People in Waziristan. Photo by Omer Wazir, January 2012.
The US agonized over the apology to Pakistan for months, the Wall Street Journal reported today.
Basically, what it comes down to is the US believes that the Pakistani soldiers fired on them first as they were patrolling the border in search of militants.
A US study apportioned blame to both the US and Pakistan. The US expressed "deep regrets," but that wasn't saying they were to blame, that was just saying they were sorry for the deaths of soldiers who were supposed to be allies.
Were they, if they shot at US troops? This, of course, has always been the problem in the "AfPak" war -- the Pakistani intelligence services taking the side of the Taliban and a certain fiction that the Pakistani government, which doesn't have control over its own intelligence services apparently, is on NATO's side in Afghanistan.
The fiction is wearing threadbare as the troops are withdrawn. It's odd in some respects because if the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) takes the side of the Taliban (to simplify a complex situation), then they should want to help US troops leave Afghanistan speedily and should not then countenance the Pakistan government's closure of the Northern Distribution Network route to Afghanistan, backing up freight for months and forcing the US to go over to the more expensive and difficult Central Asian dictators for help with transport routes.
They should just want the US out, quick. They don't like them, right?
But that isn't how it worked. Maybe they find it handy to leverage the US against their own enemies. And if this firefight in helicopters between the US and the Afghan armies and the Pakistani soldiers at the border lasted two and a half hours, i.e. not a one-minute accidental bombing type of situation, then there's more to the story here.
There was also the timing issue -- Obama couldn't apologize for the accidental Koran burnings, that then came next, and then apologize for this accidental killing, too -- too many sorries making the US look weak.
Why couldn't we have quickly done what they asked and hewed to the fiction that it really wasn't deliberate (i.e. that they shot first "by mistake" or didn't shoot first)? Doesn't a smooth exit depend on keeping up the fiction of the ISI not really undoing US work by backing the Taliban?
It's not like we can just turn full-bore on the ISI and start blowing them away along with the Taliban, right? It's not like we could fight both Pakistan as a state, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, right? Because there wouldn't be a place that could serve as a staging area, right?
Then a series of coordinated attacks blamed on the Haqanni network occurred in April, delaying the apology again.
And it is still being ironed out as now the Pakistani President Zardari is coming to the NATO summit, and we are going to pay Pakistan a whopping $365 million a year -- a million dollars a day -- to have that land route opened to get our troops and vehicles out (which some are saying privately according to news reports is outrageous and they will keep negotiating it down).
Look, there is no way to sugar-coat it: we lost this war, we didn't prevail after 10 years, the people don't like us, the army we trained shoot at us (or terrorist forces are successful in infiltrating them and donning their uniforms or something), so we should cut our losses and go. It's not pretty. It can't really be done with dignity. But since it already can't be done with dignity, it can be done with grace. Boris Yeltsin spoke in his memoirs of the importance of knowing when to leave gracefully, regarding his own presidency. One could add that Boris left Chechnya gracefully after the first war with the truce of Khasavurt.
At this point, to save the millions of dollars, to get the job of exiting done, and to pave the way for cooperating with the Pakistanis, it seems like the US should just issue that apology. One line on an otherwise empty white page with just a header should do it. If they haven't insisted that it come directly from the Secretary of State, then they could have a DAS sign it. Yes, there's a fiction to it, that we apologize for killing soldiers "accidently" who are "on our side" when maybe the whole thing was a provocation. They're good at making provocations and creating semblances of reality everywhere, clearly.
Unless, Pakistani or forces within Pakistan don't really want the US to leave, and of course, there's always that inertia caused by those who are war profiteers. But the millions spent on access to roads might be better spent on preparation for surviving floods or health care or some other needs in Pakistan, if we could make it available.
