Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

President Obama’s 22 June announcement of a phased US withdrawal from Afghanistan was both inevitable and broadly popular with the American public.  His plan to bring home 10,000 troops this year, a further 20,000 by the end of the summer of 2012, and the remainder by end-2014 is supported by 72% of the US adult population, including by 50% of Republican voters.  It is difficult to argue against the policy, but the consequences will be far-reaching and they already seem to include a rethink in Pakistan’s policymaking circles about future relations with the United States.  Meanwhile, the tensions caused by the Arab Spring are prompting an equally robust rethink in policymaking circles in Riyadh.

The Pakistanis are in favour of talks with the Taleban, so they are in favour of the main drift of Obama’s policy.  However, that Pakistan-US relations have been tested to the extreme by the discovery of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad is no secret.  The US is dubious about Pakistan’s protestations of innocence; Pakistan is furious about the infringement of its sovereignty.

Now Pakistan is worried that as US troops are withdrawn there will be even greater reliance on drone attacks and special forces operations on the Pakistani side of the border.

Obama in his speech made it clear that the US intends to increase its pressure on Pakistan.  He said: “We will continue to press Pakistan to expand its participation in securing a more peaceful future for this war-torn region.  We will work with the Pakistani government to root out the cancer of violent extremism, and we will insist that it keep its commitments...So long as I am president, the United States will never tolerate a safe haven for those who aim to kill us.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the anti-US elements in Pakistan now see the coming US withdrawal as an opportunity to call for a reassessment of Pakistan’s reliance on the US.  Pakistan has, of course, long been close to China, but there is a feeling that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan could provide Pakistan with an opportunity to further enhance this relationship, particularly as China seeks to increase its influence in Central Asia and its access to the Middle East.

As tensions in the South China Sea continue to rise, Pakistan’s Chinese-built Gwadar port is becoming of increasing strategic importance to China as an alternative transport route for Middle East crude oi,l as well as providing a route to Central Asia through Afghanistan.  Pakistan is now actively advocating to Beijing that new opportunities are arising for the exploitation of Gwadar.

The Saudi factor

Pakistan’s options may have been increased by the Arab Spring – or more exactly by Saudi Arabia’s feeling of vulnerability and its growing distrust of the United States.  Riyadh’s current unease is based, inter alia, upon a feeling that the US is not putting enough pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme, horror over the speed with which the US dropped Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Tunisia’s Ben Ali, and worry over its lack of understanding about the suppression of the Shia unrest in Bahrain.  Riyadh is further perturbed by Iranian support for the Houthi rebellion in Yemen and the strengthening of Hezbollah’s grip on Lebanon.

An example of Saudi disquiet with the US was an article published in the Washington Post on 16 May by Saudi government strategic adviser Nawaf Obaid, who complained: “As Riyadh fights a cold war with Tehran, Washington has shown itself in recent months to be an unwilling and unreliable partner against this threat.”

Saudi Arabia has also become more vocal on the Palestinian question.  The former Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud, warned in a recent article that there would be “disastrous consequences for US-Saudi relations if the United States vetoes UN recognition of a Palestinian state”.  All of this has seen Riyadh making a concerted effort to strengthen ties with China and Pakistan (there are already up to 50,000 Pakistanis employed within the military and security sectors in the Gulf States).

However, there is nothing uniform or simple about these shifting patterns.  The US, for instance, is also being castigated in some quarters for not supporting the Arab revolutionaries with sufficient enthusiasm because of fear of what might happen in the Gulf monarchies, including Saudi Arabia.

Equally, Pakistan’s enthusiasm for recalibrating its relations with the US and becoming even closer to China would not necessarily help it with its India problem.  India in recent months has gone out of its way to distance itself from any concerted effort to isolate China, and India-China trade has been booming.  By 2015 it is expected that bilateral China-India trade will reach $100bn from $60bn in 2010.  Pakistan’s trade with China was $7bn in 2009 and is expected to reach $18bn by 2015.

The only consistent theme seems to be a weakening of the American position.  It is leaving Afghanistan, like Iraq, without achieving stability; it has abandoned long-standing allies in the Middle East without finding favour with their successors; and it has upset other long-standing allies because of its apparent lack of support.

At the same time, China continues to make inroads while India is distancing itself (for the time being at least) from anything that smacks of ganging up on China.  Europe’s attempt to take responsibility for Libya is proving less than decisive at a time when it is, in any case, struggling with its own internal difficulties.

And, finally, Israel (for which the US remains the ultimate guarantor) is seeing its own strategic position deteriorate so dramatically as to render any conceivable compromise with the Palestinians impossible for as long as the current uncertainties persist – a timescale that many are calculating in decades rather than years.  The Turkish move on the Gaza flotilla (see main briefing) is a more positive sign, but it is still just one straw blowing in the wind.  It isn’t yet sufficient to alter Israel’s calculations.