Ambassador Cameron Munter

on Pakistan

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Washington, D.C.

Welcome/Moderator:

Frederic Grare

Director and Senior Associate of South Asia Program,

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Speaker:

U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter

Transcript by Federal News Service

Washington, D.C.

FREDERIC GRARE: Ladies and gentlemen, good morning and welcome to this talk on prospects for Pakistan and the United States. My name is Frederic Grare, and I’m the new director of the South Asia program. We do have the privilege to welcome this morning Ambassador Cameron Munter, who has just returned from Pakistan, what, a couple of weeks ago? Yeah. Ambassador Munter, you have had a long and distinguished career, a long diplomatic career. You did serve in a number of eminent, Europe-related positions in the National Security Council with the State Department as well as in Europe itself. This Europe specialty, in a way, ended at least for some time in 2006, when you led the first provincial reconstruction team not in Afghanistan, but in Mosul, Iraq. You then became Ambassador to Belgrade right before returning to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Finally, in 2010, you were sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan. I understand that after you retire, you’ll be going as visiting fellow to Columbia School of Law, and then followed up with some other academic affiliations. So sir, welcome back to the world of academia. You were the U.S. representative in Pakistan during a challenging time, and your tenure was exactly not an easy one. You had to mend relations between the two countries after the quite unprecedented series of crises of 2001 in particular, Raymond Davis, the raid against bin Laden, Salala and the cutoff of the lines of supply; 2011 was indeed an uneasy year for the Middle East, for Pakistan-U.S. relations. [00:01:54] Re-establishing – resuming the links was indeed no small achievement. But crises are also moments of truth, and I suppose we are all keen to know was three crises, very different in nature – I’ve told you about Pakistan, about the U.S. and about the relationship between the two countries. Will the relation ever be the same? That’s the question mark that a lot of people have in mind. How is it likely to evolve? What are the challenges that are ahead? These are some of the questions – I guess there will be many more in the Q & A session, and we – in which we’re are all impatient to listen to you. I understand that you intend to also replay that in the larger context of the evolution of the relation with Pakistan, in particular since 2008, and this is really something we will welcome as well. Ambassador Munter, we are most honored to have you, and we are very honored that you’ve chosen Carnegie for your first public event since returning from Islamabad. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in extending warm welcome to Ambassador Munter. (Applause.) [00:03:07] AMBASSADOR CAMERON MUNTER: It’s great to see a number of friends today, and I thank you all for being here. I had actually hoped to come to you next week, because I retire from the foreign service at the end of this month, and I thought, OK, I can, you know, retire, they can’t get me anymore – (laughter) – I can say what I want. But having had enough of Washington, I’m actually getting out of town next week, so this was my opportunity – even before I’m out the door – to try to have discussion with you, the people who I respect most, on this issue, about Pakistan and comment a little about my tenure there and the prospects for the future. So I’d like to speak for a little while, but I – really, I’d like to have a conversation with you, and I think we have time for that. Frederic will be – will be moderating for us.

Yeah, and those of you who have studied Pakistan, those of you who have lived Pakistan know that the guiding principle is the principle of narratives, that there is basically two narratives: our narrative, their narrative, and by our, I really do mean, you know, despite differences of ideology on the American side, despite differences of ideology on the Pakistani side, I’ve found that it’s a remarkable consistency in the set of you can say, narratives or you can say prejudices, if you choose – with which the two countries approach each other. First of all, they’re focused heavily on bilateral relations, as if there’s nothing else other than the bilateral tie. And there’s a bit of obsessiveness that comes into, I think, not only the discussion, but the literature about this, about bilateralness – and I’ll get to that towards the end – why I think it’s important to break out of that.

You all know that the American – the Pakistani notion of America is America uses Pakistan and then leaves. There is a – (inaudible) –a kind of a back and forth of positive relations, negative relations, a kind of a pattern. And this pattern, which developed, whether you want to look back to 1971, whether you want to look back to 1989, whether you want to look to 2001, it’s a very easy and warm and comfortable pattern for Pakistanis to accept, that there is a way by which America uses Pakistan for its own needs and then discards Pakistan. And having discovered this and repeated it ad nauseam to generations of young, impressionable diplomats like myself, but others, what has been known as a descriptive method becomes prescriptive; that is, it is not only descriptive that this is what happened, it is prescriptive that that is in the DNA of the United States. They will do this to you; they want to do this to you. America likes to desert Pakistan. It’s the way America works. So this is, very crudely put, the Pakistani narrative. [00:05:50] The American narrative is similarly crude, but similarly useful, in the sense that, we give these guys tons of money, and every time, they betray us, you know. They lie to us, they don’t do what they say they’re going to do, and yet we, the suckers, the needy superpower, keep coming back to them in times of need. We give them more money, and to quote Randy Newman, that great philosopher, we give them money, but are they grateful? No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful, this kind of thing. (Laughter.) And it is emotional on both sides, because this is not just a question of an analysis of the way different countries work, it’s a question of betrayal of people who you want to love, and you want them to love you, and this goes – those of you who have studied this, whether diplomatic or in cultural elements, deep down I think you would agree that there is this desire for more than just a relationship, there’s a desire for something – not just a one-night stand, we want marriage, you know, and then the disappointment that comes from that. [00:06:52] So with those two narratives, it’s my contention that in 2008, not for the first time – maybe not for the last time – with the end of the Musharraf – you can call it a dictatorship, an era, whatever – there was a concerted effort by people, I think, in both parties here in Washington, but certainly led as the Democrats came in by such people as Biden and Lugar and Kerry and Richard Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton – there was this effort to say, we’re going to break out of this narrative. We are going to break out of this seeming straitjacket of the up and down of the relationship, and we’re going to put our money where our mouth is, and because we’re Washington, we measure things – the tool we use to try to show that we’re serious is money, and that money was the Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation, which promised $7.5 billion in civilian aid over five years at the beginning of the Obama administration. And if I understand it correctly – I wasn’t working; I was busy dodging

other kinds of projectiles in Iraq at the time – but if I understand this correctly, this was a deeply idealistic effort to try to say, we are not only going to give money, we are not only going to have an impact with a fairly large civilian assistance program to balance, if you will, our ongoing military commitment to Pakistan, but we’re also going to set up a structure or a relationship through what was generally called the strategic partnership to try to make – to break out of that pattern. And after 2008, 2009, those of you who knew Richard Holbrooke knew that, you know, Hurricane Holbrooke hit Pakistan and there was a set of very ambitious, all-of-government, if you will, goals and structures that were put in to try to build a long-term commitment to Pakistan, and I use “long-term” advisedly. [00:08:53]

There had been a feeling that the American focus on the counterterrorism effort post-9/11, by its very nature, by almost the epistemological element of the way people understand CT, was, by its nature, short-term, that you needed to get results, you needed to kill bad guys, et cetera. This was to balance that short-term set of needs: American safety, the safety of our troops in Afghanistan, the safety of the Pakistani people, to balance that with a commitment to the long-term stability, and a vision, if you will – a common vision with Pakistan of the long-term stability of Pakistan. It seems naïve now, after we’ve gone through the ensuing years, but I do believe that was done in good faith from the American side, and in fact, there were many on the Pakistani side who gambled that it was going to work. Those were the people – you could put Zardari in that category, but also people like Shah Mehmood Qureshi and others. Whatever you think of their ability as statesmen, whatever you think of their governance qualities, there was an element – a true – I believe, a true attempt to try to forge a new relationship, a strategic partnership. That even went over to the – to the traditional element of our relationship, the military and ISI, where, I think, the relationship between the ISI and the military – if you measure it by how many visas they gave or how they tried to work together on various, counter terrorism projects – actually, there was a real effort to try to make that bloom after 2008.

[00:10:30] Those of you who know the details of the period here know that I’m eliding over some of

this, but I’m trying to show kind of a direction. I believe that that – that effort has failed, and one of the reasons for the failure of that effort on the Pakistani side was the inability of the Pakistani state to be the vehicle of this assistance – and more than just the money and the assistance, but the commitment. It was not strong enough or able enough to do what the Americans had hoped it could do. Those of you who follow the assistance program know that there was an attempt to have 50 percent of the Kerry-Lugar-Berman money work through what they call G-to-G, government-to-government programs, so that, for example, if you’re working in infrastructure projects, if you’re working in education, the goal was not just to build a dam, not just to build a school, but to improve the capacity, to build the capacity of the provincial and central government in the process.

When you talk to diaspora Pakistanis, when you talk to most Pakistanis, they say, are you

nuts? You’re giving money to who? The government of this province? You know, but we were saying no, it’s worth it. We were trying to say, as partners, we will work not only with NGOs, not only with beltway bandits, but with the government of Pakistan, and the government of Pakistan is going to show itself capable of working with us. And I would argue that that’s a failure, and part of it was simply the capacity of the government. Now when I say failure, not a total failure. I think

our assistance program has really gotten some results and continues to get some results, but it was a failure in the vision that we were going to build the kind of partnership with Pakistan with a capable Pakistan that we wanted.

[00:12:26] Those of you who’ve read Anatol Lieven’s book – those of you who haven’t shouldn’t be in

this room, but those of you who read Anatol Lieven’s book, you know, will understand and will buy that premise, which I do, that with a very weak state and a very strong society, the problem of putting all of your commitment into that weak state is perhaps flawed; that is, that the premise is perhaps flawed, that if, in fact, there are not very many beggars in Pakistan, if that’s not because of a wonderful welfare system but because of social and tribal and local structures, it’s worth paying attention to the fact that that is perhaps the way Pakistan is governed, and that investing in the prospects for a strong state with a state in that – in that kind of situation is fraught with risk, and that risk happened.

OK, so that’s – that’s one flaw, I think, in what happened after 2008. We – it’s as if we

drove a train over a trestle, and the trestle, which was the Pakistani government, that was simply too weak. It was not able to absorb the money or to deal with our commitment, whether, again, assistance or strategic partnership, to address the issues of energy, to address the issues. You know, I can’t tell you how many beautiful studies of the energy problem we’ve given Pakistan that have simply gone onto a shelf. You know, and so it was not able to respond. So that’s the Pakistani failure. In a certain sense the U.S. failure, I would argue, was our inability to look past counterterrorism or our tendency to see the problems of counterterrorism as the defining element of the relationship, or as I would put it, when you look at Pakistan through the telescope of Afghanistan, you see only one thing, and that’s the Haqqani network; that is to say, if you insist, in policy discussions in Washington, on seeing the counterterrorism issue focused on the immediate needs – very real needs, very important needs, life and death needs of the American effort in Afghanistan and the American effort to break the back of al-Qaida, you run the risk of losing track of those longer-term goals that people like Richard Holbrooke, that people like Hillary Clinton et cetera articulated, the Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation articulated back in 2008.

[00:14:55] So that the – the American problem was that we were unable, I believe, to sort out, in an

effective way, how we did both. Now, when Richard Holbrooke asked me to take this job, he made it quite clear that, you know, those of you who know Richard Holbrooke – humble – you know, Richard Holbrooke basically created a system, or it was created for Richard Holbrooke – a system at the State Department where he was the sun – not even in the State Department, to the whole Washington bureaucracy – he was the sun and all of us were the planets going around him, right? And then the sun went out, and those of you who know Holbrooke know that he was unbearable, et cetera, et cetera, but – no, I missed him every day in Pakistan after he died, because his commitment and his vision was something that – and just the power of his personality was something we really needed, and especially because bureaucratically, we had created not just the usual State Department geographical bureau system, we had created the Holbrooke solar system, and when the light went out, we were a bunch of rocks spinning around in the dark and space.

Now that makes us sound more pathetic than I’d like to think we really were, but it was very, very difficult. And after that time, that – we struggled to try to figure out how Af-Pak could work. Marc Grossman, who took Richard Holbrooke’s place, did a fabulous job of focusing – you know, Holbrooke was famously not a focused man, and Marc did a fabulous – and continues to do a great job of focusing that effort on the Afghan peace, et cetera. But what happened at that point was that the edifice that was built – that Richard Holbrooke sought, and I’ll use him as a – as a – as a proxy for those other people of good will who sought this – became much more difficult. And even if Holbrooke had lived, the events of 2011 might have made it difficult anyway for us to sustain this balance between the long-term and the short-term efforts that we sought to build in 2008.

[00:17:06] So we can look at 2011 and go through those – and just a few of those items, those events

and see where that imbalance came. One event just – exactly at the beginning of 2011, the assassination of Salmaan Taseer and the inability of the Pakistani government, the secular elements of the Pakistani government to rally against those people – against the forces of intolerance threw a chill I think, through the mainstream, open-minded elements in Pakistan, which I believe there are many – the progressive people of Pakistan who seem to be in retreat. You know, well, look at Ahmed Rashid’s books, and flames on the fronts and the titles are always things like “Descent into Chaos,” or “on the Brink,” and, you know, I think that while Ahmed is correct, he does tend to make things look much more dire than they actually are, right? Pakistan is not a – living in Islamabad is not living in Mogadishu, but there is that perception that that’s the case. Partly, I would argue, the perception is that way because at times, like the assassination of Salmaan Taseer, it was incumbent on the leadership of Pakistan to make strong statements, and they did not.

It may have been that they calculated they weren’t strong enough to do that. If that’s the

case, then that’s even more disturbing. Then came, of course, the Raymond Davis case – the Raymond Davis case, in which a CIA contractor was set upon by street thugs – and they were street thugs – and killed them, and I got a crash course in Sharia law, and spent the next seven weeks trying to get him out of jail, but this then showed to the Pakistanis a certain sense of, wait a minute, we have opened up to you, and all of our worst fears about America doing things behind our back have been realized. So it was a psychological moment when Raymond Davis was – that case took place, both for those people who oppose us in Pakistan – you see that Raymond Davis is – around every corner – I still had people, to the end of my time in Pakistan telling me that there thousands of Raymond Davises, you know, just all over Pakistan.

[00:19:23] But worse was the impact on those people who had committed to us, those people who

believed, and had said at the dinner parties or – not the dinner parties, but you know, at the – at whatever meeting to the Jamaat Islami or others, and said, no the Americans mean it this time. After 2008, there’s a commitment. We can build the – get away from the trust deficit. This hurt those people who had committed most to us in the sense that, hey, what is going on here? Here is this guy who was arrested with illegal weapons, what was he doing? So this hurt the trust very badly.

We had just recovered from that when, of course, we had the Osama bin Laden raid on the

2nd of May. I’m convinced, as I think most people who looked at the evidence are convinced, that top leadership, you know, the military and the intelligence but also civilians did not know that

Osama bin Laden was in – was in Abbottabad. When Marc Grossman and I visited Pasha and Kayani on May 2nd, all of us were exhausted from staying up the whole night so it was kind of a punch drunk meeting, but the first thing they said was congratulations because they realized that someone who they were against, someone who they wanted to see gone was gone.

It was only in the next days after that that that they realized that the political price that the

institution, the military was paying – that that became manifest. When, you know, public American commentators said, you are either complicit or incompetent. It happened to be true, but it also happened to be something that put them very much on the spot. And this response by those Pakistanis, especially in the military and especially in the intelligence world who had committed to working with us, who had committed to the post-2008 effort to break out of the narrative, they were the ones who suffered the most as the result of the bin Laden raid.

[00:21:24] We knew that there would be fallout from the bin Laden raid. And that’s what it is. So that

into the summer of 2011 we – for example, General Kayani decided he would ask us to take away the 150 training – trainers, the special ops forces we had in the FATA who were training the Pakistani military in counterinsurgency operations.

We – I personally went to General Kayani and said: Are you aware that under American law

when you ask these people to leave – and I know you’re doing this because you want to show that you’re not in the Americans’ pocket, that the Americans have done a terrible thing to you or however you want to describe this – we have to take with us the material – the actual assistance, the night vision goggles, the computers, everything else – we have to take that out too. If you get rid of the boys, you get rid of the toys, right?

And Kayani looked me in the eye and said, I know. I said, General Kayani, are you aware

that that could mean that in the fight in the FATA – where you’ve lost more soldiers in the past two years than the entire NATO contingent has lost in Afghanistan in the last decade – that you’re making it more likely that your soldiers are going to die? And he says, yes. I mean, that was just the political tradeoff that he had to make.

[00:22:44] So those people – and I would argue Kayani was one – who had, after 2008, looked

cautiously but tried to go along with this new picture, were the ones who had to load up the C-17s in Peshawar and send all the equipment home along with – you know, with the soldiers. So that was made even deeper, I think, by the comments that took place in September in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, when Admiral Mullen referred to the Haqqani network as a veritable arm of the ISI, which I think further upset, as you might imagine, the Pakistanis.

But the real clincher was, of course, the Salala incident of November in which 24 Pakistani

soldiers were killed in a cross-border incident. And I would maintain, as we have maintained throughout, that that was an accident. It was not something done on purpose. But as a – as a result of the appreciation of these events that had taken place, that had undercut the trust, that those people who were most inclined to want to work with us felt that the trust was eroding.

[00:23:56] We really did have senior members of the corps commanders telling us: You obviously did

this on purpose to teach us a lesson. You don’t come in with an AC-130 gunship – and I don’t know if you’re military people, but an AC-130 gunship fires not bullets but projectiles so that when you’re hit by an AC-130 gunship there’s nothing left of you. That is to say, when they – when Pakistanis said, in November of 2011 – when the Pakistanis said this was something that was – the word escapes me – not – it was over the top, it was too much. There’s a term of art that escapes me. What they were saying was you don’t do something the way you did and say it was an accident.

In my mind, it was an accident. It was a terrible accident. But we had gotten to the point at

the end of 2011 where those attempts to try to build the trust and to build the relationship had basically come to the bottom. Now, throughout my time in 2011, I kept thinking, OK, when do we hit bottom? And I realized this idea of hitting bottom, like a submarine, was the wrong – it was the wrong metaphor – it was the wrong metaphor. The metaphor was like rolling down the side of a ravine where, you know, you hit the cactus and you hit the rocks and then you just keep going. And that’s really what 2011 was.

And for someone like me who prides himself, as a foreign service officer, on having worked

on strategic planning and being able to look three months, six months, 12 months out – well, I got a lesson on looking, you know, to the next day. And that’s the way 2011 was. But it was also that way, of course, for the Pakistanis. So after that event when the NATO supply lines were closed, we hit that point that everyone, I think, acknowledged in early 2012, where there was kind of a timeout.

And it’s an interesting problem because this goes away a little bit from the bilateral

relationship, but within Pakistan there was an effort just to say, take a breath and say, what else – what else can we do? How do we assess this? What do we do? The Pakistanis ran off to China and said: If we kick out the Americans, can you come in? And the Chinese say, are you crazy? Of course not.

[00:26:20] There were other kinds of elements in the – in the Pakistani government to try to think, OK,

what do we do now that we have seen that the Americans don’t seem to be able to do what we want them to do? We, for our part, were saying, you guys, look, we have a fight. You’re kicking out the people who are there to help you in this fight – this existential fight in the FATA. Whether or not you meant to, you had bin Laden in your country for five years, right – et cetera, et cetera. I mean, we had our angry building as well.

So by the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, there was a bit of a timeout. And there

was, in my opinion, the unfortunate decision by the Pakistani government to try to abdicate from its strong position of – well, consistent opinion of being pro-American to throw this to the parliament. And the parliament, in my opinion, didn’t cover itself with glory and took a long time to try to assess how it would look at the bilateral relationship. And this, then again, underscored just how much the rhetoric of that relationship had been tied into Pakistani-American, to the – to the exclusion of everything else.

[00:27:35]

Thanks to the brilliance of various people on both sides – and I think there’s a great New

York Times article that described this actual process and how outside the chain of diplomatic channels they were able to solve the NATO supply line issue. Tom Nides will always be the hero for the work that he did on that and Hafiz Sheikh as well. Thanks to that, we got some breathing room about middle of this – of this – of this year. We had some breathing room in the sense that it was possible that we’d begin to reassess.

But I would argue that the expectations on both sides have become very measured, much

more modest, and rightfully so. And that at this point the efforts to try answer the question that was raised here, can relations ever get back to where they were – I would argue that’s the wrong question. The attempt to try to build the strategic partnership as it was conceived in 2008, 2009, 2010, is not the right way to go about this because whether or not we meant to, we looked within the confines of the two narratives to try to define how we were going to fix things in 2008.

What we were trying to do is to say, here’s the narrative, how are we going to change it?

How are we going to deny it? Sadder but wiser, I would like to argue, that there is not a way to change this narrative. If anything the narrative has become – the narratives on both sides have become strengthened. It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone can get a vote in an American election by being nice to Pakistan. It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone could get a vote in Pakistan by being nice to the Americans. So that this bilateral relationship, this bilateral focus is not the way to go. Then, if that’s the case, what do you do about it?

There are two things that I think are important in looking ahead. One is that there are –

there is the opportunity – with the situation that we’ve gotten into – there’s the opportunity to look at many of the questions that, say, the strategic partnership looked at in a different context. And those contexts are mainly regional contexts. If the year 2011 was a lousy year for me, and it was, it was not such a lousy year for India-Pakistan issues, it was not such a lousy year for various elements of the Pakistani economy.

[00:30:06] That is if, again, we go back to our good friend Anatol Lieven and we focus on those

elements of Pakistan which are the most dynamic elements, they’re not necessarily the elements at the state who we used as our partners after 2008. The most dynamic partners that American can have are the business people, media, some of the people from the universities – it’s uneven – but some of the people in the universities, the women’s groups, the NGOs. That is that say, I’m not trying to talk about this rosy, friendly civil society in the sense that those of us who worked in the revolutions of 1989 looked to civil society. It is infinitely more complex and infinitely more varied and difficult than the Euro-centric notions would have it.

But this is the part of Pakistan where, if you talk to Pakistanis who are furious with the

United States – if you talk to them about what they want from the United States, this is where it all turns into we want this badly, we want to the hope, we want the opportunity and we want that kind of social link that we’ve always felt with – the affinity with the United States. It would be wise for us to think about helping those parts of society to build ties with the United States, depending if we can – that not that we’re not going to work with the state institutions, but to put a lot more of our concentration into society where the face of America is not the face of Raymond Davis, but it’s the

face of your neighbor, an engineer who works on a Punjab ditch, the face of a student, the face of your child who’s come to America, et cetera.

So one would be a shift in our focus on what Pakistan is. I’m not sure that’s going to be

possible in the next two years. And this is my second point. One is who you deal with – and I’ll get back to the international in a moment – who you deal with in Pakistan but also when you deal with them. I think that it is right for us to make sure that we focus, even though I was – I was critical about the question of the dominance of the counterterrorism and the counterinsurgency issues that we have with Afghanistan. We have to deal with that correctly. We have to deal with al-Qaida. We have to deal with international terrorism.

[00:32:32] And until 2014, it is unlikely, in my mind, that we can have any major change. But that

doesn’t mean we can’t do our homework, doesn’t mean that we can’t get, for example, the dynamic, philanthropic sector of Pakistan to work with the very dynamic, philanthropic sector in the United States which, in recent years, has not happened very much. We can reassert the ties between our institutions. I mean, the Faisalabad Agricultural University and the University of California at Riverside probably know between them more about civics groups than any of us. So what’s the government doing in the middle of this?

Building these kinds of ties so that after 2014, when there is a new kind of American focus

on the region – and I’d like to think if all goes as well that we hope it will go in Afghanistan, and that’s big if – that it will be somewhat less militarized and somewhat more focused on maintaining the peace in Pakistan and investing in Pakistan’s long-term future in its society a little bit more than in the – in its – in its politics.

[00:33:44] Similarly, to expect that American assistance or even ties between philanthropies and ties

between universities and all this is going to alter Pakistan is not realistic. And I don’t mean to imply that we can make, as many people would like, Pakistan into Switzerland in a few years by just sending the Carnegie Endowment over there to fix them up. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Nor is it right for us to even think that that’s a worthy goal.

The right way to approach this, in my mind, would be to see that if we can do what we can

to help the efforts to internationalize Pakistan – it is an inward-looking country. Again, that’s part of the attraction that Pakistan has, I think, for this bilateral narrative and bilateral focus, that sadly when you talk to Pakistanis and they talk about seeing the taillights of South Korea and the taillights of Turkey and the taillights of Indonesia, even Bangladesh, receding in the distance ahead of them.

Countries that sent – you know, Koreans sent teams to Pakistan in the 1960s to find out

what Pakistan had done right and how they could learn from them. The Chinese sent teams in the late ’70s. And I met the Chinese ambassador – introduced me to one of these professors – actually, a businessman, who had come in 1979 or something from – Deng Xiaoping had sent these people. And he said, I came here in the ’70s when we wanted to be like Pakistan. And he says, and the place just hasn’t changed.

So that relative deterioration of their position is – you know, I would argue – in part – because of a number of factors, but it has led to an inward-lookingness that cripples Pakistan’s ability to move forward. So we should do all we can, quietly, in a measured way, to help Pakistan to reach out to neighbors, such as India. It’s crucial to see whether there is common ground between the United States and China. And there may be common ground between the United States and China in Pakistan.

[00:35:50] The Chinese Ambassador Liu Jian, when he would talk to me about their priorities, it

sounded pretty close to ours – investment and keeping a lid on Islamic fundamentalism. It sounds like a set of common goals. Can we work with other people? Now, this is – this is not just a question with the Americans. It’s a question of whether Pakistan itself is able to reach out outside the country.

I would argue that one of the greatest things that’s happened in the last few years is that,

unless I read them incorrectly, the leadership of the military has blessed the opening to India. And I think those of you who have much more experience in Pakistan than I know that wasn’t the case years ago. Certainly in India there is still, I think, great skepticism about the – about whether or not the leadership of the Pakistan military supports this opening. I believe it to be the case.

The point is that the traditional means of looking at this country in a bilateral way, the

traditional means of trying to balance counterterrorism and long-term stability need to be broadened, redefined – I’m not quite sure how I would say it. But we have the opportunity in two – in two parts. One would be between now and 2014 as we focus on getting the job done right in Afghanistan and making sure that we break – continue to break the back of al-Qaeda and minimize the threat to the United States.

But then in the long term, after 2014, if you look at a region where, as Bill Keller said in I

think his rather brilliant piece last November, I think, in The New York Times magazine, looked at these two countries 10 years from now. What matters? Afghanistan or a country of 200 million with nuclear weapons? And we are – we will be able, I think, to conceive of our policy – our American policy towards Pakistan, I hope, in a way that is broader, has more of a long-term focus, and isn’t trapped by the narratives that I started off with.

[00:37:58] We don’t change those narratives but the question is can we go around them? Is there a way

we can do something else so that the question of whether or not Pakistanis are all betrayers and people who take our money and whether Americans are those people who come and leave you, whether that question doesn’t get solved, it becomes perhaps less relevant. And that is where I think the analogy for most people who have worked in Europe and have seen the end of the Cold War actually have some currency.

It can be done. It can be done because things that people thought were never possible, like

Poles liking Russians, Poles liking Germans – things like that, they are possible. It’s not a question of hope; it’s a question of experience. We’ve seen it happen. It can happen in Pakistan, but it’s going to take patience. And you know, we’re all very good at patience in the United States. We all

take the long view, right? (Laughter.) You know, it’s going to take patience and that’s going to be hard to sell to any political party in the United States.

[00:38:52] But I am – after giving you this litany of horrors that I lived through in 2011 – I do have that

sense of optimism that it is possible to have a relationship with Pakistan that’s different. Again, I would emphasize not taking the old relationship and saying how do we fix it, but going around to develop something that’s bigger, different, more international, that addresses the questions of energy and water, not in a bilateral dialogue but in a much more multilateral way.

So that’s basically my take on how rough it was and where I think we can do. And what I’d

like to is take the rest of the time and have a discussion about whatever you’d like to discuss. Thank you. (Applause.)

MR. GRARE: Thank you very much, Ambassador. AMB. MUNTER: Should I join you? Well, actually, if I can just stand here that’s fine with

me. [00:39:42] MR. GRARE: Before – well, thank you very much, Ambassador, for very candid and

reasonably optimistic presentation about Pakistan, which is quite unusual these days. I mean, on another point, I mean, we at Carnegie have been sort of outgoing to Pakistan to turn it into the next Switzerland although I knew both countries very well, but that will give some certainty.

Perhaps before we turn to the Q-and-A, may I ask you a question? You mentioned the new

approach of 2008 and mentioned the capacity of the Pakistani state to really absorb U.S. financial aid for them and on the U.S. side to narrow focus on counterterrorism. But the very idea of a strategic partnership meant also some convergence of interest which were always on the line but never really defined. Do you think, looking back, that those convergence of interests did exist at the time?

AMB. MUNTER: Yes, I do, and I think they still exist. I think people who claim that we have come to a parting of ways and why don’t we just admit that Pakistan is bad and we’re good and let’s do this – I just think that’s intellectual laziness, that’s just people who are frustrated, understandably frustrated – and believe me, I know frustration. But if you’re frustrated to walk away, simply, I would make the same statement about the people who were saying that Ambassador Stevens was killed, therefore, let’s walk away from Libya. I just don’t think that’s intellectually defensible.

What you have to do is you have to say, what is it – which elements of Pakistan are the progressive elements, if indeed we believe they exist – and I believe they do – which are the elements of progressive Pakistan that do have common interest with us? If we are to look forward to Pakistan opening up, if we are to look forward to a Pakistan that’s going to be energy self-sufficient, has proper education, open to a world economy, therefore less susceptible, perhaps, to extremism in the country, I think we have to do a better job – and I think many of the people in this room have a subtle understanding of Pakistan and do know this – we have to do a better job of

seeing who are the people we work with. It’s not Pakistan as such. What – given the fraught relations of different institutions in the country, who do we choose to work with in which way, and how can we very modestly work – move ahead on different kinds of problems?

[00:42:08]

But when what we say is we’re going to create a strategic partnership in 12 areas – here’s agriculture, here’s water, here’s this, here’s that – and we’re going to do it bilaterally, and we’re going to use one – what I consider one-size-fits-all institutional links – by its very nature, some of these problems aren’t given to that kind of structure. So we would have to say, where do we have to work with the Indians? Where do we have to work with the kind of strange group of people who are brought into what Marc Grossman is trying to build for the future of the neighbors of Afghanistan? What do we do about Iraq? What do we do about Saudi Arabia? What do we do about the Turks? What about these countries who have interests, some of them good, some not so benign – and to assess them in a little more sophisticated way than I think we have in the past. I hope that kind of answers your question. It’s going to be very difficult, and it’s not going to fit on the back of a bumper sticker, but I think that’s the only way we can gradually address some of these issues.

MR. GRARE: Please introduce yourself before you ask your question.

Q: Casey Schaffer from Brookings. Thank you for being here. I profoundly agree with your basic prescription, which I would take to be developing the relationship with Pakistan for its own sake in those areas where there are people and institutions whose interests align well with ours, with a little bit less dependence on the government.

But I’d like to push back a little bit against your notion that our problem is too much bilateralism – is too much bilateralism and not enough internationalism. When the United States has been involved in Pakistan, it’s usually been driven by something that was happening outside of Pakistan’s borders – the Cold War, Afghanistan. What we are hung up on now is not just counterterrorism, it’s Afghanistan. What you’re suggesting is that we need to develop a relationship with Pakistan that’s not derivative of Afghanistan. Totally agree. But I think we’re going to have trouble dealing with the Afghan factor because there I think our interests actually don’t align all that well. So having said I agree with your main point, what would you suggest as the kind of approach the United States can take to the Afghan problem in order to minimize our dependence on a government of Pakistan that only very selectively agrees with us?

[00:45:00]

AMB. MUNTER: What I am critical of bilateralism – again, and you’ve called me on it, and you’re right – I’m trying to do this for the illustration of the broader than just CT, broader than just developmental idea, that there is a world that is just America and Pakistan and no one else is in it. And it is not fair of me to say that. Of course, smart people have looked outside of those bounds. But there is a tendency to try to say this is how we define it. That’s what I’m arguing against.

I agree with you that I think Afghanistan is a huge, difficult problem, and it is certainly foremost in people’s minds. In 2010, as you recall, General Kayani gave to President Obama the so-called Kayani 3.0 paper which outlined, in his mind, the way ahead in Afghanistan. We then responded at the – at the Wehrkunde conference, I think, in February of 2012 – and I don’t think it’s called Wehrkunde anymore; it’s called something else – but the conference that takes place in Munich, Hillary Clinton gave back our assessment. And I think there is – speaking very

diplomatically, there’s a great deal of space between our assessments. One of them is not just a question of, you know, are the Pakistanis and the Americans seeing eye to eye on Afghanistan, but a lot of it’s really the way we talk about it.

[00:46:28]

The American assessment, the picture that we draw from the Pakistanis when the Pakistanis say what’s your end game, we tend to talk about institutions. We talk about a constitution, we talk about a strong central government in Afghanistan, we talk about education, we talk about judiciary, we talk about an army of 200 to 300,000 people. We describe that. And I won’t put these words in General Kayani’s mouth, but let’s just have kind of a Pakistani security expert kind of saying, yeah, but who’s going to win? Who are you picking? Who’s going to win? The way we look at it, the way that many of our Pakistani colleagues, is not positivistic social science, not institutional; it’s anthropological, it’s geographic, it’s historical; it’s saying, OK, but the Panjshir valley is not going to do this with Paktika. You know, this person hated that person’s grandfather.

You don’t ever have a – for example, the rival visions of the military. A senior general in the Pakistani military once told me, you and the Americans think of your army and how Sergeant Gonzalez from Los Angeles and Corporal Munter from Chicago and Major Schaffer from New Jersey all come into the military, you’re all put into the military and it’s a uniform group and you just mix the pieces. We this part of the world, especially Afghanistan, as needing a regimental area, where you have the Uzbeks and you have the – you have the Tajiks, et cetera, which you are – in your attempt to define the end game with institutions that you’re comfortable with, you’re missing the point, whereas – and so therefore they see that American effort or what we would call Western effort, that kind of transformational vision with Afghanistan – again, I don’t want to say to make it Switzerland, but make it Bethesda, say (Laughter) – you know, that transformation effort. You know, will girls go to school – in 2001, they didn’t go to school – making it into something, spending a huge amount of money with a vision – a progressive vision – I would argue that the Pakistanis have a perhaps realistic but very static notion. These guys have been this way for a thousand years. They beat the Brits, they beat the Russians, they’re going to beat you – this kind of fatalism. And again, I’m making caricatures.

[00:48:45]

But the difficulty I see – I guess I’m agreeing with you – in coming to some sort of closure about Afghanistan is, it’s not that we think of the problem the same way and disagree. I think we think of the problem differently. We haven’t found the common language with which to talk about the end game in Afghanistan. And in as much as that’s the case, how are we going to get down to the tactical questions of reconciliation and the reintegration of forces, et cetera, that we want to have with the Afghans and with the Pakistans in trilateral talks, et cetera.

So I agree with you that it’s a big problem. I don’t know that it’s impossible for us to at least come to a set of principles that we agree with in Pakistan on Afghanistan. I don’t – I think we – I think neither of us want to see a civil war. We should find that basis. The question I think people are struggling with right now is, what’s the right mechanism? In a bilateral relationship that has been fraught with problems in 2011, what’s the right mechanism to try to pull people together, to define those things that we have in common with Afghanistan? I think they’re working on it right now. But – and I’ve, even in the last month, six weeks, I think there have been developments that I’m not privy to, that I sense are moving ahead.

[00:50:07]

But your question is a good one. We don’t have – to my knowledge, we have not achieved the kind of meeting of minds on Afghanistan that we’re going to need for this process up to 2014, and then beyond 2014, to address. So I – it’s an open question, and I agree with you. That’s going to be a tough – if there’s a tough one, that’s it.

MR. GRABE: Polli Nayak. (sp)

Q: Thank you. I’m Polly Nayak; I’m an independent consultant. And I have a couple of questions that pick up on other points that I believe you made. If I understood you correctly, you’re really suggesting that we start – we reset our relations with Pakistan based on people who share our values, and I’m sympathetic to the idea. But I wanted first to make a comment, which is that many of those people who, in some sense, identify with our values or goals, or at least are simpatico with the United States, feel besieged at this point. And in fact, our contacts – and I don’t know mean just official contacts – even unofficial U.S. contacts with them, has put them at hazard in some ways. So that’s my first observation.

My second observation is that when you were talking about Afghanistan and about the notion of gradual social progress with the assistance of the international community, we are still, when we’re talking about sending little girls to school, talking about a set of values that are not local.

So coming back to Pakistan with those two thoughts in mind, how, as a practical matter, as a country, allowing for the fact that there is – as Tacey (sp) also reiterated – a large role for nongovernment relations, how do we leap the moat, the current moat of not just anti-Americanism, but a kind of visceral opposition to the international community as well as the United States, something that our friends at the World Bank, et cetera, are very aware of when they work in Pakistan? Where do we start at an official level, once we get past the university to university, et cetera? How do we reset the official relationship, and what do we do about our – the U.S. concern concerning nuclear weapons, their security and Pakistan’s path?

[00:52:43]

AMB. MUNTER: OK, so that’s a lot of questions here. OK.

Q: It’s – it’s really –

AMB. MUNTER: I’ll start with what I understood to be your main question. It’s very important, I think, to talk about Pakistani society, and not to talk about it as NGOs. That is to say – and I’m not accusing you of that – but I’m saying that if we look at the people who – let’s call them like-minded people, if we’re very precise about that, those people who really are in the Western-oriented, often Western-funded NGOs, it’s a very small group of people. And they’re concentrated in a very small group, area.

When I speak of reaching out to society – and admittedly, this doesn’t get to your question of exactly how we deal with the government; I’ll try to get back to that – we have to accept that a progressive vision of Pakistan is not a progressive vision of – a progressive vision in the remade European-style Pakistan. It’s that, in a general sense, a very – I would argue a very broad group of people in Pakistan, to varying degrees, is tolerant, is open, certainly religious but I don’t think dogmatically religious. There are elements of society, and I’m talking digging deeper than just the

rarified atmosphere of the Western NGOs, and in that – we have not reached out to those people as much as we should. Now, it’s very hard because it’s very dangerous, and a lot of people who ought to be doing this – not diplomats, but university professors and businessmen – having those people on the street to do that is where the relationship will build. And so it’s predicated on the idea that we come out these years of the terrorist threat successfully.

[00:54:36]

So yes, we have to keep up the fight against terrorism, and against – and to come to an equitable some sort of solution in Afghanistan, so that the representatives of the United States and of the Western countries are going much more deeply into society.

So when we talk about building a progressive Pakistan, this is a long slog. And it’s not just done by NGOs, and it’s not just done by diplomats. So I – the people who feel besieged, that level of – you know – people who work for Save The Children and stuff like that – we need to work with them, but I think we want to look at the people who are our friends there, who are effecting change in that country as a much broader area. What we in our embassy tried to do was, for – just for example – in our public diplomacy, you know, it’s not enough to send out a press release in English. You know? We – you know, there are 50 million people in that country who speak Sindhi, many of them are not very politicized. Many of them, when you talk to them, you’ll find, we don’t buy that Urdu stuff. You know, the – there’s great differences in the country, and we have done – we have done nowhere near the amount of outreach to find the sympathy and the areas of common ground that we could. So I would argue that we have to reconceive of our allies and the people who are progressive; we have to see them a little bit differently.

[00:56:06]

Those universal values – those universal values are going to be – we’re going to have some tough decisions and some tough real world tradeoffs about those universal values. Let’s take, for example, education in Pakistan. If we are going to have, as we would like to see, curriculum reform in Pakistan that doesn’t portray India negatively, that’s going to be a long-term process. It’s not going to be something that we can deal with quickly, and we’re going to have to take incremental progress to try to fix that. It’s what’s happened in Northern Ireland, it’s what’s happened in Kosovo and Serbia. It will have to happen there as well. Those – these are long, hard things. So you’re right that we have to keep as our goal those universal values, and we have to keep as our goal to support the Westernized NGOs who are working in these countries, but we must go far beyond that. I hope I’ve addressed your question.

Now, I’m not sure what your question was about nuclear weapons, if you could –

Q: If I could just clarify, the other end of the spectrum from the people-to-people engagement is what most U.S. policymakers believe to be our ultimate, no way to get rid of this, problem with Pakistan, which is its nuclear posture. So, you know, starting at the humanist end of this is great, but those hard knots haven’t gone away. And the question really is, what are – what does the dotted line look like, from re-engagement on the soft side to dealing with hard issues?

AMB. MUNTER: Yeah. Throughout the very difficult year of 2011, and throughout the – the entire time I was there and my predecessors were there, and I would imagine, into the time that Ambassador Olson will be there – we can illustrate what people would write in the op-ed pieces as the collapse – you know, you choose your verb – you know, the collapse of relations, the disasters,

the crashing, the crash and burn. There are many elements of the relationship, government to government, institution to institution, that remained quite strong; that is to say, throughout these last couple of years, we have had very, very close ties to the ISI. We’ve always had close ties to the ISI. We haven’t done the things that we – we haven’t achieved the things that we would like to. We’ve had very close ties – and here I am, you know, heartbroken about the trainers leaving the FATA. We have a very close air force to air force, navy to navy link with the Pakistanis; that is, let my – don’t let my broad categories obscure the fact that there are many things that we deal with the Pakistanis very well. One of them is in nuclear safety; that is, we can’t – we are always engaged with the Pakistanis on this issue. And while there’s always room for concern for those people who are nuclear experts –you know, there are lots of talk about it, and some fascinating work being done by, I think, groups out at Stanford and other places – I would argue that we have worked responsibly behind the scenes, behind the headlines, to try to make sure, do our best, that there won’t be irresponsible protection of nuclear weapons, and that the chances for an accident or an ill thought-out attack are minimized.

So I guess I would – I would disagree that we aren’t doing that. What I’m saying is, from that basis, the basis of our mil-mil contacts, our ISI contacts, our military contacts and General Kidwai and everyone else – that the broader context of the relationship definitely needs to expand both regionally and socially. That’s in addition.

[01:00:01]

MR. GRARE: The gentleman at the end of the room. Yes.

Q: Thank you. This is Lalit Jha from Press Trust of India. I’d like to follow up on your remarks that the Pakistani military has – leadership has now blessed opening of its relations with India. Can you give us more insight into it? What are the reasons why they are doing so? Is it just a time gap arrangement, just to buy some time to strengthen themselves? Or they’re really sincere, honest in improving their ties with India?

Thank you.

[01:00:33]

AMB. MUNTER: Now, I can’t judge their motives. I can’t judge whether they’re sincere. But they have told me and they have said in public – and I will mention General Kayani, I’ll mention General Pasha – they had said in public that it is important to do this specifically focusing on those items of confidence-building measures. You remember hearing what General Kayani was saying in public after the Siachen tragedy on the glacier, what both of them have said to the business community – I can think of an example in Lahore – where they’re saying it is in our country’s interest to open up to India.

Now, your guess is as good as mine. I mean, if they are doing this as a tactic that – you’ll have to ask them. But the fact is they are doing it.

MR. GRARE: The gentleman just there.

[01:01:27]

Q: Hi, good morning, Ambassador. (Name inaudible) – I’m a special assistant to Vali Nasr at SAIS. Thanks for the wonderful talk. I’m in agreement with, in most part, with a lot of what you said. But I wanted to shift focus to your time in Pakistan and talk more about how do you see the domestic politics with elections coming up in both Pakistan and the United States, impacting this relationship. You speak about working with strong societies as opposed to weak institutions, which, in large part, gets done in tandem with building institutions, and actors within or working with actors within institutions. I think that’s a positive move. But could you speak of any initiatives or any actors that you think the United States can see itself working with? So that’s a two-part question for you, thank you.

AMB. MUNTER: Right. On the domestic politics – you’re right – I mean, in trying to make, you know, kind of heuristically the argument that we should look out beyond where we looked before, obviously we don’t want to stop working with the people in party politics, because, you know, when people have asked me the question – and this used to happen quite a bit – how do you see Pakistan when you look at the Arab Spring, you know, it was quite obvious that, you know, whatever we think of Pakistani democracy – distorted, inefficient, in some ways unable to cope – it is a democracy. It is – it is in that sense, a system that has ways in which social unrest and social anger can be channeled, whether it’s through the – you know, the absolutely outrageous, but impressive, media, whether it’s through the courts, inefficient as they are, especially at the local level. It’s – so, one of the things that we have to – that we should celebrate in a certain sense, is that there is this imperfect democracy that is worth – definitely worth working with.

Despite Imran Khan’s claims that he’s going to sweep the board, I don’t think that’s going to happen. This is – I’m just giving you my take on what I think will happen in the 2013 elections. I think, however, that he has done more than just have big rallies in sports stadiums, where you see girls in blue jeans standing next to the mullahs, you know, the lion and the lambs. You know, it’s amazing what he can do. You have these items, but he’s also sent people out to the – to say southern Punjab. And one example that I got from some of his people: They went out to some village near Multan, and he sat down on a bench in the village, and people came to – they advertised – they were there – people came to them and all the people did was come in to talk about what’s wrong. You know, the national support of Pakistan, let me tell you what’s wrong with Pakistan. So all the people in the village came, and the representatives of the PTI simply listened. And then after it was done, some pollsters came in and said, gosh, PTI s smart. You know, why did they think they’re smart? Because they listened, or they appeared to be listening.

[01:04:23]

I give that illustration to say I’m a little more impressed with the organization of Imran Khan than other people are. I think he, let’s say, is going to get his 40 seats, not his two seats. I think it’s possible that that could happen.

If that vote, which it would be the repository of the throw the bums out vote, if that, mixed with the strange system that they’ve – of local politics that exists in Pakistan, if it works that way – my prediction would be that instead of two parties dominating – you know, a Sharif party and Bhutto party – with plankton around, right – what you may end up with is something that you might recognize from, say, Germany, or even Israel, where you have a number of parties, none of which is a truly dominant party, many of which have to work with each other. This could lead to the kind of stability that you have in those countries, where you swarm – you form coalitions based on many partners. But as you know from both of those countries, the more you have many partners in the

coalition, the more difficult it becomes to effect reform, especially economic reform, especially things like tax reform, energy reform, the key – the key elements.

[01:05:47]

So my guess – and I’m really guessing – but it’s many months until the election – my guess is that what we’ll see is a stable outcome in 2013, where the prospects for reform are probably less than they even are now. So that’s not – that’s not a pretty picture. I mean, it means that you have more people in the tent potentially, so the people feel their voices are being heard – I mean, this is argued – people have had the argument of, are there are such things as constituents in Pakistani politics and we can go into that one, but people, they’re being represented. But does this mean that we can look forward, after 2013, to a government that can tackle the big issues? I’m not terribly optimistic. And again, that would be why America, if America and other like-minded countries – just let’s call them the OECD countries, the Japanese, the Australians, and the Europeans, et cetera – if they want to see change, it’s the opposite of what the Dalai Lama tells you, right? Change comes from without, right?

So that you – the most potentially positive thing, I think, that could happen that would change the structure of things in Pakistan, in a good way, would be opening up to India – you know, opening up to Indian capital, having opportunities for Pakistani labor with South Asian investments from the United States and elsewhere; that is, I don’t see the domestic politics – and I could be way wrong – having a major change that wouldn’t make the structure able – the structures able to take on the financial and the big kind of issues that they’re talking about. So that’s, I think, my first answer to you.

[01:07:34]

On the second question about what initiatives can we take, you don’t want a – if you’re making an argument for society’s society ties, it may be disingenuous to say “the government” should do this, right? But as a partner, I would hope, and what I’d encourage, you know, with what we try to in the embassy and what I would hope that we continue to do here, is that we work with various economic groups, foundations. And especially one thing we haven’t done is – enough of is working with the Pakistani media, both as purveyors of information, but as businesses as well, to try to build ties that basically – you know, we had a rule in the embassy that, you know, if you’re going to come up with a new people-to-people idea, make sure that the people are not from Islamabad, not over 40, and not male, right? The whole idea is to reach – we have a tendency when we do these initiatives to reach out to the same old people. Every country does that. You know, here’s a guy, I’m a retired diplomat. I’m going fall into the same trap as everyone else: When I was back in Islamabad, I used to have dinner with X. So I want to invite X to Dubai and we can have dinner together and have great thoughts, right? Let’s see if we can do things where we’re able to tap into different groups.

One thing I loved at Harvard is this Harvard young entrepreneur group, you know, young people making huge scads of money who I hadn’t heard of before I met them, and whose names were not famous last names. The more we can work with new groups, the more that we are going to find that the sense of stasis can be challenged. I mean, the scary thing that everyone has looked at, when you’re looking at the Pakistanis, you know, those very things – tribal, ethnic, local, family issues – those very things that sometimes prevent progress, are the very things that keep Pakistan stable.

And so one has to be aware that, you know, you don’t really want the whole place to go up in smoke. And so it’s a very – it’s a very tough job to try to identify those people who can be the locomotives of social change at a local level – Karachi, Multan, not necessarily up in the north. We’re not going to turn everything upside down. So I think that the embassy would be wise, when we say, what are the – what are the tasks of an embassy or the State Department – they would be wise to identify different groups who are interested, whether they’re business institutions, university institutions, et cetera, to go beneath the surface of what we traditionally thought.

[01:10:37] MR. GRARE: Sir. Q: Thank you. Jonathan Broder from Congressional Quarterly. You mentioned a – the

fact that the United States and Pakistan look at Afghanistan in different ways. The United States, when it talks about the endgame, talks about institutions. And the Pakistanis want to know – (inaudible) – sort of real pragmatic bottom line: Who are you putting your money on? Who’s going to win? Given the fact that we don’t answer that question, that we come back with our response about institutions, why should the Pakistanis in 2014 not feel that their narrative of we just – you know, we come in and then we throw them away – why shouldn’t that narrative be strengthened? That’s question number one.

Number two, the Kerry-Lugar bill – what is your sense of the appetite for continued aid on

Capitol Hill, given these disparate narratives? And as we saw last week, you know, there are – there is a lot of legislation – I mean, there’s some legislation out there that wants to cut off aid altogether. I mean, there’s a – there’s sort of an ugly mood up there. So your – just your sense of the prospects of convincing lawmakers what you’re trying to convince us of right now.

MR. MUNTER: Right. Let me start with your second question first, if I could. I’ve had the

privilege of speaking with the leadership of both chambers and both parties. And what I’ve been impressed by is that they understand the imperfection of what we’ve done. They understand that, you know, if I put it in terms of failure – and that’s pretty tough language; I don’t, you know, mean utter failure – many of our programs have had real impact. But the failure of what we wanted to do in the heady, idealistic days post-2008 is what I meant.

[01:12:58] I think that the leadership on the Hill understands that we aren’t giving assistance to make

Pakistan love us. I mean, there are some who say that – some commentators who say that. But the point is these are elements which contribute to a stability in the long term in Pakistan that we’re for. They understand, I believe, that we have come to understand – we in the – in the administration – I guess I’m still in the administration for the next three days – (laughter) – we the administration believe that incrementally we have made a difference and that for us to, in a fit of pique, pull money away from these programs is not a question of rewarding or punishing Pakistan. It’s a question of achieving American goals: the stability of a country, the ability of this country to generate enough power for its people, the ability of this country to eradicate disease, et cetera.

[01:13:58]

So I would predict in the long run – regardless of Pakistan, I would predict that, given our financial situation, we should be realistic about expectations of what American assistance is going to be. I would predict, you know, a glide path down around the world. But I think that the leadership of both parties are responsible enough to know that as that glide path down works, that the way that you want to deal with Pakistan is to look hard at what America wants to achieve, what America’s goals are long-term, and to – in its oversight capacity to guide USAID and the other institutions and to focus on those things which keep Pakistan on the straight and narrow and keep Pakistan developing in the right way.

And I’m actually impressed that the leadership does – says this and means it. So on that, I’m

not saying I’m confident. I mean, it’s up to Congress to decide what it thinks. But I’ve been impressed – what I – what I’ve heard about congressional leadership and responsibility that congressional leadership has shown on that.

On your question about the narrative, I think it’s a good one, because if the goal here is to

play for the domestic crowd, it will be very easy – given our need to get out of Afghanistan, given the consensus in the United States of both parties that they want us to be out, it’ll be easy for leaders of any sort in Afghanistan to perpetuate the myth – to perpetuate the narrative that the Americans use us and leave us. And I think we have to be prepared that some of that is going to happen no matter what.

The question more that I was trying to get at was, rather than using the myth or the narrative

itself as kind of the intellectual focus of what we do – how do we counteract that narrative – to try our best to put the narrative aside and to work on these issues in a different way. So not so much that we win the argument – no, no, no, we’re not leaving you – I mean, sure, we’ll make that point. And in fact we’re not leaving; we’re having – we have the agreement with the Afghans. There will be an enormous amount of aid that will still go to Afghanistan, et cetera. And there will be, I believe, still a commitment to Pakistan. So we can argue back, we’re not leaving or changing the face of our commitment, et cetera, et cetera.

[01:16:27] But more important than that is not getting caught in the narrative as the defining

intellectual construct of our relationship, in my mind. That may seem like I’m trying to dodge your question, and in a way I am. (Laughter.) I would like to see – I would like to see us dodge that question. I would like us to see – when I stand in front of the NDU, you know in Islamabad, and they say, well, what about, you know, the fact that the Americans always do this, I’d like to say, I don’t want to talk about that anymore. I – we can; I mean, we can fight about the details of what you did in 1990 or the details of what we did in 1971 and the details of what happened in 2014. But what I’d like more to talk about is concrete instances in which we’ve redefined the way we work together, talk about those other things and let this die, I hope, a quiet death.

That may not be possible. It may be that the narrative is so strong – and believe me,

Pakistan is not the only country in the world that relies on narratives. I came, you know, from the Balkans a few years ago. You want narratives, you know those guys… (Laughter.) But – so it’s not that this is easy. But I think that the effort should be to say – instead of saying, we’re answering this and we’re committed, which we tried to do in 2008 with all good faith – that we move on to trying

to define the issues in a different way. I’m not sure it’s going to be possible, but I think it’s worth trying.

[01:17:47] MR. GRARE: Madame, please. Q: Hi. Thank you very much for that. My name is Christina Lamb, and I’m the U.S. editor

of the Sunday Times of London. But I’ve also been going back and forth to Pakistan for 25 years, since 1987, I’ve lived there. I have to say, I found what you said about reaching out to nongovernment actors profoundly depressing, because some of us have been arguing that for years. When Ambassador Holbrooke first took over I remember asking him at a press conference about what he was going to do to reach out to the media. Instead, I watched ISI paying more and more people in the media to put their message over. I’m part of something called the Institute of War and Peace Reporting, which trains media in countries. And our trainers in Pakistan get killed when they try and help. We’ve had three people now killed.

I just feel that the space for doing what you want to do seems to have just narrowed and

narrowed. I went to Pakistan three times last year. I talked to people, and everybody blames America for everything now, even people that you would think would be very Westernized and moderate – Web designers, people like that. I had people blaming America to me even for the lack of literacy in Pakistan. And I find it quite hard to see how you can convince people – given that that is now such a strong feeling, and with the drone attacks still going on regularly in FATA, how you can possibly convince people to work with you.

And then just another point on Afghanistan – I mean, you talked about Pakistan’s more

pragmatic view. But isn’t it actually – isn’t the real problem ideology, that there are people in ISI who believe what the Taliban stand for or what al-Qaeda stand for? I don’t think we should forget the fact that General Kayani was head of ISI when the Taliban was regrouping and openly fundraising and training in Pakistan. You know, how can you persuade them to actually stop the havens in Pakistan?

[01:20:12] MR. MUNTER: Yeah, I disagree profoundly with what you said. My contact with

Pakistanis – and yours is much longer than mine, but I would like to coax you to agree with this, that there is a surface feeling of enormous frustration. I would argue that it sometimes comes up – often kind of comes out as, you know, what we call the “man in the moon” problem. If you can put a man on the moon, you can do anything; nothing happens that the viceroy doesn’t want, et cetera – you know, that notion of American omnipotence.

I think that the frustration is mainly not with us; the frustration is within own governance.

And I think when you have more than one sentence but three, four, five sentences with people, it does come out that they may blame us for perceived support of people who are – who governed them badly. But the anger is with the way they are governed. Fundamentally, when you look at polling data and what I would say is unscientific, non-Islamabad country club data – that is, talking with other kinds of people – there is an – there is an enormous frustration with the United States

but an enormous desire for the United States to give its approval to Pakistan – almost unhealthy desire for Pakistan to give – for America to bless Pakistan.

[01:21:36] And while I think it – sometimes these two things are over the top, nonetheless I see a little

ray of light that I don’t perhaps think you see. And you’ve been at it longer than I have, so I’m willing to be corrected. Let’s meet in 25 years, and you may be right. But that there is – if the – if the fundamental problems of daily life in Pakistan – the frustration, the humiliation, the feeling of not being – having any way to deal with problems – can somehow be addressed through institutions – and it’s not likely, in my mind, that that’s going to be in a traditional way – I think that the code – the American – the anti-Americanism will be part of that. There – in other words, I don’t think it’s a well-thought-out, fundamental anti-Americanism. It’s an enormous disappointment and lack of self-confidence in the country that we – and we – and we blow it enough that we contribute to this – we are – we find ourselves being the yardstick for that.

So I think that if we are able to address some of these questions – this is what Richard

Holbrooke wanted to do, you know, God bless him, but that I think we can do over time – that the reservoir of people who care deeply what the Americans think about their country is great. You go to Syria – I think we probably have 20 percent favorable rating and about 10 percent people who care about us. In Pakistan it’s, like, 10 percent people who approve of us and 95 percent who care deeply what we think.

So that’s at least the model that, I believe, gives us the chance to have a positive effect on a

country – not that we’re looking for people to love us. And I’ve, you know, given the speech about, you know, the Tina Turner doctrine of, you know, what’s love got to do with it. It’s not about love. (Laughter.) It’s much more the question of – this country has, I believe, more than any country I served in in 30 years in the Foreign Service, latent pro-Americanism. I’ve never been in a country where I have felt it that strongly. And it’s not a question of ideology. It’s a question of just the way people will always come up to you and say, you know, I’m going to be very blunt; I’m not a diplomat; I’m very blunt with you that’s what they say in Iowa, and that’s what they say in Faisalabad. You know, there are just – there are just habits, you know – charity, things like that.

[01:23:56] So I still maintain, after getting kicked around for two years as ambassador, that there is

actually a hugely – a huge affinity between cultures. And that’s why I think working at a more cultural, social level, showing the side of the United States that most people there desperately want to see – which we have not done recently because they want to see students. They want to see – and those people, because it’s dangerous, aren’t there. And your point is true. The longer – the more the space closes, the harder it is for us to show what Pakistanis want. But I guess I’m arguing that it’s still there. People still want it.

[01:24:37] On your point about the ISI, you know – Q: Actually I said, how can we do that when the drone attacks –?

MR. MUNTER: When drone attacks are continuing? Well, I’ll do ISI and then I’ll do drone

attacks. I think that we tend to see – I think we tend to overestimate both the impact and the kind of

cosmic role of the ISI. It’s convenient, and there’s enough evidence that they sometimes misbehave that it’s not wrong. But I think it’s also important to ponder on why America has always seemed to have a close – a close relationship between our militaries. And it’s because that – for better or worse, that is the only institution in the country – only major institution in the country where it doesn’t matter what your – what your parent’s name is; that you can be the son of a jawan and be the chief of army staff. When you talk with officers in the military, many of whom are terribly frustrated with us, many of them talk in ways that we would find recognizable here, because that is an institution – it’s a meritocracy, et cetera.

So again, even the ISI, I would say, all is not lost. I think there are people in that institution

who are not the evil connivers that they are sometimes painted to be. They do, I think, very dumb things, like they plant articles in the newspaper. And you can argue that they’ve planted articles in the newspaper that are critical of the drones that have led them into the cul-de-sac of trying to play to the public in a way that now traps them and limits the way they – they’ve come out of this. But I think, just as they demonize us, I would urge us not to demonize them. You know, it would be best if we would – I would love to see a – if we can do this, I would love to see one of the people in this room get a great source and write kind of inside the ISI. I think it’s – I think inside the ISI is not what a lot of people fear and suspect. But maybe I’m being too nice to them.

[01:26:49] On drone attacks, right, I’m not convinced – and here is – you know, this is Title 50; this is

an issue that I can’t talk a whole lot about because it’s the way that it works in the U.S. government. The – when you travel around the country in Pakistan and you talk to people who are not in the elites, I never, ever, ever, ever, ever got a question about drones. I got hammered every time I went to the NDU. I got hammered whenever I went to the gun club, you know, this kind of thing. I interpret that as being that the drone issue is a question of the repository of the sense of humiliation and the sense of powerlessness that we have sometimes – often – visited upon – on Pakistan, but that it is – it is not a deep issue in Pakistan – it’s an important one but not a deep one – and that the issues of how do we get ahold of our future, how do we deal with governance, are the things that most people in that country are dealing with. That said, among the elites it’s a very important issue. Elites matter.

I would like to see us be able to talk about drones. I would like us to be able to have an

honest back-and-forth about what our policy is and why we think it’s in everyone’s interest that we use all the weapons that we have – all of Pakistani weapons, all the American weapons, all of the Afghan weapons – against the common enemy that we have. And I think that would be – I think we have a good story to tell. But at this point we’re not able to do that.

[01:28:40] MR. GRARE: Thank you very much, Ambassador. I mean, unfortunately this session has

to come to a close, and we won’t take any more questions. Let me say that it was a very, very

interesting presentation. We would have come up with lot more questions – regarding, for example, the handing over of the political system writ large, not just political parties; on the access to the civil society and so on; a number of other questions as well. Nevertheless, we don’t have time. But it just – a word for me to say that you’re most welcome any time to come back here and continue the conversation with us.

Thank you very much, Ambassador. And good luck. (Applause.) MR. MUNTER: Thank you. (Applause.) [01:29:25] (END)