In Pakistan, Drone Strike Turns a Villain Into a Victim

By DECLAN WALSH

In life, Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was Public Enemy No. 1: a ruthless figure who devoted his career to bloodshed and mayhem, whom Pakistani pundits occasionally accused of being a pawn of Indian, or even American, intelligence. But after his death, it seems, Pakistani hearts have grown fonder. Since missiles fired by American drones killed Mr. Mehsud in his vehicle on Friday, Pakistan’s political leaders have reacted with unusual vehemence. The interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, denounced the strike as sabotage of incipient government peace talks with the Taliban. Media commentators fulminated about American treachery. And the former cricket star Imran Khan, now a politician, renewed his threats to block NATO military supply lines through Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa — a province his Tehreek-e-Insaf party controls — with a parliamentary vote scheduled for Monday. Virtually nobody openly welcomed the demise of Mr. Mehsud, who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Pakistani civilians. To some American security analysts, the furious reaction was another sign of the perversity and ingratitude that they say have scarred Pakistan’s relationship with the United States. “It’s another stab in the back,” said Bill Roggio, whose website, the Long War Journal, monitors drone strikes. “Even those of us who watch Pakistan closely don’t know where they stand anymore. It’s such a double game.” To many Pakistanis, though, it is the United States that is double-dealing, and sentiments like Mr. Roggio’s exemplify typical American arrogance. Shireen Mazari, a senior official in Mr. Khan’s party, has urged the Pakistani military to shoot down drones. But if the equivocation over Mr. Mehsud’s death seems to be just another manifestation of the cankerous relationship between the two countries, albeit a particularly troubling one, it is rooted in a complex mix of psychology and politics that may be central to the way Pakistanis see their arch allies, the Americans. Partly, it is a product of Pakistan’s failure to counter a stubborn insurgency. After years of Taliban-induced humiliations and bloodshed, and of heavy American pressure to step up military action against the Taliban, Pakistan’s political and security establishments still agree that starting peace talks with the Taliban is the best course. Such talks may have had slim chances of success — previous negotiations quickly foundered — but Mr. Mehsud’s death appears to have thoroughly derailed them, at least for now. Beyond that, analysts say, Pakistanis have a consistent, if relatively recent, history of rooting for people the West has deemed villains, and against people the West has praised. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman who is serving an 86-year jail sentence in New York for trying to kill Americans in Afghanistan, is a virtual national hero, popularly known as the “daughter of the nation.” On the other side, Malala Yousafzai, the teenage education activist who was shot in the head by the Taliban last year, making her an icon around the world, has been demonized in Pakistan, where she is regularly called a C.I.A. agent or a pawn of the West. These adversarial reactions stem in part from Pakistanis’ perception of their country’s history with the United States. In their view, it is a long story of treachery, abandonment and double-crossing: The United States, many Pakistanis believe, used Pakistan during the Cold War, dropped it in the 1990s and has spent much of its time since trying to steal the army’s nuclear arsenal. Then came the C.I.A. drones. In recent years, that resentment has been bolstered by a growing sense of impotence among Pakistanis: The country’s own security forces failed to find or capture Osama bin Laden, for instance, and it also took an American drone to kill the previous Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in August 2009. “In a sense, this has nothing to do with Malala or Aafia Siddiqui or Hakimullah,” said Adil Najam, a professor of international relations at Boston University who is Pakistani. “These people are just characters in a larger relationship that has become so poisonous.” The problem, some analysts say, is that hostility toward the United States may be clouding Pakistanis’ ability to discern their own best interests. In the conflagration over Hakimullah Mehsud’s death, Mr. Najam said, the government has failed to distinguish between opposition to drone strikes and to the removal of a homicidal, militant enemy. “It’s very destructive that we can’t untangle these two things,” he said. “The reaction has become absolutely absurd.” Analysts say this reaction also holds lessons for the Obama administration, showing that drone strikes, for all their antiseptic appeal, will always struggle for legitimacy because the covert program operates in the shadows of international law — no matter how big the target it takes out. For now, the ball is in Mr. Khan’s court. If his party votes on Monday to block American supplies bound for Afghanistan, it will make life difficult for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who opposes closing the supply lines but has nonetheless vowed to press ahead with Taliban peace talks. It is concern for the fate of those talks that has been given as justification for the most vehement criticism of the killing of Mr. Mehsud. But amid all the enthusiasm for negotiations, Pakistani politicians have yet to publicly address the first hurdle: deciding what the government would be willing to concede to the Taliban, given that the movement’s central aim is to overthrow the state itself.