It was also something that gave us another kind of access, which was a physical access of routes through Pakistan into Afghanistan, which is still very important today. So the opposing argument is basically: Why are you doing this? Don’t you still need access into those routes into Afghanistan if you are actually increasing the number of troops like you said? If you don’t do it through Pakistan, you have to do it through Central Asia, which is a lot more expensive and requires balancing the relationship and dynamic with Russia, which opens up this whole other weird can of worms. The Obama administration didn’t want to deal with Russia and only did it for a certain amount of time. So I guess you could argue that, because of the Trump administration’s relationship with Russia, they see this as not really an issue, because they can get the material there. This is the No. 1 issue: How are you going to support the war in Afghanistan now? [...]
But I don’t actually agree with the whole thing and don’t think that in the long-term it is a good strategy because of our interest in Afghanistan and the region as a whole. We need to figure out a way to have this relationship besides threatening to cut off aid and cutting it off until they check some box somewhere. Trump is actually being pretty consistent with the Bush administration policy and the Obama administration policy. Nobody found a good way to work with Pakistan, and that is underlying all of this. We have lots of relationships with other countries where we don’t agree on everything, and we figure out a way to meet somewhere—not in the middle, but somewhere, and we hash it out. [...]
You're right, though. Those are the answers. I think that a lot of folks, including Pakistanis often, would go to the United States to do this, because we gave the most money, or we had the most at stake. But guess what? It's not that anymore. The Chinese have a lot at stake now. The Russians actually have a lot at stake. Saudi and Iran have a lot at stake too, especially because of what's happening in the Middle East and how they're using South Asia as their strategic bet to engage each other, and Pakistan is smack dab in the middle of that. I actually think that there are more stakeholders now than there were when 9/11 happened, and we should see that as an opportunity. I don't think the Trump administration is at all going to be interested in doing any of that. That's not really a priority for them. It's the opposite. They want to pull out.
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