Episode 35. Pakistan-US Relations: Striking a Balance

Episode Transcript:

Amb. McCarthy: [00:00:13] Our podcast brings together senior US diplomats and senior US military leaders in conversations about their partnerships and tackling some of our toughest national security challenges. I am Ambassador Deborah McCarthy, the producer and host of the series Today on the General and the Ambassador. We will talk about the US relationship with Pakistan, a country which shares borders with Afghanistan, China, India and Iran. Besides its strategic location, Pakistan is a country which has nuclear weapons where Osama bin Laden was found and killed by US forces and where terrorist groups which threaten the United States take safe haven or reside. Our guests are General Lloyd Austin and Ambassador Richard Olson. General Austin was the commander of US Central Command from 2013 to 2016. During a 41 year career in our military, he served in many places, including Germany, Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan. Among his senior positions, he was the vice chief of staff of the Army and commanding general of United States forces Iraq. He is currently president of the Austin Strategy Group. Ambassador Richard Olson was ambassador to Pakistan from 2012 to 2015. Subsequently, he was the US Special Representative for both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Among his senior positions, he was the US Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and the deputy Ambassador at the US mission to NATO. He is currently a senior advisor at the US Institute of Peace and Senior Associate at the Center for International and Strategic Studies. Gentlemen, thank you for joining the podcast series To help orient our listeners, I want to start with some basics. Why is Pakistan important to the United States? How does its strategic location factor into our regional security interests?

Gen. Austin: [00:02:05] Pakistan is and will remain strategically important to the United States of America. It is a nuclear armed state, and it has al Qaeda in its backyard. It also is important to us because of our efforts to protect our vital interests here, and that is the protection of the homeland against a very real and persistent threat of terrorism.

Amb. Olson: [00:02:27] I would say the fundamental point that many people don't think about is everyone knows that Pakistan borders Afghanistan, but it also constitutes Afghanistan's access to the sea or its blockage to the sea. And so what that means is for the US, if you're going to fight a war in Afghanistan, as we have been doing for the past 18 years, you have to do it pretty much through Pakistan. For the United States, being able to fight effectively in Afghanistan has meant that for all the complications of the relationship with Pakistan and we'll get into those complications, we ultimately do have to have some kind of relationship, I think, with Pakistan to make it work.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:03:08] And, Rick, you arrived in Pakistan about a year and a half after the US raid to kill bin Laden. This raid caused a major fallout between both countries. Can you talk a little bit about this fallout and the things that you had to work on your first steps when you got there as ambassador to rebuild the relationship? Because we needed it for strategic reasons?

Amb. Olson: [00:03:30] A couple of things on the background. In 2011, it was actually a series of events. The first was the Raymond Davis incident in which a contractor working for the US government killed three people on the streets of Lahore. That was in January of 2011. Then there was the Abbottabad raid, as you say, in May of 2011, which of course looks very different from a Pakistani perspective, from how it looks to the US. The culminating incident was in November of 2011, when the US accidentally, in an incident on the Afghan border, killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in an outpost, a Pakistani outpost at Salala. In response to that, and really in response to those cumulative events, the Pakistanis closed the so-called ground lines of communication, the supply lines that run through Pakistan into Afghanistan. They were closed for about the next six months until the Pakistanis perceived that we had issued an apology. We never really apologized. But Hillary Clinton, who was then secretary of state, made some positive noises. So I went out in October of 2012. So the GLOCs were reopened, but I went with a specific mandate, actually, from the president to reset and rebalance the relationship. Pakistan had been very central to US policy during the Holbrooke period. Holbrooke had made much of building a strategic partnership with Pakistan, and President Obama, by the way, had actually spent time in Pakistan as a young man.

Amb. Olson: [00:04:51] So and had had Pakistani friends. And so there was kind of a personal element to this. In fact, his mother had worked in Lahore as a development expert. So there were a variety of motivations. But I mean, mostly this was, as Lloyd rightly pointed out, this is about strategic interests for the United States. We needed to have a relationship with Pakistan where we could do business by the summer of 2015. I think we had gotten rid of the irritants in the relationship that prevented us from talking directly. But all of this is against a backdrop of two overwhelmingly important strategic interests for the United States. One is counterterrorism and a sort of a subset of that Pakistani support for the groups that are fighting against us in Afghanistan. That is to say, support for the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network. And of course, our interest is in getting that to stop. And the other strategic interest is the development of Pakistan's nuclear program. By the summer of 2015, I would say those issues had kind of reasserted themselves, and we have a pretty clear strategic divergence between the two countries, and that has characterized the relationship, I think, since about the summer of 2015 as kind of a, you know, going downhill again.

Amb. Olson: [00:05:58] One thing that I thought was particularly important and this is especially where Lloyd comes in, given the nature of the issues that we were dealing with, although I had obviously a public diplomacy role and a public role and a lot of classic diplomatic encounters, you know, the fundamentals of the relationship were in some ways very shaped by how hard power considerations. And so for me, it was really important that I have a particularly close relationship with my colleagues in the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. And of course, we can't really talk too much about the latter, but I spent a lot of time with a member of my staff. I had a lieutenant general, a three star general assigned at the embassy in Islamabad. We were in each other's offices continuously all day long. And then Lloyd was a great collaborator. And before that, General Mattis, with whom we had bi weekly video conference calls, which is, I think, kind of a best practice, I would recommend to any ambassador that you make sure you know your military counterpart and talk to him regularly and kind of a structured way. And that's how Lloyd and I developed our relationship, which I think was quite important.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:07:03] Lloyd is commander of the US Central Command. I mean, you covered Pakistan, but a huge swath, 26, 27 countries. How did you approach rebuilding this relationship after the fallout?

Gen. Austin: [00:07:15] It is all about relationships. Relationships lead to increasing trust and trust between us as US representatives and also trust between us and the Pakistanis. I came into the job very comfortable with respect to things concerning our relationship with Pakistan, because I knew the ambassador, as you pointed out earlier, we had met when he was the ambassador in UAE and I was a three star commander in Iraq at the time. I was very, very comfortable as I came into the job and knew that one of the most challenging portfolios would be the Pakistani portfolio. I knew Rick, and trust was immediately there and throughout the relationship, not once did we ever have an incident where there was a question of trust or never once was he uncomfortable or was I uncomfortable and allowing us to work an issue that that spanned boundaries? We truly were a team. The relationship with the Pakistanis. I had two chiefs of the army that I dealt with. General Kayani was chief when I came into the job. He left shortly after I took command. And then General Raheel Sharif came in. I had a good relationship with General Kayani. I had a great relationship with General Raheel. We bonded right away. And we could have frank and tough conversations one on one. Again, we worked on this relationship over time. And I like to tell people that you can surge military capabilities, but one thing that you can't surge is trust. And so this is a thing that we had to work on continuously. I talked to the ambassador, as he pointed out, over Vtcs biweekly, but I also talked to the chief of the army in Pakistan on a fairly frequent basis. And I really, really leveraged that three star that the ambassador mentioned earlier that was working in the embassy there in Islamabad. And so I had good situational awareness of not only what the ambassador's concerns were, but also what the chief of the army was doing and what his concerns were. And so I think we were adequately equipped for success coming into the job.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:09:19] And Pakistan shares a long history with Afghanistan as well as the border. Can you explain to our listeners a bit about this convoluted relationship and what role you each play to encourage stronger ties so that we, the US, could accomplish our security objectives?

Amb. Olson: [00:09:36] I had served in Afghanistan immediately before going to Pakistan. There's a very strong narrative that develops when you are in Afghanistan and you tend to pick up from the Afghans. It's often expressed that this is really a war by Pakistan against Afghanistan, and that's what's been going on for the last two decades. It's a very difficult relationship. The Afghans actually don't recognize the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan has agreed to the border. And by the way, so does the United States. The United States regards it as an international boundary. But Afghanistan has never done that because of complicated historical beliefs that. That was an imposed border that they can't really accept. There's some complicated issues on both sides. But as a practical matter, what I took as a, you know, a principle element of my mission was addressing the fact that Pakistan was supporting the Afghan Taliban and allowing them safe haven on their territory. The support is probably not a matter of overt actions, but it certainly happens quite a bit, and particularly with regard to the Haqqani network, which is the most lethal of the Taliban groups. This was really very problematic.

Amb. Olson: [00:10:48] And, you know, just at a personal level, I had been through several Haqqani attacks in Afghanistan at the embassy. So, you know, I had sort of a bit of personal stake in this in addressing this issue with the Pakistanis. And right from my confirmation hearing that was front and center with the Congress. And I found Lloyd to be a real partner in this regard, because believe it or not, despite the sort of difficulty of the relationship and this fundamental problem that we have in the relationship between us and Pakistan, I didn't always find that my Washington colleagues would necessarily be able to deliver as tough a message as was necessary. But Lloyd, because of the fact that he had this great relationship with General Raheel and Lloyd, could bring great credibility to his encounters with General Raheel and be very direct in a way that I found was not always the case with our visitors. And just one more thing at the sort of personal level, One of the things that always struck me is our listeners can't see it, but Lloyd is a very imposing man physically. I'm not a small guy, but.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:11:48] I would stand up if he came into the room.

Amb. Olson: [00:11:50] Yeah, I look up to Lloyd in more ways than one. And the same with General Raheel. He's a pretty big guy. And so we'd get these two big guys together in General Raheel's office, and Pindi and I would just be kind of sitting there and watching the dynamic. But I thought it was very effective. Very effective.

Gen. Austin: [00:12:06] Well, Raheel was you're right. He's a pretty big guy as well. And a national hero. Yeah. He had received Pakistan's highest award for valor in some actions against India earlier. And speaking of India, I think it's helpful to view this relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan through the lens of the rivalry between Pakistan and India. There are many that believe that Pakistan uses Afghanistan as its strategic depth, and by the same token, India does some things in Afghanistan from time to time that kind of keeps Pakistan on its toes. And so you could say that India uses its relationship with Afghanistan as an asymmetric advantage. In doing so. It places a little pressure on Pakistan, on both the Eastern and the Western boundaries. That increases the tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And both countries have a number of forces deployed along the border. And over time, as the ambassador has pointed out, we've seen exchanges of fire. We've seen significant casualties from time to time because of mistakes that have been made. And those are tough issues to always try to work through. The tragedy of this is that both had a common enemy in the Taliban or elements of the Taliban. And rather than working together on that, they spent a lot of time poking at each other along the border. And so Ambassador Olson coming into the job as an ambassador in Pakistan, just coming out of Afghanistan, I mean, he had in-depth knowledge of dynamics of the internal workings of Afghanistan that were very, very helpful to him in engaging the Pakistani leadership as well.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:13:48] I wanted to get back to the issue which is central, which is the number of terrorist groups that work in and around Pakistan, including the Taliban, the Haqqani network. The US has employed drone attacks to go after them. The Pakistani military and intelligence seems to sort of pick and choose amongst them which ones to support, to attack, to ignore what have been the most effective ways, both diplomatic and military, to get Pakistan to work with us to go after these key groups.

Amb. Olson: [00:14:16] As Lloyd pointed out, the Pakistanis have a long history of supporting these groups to wage asymmetric warfare against their enemies, essentially. And that boils down to India. So they have associations with and in some cases, sponsorship of a whole range of different groups. With regard to India, it's Lashkar-e-Taiba and maybe in the past, Jaish-e-Mohammed. And with regard to Afghanistan, it is the Taliban, including the Haqqani network. But what we repeatedly pointed out to them is that the danger is these proxy groups take on a life of their own and they transmogrify in ways that you can't expect. And so while the Pakistanis had no use for al Qaeda, for instance, and were very helpful to us, I mean, one of the things we tend to forget is the decimation of core al Qaeda is largely the result of US-Pakistan cooperation between 2001 and 2011. And a classic example of this is the Afghan Taliban which transmogrified over time and. Resulted in the creation of the Pakistan Taliban, which was directed against the Pakistan state. And it took a long time for the Pakistanis to kind of recognize that this was happening and take effective action. They did eventually, during the time that Lloyd and I were working on this issue. There's always a bit of hesitation and it takes continual messaging to get them to appreciate that all of these groups ultimately are somewhat dangerous and can turn against the Pakistanis.

Gen. Austin: [00:15:41] I absolutely agree with the ambassador. The Pakistani army is going to focus on those things that are in their best interest. And so they're not going to do things typically that jeopardize their influence within Pakistan or the region with writ large. And they're certainly not going to do things that affect their relationship with some of its important neighbors like China. It was our task to convince the leadership, civilian and military, that it was in their best interest to go after these elements. And I think that as the Taliban became more and more bold in their actions, it was easier to convince them that it was in their best interest to get their arms around this threat. That and the combination of other sticks and carrots helped us be a bit more effective over the years.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:16:30] Well, they had their own incidents, as you mentioned, Rick. The Pakistan Taliban were attacking Pakistan, the Pakistanis. And there was this major terrorist attack in December 2014 where the Pakistan Taliban assaulted a school and killed 132 children in a horrible manner. Did this attack on children spur any additional action by Pakistan on not only the Pakistan Taliban, but other groups? Did that spur them to take more action?

Amb. Olson: [00:16:59] As you say, it was absolutely horrendous. And I remember the day it happened. It was actually about mid-morning. I started hearing, you know, reports on the media that there was a hostage taking of an Army school in Peshawar. And right away I could see where this was going to be very, very ugly. I mean, it turned out to be much uglier than I anticipated. But taking schoolchildren hostage and the children of Army personnel who.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:17:21] I gather they lined them up and shot him.

Amb. Olson: [00:17:23] Right away, I thought, this is really ugly and this is very bad. So I called the three star general, Tony Rock, and I said, well, look, are you in touch with GHQ about this? And he said, I've heard something about it, but I haven't, you know. And I said, Well, look, call GHQ and tell them that the US is behind them and we'll support them whatever they need. I knew that in the end, the Pakistan army would not take us up on that because it's a domestic issue. But I thought it was important to sort of signal some support. And in fact, I think it did have a very galvanizing effect. I mean, it was a terrible tragedy, but I think it hardened the resolve of Pakistanis across the board to really go after the TTP and many other groups. I wish it had resulted in a complete break with the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqanis. It did not. You know, unfortunately, the pack mill continues to distinguish between these various groups. That may be a little different now, but that was kind of the way it was.

Gen. Austin: [00:18:14] This was a pretty dark day for the Pakistanis. I think one of our combat multipliers in this case was the instincts of the ambassador. Again, having served in the region. He knew the dynamics here and he understood the gravity right away and reached out in a number of ways to the leadership. The leadership of CentCom also immediately reached out to our counterparts at all levels and expressed our condolences and offered our help. I think the leadership in Pakistan was hearing from the civilian side and the military side in stereo the same things. And they really felt that we were genuine. And it also helped to reinforce the points that the ambassador and I had been making regarding these elements that were in the country and how bad they were for the government and the people of Pakistan going forward. It made some things a heck of a lot easier. But again, to Ambassador's point, we wish they would have gone further with the Afghan Taliban. They did not.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:19:09] Well, I wanted to go back to the issue of Pakistan's relationship with India. Each country has nuclear weapons. They have fought three wars since 1947. They continue to have border skirmishes. And each is in a constant state of military preparedness against the other. The recent Indian decision on Kashmir, a region disputed between the two, is an example of the tensions. Can you talk a little bit more about that vital relationship between Pakistan and India and how it affects US national security interests in the region?

Amb. Olson: [00:19:40] This strikes me as one of the sort of great, underappreciated problems and underreported problems of our time. I mean, you have here two nuclear weapons states that are almost perpetually in a state of low level, low intensity conflict. And sometimes that really gets substantial, you know, as happened in Pulwama earlier this year, that conflict moves beyond low intensity and moves into fairly high intensity because the two countries are staring eyeball to eyeball across a narrow strip of territory. The. Possibility of a rapid escalatory cycle is great. I mean, the place where nuclear war is most likely in the world is probably in the subcontinent. One of the complications, at least from the perspective of being the US ambassador in Pakistan, is that the US at that time was in a way not very well set up for dealing with these cross border issues because bureaucratically both the US military and the State Department had a bureaucratic seam between India and Pakistan. I reported Deathtrap, which had responsibility for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the military division. I mean, Lloyd's area of responsibility ended at the Indo-Pak border.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:20:50] Yeah, the Pacific Command.

Amb. Olson: [00:20:51] What that meant is that we really in some ways had to almost work informal arrangements. And I did with my counterparts in Delhi. And I had very close relationship with both Nancy Powell and then later with Rich Verma. But it was really in a kind of a way it was up to us to work the de-escalation. Ambassador Verma, to his credit, actually invited me down to Delhi and we sort of played some, you know, notional war games, how we would deal with, you know, we did a tabletop exercise in which we would talk about how we would handle a de-escalation of a really serious crisis. And then within a few months, we had to put it really into effect despite the lack of kind of public attention to this issue. This is the one that could really get out of control very fast. And I still believe that.

Gen. Austin: [00:21:33] We had pretty good situational awareness and good lines of communication open. But maintaining a balanced relationship between India and Pakistan was crucial for our efforts with respect to Afghanistan. This was something that we always had to kind of be on our toes in terms of making sure that we understood what was going on. And we're monitoring things along the border there. But really, as a CentCom commander, my ability to get things done was somewhat limited because of that scene, because.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:21:59] It wasn't in your area of responsibility. Well, I'd like to turn now a little bit to a tool that we use across the world. But in this case, we're going to talk about Pakistan, and that is the security assistance we have given to Pakistan and the military sales. We have made to the country. In one study by the Congressional Research Service, it indicates that from 2002 to 2015, Pakistan received approximately $7.6 billion in security assistance and about 13 billion in what are called coalition support funds. In 2018, the US suspended security assistance for non cooperation on counterterrorism. But a just a few weeks ago, after the recent visit of Prime Minister Khan, I understand it was announced that certain funds will be released during your time in Pakistan and covering Pakistan. Gentlemen, did the availability of assistance packages help you get leverage for the United States?

Gen. Austin: [00:22:56] There's no question that the assistance packages were a useful component of our efforts with respect to Pakistan. I think it will be less so going forward because there are other nations that are producing arms that are very willing to fill the void if we threaten to shut off providing military assistance or aid to Pakistan companies in China, for example, that are making some pretty sophisticated weapons, they'll fill that void. But they were very useful to us in the past. Our concern was that we wanted to make sure that Pakistan remained focused on counterinsurgency efforts and counter-terrorist efforts. And of course, the things that they wanted most were the high end items, the F-16s, helicopters and things of that nature. And while some of those weapon systems are very useful in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban, we were more interested in improving techniques and capabilities that were focused on counterterrorism and combating the Taliban and al Qaeda. And so striking that balance with the Pakistanis was always a challenge.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:24:04] So training versus high end equipment.

Gen. Austin: [00:24:06] At the end of the day, it's the training and the commitment that really proved most beneficial to the Pakistanis versus the high end platforms.

Amb. Olson: [00:24:15] When I would think about assistance to Pakistan, I would think of it in terms of three broad buckets. You know, one was the security assistance, which was primarily to use the acronym FMF. And then there was, as you mentioned, the Coalition support funds, which were actually a direct cash reimbursement to the Pakistanis for actions they had taken in support of our war in Afghanistan. And then there was the civilian assistance. You know, broadly speaking, ISAF. And I would say the leverage is sort of different between the three on the security assistance. To be totally candid. The challenge there is that those programs are developed over a very long time range. You know, so for instance, the big packages, the things that really matter to the Pakistanis probably like, say, the F-16s, you know, that's developed over the course of 5 to 10 years, it's very hard to exercise leverage when something has been in gestation that long. You know, you can cut it off if the relations are bad, but there's a lot of work that's gone into it and there's a kind of a mutual feeling. So it kind of. Doesn't really work. It's not something that you can easily turn on or off. Csf, on the other hand, was something that was turned on and off pretty quickly and that the Pakistani government really did count on that. I mean, that was one of the few direct cash transfers from the US government to the that was.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:25:28] To reimburse them for the shipment of equipment through the country to their ports. Yes, our equipment, NATO equipment.

Amb. Olson: [00:25:35] And to some extent some of the military operations that they conducted in in the Federally Administered Tribal areas, the Fata. Now Pakistanis would say that that was the US reimbursing them for the War on Terror. That's not exactly right. You know, for their war on terror. That's not exactly correct. It was for our operations in Afghanistan, but it was a cash transfer. Pakistan then, as now, had fiscal problems. And when we were coming up to the deadline of CSF payment, the finance minister would be nonstop calling me and asking me, you know, where it was. And so where is my check? So I think that actually gave us a great deal of leverage and then the civilian assistance, even more than the military assistance or security assistance is on such a long time frame and spread over so many programs, it's very hard to say that it really gives us direct leverage. And frankly, after I had left government, but when the Trump administration cut off basically all assistance in the spring of 2018, the prime minister at the time, Shahid Abbasi, said, you know, there's no civilian assistance coming in anyway. Well, that's actually not true. There's about $1 billion in the pipeline, but it just wasn't apparent to the Pakistanis in many ways. So purely in terms of leverage, I think it's the CSF that's most effective.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:26:48] It was the most effective. You mentioned that other countries are more than willing to come in and fill the void such as China. Pakistan, as I noted in the beginning, shares a border with China. China has sold arms to Pakistan, and there Chinese investments, companies and workers in the Pakistan economy. Pakistan is also, I understand it, part of China's One Belt One Road initiative. Can you talk a little bit about this relationship between the two and how it affects US interests today in the region?

Amb. Olson: [00:27:18] The relationship between Pakistan and China goes way back really to almost to the foundation of Pakistan. And one of the things that, by the way, we tend to forget as Americans is that Pakistan actually brokered the US opening to China. Kissinger went to Beijing from Pakistan. He went on a secret mission. He was out on a visit to Pakistan and disappeared for the weekend from a guest house in Nathiagali and went to Beijing and met Zhou Enlai. When I was there, the Obama administration took the view with regard to China generally that we would cooperate where we could and compete where we had to. Pakistan and Afghanistan were largely areas that were considered to be cooperative. There was a basis for cooperation between the United States and China. So we were not necessarily opposed to CPAC. That is the China-pakistan economic corridor, which is the Pakistan element of the Belt and Road and probably the most extensive of all of Chinese overseas investments overall, our position on China has hardened, of course, under the Trump administration. I think there's a bipartisan consensus on that. The one note that I would say is just as we're going forward, we have to remember that I don't think it's really in our long term strategic interest to have a hardening of lines of alliance in South Asia. And what I mean by that is coming back to India. India is increasingly aligned with the United States. That's the basis of Indo-Pak command. Pakistan is perhaps increasingly aligned with China. That means and these are again, two nuclear weapons states staring across a very narrow border at each other. So that means if there is an incident that sets something off between the US and China, it may very well play out between India and Pakistan. And I think it's probably in everyone's interest that there be cross-cutting relationships, that it not be solidly India just in one camp and Pakistan and in another camp.

Gen. Austin: [00:29:10] As the US reduces its military assistance to Pakistan, we can look to see China begin to fill some of that void. It will be interesting to see how China leverages their investments in the infrastructure in Pakistan and hopefully we won't see a militarization of some of that infrastructure, but it'll be to our best interest to keep an eye on the ports and those kinds of things that China is investing in. And I absolutely agree with Ambassador Olsen in that China could use its relationship with Pakistan to frustrate our efforts to deepen our relationship with India. If we head down that road in a major way, it won't be good for the region and it won't be good for stability for the long term.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:29:53] Well, it's one last question. I wanted to put it in a larger context. Lloyd, you testified when you were Commander that Pakistan is in a region plagued by violence and instability, economic stagnation, ethnic and religious tensions and wide expanses of ungoverned or under-governed space. Space for both of you going forward, Given your experience in the region, what are the most effective military and diplomatic tools the United States can use? And what should our military leaders and senior diplomats be doing together in the region?

Gen. Austin: [00:30:27] Well, Ambassador, I would say that that statement is just as true today as it was when I made a statement in congressional testimony a couple of years ago. There are some folks that would advocate us backing away from our investments. I am not one of those people. I think that we have to remain engaged with Pakistan. I think it's in our best interest to do so. Again, we have vital interest in that country, and I think it's something that we're going to have to continue to work on and continue to develop those relationships so we maintain influence, everything that we can do to deepen the relationship and to keep the lines of communications both with the military and with our diplomats, keep those lines of communication open. I think it's in our best interest. So we should lean into this and remain engaged.

Amb. Olson: [00:31:15] If you look at our historical experience in the region, you know, the reason that the Pakistanis support the Taliban is in part because after the end of the last Afghan war in 1989, that is at the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the United States basically decided, well, that was it. You know, the Cold War is over. We don't need to engage with South Asia in general. We don't need to engage with Pakistan or Afghanistan. In fact, we put Pakistan under severe sanctions in 1989, 1990. And so when it came time for dealing with the chaotic situation in Afghanistan that obtained after the end of the Soviet occupation, the Pakistanis came up with the Taliban as in part a solution to that problem. So we need to be wary, I think, of leaving the region and disengaging and just letting things go the way they want to go. I think we want to stay engaged and help to shape events to protect our national interest.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:32:13] Well, I want to thank you, gentlemen, for pointing out repeatedly the strategic importance of Pakistan and the region. But I also want to thank you for your leadership in those tumultuous years. As I mentioned, I know you continue to be engaged in the area and weighing in on our interests in the region. But I also most of all, want to congratulate you on your relationship, the relationship that you started in another country and continued for it is truly a model for future leaders. Thank you.

Gen. Austin: [00:32:44] Well, thanks, Ambassador.

Amb. McCarthy: [00:32:46] My guest today were General Lloyd Austin and Ambassador Richard Olson. This program, the General and the Ambassador, is a project of the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Una Chapman Cox Foundation. You can find us on all podcast sites. We urge you to send us comments and give us reviews. We would love to hear from you on suggestions for future episodes. You can reach us at General.Ambassador.podcast@gmail.com. Our website is GeneralAmbassadorPodcast.com. I'm Ambassador Deborah McCarthy. Thank you so much for listening.