” MM Singh will come to the rescue with Funds..”
Pakistan is different from its military. Its military is the real nation. The rest is just a skin being used to appear valid. Saudi Arabia deals only with Pak military. They are like their security guards. They’d love to control the Saudis as well. That is why they are protecting Bin Laden. It can come in handy in the future if the odds turn against them. Pakistan always has some chips up its sleeve to counter moves by others, including the US.