Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, was in Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001, when the Pentagon was struck by a commercial airliner piloted by a terrorist. That afternoon, government officials took him to view the still-smoking site. The next day, September 12, 2001, he met with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who presented him a list of seven unilateral demands to be communicated to Pakistan’s leader, General Pervez Musharraf. Mahmud pleaded with him to reconsider the demands, saying, “You have to understand history.” Armitage interrupted him, stating firmly, “No, history begins today!”

The naïve expectation that the two sides could put their fraught historical experiences behind them in a post-9/11 partnership overlooked a fundamental — nearly fatal — misalignment in Washington’s and Islamabad’s interests. To Pakistan, India represented the primary threat around which its security forces were organized. It likewise had deeply held views over how best to preserve its interests in Afghanistan and limit Indian influence there. And, having experienced the destabilizing vacuum and Afghan civil war after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, Pakistan was concerned about U.S. motives and commitment to the region.

To Washington, Afghanistan briefly became the priority theater as it sought to avenge the 9/11 attacks, and Pakistan was a neighbor with whom cooperation was deemed necessary for access to airspace, military facilities, and logistical support. India, meanwhile, was emerging as the preferred strategic partner in the region and one with which Washington was keen to build a broad-based relationship.

From Pariah to Partner

When I arrived in Islamabad as the U.S. Army Attaché in November 2000, the US-Pakistan relationship was at its lowest level ever — practically moribund. The United States had imposed an array of congressionally mandated sanctions on Pakistan because of its nuclear and missile programs, its support to terrorists in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, and because an elected civilian government had been overthrown in a military coup. Worse, Pakistan was one of only three states to recognize the odious Taliban government in Kabul that had given sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda global terrorism organization. In short, the United States treated Pakistan as a pariah state.

This situation changed overnight on September 11, 2001. To do anything more to Osama bin Laden than lob Tomahawk missiles into the Afghan desert as President Clinton had done in 1998, the United States needed to use Pakistani airspace and military facilities for a military campaign in Afghanistan. This required a complete reset of the bilateral relationship. I was literally “present at the creation,” and later served in a series of successive positions in the Department of Defense — defense contractor, senior country director for Pakistan in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy, and senior expert for Pakistan in the Defense Intelligence Agency — which allowed me to see the process play out from the beginning in 2001 to the near-total collapse in 2012.

This reset injected new energy and resources into the US-Pakistan relationship, but it never succeeded in overcoming the hesitations of history. Pakistan was always a reluctant ally in the so-called Global War on Terrorism. Although Musharraf acceded to the seven demands Armitage gave Mahmud on September 12, his decision was made under extreme duress and was unpopular with the people of Pakistan and the Pakistan Army.[1] Pakistan officials doubted U.S. motives in the region and sought to defend what they saw as Pakistan’s core interests even as they continued to work alongside Washington.

Enduring Interests at Odds

Pakistan’s perception of India as its foremost security threat was a critical obstacle to effective partnership with the United States. Nothing was more irritating to Pakistani officials than the U.S. dismissal of their concerns about a much larger country with an economy seven or eight times larger than Pakistan’s, an armed forces twice its size and magnitudes greater in every category of combat power, and with which it had fought and lost three wars. This enduring focus on India set the outer limits of what Pakistan was prepared to do in Afghanistan. After a December 13, 2001, terrorist attack on the Indian parliament, which was attributed to Pakistan-based groups, India mobilized its armed forces, deployed them to the international border, and threatened general war with Pakistan for the next 10 months. This all but brought a halt to Pakistani support to Operation Enduring Freedom as Pakistan mobilized in response, despite U.S. efforts to maintain momentum in support of the war in Afghanistan.

Pakistan likewise maintained its vision for what an acceptable outcome in Afghanistan would be and took matters into its own hands when it no longer believed U.S. efforts would secure its interests, including by offering sanctuary to senior Afghan Taliban leadership after they were flushed from power by US-backed forces. Islamabad articulated these requirements directly to the United States many times, including during a high-level 2010 dialogue process. They included that there be a friendly, or at least not overtly hostile, government in Kabul, that the government be headed by Pashtuns, and that Indian influence be circumscribed.

From December 2001 until 2005, Pakistan believed that a robust and continuing U.S. military presence might influence the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai to meet its requirements. That changed in December 2005, when the United States announced plans to free up U.S. forces for the growing counterinsurgency fight in Iraq by relying on NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. The announcement reinforced Pakistan’s fears that the United States would abandon Afghanistan and validated a strategy of continuing to provide sanctuary to Afghan Taliban inside Pakistan.

When the Taliban insurgency significantly revived in 2006, Pakistan perceived that backing it would be the lesser of two evils in Afghanistan. Ryan C. Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 2004 to 2007, later recounted a conversation with DG ISI Ashfaq Kayani. Kayani told him candidly, “You know, I know you think we’re hedging our bets. You’re right, we are, because one day you’ll be gone again, it’ll be like Afghanistan the first time, you’ll be done with us, but we’re still going to be here because we can’t actually move the country. And the last thing we want with all of our other problems is to have turned the Taliban into a mortal enemy, so, yes, we’re hedging our bets.”

Deepening US-India ties were an added source of tension in the US-Pakistan partnership. On September 11, 2001, India was emerging as Washington’s preferred strategic partner in South Asia, based on converging interests in offsetting China’s growing military and economic power in Asia and protecting the sea lanes running through the Indian Ocean. Also, unlike Pakistan, India was a democracy, and its economy was picking up pace.

After 9/11, when India offered the United States access to its ports and other military facilities, Pakistan saw it as an insincere ploy to enjoy the fruits of an alliance without shouldering any of the burdens. Pakistan also resented what it perceived as a green light the U.S. gave India to attack Pakistan in the 2001-2002 border crisis. The 2005 US-India civil nuclear agreement was especially grating as Washington categorically rejected a similar deal for Pakistan, given non-proliferation concerns among other issues. Then came the growing Indian diplomatic and economic presence in Afghanistan, which Pakistan perceived as a cover to destabilize Pakistan’s two western provinces of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The Limits of U.S. Leverage

Over the course of the war, Washington sought to leverage a mix of carrots and sticks to incentivize greater Pakistani alignment with U.S. objectives, largely unsuccessfully. One tool was financial, in the form of security and economic assistance. Despite the potential for these funds to smooth friction in the relationship, their execution and scale were both problematic in the eyes of Pakistan’s military. Operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas undertaken at U.S. request were unsustainable on Pakistan’s paltry $2.5 billion defense budget, and Pakistan soon grew frustrated by the full-year delay in delivery of the supplemental funding Congress approved in 2002 to defray military costs. The sum total of U.S. security and economic assistance to Pakistan, $34 billion sent from FY2002 to FY2017, amounted to just one-third of what the U.S. spent on Afghanistan each year over the same period and 1.39% of the total cost of the war. While this was a significant investment of U.S. taxpayer dollars, it was clearly not enough to achieve Washington’s strategic aims with Pakistan. Less clear is whether any amount of U.S. assistance would have been sufficient to the task, given divergent U.S. and Pakistani interests and perceptions.

While the Obama administration belatedly initiated a series of four high level engagements in 2010 designed to change “Pakistan’s strategic calculus,” this effort proved too little too late. Every initiative identified as being of sufficient magnitude to change Pakistani behavior with the Taliban was rejected, most summarily without any consideration. Options proposed included, among others, offering Pakistan a civil-nuclear deal similar to the agreement with India, restricting the scope of U.S. arms sales and technology to India, pressuring Afghanistan to recognize the Durand Line as an international border, allowing freer access to U.S. markets for Pakistani exports, and pressuring India to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Chosen in their place was a cluster of smaller, flabbier carrots that stood no chance of changing opinions in Rawalpindi.

By 2011, mutual frustrations reached a tipping point as a series of crises pushed the partnership to the brink. These included the U.S. discovery and raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan; the killing of two armed men in Lahore by CIA contractor Raymond Davis; and the Salala incident, in which NATO forces mistakenly killed some two dozen Pakistani soldiers at a border check post. The relationship nearly collapsed that year, saved only by the mutual recognition that deeper hostility would serve neither side’s purposes.

Arguably, however, the limits of US-Pakistan cooperation should have been evident from the start. A genuine strategic partnership was impossible for two core reasons: India was the United States’ preferred South Asia security partner while Pakistan considered it an existential threat, and Pakistan saw the Afghan Taliban insurgents as more likely to meet Islamabad’s stated security concerns in ways the US-backed government would not.[2] In addition, as Washington grew wary of China’s rise and sought stronger ties with India to counter it, Pakistan considered China its most reliable ally and security partner – a divergence that grew more acute as great power competition intensified.

These fundamental divergences proved more enduring and disruptive than Washington anticipated when it sought to reset the clock on US-Pakistan relations in the aftermath of 9/11. Rather than recognizing the sharp difference in views and assessing whether and how a partnership with Pakistan in the war on terror was truly possible, Washington instead sought to reshape Pakistan’s interests over the course of the decade that followed. The carrots and sticks approach the U.S. employed ultimately failed to bridge the gaps and left both sides bitter and disillusioned. U.S. policymakers seeking support from regional partners today would do well to reflect on this lesson and take deeply held interests seriously rather than arrogantly assuming they can be ignored or reshaped at will.

[1] The seven U.S. demands were (1) Stop AQ operatives at the Durand Line if they tried to enter Pakistan and end all logistical support to AQ; (2) Give blanket overflight and landing rights for all necessary military and intelligence operations; (3) Provide territorial access to U.S. and allied military intelligence and other personnel to conduct operations against AQ; (4) Provide any requested intelligence information; (5) Publicly condemn terrorist acts; (6) Cut off all shipments of fuel to the Taliban government and stop any Pakistani recruits from going to Afghanistan; and (7) Sever all relations with the Taliban government.

[2] The post-2021 tensions between Pakistan and the Taliban government demonstrate the extent to which Pakistan failed to anticipate the continued challenges it would face after the Taliban took power.