The Foreign Service Journal, March 2015

74 MARCH 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Reading Pakistan Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War C. Christine Fair, Oxford University Press, 2014, $34.95/hardcover, $14.39/ Kindle, 368 pages. Reviewed by Kapil Gupta Sometime in 2005 a Pentagon briefer made a reference to Pakistan, and was promptly cut off—“What Pakistan are you referring to? There is no Pakistan! There is the army, the ISI (Directorate for Inter- Services Intelligence), the politicians, the industrialists, the tribal areas…” The moment was hallmark Donald Rumsfeld, and the staffer had no reply. With the publication of C. Christine Fair’s Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War there is no longer an excuse for any U.S. national security policy professional to be unprepared for such a question. In writing this book, Fair has person- ally upped the ante for scholarship on Pakistan. Like a mathematically gifted card-counter banned from the casino, she is now persona non grata in Paki- stan. Someone there even felt compelled to produce at least two YouTube video rebuttals to this book, complete with ad hominem attacks. Although she is a controversial figure for Pakistan’s military-intelligence com- munity, Fair’s work is firmly grounded in political science, empirical analysis and a detailed reading of the Pakistan Army’s defense literature. Dissecting Pakistan’s praetorianism is not new territory, but in this book Fair exposes the full extent to which Paki- stan’s political character is defined by its military’s strategic culture. She details how Pakistan’s “unreasonable revision- ism” regarding its history and role in the BOOKS world combines dangerously with the characteris- tics of a “greedy state” that is implacably driven to initi- ate hostilities against its per- ceived existen- tial rival, India. Ironically, as Fair notes, pursuit of this rivalry is ultimately self-defeating: “Paki- stan has doggedly attempted to revise the geographical status quo and roll back India’s ascendancy, and the very instru- ments it has used to attain these policies have undermined Pakistan’s standing within the international community and even its own long-term viability.” The army’s maladjustment to battle- field defeats (to India) and the territo- rial loss of East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) have contributed signifi- cantly to narratives of existential external threats. According to its own self-serving criteria, which differ from objective measures of national defense, Pakistan’s mission across the various conflicts it has precipitated is simply to avoid defeat. For Islamabad, winning is simply preserv- ing the ability to inflict security costs on India; loss is any constraint on offensive, low-intensity capabilities. Thus, win or lose, the Pakistan military has been able to rationalize the core tenets of its strategic culture that, unfortunately, play out in a manner that is regionally destabilizing. Fair explains the ways in which Pakistan is existentially hard-wired to act in a regionally destabi- lizing manner, both against India and in pursuit of “strategic depth” in Afghani- stan. If you have worked on the Pakistan portfolio in the past 20 years, Fighting to the End will either confirm your wisdom of folding early, or carry the humiliation of losing to a low-card pair. The history Fair recounts is unforgiving on the facts of how Pakistan’s strategic culture has led to outcomes antithetical to U.S. national security goals. There is no shortage of evidence suggesting that Pakistani offi- cials have acted as sponsors of terrorism, proliferators of nuclear weapons and providers of a safe haven for Osama Bin Laden. According to Fair, it is unlikely that Washington will call Islamabad’s bluff: “Doing so would require American diplo- mats who are as thoroughly knowledge- able as their Pakistani counterparts. Even if more American negotiators were able to counter the narrative presented by their Pakistani counterparts and prevent them from employing their preferred strategy of playing on American desire to make restitutions for past failures, it is not obvious that they would do so. American policymaking—toward Pakistan gener- ally and the army in particular—is always aimed at quickly completing transactions to meet short-term needs.” Cumulatively, since the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan’s winnings from the U.S. tax- payer are at least $27 billion and count- ing. (For detailed documentation of U.S. The history Fair recounts is unforgiving on the facts of how Pakistan’s strategic culture has led to outcomes antithetical to U.S. national security goals.