So the ISI decided to blow the cover of our CIA Station Chief in Islamabad, causing his recall from Pakistan. The two obvious motivators for this?
Obama’s speech was followed Friday with fresh evidence that the United States will continue pounding militant groups when Pakistan can’t or won’t. Three CIA drone attacks reportedly killed as many as 54 suspected militants in the Khyber tribal area near the Afghan border, an unusually large casualty count.
The ISI, as the Pakistani service is known, may have done so in retaliation for a civil lawsuit filed in New York last month accusing ISI chief Ahmed Shuja Pasha of being involved in the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, U.S. officials suggested.
Our relationship with Pakistan is the most complicated and contradictory bilateral relationship in the world, so I am not going to poke logic holes in our policy. Nothing over there is going to pass a strict logic test. But we do need someone who is a little more sophisticated than John Bolton there to replace the recently deceased Richard Holbrooke.
If the ISI was involved in bombing in Mumbai, the Indian embassy in Kabul, and the outing of our CIA Station Chief, they aren’t exactly reliable partners in a war against Muslim extremism. On the other hand, what country sides with an outside power that kills 54 of their people in a single weekend.
Our policy should be disengagement from Pakistan and closer relationships with their neighbors. The only merit in our current relationship with Pakistan is contained in that old saw about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer.
