Like a drug cartel claiming to have launched a counternarcotics drive, the Saudi-led “anti-terror” coalition includes all the world’s terror sponsors

BRAHMA CHELLANEY

A column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate

BERLIN – Containing the scourge of Islamist terror will be impossible without containing the ideology that drives it: Wahhabism, a messianic, jihad-extolling form of Sunni fundamentalism whose international expansion has been bankrolled by oil-rich sheikhdoms, especially Saudi Arabia. That is why the newly announced Saudi-led anti-terror coalition, the Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism, should be viewed with profound skepticism.

Wahhabism promotes, among other things, the subjugation of women and the death of “infidels.” It is – to quote US President Barack Obama’s description of what motivated a married couple of Pakistani origin to carry out the recent mass shooting in San Bernardino, California – a “perverted interpretation of Islam,” and the ideological mother of jihadist terrorism. Its offspring include Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and the Islamic State, all of which blend hostility toward non-Sunnis and anti-modern romanticism into nihilistic rage.

Saudi Arabia has been bankrolling Islamist terrorism since the oil-price boom of the 1970s dramatically boosted the country’s wealth. According to a 2013 European Parliament report, some of the $10 billion invested by Saudi Arabia for “its Wahhabi agenda” in South and Southeast Asia was “diverted” to terrorist groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.

Western leaders have recognized the Saudi role for many years. In a 2009 diplomatic cable, then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton identified Saudi Arabia as “the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” Thanks largely to the West’s interest in Saudi oil, however, the Kingdom has faced no international sanctions.

Now, with the growth of terrorist movements like the Islamic State, priorities are changing. As German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said in a recent interview, “We must make it clear to the Saudis that the time of looking the other way is over.”

This shift has spurred the Kingdom to announce a “crackdown” on individuals and groups that fund terror. But, according to a recent US State Department report, some Saudi-based charities and individual donors continue to fund Sunni militants.

From this perspective, Saudi Arabia’s surprise announcement of a 34-country anti-terror alliance, with a joint operations center based in Riyadh, is a logical step, aimed at blunting growing Western criticism, while boosting Sunni influence in the Middle East. But, of course, the alliance is a sham – as a closer look at its membership makes clear.

Tellingly, the alliance includes all of the world’s main sponsors of extremist and terrorist groups, from Qatar to Pakistan. It is as if a drug cartel claimed to be spearheading a counternarcotics campaign. Listed as members of the alliance are also all of the jihadist citadels other than Afghanistan, including war-torn Libya and Yemen, both of which are not currently governed by a single authority.

Moreover, despite being touted as an “Islamic” alliance, with members coming from “all over the Islamic world,” the group includes predominantly Christian Uganda and Gabon, but not Oman (a fellow Gulf sheikdom), Algeria (Africa’s largest country), and Indonesia (the world’s most populous Muslim country).

The failure to include Indonesia, which has almost twice as many Muslims as the entire Middle East, is striking not only because of its size: Whereas most countries in the alliance are ruled by despots or autocrats, Indonesia is a robust democracy. Autocratic rule in Islamic countries tends to strengthen jihadist forces. But when democracy takes root, as in tolerant and secular Indonesia, the clash between moderates and extremists can be better managed.

Saudi Arabia’s dysfunctional approach is reflected in the fact that some alliance members – including Pakistan, Malaysia, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority – immediately declared that they had never actually joined. The Kingdom seemed to think that it could make that decision on behalf of the major recipients of its aid.

Add to that the unsurprising exclusion of Shia-governed Iran and Iraq, along with Alawite-ruled Syria, and it is clear that Saudi Arabia has merely crafted another predominantly Sunni grouping to advance its sectarian and strategic objectives. This aligns with the more hardline policy approach that has taken root since King Salman ascended the throne in January 2015.

At home, Salman’s reign so far has meant a marked increase in the number of sentences of death by decapitation, often carried out in public – a method emulated by the Islamic State. Abroad, it has meant a clear preference for violent solutions in Bahrain, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

A smaller Saudi-led Arab coalition has been bombing Yemen since March, with the goal of pushing back the Shia Houthi rebels who captured Sana’a, the capital, after driving the Saudi-backed government from power. Saudi warplanes have bombed homes, markets, hospitals, and refugee camps in Yemen, leading critics to accuse the Kingdom of deliberately terrorizing civilians to turn public opinion against the Houthis.

Saudi Arabia’s solutions have often controverted the objectives of its American allies. For example, the Kingdom and its Arab partners have quietly slipped out of the US-led air war in Syria, leaving the campaign largely in American hands.

But beyond Saudi Arabia’s strategic manipulations lies the fundamental problem with which we started: the Kingdom’s official ideology forms the heart of the terrorist creed. A devoted foe of Islamist terrorism does not promote violent jihadism. Nor does it arrest and charge with “terrorism” domestic critics of its medieval interpretation of Islam. Saudi Arabia does both.

This speaks to the main shortcoming of today’s militarized approach to fighting terrorism. Unless the expansion of dangerous ideologies like Wahhabism is stopped, the global war on terror, now almost a generation old, will never be won. No matter how many bombs the US and its allies drop, the Saudi-financed madrassas will continue to indoctrinate tomorrow’s jihadists.

© Project Syndicate, 2015.

With the horrific Paris attacks refocusing global spotlight on the scourge of international terrorism, we should not forget the factors that continue to aid the rise of jihadist forces. The international fight against transnational Islamic terrorism can never succeed as long as short-term geostrategic interests prompt Western powers to form alliances of convenience that strengthen fundamentalist forces extolling violence as a sanctified tool of religion.

Islamic terrorism poses an existential threat to liberal, pluralistic states everywhere, not just in the West. So, the interventionist policies of some powers that unwittingly bolster Islamist forces threaten not just their internal security but also that of other democracies with sizable Muslim populations.

Make no mistake: The war on terror cannot be credibly fought with treacherous allies, such as jihadist rebels and fundamentalism-exporting sheikhdoms. Indeed, the pursuit of near-term geostrategic goals at the cost of long-term interests has created an energized international jihadist threat and fostered greater transnational terrorism. The focus on securing short-term gains is helping to inflict long-term pain on the international community.

The notion that Western powers can aid “moderate” jihadists in faraway lands — training them in how to make and detonate bombs and arming them with lethal weapons — and yet not endanger their own security has repeatedly been shown to be false. The training and arming of such militants in collaboration with reactionary Islamist sheikhdoms has only allowed these countries’ cloistered royals to play double games and bankroll Muslim extremist groups and madrasas in many countries.

In fact, it is the state and non-state allies of convenience since the 1980s — when the CIA trained and armed thousands of anti-Soviet Afghan rebels with Arab petrodollars and the help of Pakistan’s rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency — that have come to haunt the security of Western and non-Western democracies alike.

In 1985, at a White House ceremony attended by several Afghan top-ranking “mujahedeen” — the jihadists out of which Al Qaeda emerged — President Ronald Reagan gestured toward his guests and declared, “These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers.” It was the Reagan administration’s use of Islam as an ideological tool to spur jihad against the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan that created Al Qaeda, undermining the security of several regional states.

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton admitted in a 2010 ABC News interview that, “We trained them, we equipped them, we funded them, including somebody named Osama bin Laden. And then when we finally saw the end of the Soviet Army crossing back out of Afghanistan, we all breathed a sigh of relief and said, okay, fine, we’re out of there. And it didn’t work out so well for us.”

Today, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, has emerged as a new international monster because the lesson from Al Qaeda’s rise has been ignored. This is apparent from President Barack Obama’s recent decision to ramp up U.S. support to Syrian rebels with nearly $100 million in fresh aid. The decision has come despite the vast majority of the CIA-trained “moderate” jihadists having defected with their weapons to ISIS. Now, ISIS wages its terror campaigns largely with Western weapons and with many Western-trained fighters.

France finds itself increasingly in the crosshairs of terrorism in large part because of President François Hollande’s interventionist impulse. A political lightweight who became president by accident in 2012, Hollande has shown himself to be one of the world’s most interventionist leaders, despite being a socialist. Serial interventions have come to define the “Hollande doctrine.”

Under Hollande’s leadership, France has conducted military operations in Ivory Coast, Somalia, Mali, Central African Republic and the Sahel, provided assistance to Syrian rebels as part of a U.S.-led effort to topple President Bashar al-Assad and, more recently, launched airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. When U.S. President Barack Obama considered sending the U.S. military into combat in Syria in 2013, one foreign leader egging him on was Hollande.

Hollande’s happy interventions, especially in the Middle East, have angered radical elements in France’s sizable Arab immigrant community. Hollande was singled out by name by some of those who carried out the November 13 attacks in Paris. Despite several new security measures being implemented after the Charlie Hebdo attack, including a sweeping surveillance law in the supposed cradle of liberty, France has become more vulnerable to terrorist strikes. Hollande now wants the French Constitution amended.

More broadly, almost every Western intervention in the wider Middle East has triggered unforeseen internal and cross-border consequences. Creating a vicious circle of action and reaction, the unintended effects have then prompted another Western intervention in due course to control the fallout.

For example, many of the Arab and other jihadists trained by the CIA in Pakistan, as part of the Reagan administration’s clandestine war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, later returned to their homelands to wage terror campaigns against governments they viewed as tainted by Western influence. Such Al Qaeda-linked militants were linked to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s assassination and to terrorist attacks on several U.S. targets in the Middle East in the 1990s. Large portions of the multibillion-dollar covert U.S. aid for anti-Soviet Islamic guerrillas were siphoned off by the conduit — Pakistan’s ISI — to ignite a bloody insurgency in the Jammu and Kashmir state of India, which bore the brunt of the unintended consequences of the Russian and U.S.-led interventions in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.

More than a decade after its proxy war drove Soviet forces out of Afghanistan, the U.S. — following the September 11, 2001, terror attacks at home — invaded Afghanistan. Over 14 years later, it is still embroiled in that war.

Take another example: The U.S.-French-British toppling of strongman Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 has turned Libya into a battle-worn wasteland that now serves as a happy hunting ground for ISIS, Al Qaeda and other jihadists. This has opened the door to the flow of arms and militants to other countries, leading to the French military’s antiterrorist operations from Mali to the Sahel.

No state has unravelled faster and become a terrorist haven due to foreign intervention than Libya. Yet the U.S. has endlessly debated the 2012 killing of four Americans in Benghazi, including its ambassador, but sidestepped the Obama-made disaster that Libya represents. Indeed, one of the first acts of the short-lived successor regime that the Western powers installed in Tripoli was to introduce Shariah — Islamic law rooted in the ultra-extreme Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam.

Today, a lawless Libya continues to export jihad and guns across the Sahel and undermine the security of fellow Maghreb countries and Egypt. As a jihadist stronghold, it also poses a potential threat to European security.

Likewise, the operation led by the U.S., France and Britain to overthrow Assad not only contributed to turning the once-peaceful, secular Syria into a jihadist bastion and vast killing field but also enabled ISIS to rise from its base in northern Syria as a powerful, marauding army that has gained control over vast swaths of territory extending to Iraq.

That, in turn, prompted Obama more than 14 months ago to launch an open-ended bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. According to Henry Kissinger, the “destruction of ISIS is more urgent than the overthrow of Bashar Assad, who has already lost over half of the area he once controlled. Making sure that this territory does not become a permanent terrorist haven must have precedence.”

Obama’s ineffectual air war, however, has done little to contain ISIS but prompted Russia to launch its own airstrikes. The bomb-triggered crash of a Russian jetliner over the Sinai Peninsula and the ISIS-linked Paris attacks now threaten to deepen outside powers’ military involvement in Syria and Iraq and thereby set off a fresh circle of action and reaction.

More fundamentally, the toppling of secular despots in Iraq and Libya and the attempt to overthrow a similar autocrat in Syria have paved the way for the rise of violent extremists in the Sunni arc that stretches from the Maghreb-Sahel region of North Africa to the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt. Several largely Sunni countries, including Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Afghanistan, have become de facto partitioned, while Jordan and Lebanon face a similar spectre of succumbing to Sunni extremist violence.

In fact, the U.S.-French-British campaign to oust Assad — with the support of Wahhabi sheikhdoms like Saudi Arabia and Qatar — began on the wrong foot by seeking to speciously distinguish between “moderate” and “radical” jihadists. Those waging jihad by the gun can never be moderate, which is why many CIA-trained Syrian rebels have joined ISIS.

Western powers must reconsider their regional strategies, which have long depended on allies of convenience ranging from despotic Islamist rulers, as in the Persian Gulf, to Islamist militias of the type that were used to drive out Soviet forces from Afghanistan or to overthrow Gaddafi. By continuing to shower Pakistan with generous aid and lethal arms, the U.S. unwittingly enables Pakistani export of terrorism to India and Afghanistan.

The West’s dubious allies, ranging from Qatar to Pakistan, have made the international terrorism problem worse. How can the international community combat the ISIS ideology when a major Western ally like Saudi Arabia has played an important role in funding the spread of such ideology and Salafi jihadism?

Western powers must shine a light on their past mistakes so that they don’t repeat them. The Western focus ought to be on securing long-term goals rather than on achieving short-term victories through alliances of convenience.

The larger lesson that should not be forgotten is that unless caution is exercised in training and arming Islamic militants in any region, the chickens could come home to roost. Jihad cannot be confined within the borders of a targeted nation, however distant, as Afghanistan, Syria and Libya illustrate. The involvement of French and Belgian nationals in the Paris attacks indicates how difficult it is to geographically contain the spread of the jihad virus.

© Mint, 2015.

The U.S. highlights the rot in its Pakistan policy by feting Gen. Sharif in Washington, where he held talks with Vice President Biden, the secretaries of state and defense, and the CIA chief. The visit showed how the U.S. coddles Pakistani generals at the expense of Pakistan’s elected government.

Brahma Chellaney, China-US Focus

Strategic weapon transfers, loans, and political support allow China to use Pakistan as a relatively inexpensive counterweight to India. Yet, oddly, America also extends unstinted financial and political support to Pakistan, a country that has mastered the art of pretending to be a U.S. ally while hosting those that kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Washington’s present approach bolsters China’s Pakistan strategy but undercuts its own interests.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to sell an additional eight nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan is just the latest example of America persistently rewarding a country that still refuses to snap its ties with terrorists or observe other international norms. By showering Pakistan with billions of dollars in aid annually, the U.S. has made the financially-struggling country one of this century’s largest recipients of American assistance.

Terrorists reared by the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency continue to train inside Pakistan for cross-border operations in India and Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban’s top leaders remain holed up in Pakistan, which also hosts sanctuaries for those waging hit-and-run campaigns in Afghanistan. Pakistan has not come clean even in regards to who helped Osama bin Laden hide for years in a military garrison town near its capital.

Yet, the U.S. has allowed itself to be repeatedly duped by Pakistan’s false promises. U.S. policy has not only turned Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker but also made it easy for Pakistan to merrily run with the foxes and hunt with the hounds.

Over the past 13 years, the U.S. has given Pakistan more than $31 billion in aid and other financial support. And like China, it has been arming Pakistan with lethal weapons.

Under Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, the weapon systems that have flowed to Pakistan or are to be provided include eight P-3C Orion maritime aircraft, 18 new and 14 used F-16s, one Perry-class missile frigate,six C-130E Hercules transport aircraft, 100 Harpoon anti-ship missiles, 2,007 TOW anti-armor missiles, 500 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, 500 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, 1,450 2,000-pound bombs, six AN/TPS-77 surveillance radars, 115 M-109 self-propelled howitzers, 20 AH-1F Cobra attack helicopters, and 15 Scan Eagle unmanned aerial vehicles.

More recently, Washington, in a nearly $1 billion deal with Pakistan, agreed to supply 15 AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters, 1,000 Hellfire II missiles, and targeting and positioning systems. The U.S. justification for arming Pakistan with such sophisticated weapons has been that they are needed for counterterrorism, as if the “bad” terrorists that Pakistan seeks to battle (while taking care of the “good” ones) have acquired naval, air, and ground-force capabilities.

Consider another issue: Despite Pakistan’s duplicity in the fight against terrorism, Washington continues to extend carrots to Pakistani military commanders in hopes of convincing them to sever their ties with all terrorist groups and to bring the Taliban to Afghanistan peace talks. Hope seems to spring eternal.

Yet, the U.S.’s Pakistan policy has also failed to deliver on other fronts, including reining in Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program and promoting a genuine democratic transition there. With the development of a robust civil society remaining stunted, jihad culture is now deeply woven into Pakistan’s national fabric. And despite an elected government in office, the military rules the roost in Pakistan.

Indeed, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been forced to let the military take charge of foreign policy and national security. Army chief Gen. Raheel Sharif (not related to the prime minister) calls the shots on key issues. The government’s main responsibility is now limited to the economy, yet it cannot touch the financial prerogatives of the military, which, according to some estimates, consumes 26% of all tax receipts.

With the military, intelligence, and nuclear establishments not answerable to the government, Pakistan has been frenetically expanding its nuclear arsenal, building even low-yield tactical nukes for use on the battlefield against India. The arsenal provides the generals the nuclear shield to harbor terrorists without inviting military retaliation from India.

More than ever, Pakistan stands out as a military with a country, rather than a country with a military.

Against this background, if Pakistan is to become a moderate, stable country, the military’s viselike grip on power must be broken and the ISI made accountable. However, the U.S., far from seeking to address Pakistan’s skewed civil-military relations, has been mollycoddling Gen. Sharif, awarding him the U.S. Legion of Merit for his contributions to “peace and security.” Shortly, the general will pay another high-profile visit to Washington for talks with top officials.

More ominously, the U.S. has explored the idea of cutting a nuclear deal with Pakistan. Dangling the offer of a “nuclear mainstreaming” Pakistan — as advocates of the exploratory talks call it — carries a double risk: Incentivizing breach of norms by a state sponsor of terrorism, andlegitimizing a nuclear program built through theft of technology, deception, and clandestine transfers from China. A deal would also whitewash the biggest nuclear-proliferation scandal in history, known as the A.Q. Khan affair.

As long as Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons program remains outside government control, any American attempt to limit it would fail.

The U.S.’s Pakistan strategy, despite a long record of failure, remains focused too much on carrots and too little on sticks or disincentives.Obama has spurned congressional advice to suspend some aid to Pakistan and impose travel restrictions and other sanctions on Pakistani officials known to have ties to terrorists.

Worse still, Obama’s recent move to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely, leaving a withdrawal decision to his successor, means that the U.S. will continue to fight the war on the wrong side of the Afpak border while still rewarding the Taliban’s backer, Pakistan.

It is time for America to stop getting duped and fix its broken Pakistan policy, which permits the Pakistani military to nurture more transnational terrorists and Islamists. The policy also plays into China’s hands by unwittingly aiding Beijing’s designs and helping to cement the Sino-Pakistan nexus. Pakistan is a valued asset for China to keep India boxed in, but a burden for America’s geostrategic interests.

Washington must balance its carrots by employing an appropriate level of sticks to force change in Pakistan’s behavior. Sustained U.S. pressure is vital to encourage a reformed Pakistan at peace with itself.

© China-US Focus, 2015.

By Brahma Chellaney

A column internationally syndicated by Project Syndicate.

The Islamic State’s horrific attacks in Paris provide a stark reminder that Western powers cannot contain – let alone insulate themselves from – the unintended consequences of their interventions in the Middle East. The unraveling of Syria, Iraq, and Libya, together with the civil war that is tearing Yemen apart, have created vast killing fields, generated waves of refugees, and spawned Islamist militants who will remain a threat to international security for years to come. And the West has had more than a little to do with it.

Obviously, Western intervention in the Middle East is not a new phenomenon. With the exceptions of Iran, Egypt, and Turkey, every major power in the Middle East is a modern construct created largely by the British and the French. The United States-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001 represent only the most recent effort by Western powers to shape the region’s geopolitics.

But these powers have always preferred intervention by proxy, and it is this strategy – training, funding, and arming jihadists who are deemed “moderate” to fight against the “radicals” – that is backfiring today. Despite repeated proof to the contrary, Western powers have remained wedded to an approach that endangers their own internal security.

It should be obvious that those waging violent jihad can never be moderate. Yet, even after acknowledging that a majority of the Free Syrian Army’s CIA-trained members have defected to the Islamic State, the US recently pledged nearly $100 million in fresh aid for Syrian rebels.

France, too, has distributed aid to Syrian rebels, and it recently began launching airstrikes against the Islamic State. And that is precisely why France was targeted. According to witnesses, the attackers at Paris’s Bataclan concert hall – where most of the night’s victims were killed – declared that their actions were President François Hollande’s fault. “He didn’t have to intervene in Syria,” they shouted.

To be sure, France has a tradition of independent-minded and pragmatic foreign policy, reflected in its opposition to the 2003 US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. But after Nicolas Sarkozy became President in 2007, France aligned its policies more firmly with the US and NATO, and participated actively in toppling Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011. And after Hollande succeeded Sarkozy in 2012, France emerged as one of the world’s most interventionist countries, undertaking military operations in the Central African Republic, the Ivory Coast, Mali, the Sahel, and Somalia before launching its airstrikes in Syria.

Such interventions neglect the lessons of history. Simply put, nearly every Western intervention this century has had unforeseen consequences, which have spilled over borders and ultimately prompted another intervention.

It was no different in the late twentieth century. In the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, the US (with funding from Saudi Arabia) trained thousands of Islamic extremists to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The result was Al Qaeda, whose actions ultimately prompted President George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan and provided a pretext for invading Iraq. As then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted in 2010, “We trained them, we equipped them, we funded them, including somebody named Osama bin Laden….And it didn’t work out so well for us.”

And yet, disregarding this lesson, Western powers intervened in Libya to topple Qaddafi, effectively creating a jihadist citadel at Europe’s southern doorstep, while opening the way for arms and militants to flow to other countries. It was this fallout that spurred the French counter-terrorist interventions in Mali and the Sahel.

Having barely stopped to catch their breath, the US, France, and Britain – with the support of Wahhabi states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar – then moved to bring down Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, fueling a civil war that enabled the Islamic State to seize territory and flourish. With the group rapidly gaining control over vast areas extending into Iraq, the US – along with Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – began launching airstrikes inside Syria last year. France joined the effort more recently, as has Russia.

Though Russia is pursuing its military campaign independently of the Western powers (reflecting its support for Assad), it, too, has apparently become a target, with US and European officials increasingly convinced that the Islamic State was behind October’s crash of a Russian airliner in the Sinai Peninsula. That incident, together with the Paris attacks, may spur even greater outside military involvement in Syria and Iraq, thereby accelerating the destructive cycle of intervention. Already, the danger that emotion, not reason, will guide policy is apparent in France, the US, and elsewhere.

What is needed most is a more measured approach that reflects the lessons of recent mistakes. For starters, Western leaders should avoid playing into the terrorists’ hands, as Hollande is doing by calling the Paris attacks “an act of war” and implementing unprecedented measures at home. Instead, they should heed Margaret Thatcher’s advice and starve terrorists of “the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.”

More important, they should recognize that the war on terror cannot credibly be fought with unsavory allies, such as Islamist fighters or fundamentalist-financing sheikhdoms. The risk of adverse unintended consequences – whether terrorist blowback, as in Paris, or military spillovers, as in Syria – is unjustifiably high.

It is not too late for Western powers to consider the lessons of past mistakes and recalibrate their counterterrorism policies accordingly. Unfortunately, this appears to be the least likely response to the Islamic State’s recent attacks.

© Project Syndicate, 2015.

More than ever, Pakistan stands out as a military with a country, rather than a country with a military. In handling Pakistan, the U.S. must remember the old adage: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asian Review

Having mastered the art of pretending to be an ally of the U.S. while working to undercut its interests, including aiding its battlefield foes, Pakistan has merrily been playing a double game. Yet, the U.S. continues to arm it with sophisticated weapons and provide multibillion-dollar aid to prop it up.

U.S. President Barack Obama meets Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif at the White House in Washington on Oct. 22. © Reuters

President Barack Obama’s decision to sell an additional eight nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan is just the latest example of the U.S. persistently rewarding a country that refuses to cut its ties with violent jihadists or observe other international norms. Indeed, by showering a financially struggling Pakistan with generous aid, the U.S. has made the country one of the largest recipients of U.S. assistance.

Through its financial and political support, the U.S. unwittingly enables Pakistan’s export of terrorism. As two American scholars, C. Christine Fair and Sumit Ganguly, suggested in the journal Foreign Affairs, “If Washington cannot end Pakistan’s noxious behaviors, it should at least stop sponsoring them.”

The Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency continues to aid the Afghan Taliban, which has killed hundreds of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, while nurturing other terrorists for cross-border operations in India and Afghanistan.

Yet, over the past 13 years, the U.S. has given Pakistan more than $18 billion in economic and military aid and $13 billion from the Coalition Support Funds. U.S. policy has made it easy for Pakistan to free ride, turning Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.

Since President George W. Bush upgraded U.S. relations with Pakistan by designating it a Major Non-NATO Ally, a lot of U.S. weapon systems have flowed to the country, which has encouraged it to ratchet up hostility with India.

The weapon supplies include eight P-3C Orion maritime aircraft, 18 new and 14 used F-16s, one Perry-class missile frigate, six C-130E Hercules transport aircraft, 100 Harpoon anti-ship missiles, 2,007 TOW anti-armor missiles, 500 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, 500 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, 1,450 2,000-pound bombs, six AN/TPS-77 surveillance radars, 115 M-109 self-propelled howitzers, 20 AH-1F Cobra attack helicopters, and 15 Scan Eagle unmanned aerial vehicles.

The Obama administration, in a nearly $1 billion deal with Pakistan, recently agreed to supply 15 AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters, 1,000 Hellfire II missiles, and targeting and positioning systems. However, its move a year ago to equip the Pakistani navy with eight GRC43M cutter vessels for medium to long endurance coverage of the northern Arabian Sea has run into congressional opposition.

The U.S. justification for arming Pakistan with such lethal weapons has been that they are needed for counterterrorism, as if the “bad” terrorists that Pakistan seeks to fight (while taking care of the “good” ones) have acquired sophisticated naval, air and ground-force capabilities. In reality, the U.S., despite emerging as India’s largest arms supplier, has sought to equip Pakistan with specific systems to offset some of India’s military advantages, even though Pakistan refuses to accept the territorial status quo on the subcontinent and continues to train and export terrorists.

While emboldening Pakistan’s antagonism and intransigence, U.S. policy, paradoxically, pushes for an India-Pakistan “peace” dialogue.

Consider another issue. Despite Pakistan’s duplicity in the fight against terrorism, Washington, largely because of its interests in Afghanistan and other regional considerations, has shied away from imposing any costs on the Pakistani military for nurturing jihadist forces. Instead, it continues to extend carrots to Pakistani military leaders in hopes of convincing them to sever ties with all terrorist groups and to bring the Taliban to the Afghan peace talks.

Short-term factors have led the U.S. to forge even closer institutional ties with the Pakistani army and the ISI, the main wielders of power in Pakistan. The F-16 decision followed Obama’s U-turn on U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Significantly, Washington’s Pakistan policy has failed to deliver on other fronts as well, including curbing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and promoting a genuine democratic transition there. While the development of a robust civil society remains stunted, jihadist culture is now deeply woven into Pakistan’s national fabric. Despite an elected government in office, the military rules the roost in Pakistan.

The most powerful person is not Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, but Army chief General Raheel Sharif. Gen. Sharif, who is not related to the prime minister, calls the shots on key issues. Without staging an overt military coup, Gen. Sharif has encroached on the authority of the elected civilian leadership.

In fact, the prime minister has been compelled to let the military take charge of foreign policy and national security, including all aspects of internal security. So the government’s main responsibility is limited to the economy, yet it cannot touch the financial prerogatives of the military, which consumes 26% of all tax receipts, according to some estimates.

With the military, intelligence and nuclear establishments not answerable to an elected government, Pakistan has been expanding its nuclear arsenal, building even low-yield tactical nukes for battlefield use against India. The arsenal provides the generals the nuclear shield to harbor terrorists without inviting military retaliation from India.

More than ever, Pakistan stands out as a military with a country, rather than a country with a military.

If Pakistan is to become a moderate, stable country, the military’s viselike grip on power must be broken and the ISI made accountable. However, far from seeking to address Pakistan’s skewed civil-military relations, the U.S. has been mollycoddling Gen. Sharif, awarding him the U.S. Legion of Merit for his contributions to “peace and security.” Washington will soon host the general on another high-profile visit.

This behavior has also encouraged U.S. allies to pamper Gen. Sharif. British Prime Minister David Cameron held talks with Gen. Sharif earlier this year at Downing Street, while new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani started his Pakistan visit by meeting the general first.

More ominously, the U.S. has explored the idea of cutting a nuclear deal with Pakistan. Dangling the offer of “nuclear mainstreaming” Pakistan, as advocates of the exploratory talks call it, carries a double risk: Incentivizing breach of norms by a state sponsor of terrorism, and legitimizing a nuclear program built through the theft of technology, deception, and clandestine transfers from China. A deal would also whitewash the biggest nuclear proliferation scandal in history, known as the A.Q. Khan affair after the Pakistani nuclear scientist who supplied nuclear know-how to rogue states such as Libya and North Korea.

The irony is that those in Washington who worry about a rogue commander in Pakistan seizing control of a nuclear bomb seem oblivious to the fact that the Pakistani military has already been radicalized and the ISI has turned rogue, with its jihadist rampages spawning more dangerous Islamists.

As long as Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program remains outside government control, any U.S. attempt to limit it will remain a false hope.

The real problem with U.S. policy is that it refuses to learn from past mistakes. For example, the U.S. failure or unwillingness to bring the ISI to heel parallels its ineffectual air war against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which bears an acronymic affinity with the ISI. ISI and ISIS became powerful, respectively, because of misguided U.S. policies of arming jihadists in Afghanistan in the 1980s and in Syria in recent years.

Washington’s Pakistan strategy, despite a long record of failure, remains focused too much on carrots and too little on sticks. Obama has spurned congressional advice earlier this year to suspend some aid to Pakistan and impose travel restrictions and other sanctions on Pakistani officials known to have ties to terrorists. Even those that harbored Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani military garrison town have gone scot-free.

Worse still, Obama’s recent move to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely, leaving any withdrawal decision to his successor, means that the U.S. will continue to fight the war on the wrong side of the Afghan-Pakistani border while rewarding the Taliban’s backer, Pakistan.

It is time for the U.S. to stop being duped and instead fix its broken Pakistan policy. It must begin by bridging the gap between policy and practice, including employing some sticks. Sustained U.S. pressure is vital to encourage a reformed Pakistan.

In handling Pakistan, U.S. policymakers must remember the old adage: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

© Nikkei Asian Review, 2015.