Is Pakistan at War With the United States?

To answer the question in the headline: not in so many words. But Just about the entire relationship between Pakistan and the United States since 2001 can be defined by those five words: not in so many words. Pakistan has reaped the monetary benefits of an alliance with the United States, cashing in on more than $12 billion, without quite acting like an ally in return. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (its combination CIA-FBI) never seriously abandoned its loyalty to the Taliban, which it created in the 1990s as a hedge against Indian influence in Afghanistan.

Pakistan had the experience of 1989, when, after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the Americans lost interest in what until then had been a well-funded CIA proxy war on Afghan soil, by way of Pakistan. Pakistan has no reason to think the same thing won't happen again, as indeed it has with the killing of Osama bin laden and the American public's weariness with the war in Afghanistan.

But Pakistan's sense of abandonment on that account is self-inflicted. Just last year, Congress passed a Pakistani aid package worth $7.5 billion over five years. Then bin Laden was discovered and assassinated in his laird in Abbottabad, just north of Rawalpindi, the Pakistani military establishment's capital. It is almost impossible to think that al-Qaeda's leader lived there five years without some knowledge, at some level, by Pakistani authorities. It's par for Pakistanis' course: they helped him escape from Tora Bora in 2001. They helped him escape from prying eyes for the past five years, maybe more. Chances are that bin Laden had been in Pakistan for the past decade.

It's all been a double game.

Now American forces along the Afghan-Pakistani border are taking fire from insurgents who either step onto Afghan territory to fire their 105 mm shells or do so from inside Pakistan. The attacks have surged in 2011, as documented by The New York Times, and American military officials say that the level of command and control exhibited by the attacks is too sophisticated not to be backed up by the Pakistani military. Those officials are also angry at the rules in place: no firing back at Pakistani-based positions.

That, of course, is deceptive, too: Just as attacks on American forces from Pakistani bases have increased, so have attacks by American drones vastly increased on Pakistani targets. There's a tit-for-tat war going on, with each side choosing to tell only half the story. Strictly speaking, neither side is acting according to the rules of war. But the rules of war have never really prevailed in Afghanistan, which long ago ceased being, on the American side, a war against terrorism. It turned instead into a counter-insurgency, an insinuation into a civil war fudged as a battle against terrorism. But al-Qaeda is all but eradicated. And the Taliban is no al-Qaeda. It has no interest in attacking the United States or Europe or spreading its caliphate anywhere but in Afghanistan.

It's the Americans who are the strangers in the mix. They'll continue to be. Until, like every other invading foreign force on Afghan soil since the days of Alexander the great, they, too, are forced to leave.

See Also:

• Are US Troops Operating in Pakistan?
• About Those US Missile Strikes in Pakistan...
• Predators Among Them: Why Al-Qaeda Is Lashing Out