 Good morning. My name is Steve Risken. I'm a senior program officer and the Institute's grant program and I'm very pleased I'm delighted to be welcoming you here to today's session a session that's focused on an important relationship that between the U.S. and Pakistan and on the newly published work by ambassadors Tara Sita and Howard Schaefer how Pakistan negotiates with the U.S. riding the roller coaster. Pakistan is of course a key partner in South U.S. partner in South Asia and amid the violence and instability is a critical component for bringing peace to that war torn region and not surprisingly it's a high priority country for U.S. I.P. Several country departments at the Institute are actively involved in working on Pakistan. The grant program is funded over many years quite a few policy oriented studies one I would draw your attention to that is nearing completion is a study of Pakistan youth perspective perspectives on the future of Pakistan undertaken by one of our panelists Stephen Cohen. The grant program also has a dedicated grant making mechanism that is funding projects on the ground in Pakistan. It is funding programs that are promoting dialogue and understanding across religious cultural and regional divides. It is working to strengthen Pakistani civil society in their efforts to work on nonviolent conflict prevention and resolution. And these programs are also encouraging counter extremist voices to contribute to the public discourse. Now other U.S. I.P. units are also pursuing work on Pakistan as well. We have leading policy analysts and scholars like Moid Yosef who are having their imprint on the policy deliberations in the city. The Institute's Academy has provided conflict resolution training for women parliamentarians in Pakistan and our religion and peacemaking program has for several years been working with Sunni and Shia Ulama and Madrasa administrators to develop and to publish educational materials including a textbook for use in Madaris in Pakistan textbooks on subjects relating to peace tolerance and pluralism. And U.S. I.P. also has been publishing several reports reports that are available out on the desk outside several reports of late on Pakistan. And also there's information on upcoming events also out on the table. But the anchor for today's session is on the Schaefer's volume. The latest in the Institute series on cross-cultural negotiation, a series you will hear more about in just a few minutes. At the core of U.S. I.P.'s mission are efforts to enhance the nation's capacity to prevent, manage and peacefully resolve international conflicts. And this includes initiatives to develop knowledge and the tools needed to achieve those goals. It is our hope that this timely and groundbreaking study will provide the scholarly and policy-making communities with important knowledge and some practical tools, tools that will enhance the prospects of success as these two countries navigate and negotiate this important, very complicated relationship through the difficult times ahead. Now the Schaefer's were uniquely qualified to undertake the study. They brought to the table very sharp analytical skills, the discipline to write a book and the intimate knowledge of both U.S. foreign policy-making drawing on over 60 years of cumulative experience in U.S. government service, but combining that with their knowledge and understanding of Pakistan, its society, its institutions, and its role in the region. And I want to thank the Schaefer's for all their hard work and diligence in preparing this study. And I also want to thank our distinguished panelists for joining us today. Now before moving to the panel discussion, I want to turn the podium over to Ambassador Richard Solomon in addition to being the Institute's president for the past 17-plus years, Dick conceived and was really the prime mover behind the Institute's initiative on cross-cultural negotiation. And drawing on his extensive experience negotiating the opening with China back in the early 70s, he authored one of the earlier studies in this series on Chinese negotiating behavior. He was also the co-author of a more recently published study on American negotiating behavior entitled American Negotiating Behavior, Wheeler Dealers, Legal Eagles, Bullies, and Preachers. And a few final notes if you could take a moment to turn off your cell phones. It may interfere with the communications here. Also, I want to thank Kay Heckler, who has carried the heavy water in putting this both on the publication side, but also putting together this event. And finally, I just wanted to let you know that copies of the book are available outside for purchase, and the shapers have agreed to sign copies if you so wish. So welcome again, Dick. Thank you, Steve, and good morning. Sorry it couldn't be a nice sunny day, and I urge you all to not spend your time staring out the window at the Lincoln Memorial, but this is our third week in our new building, and we're still getting used to how we use these facilities, tweaking the sound systems, and otherwise taking advantage of this remarkable piece of architecture. What I wanted to do was give you a little bit of context of our cross-cultural negotiating series, of which we're very, very pleased to have this as our most recent contribution. Why should we undertake this kind of a study? It gets fundamentally to the objectives, the charter of the work of the Institute of Peace. Conflict is all around us. Our objective is to try to prevent conflict from turning violent, and can we develop tools, techniques for managing conflict situations that will at least keep them under control if not resolve them? Well, negotiating goes on in daily life in all sorts of ways, but clearly the objectives of government work is to try to more formally deal with other countries, and today with other non-governmental entities through negotiating procedures. Now one of the things we discovered early on is that the State Department, its professionals, are not explicitly trained in negotiating techniques. They are trained in how to deal with the interagency negotiations that are fundamental to creating policy positions, but there really is no formalized approach to looking at lessons learned, for example, and the reasons for that in part relate to the fact that the fundamental purpose of the State Department is to support our government in implementing its own policies, and so creating that policy consensus through the interagency effort is fundamental, and so almost anyone will tell you that 80 or 90 percent of the work of let's say an assistant secretary who is organizing a negotiation is going to try to is trying to deal with his colleagues from other government agencies or within his own building in creating that policy consensus. Moreover, the State Department has been understaffed and under-resourced for many, many years, and so our diplomats experience, though they may be as learned as they may be having learned on the job how to manage a negotiation, just don't have the time to sit back, take time off, and think about or draw lessons learned from their experiences. Unlike the military, again much more amply resourced, does take the time to do what they would refer to as after-action reports. A good example was one of the more challenging countries to deal with is North Korea, and we initially did a study almost 18 years ago by Scott Snyder who interviewed countries like Japan, Europeans who had dealt with North Korea at that point, we really didn't have negotiations going, and he produced I would say an early version of what it's like to deal with this very unique country, a failed state but one that nonetheless has proven to be a very effective negotiator. Well when Ambassador Chris Hill finished four years of trying to negotiate with officials from Pyongyang on their nuclear program, I urged him to come to the institute and spend even six weeks debriefing himself and talking with us about what his experiences were in dealing with the North Koreans. Well he was never able to do that because virtually as he was leaving his post he was called to a new assignment in Iraq and our top line diplomats are just in constant demand. And so what we have tried to do is fill that space and to try to do the analytical work, the drawing the lessons learned, best practices that in our view should be part of the more formal training of our diplomats. As Steve Riskin mentioned my own study was undertaken after I had worked for Henry Kissinger for five years in the early 1990s on the opening to China. Again the Chinese, a country we hadn't really dealt with for over two decades, shocked Kissinger when he began his negotiations because his experience was with European diplomacy. And Henry was really intrigued and very impressed by the fact that the Chinese, they were not negotiating as communists, they were drawing on their own culture, their own traditions in the way that they managed the negotiation. And so after an extended period of watching Kissinger deal with Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, the other leaders, I left and actually I went initially to the Rand Corporation and spent several years doing a study of Chinese negotiating behavior. And when I came to the Institute in 1993 Raymond Cohen had done a conceptual work called Negotiating Across Cultures. And so the country study effort and Ray Cohen's work has now led to what is now 14 different volumes, most focused on analysis of how different countries negotiate. But also some very interesting broader brush studies I particularly attracted to Chas Freeman's book, The Diplomats Dictionary, which draws together quotes and perspectives from a whole range of foreign and American officials who have run negotiating as well as several other books, one recently dealing with the process of mediation. Now, just let me make one comment about methodology. How do you do these studies most effectively? Clearly, if you can do them not in the abstract, but to work with people or draw in officials who have actually done negotiating, you're going to get a study that is much more effectively grounded in the way the real world works. So we're extremely pleased that the Schaffers, who as Steve mentioned, have many, many years of formal government experience bring that ground truth, if you like, to their work. But there's another what you might call a methodological trick behind these studies. You might say, well, we want to look at how the Pakistanis negotiate, get a Pakistani to do a study. But that in my view is counterproductive for the following reason. Countries have very unique cultures, apart from history and institutions. And generally we're really not, if you're of a culture, you're really not as conscious of what is unique, distinctive about it. And so the trick or the approach that we try to pursue is to get someone who has practical experience but is not from that culture to actually do the study because the foreigner, if you like, is much more conscious to that which is distinctive, if not unique about the way a given country, its officials manage negotiating. And again, if you look at this stack of studies that we've done, you'll see that we've pursued that approach. So we hope that you will find this newest study to our stack of our body of work on this subject of value. What we will be doing is using these studies as part of our professional training work. And one of the things that this new facility here gives us the opportunity to do in a much more convenient way, particularly for the officials from the State Department, the Foreign Service officers who are working virtually right across the street, is to get them, give them the opportunity to interact with those who have done these kinds of studies to raise their skill levels in negotiating behavior. So again, we're delighted to have this first opportunity to convene the study that we'll hear from today. And Tessie and Howie, we're delighted that you've been able to participate. Steve Cohen, again, a longtime colleague. He and I were on the best policy planning staff in the State Department not too many decades ago. And Moid Yosef, our friend here and colleague will be moderating the session. So thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks, Ambassador Solomon. Once again, welcome, everyone, for coming here. I see no better time, perhaps, or no more pertinent time than at present to be talking about the Pakistan-U.S. relationship, and especially the negotiating behavior as Pakistan plays it out. We are talking on a day when Pakistan's intelligence chief has been in town yesterday, held meetings. There's been a lot of talk about Pakistan in the press. Today, you've seen front-page news Pakistan all over it. And as we move to 2014 and beyond in Afghanistan, I think the single most critical element of this relationship is going to be negotiation. As we get into reconciliation, as we get into how we move forward on Afghanistan, I think it's really going to get down to the Pakistani and American diplomats to sit down and work out how things are going to move forward. We have here an eminent panel, the two authors of the book that we are going to discuss today. Let me just introduce them, and then I'll tell you how we proceed. Ambassador Howard Schaefer is a retired American foreign service officer, and he spent much of his 36-year career working on South Asia. He was twice Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and was also posted to various countries in South Asia. Currently, he is a senior counselor at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, an author of various books. A recent one, The Limits of Influence, America's Role in Cashmere, looks at American diplomacy on the cashmere dispute over the years, and it's an absolutely fascinating read. Ambassador Teresita Schaefer, again, retired Foreign Service Officer, a long-time South Asia expert, spent 11 years of her career in South Asia, including Pakistan and India. She also talks about international economic issues a lot, and again, an author of several books, the most recent one before this one being India and the US in the 21st Century Reinventing Partnership. We'll start with the authors, Ambassador Howard Schaefer and then Ambassador Teresita. We'll move on to then Ambassador Akbar Ahmad, who was previously Pakistani High Commissioner in Great Britain, currently the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, and has been rightly titled The World's Leading Authority on Contemporary Islam by the BBC. An author of several books won the critically acclaimed Journey into Islam, The Crisis of Globalization, and his fresh book, The Journey into America, The Challenge of Islam. Again, two fascinating reads. Finally, Professor Stephen Cohen, who has had a distinguished career as a Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Illinois, has been at the Brookings Institute since 1998 and has run the South Asia program there. He's part of foreign policy and the 21st Century Defense Initiative at Brookings. Again, an author of at least 14 books, or co-author of at least 14 books, most recent one being Arming Without Aiming India's Militia Modernization. And it's a special privilege because to me he's been a mentor and much more. So, may I move to Ambassador, how would you please take the floor? Thanks. Thank you very much, and thanks to Dick and Steve for your introduction, and good morning, everybody. We appreciate your coming to the launching of our book and this beautiful, newly inaugurated USID bill. Until a few minutes before midnight last Friday, we wondered if the event would actually take place. Although we doubt that the congressional negotiators who put the budget agreement together at that 11th hour had this gathering in mind, we're grateful to them. Republicans and Democrats alike are coming through and keeping USIP in operation. It's good to see many friends and associates here this morning. Many of you know far more about the torturous course of US-Pakistan relations than we do. Some of you have been good enough to submit yourselves, to interviews with us. We interviewed a large number of people, many of them actual practitioners who had negotiated on behalf of the United States, or on behalf of Pakistan, or with their opposite numbers of the other country. And so we feel that we really have an understanding, a much better understanding than when we started out, about what makes the guts of the US-Pakistan negotiating dialogue. Hazy and I, then a married couple of three years standing, first came to Pakistan on diplomatic assignment 37 years ago. Our second son was born at our house in Islamabad. We've been following developments in the country with great interest, often mingling with anxiety ever since. We need to stress, however, that ours is not another book on US-Pakistan ties. What we've tried to do instead is to analyze the themes, techniques, and styles that have characterized Pakistan in negotiations with American civil and military officials in recent years and to reach some conclusion about how these are likely to shape up in the future. In other words, we've interpreted negotiations in a broader sense. We've discussed not only what happens at the negotiating table or in tea breaks, but also the way Pakistan has worked out its rules of engagement with the United States, especially during the three periods of especially close relations, in Ayub's time in the 1950s, in Zia's time in the 1980s, and since 9-11. The starting point in our analysis has been our interpretation of the major factors we believe crucially influence the way Pakistanis deal with this country. We believe that the first and foremost of these is Pakistanis' interpretation of their country's place in the world. This, of course, includes their perception of the United States and their interpretation of the volatile history of U.S.-Pakistan relations. It's this volatility that led to our subtitling the book, Riding the Rollercoaster. After some consideration, we chose this over three marriages and two divorces. That title too would have been appropriate. It refers, of course, to the three periods I just spoke about and the subsequent messy, bittering collapse of the political, military, and economic ties that the United States and Pakistan forged in the first two of them. Many Pakistanis predict that a third divorce is in the cards. We hope they're wrong. We argue that Pakistanis who negotiate with Americans start from a common geopolitical framework. At its core is Pakistanis' sense of an existential threat from India, a chronic insecurity dating back to partition that impels Pakistan to seek powerful outside balance years. Pakistanis looked to the United States to fill that role, beginning in 1954, when it joined the U.S. and then Western alliance system designed to contain the communist powers. And it still does, even as it continues to maintain that this balancing is not its objective in developing a partnership with Washington. A vital element to this commonly held Pakistani worldview is ambivalence and mistrust about the United States. Many Pakistanis are convinced, on the basis of Washington's past record, that the United States discards Pakistan when a country no longer serves its purposes. Pakistanis, of course, recognize the negotiations with the United States or exercise in asymmetrical diplomacy. They are acutely aware of the disparity in national power and look for ways to turn it to their advantage. The second factor in Pakistan's approach to negotiations with the United States is its culture. Pakistanis' operating style of expectations are shaped by society in which the most important bonds are personal. Relationships between both inside and outside government are hierarchical and the less powerful try to turn their weakness into strength. Pakistani leaders have laid great stress on their personal ties with influential Americans. The three leaders who forged the successive bilateral partnerships were careful to cultivate major figures, both military and civilians, from the occupant of the White House on and down. In this, they were very successful. The final factor in Pakistan's negotiations with the United States has been the structure of the country's government and political system. Notably its divided authority and the prominent role of its military is played in determining its diplomatic and security relationships. Taken together, these three elements produce what we have called Pakistan's cultivation of the art of the guilt trip. Pakistanis try to make Americans feel a sense of obligation to them. They seek to instill and heighten a fear on the part of the United States that failure to honor Pakistan's requests will have a strongly adverse impact on American interests. When disputes arise, they try to make Americans feel that they are letting them down as they point out Americans have done in the past. They calculate, if not too hopefully, that this strategy can help fend off another American betrayal. In doing so, they also maintain through varying degrees of subtlety that America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs the United States. Applifying this approach, we look first at the prevailing Pakistan review of how Pakistan and the United States fit into each other's worlds. We analyze the cultural setting in which Pakistan diplomacy is conducted and discuss the character and comparative power of three groups of Pakistani negotiators. Military officers, civil servants and politicians. After dissecting a few key U.S. Pakistan negotiations in which Pakistan's national leaders were directly involved, we look briefly at how Pakistan deals with the United States when negotiations directly involve India. We conclude with some observations on what our findings mean for the way Americans deal with Pakistanis on major issues as well as on seemingly minor matters that, if more sympathetically handled, would help create a better negotiating environment. And now, let me turn over to my co-author. Thank you, Howie, and let me also thank all those who so warmly welcomed us. What I'd like to do is to look a bit more closely at how the basic themes you've just heard about play out in practice. Let's start with the practice of creating obligations, the guilt troop. This happens in large ways and small in many, many encounters between U.S. and Pakistani officials. It was a key theme in the negotiation that took place after Pakistan sent troops into the Kargil area in the high Himalayas on the Indian side of the line of control in Kashmir in 1999. The Kargil operation was planned and executed by the army, but they brought the civilian prime minister of the day, Nawaz Sharif, into the decision process, and Sharif had to pick up the pieces when the Indian military responded in force. After a six-day Sharif visit to Beijing designed to enlist Chinese help ended in failure a day and a half later, Sharif turned to Washington. His telephone call to President Clinton begging for a face-to-face meeting elicited the response that Sharif shouldn't travel to Washington unless he was prepared to withdraw his troops. Sharif didn't answer the question, but he came. His argument once he arrived was that the United States had a responsibility as a great power and as a friend of Pakistan to try to settle the Kashmir issue. He was trying to make a silk purse out of, one shouldn't say a sow's ear in Pakistan, let's call it a cat's ear and get something for their basically strategic failure. Sharif argued that unless Pakistan intervened to settle Kashmir implicitly on Pakistan's terms, it would put him at risk of being overthrown. He compared, he contrasted the modest US role in Kashmir with enormous US efforts on Israel and the Palestinians. This argument was a classic example not only of the guilt trip, you heard all those obligations going by, but also of using Pakistan's and his own government's weakness as a trump card. What one observer in the workshop we held before we finished the book referred to as maintaining the lower hand. Even more characteristically, Sharif made his appeal intensely personal. He placed the first call to Clinton. Once in Washington, he continually tried to see Clinton one-on-one. He was calling on a friend, a personal friend, to honor the obligation's friendship. The appeal to protect Pakistan from its own weakness was classic Pakistan negotiating style, as was the appeal to defend him against the risk of being overthrown. That, of course, doesn't mean that his concerns were grandless. Indeed, Sharif was overthrown in a military coup four months after his dramatic trip to Washington. As Howie said, a second theme that recurs throughout the book is Pakistan's assumption that the United States needs it more than it needs the United States. Probably the clearest example comes from the negotiations that established the relationship between the United States and Pakistan, Pakistan led by General Zia. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day, 1979, there is an extended discussion of that in the book, which I commend to you. When this invasion took place, Jimmy Carter was president, and Pakistan had been the object of not one but two separate aid cutoffs in a single year, both of them related to Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. With the Soviet army at the edge of the Kyber Pass, Carter telephoned President Zia to offer U.S. support. The fact that Carter made the call is significant. On repeated occasions, Pakistan has honored the standard negotiators dictum that he who asks first is putting himself in a position of weakness. But Carter's negotiations, as it turned out, came to naught. The aid and military sales package proffered by Brzezinski was currently rejected as peanuts. Now, we are convinced based on extensive interviewing that this peanut remark was not an insulting reference to Jimmy Carter's peanut farm in Georgia, but an illustration of a different problem, namely the danger of using idiomatic expressions when you don't totally possess all of the facts that may be relevant to the phrases you're using. But the real reason that Pakistan turned down Brzezinski's offer was that it assumed it could do better. As the 1980 approached, Zia made the calculation that Reagan would win and would offer better terms, that the United States needed Pakistan more than the other way around. So he in effect walked out of the store to recalibrate the bargaining based on his judgment that the US would have to come to him. And come it did soon after Reagan's election. The aid package Reagan's team offered was four or five times the size of the one Zia had rejected. To implement it, Reagan worked with the Pakistanis to get legislation enacted that would make it make aid possible, establishing a new and higher policy threshold for Pakistan's nuclear weapons program before the US would be required to cut off aid. This threshold was of course reached in 1990, occasioning the second US-Pakistan divorce and ushering in 10 years of bad feeling. But Pakistan's decision to bet on its essentiality to US policy worked for a decade before that happened, not a bad record. A third characteristic is the tendency not to recognize that the US too has red lines. The clearest example of this was the US aid cut off in 1990 from the beginning of the Reagan administration and especially since the enactment of the Pressler Amendment in 1985, that's the legislation I referred to a minute ago. US officials had repeatedly reminded their Pakistani counterparts that this legislation would require the United States to cut off aid if Pakistan came to, in the words of the amendment, possess a nuclear explosive device. Pakistan's civilian and military leaders alike were convinced that as long as Pakistan continued to support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the nuclear problem could be managed. In this case, both the US and Pakistan misplayed things. The US did not involve the top military and intelligence leadership in its efforts to persuade Pakistan that the nuclear cut off threat was a serious one. And the Pakistan military, looking on the US government as a mirror image of their own, assumed that if the message was not coming from those they looked on as their best friends, the Pentagon and CIA, it must not be serious. When the cut off became inevitable in 1990, it came as a terrible shock to Pakistan. One senior official told me, you never told us. We were both involved in the telling. They didn't hear it. These themes, and there are others as well in the book, but you're going to have to read the book for that. And the basic framework described are very much in evidence in things that have happened since the book was completed. Take, for example, the Raymond Davis case, which is at the heart of today's front page stories. Last January, you will recall a person attached to the US embassy in Islamabad, a CIA contractor it later developed, shot and killed two men in Lahore who he believed were either stalking him or trying to rob him. Over nearly two months, he sat in jail. The two governments argued over whether or not he had diplomatic immunity, and the newspapers in Pakistan reverberated with demands for him to be hanged. On March 18th, he was released quite suddenly, following a payment of blood money to both families as provided for in Islamic and Pakistani law, a payment that the US government stiffly asserted it had not made. There's a lot one could say about the underlying situation, but let's just look briefly at some of the features of how the two governments tried to resolve it. Initially, they followed the standard diplomatic playbook, trying to have him quietly and quickly released and expelled from Pakistan on the basis that he had diplomatic immunity. It didn't work. The US had been sloppy, it turns out, both in the claims it made on his behalf and in its paperwork. Two people were dead, actually three, one of whom was a bystander run over by a car that was trying to speak to Mr. Davis's rescue. The foreign minister was advised by his staff that Davis did not have full immunity and dug in his heels. When he was dropped from the cabinet, his opposition became a political cause, and basically boxed in the civilian side of the Pakistani government. And the Army and Intelligence Service, ISI, were genuinely and deeply furious that the CIA was apparently conducting surveillance against military organizations friendly to the Army. Perhaps more importantly, the US had a talented but brand new ambassador in Islamabad who hadn't really had time to develop personal relationships. He relied on the assurances of Pakistan's president and prime minister, who in the end could not deliver either the Army or public opinion. So the cultural setting and the structure of Pakistan's government were aligned against the kind of settlement that would have been ultimately least painful to the US government and arguably less publicly painful to the Pakistan government. The real negotiation, of course, took place behind closed doors and involved primarily CIA and ISI. We are not privy to any of the details. What hints we've been able to find out or read between the lines make clear that this is another case of Pakistan's military assuming that the United States needs them more than the other way around and consequently playing hardball. And I think that's what we still see in today's paper. You'll see the New York Times story has the greater amount of detail and is talking about hundreds of people being kicked out of Pakistan, all CIA contractors being kicked out of Pakistan, and the Pakistan Intelligence Chief, who is as we've noted in Washington, demanding that no operations take place in Pakistan without ISI having consented to them. In the end, the Davis case was settled when ISI became interested in settling it and the mechanism for doing so drew on Pakistan's Islamic heritage. One thing that may wind up being an outcome of this case, it's hard to tell at this point whether it's likely to be permanent or not, but at least for the time being the Pakistan military establishment seems to have revised its estimate of who its best friends are in the US government and CIA doesn't make that cut. They are probably both going to be subtly negotiating to change that and put CIA back on the best friends list, but we'll have to talk about that sometime down the road. So what should the US diplomats learn for future negotiations? Let me cite five lessons. First, focus on culture. Sometimes you have to play two types. In other words, use American culture, be yourself, and draw on the strengths of American culture. And I would say that one of those is that when negotiating, Americans generally try very hard not to say anything untrue or commit to something they can't deliver. I think that regardless of whether Pakistan's culture operates the same way, that's something Americans should continue to do. But sometimes you have to play contrary to expectations. And a key concept here is honor, which many Pakistanis don't see as part of the American cultural makeup except that it is. And when it is, I think it's important to say so. It's going to be a bracing revelation. Second, also in the cultural arena, but perhaps the most important cultural dimension is build personal relationships. Take the time necessary to develop these. That's tough for Americans. We're in a hurry. We're scheduled. We've got a plane out of there. We want deliverables. The Pakistanis do too, of course, which is something that they like to gloss over when complaining about how focused we are on deliverables. But personal relationships really are critical. Third, understand who has authority and how far, if possible, that authority goes. Americans tend to be drawn to the military a more can-do organization than its civilian counterparts. They are necessary, but not sufficient, especially when you have a civilian government. And in both cases, we need to hear with extra ears to pick up not just the words, but the music, the intent behind them. This applies especially when one's Pakistani counterparts seem to be dissembling or withholding information. One needs to ask why and assess whether the dissembling is itself a message that needs to be heeded. Fourth, develop incentives and leverage that go beyond aid. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Americans can come across sounding as if they're trying to buy Pakistani loyalty. This is not a good message in a culture that prizes honor. Fifth and most importantly, recognize the potential of our relationship, but also its limits. The strategic partnerships between the United States through the years have ostensibly been based on an assumption of shared strategic interests. This assumption is only partly true. Pakistan's sense of insecurity and focus on India means that its priorities are different from those of the United States and sometimes its objectives are different. Pakistan will pursue its own strategic interests first. In Afghanistan, for example, its first priority is eliminating Indian influence, quite different from our priority of eliminating Al Qaeda influence. The US and Pakistan have worked together at critical points in our foreign policy for 50 years. Each of the three marriages ushered in an extended period of close collaboration. This represented both a negotiating and a policy success for both countries while it lasted. Our hope is that by understanding how we got to the two divorces, we can avoid a third one. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, ambassadors. I wouldn't ask you to shift up. Having read the book, I think you've presented an excellent crystallization of the critical points. But I do want to mention that there are other aspects of this book which deserve a read as well. What I found most fascinating was your chapter on India and how the Pakistanis deal with the Indians. So there's much more to look at in the book. Let me turn over to Professor Abbas Ahmed, who unfortunately has to leave right after he speaks. But that's up on yours. Thank you, Roy. Let me first congratulate the shapers. There's no greater pleasure for a panelist than to read top scholars in their top form. And they really are at their top form in this book. The given quote I've read is, in this forward set, this is a must read book and I completely agree. It is excellently written, good writing, realistic, brings out the challenges. Let me give you an example of the writing. It's the end of the book, the conclusion which broadly I agree with. On the rollercoaster ride of US-Pakistan relations with every soup upward, the memory of the last downturn is a little sharper and skepticism of US intentions of it harsher. So this kind of writing captures the tensions and of course the sophistication of the analysis. I would like to make three friendly observations. I don't dare call them criticisms to the holy trinity or South Asian affairs sitting on my right, but they will in a sense expand on the discussion and perhaps add to it. Keeping in mind that the title is, How Pakistan Negotiates with the United States, Not the Other Way Around. It's not a mutual discussion that the book focuses on. It is on Pakistan primarily. My observations will be made through the prism of my own experience, both as a diplomat, as an ambassador, and as someone who has been a commissioner in the field and has some idea of the administration of the players in the field in Pakistan. So they will raise methodological and conceptual questions. First observation, there is a much sharper connection between Pakistan culture, but that's the issue of a pointer to culture, history, society, and foreign policy than we assume. Very often foreign policy analysts and I've been an ambassador, so I had to deal with the foreign office in Pakistan work as if they are in a cultural and historical vacuum. That is not the case. Let me give you some examples. Even in the 1960s, when there was a good relationship with America for a lot of Pakistanis, and I refer you to the remarkable photograph of Jackie Kennedy on a visit to Pakistan, standing in an open car in the hall with the president of Pakistan, President Ayub Khan. For those of you who don't have easy access, it's a photograph in my Pope's journey into America, and surrounded by hundreds of Pakistanis smiling, greeting her, and throwing flower petals at her. Now just picture to yourself any American, including my three distinguished colleagues on my right in the hall in any kind of vehicle, and imagine what Pakistanis would be throwing at that. This is how things have gone down. Even at that time, President Ayub Khan wrote a book, and he was the greatest supporter of the U.S. American Alliance, and it was called Friends, Not Masters. So the perception that we want you as Americans to be friends, but not our masters. Today that relationship has seriously deteriorated, and it does impact foreign policy, whatever the diplomats and the official communicates say. For example, Americans and Pakistanis are looking at each other through the prism of distrust, some anger, some contempt. In Pakistan today, Pakistanis perhaps not our ambassadors, and I know that a lot of the references in this book come from very distinguished Pakistani ambassador. I wish there was a more stronger social sciences perspective to support the thesis. The perception is that even the floods that came to Pakistan were engineered by the Americans. That the plane that crashed north of Islamabad, and this is very widely talked about, and maybe some Pakistanis even believe this, that the plane that crashed north of Islamabad was, in fact, aimed by the Americans into the Pakistan nuclear program. Now this is how irrational the mood is in Pakistan. In America, we constantly hear of Pakistan's ISI being involved with the Taliban and so on. So it really is a prism through which the two are looking at each other, and that does make an impact in terms of how Pakistanis negotiate irrespective of our presidents and chiefs of ISI coming to Washington, and maybe pitching it at the level what they think the Americans would like to hear. My second point, and this is again a general point, is to do with what Pakistan offers. On page 181, the shapeless talk about Pakistan's importance in terms of being a large Muslim nation, in terms of the extremists that are based there. But with some regret, I notice they leave out what to me is perhaps the most important thing that Pakistan has to offer, and surprising why it's constantly overlooked by my colleagues. And that is that there was and remains an idea of Pakistan around the person or Mr. Jinnah as providing a political model. Forget his politics, you may love him, hate him, adore him, but he brought an idea of modern politics. He brought the idea of women's rights, minority rights, respect for the constitution. He has given an idea which every Pakistani you read and scratch them under the surface, and somewhere or the other that Pakistan lingers. And that is what causes a lot of frustration in the minds of a lot of Pakistanis. If you dug this, go and visit the mausoleum, and you'll see hundreds of ordinary Pakistanis, not the elite, to whom Jinnah has now become from a very secular leader, Rehmetullah Aleh, which Moid will translate and tell you what it means. So he's been elevated almost to central. He is there. Similarly, as an anthropologist studying Pakistan, I was intrigued by the Taliban. And his book, Tehrir in England, would attack Jinnah in particular, not so much Western leaders, but why Jinnah? Because to them, he is a Muslim leader within the umma who talked of women's rights, and they signaled this out. They said Jinnah talked of women's rights, and he talked about protecting and having relations with the Hindus, minority rights. They signaled these two items out. And this was late in the 1990s when I was in England. And I really was intrigued, why should they be attacking a leader who seemed to be relevant to the world? People don't even know his name, perhaps except through the film Gandhi, in which he's shown as a villain. But 50 years later, they're attacking him. Why are they pulling him out from history? It is precisely because he's offering something which exists in the minds of millions of Pakistanis. So this is something I would like to be dug out as a part of history, when we're talking about the importance of Pakistan. If we can help reinforce the idea of this kind of Pakistan as a modern Muslim nation, we have a ready-made model for the rest of the Muslim world. It may not have worked out. It's in crisis right now. Perhaps the graph is lowest ever in terms of history, law and order collapsing, a corrupt and incompetent government and so on. But it is there. It can be brought out. It can be reinforced. And if we don't acknowledge it, I don't think we even have an idea how to bring it out. My third point deals with the notion that Pakistan somehow starts in 1947. Israel and Pakistan are both states made around the same time with an idea of a religious tradition, with an idea of a historical tradition, a cultural tradition. To Pakistan, history and culture matter. And you cannot simply say in 1947, where we are Pakistan starts. Pakistan doesn't exist in 1947. Maybe if Jinnah's 1946 withdrawal from the proposal to divide Pakistan was accepted by Nehru and we have a very prominent friend of mine, Professor Pramu sitting here, maybe there would have been no Pakistan. So Pakistan starts zero. But yet Pakistan comes with thousands of years of history, particularly the last two centuries. So everything we need to understand about Pakistan and how it negotiates with the United States, with India, with Kashmir and so on, has roots, has deep roots. And the history of Pakistan in terms of the mid-19th century, when the Muslims of India rise with the Hindus in the subcontinent in 1857, when the Muslims then react in two ways. One, the creation of Aligarh, and secondly, the creation of Devban, two distinct ways of engaging with modernity. From the Aligarh movement comes Iqbal and Jinnah and a lot of the future leadership of Pakistan, including Ayukhant. So again, this consciousness of how history is playing itself out, I see this very much as a historian and a sociologist of that part of the world, how even the debates and conflict and the violence today that you have, the Taliban who are inspired by one aspect of Devban. And I want to emphasize that Devban does not promote violence or perhaps one extreme wing would be involved in defending Islam and they would see defending Islam as allowing themselves to be violent. They, the Taliban are inspired by the Devban model, if you like. And how Aligarh even today inspires not only the Jinnah model but leaders as recently as Benazir, so would be inspired by that particular model. So once again, the importance of understanding one policy, certainly Pakistan's one policy, in terms of its history and culture. Because if we don't acknowledge this, the whole history of Kashmir to Pakistanis, they may not be that aware of it, but it does go back over a century and they will start with that. They will start, in fact, how Kashmir was a Muslim state ruled by Hindu rulers and so on. So the importance of constantly understanding this event and negotiating with Pakistanis because they will at some stage bring this up. So with these three observations, I would like to once again congratulate the shapers. It's an excellent book, a great contribution and something that I hope will stimulate the kind of discussion and the kind of issues that I've raised this morning. Thank you. Thank you very much, Agbassar and I realize that you have to leave. Ambassador Sheper has an observation on what you've just presented and then we'll thank you. I want to thank Akbar for bringing up the issue of the Jinnah legacy. What we have argued is that the definition of Pakistan's Islamic identity is one of the most vexed issues in Pakistan and I certainly share Akbar's hope that Jinnah's legacy will be reclaimed in more recognizable form by those who speak for Pakistan and will achieve the place it deserves in the international market. Tensi, thank you. I mentioned this because when I was making the Jinnah film in Pakistan, we were filming there and some of you may have read the controversies and some of the nonsense in the media. It became a national debate and I wasn't even aware of what I had touched because I was touching the foundations of Pakistan, how every Pakistani looks at Pakistan and that's why for me suddenly I realized that Jinnah wasn't simply someone in the office painting. Why when the Taliban come to negotiate with the Chief Secretary of the Frontier province in the 1990s before 9-11, they insist that the Chief Secretary remove the painting that hung behind his chair, the painting of Jinnah and to his eternal shame he does that, otherwise the Taliban won't talk to him. I realized the debate because hundreds of Pakistanis attacked the project, the film, because I was showing that Jinnah was essentially a man who accepted Hindus, seeks everyone as Pakistani in 1947. He continuously reached out to the minorities. His statement that I would be the protected general of the Hindu minority is a remarkable statement. He spends his Christmas, our 25th of December in Karachi with the Christian community in a church. So people attacking, personally attacking me in their tutorials and so on and saying that Jinnah was actually a straight warrior with the sword in one hand and the Quran in the other and also hundreds of ordinary Pakistani women particularly and the young supporting him. So I could see suddenly there was a much much stronger and a bigger debate about identity than just about the film and it will help us a great deal if we understand that at the basis of Pakistan's idea of itself, perhaps missed by outsiders, there is there is somewhere not so discernible, sometimes misinterpreted, but there is the founding father and for Pakistanis Jinnah is literally what Washington, Jefferson and Franklin are for Americans. So we can't simply remove that from the scene because if we do, we're leaving out a very important part of Pakistani identity. Thank you. Thank you. Once again, Abbasah for joining us and giving us your thoughts on this and thanks again for coming. Thank you so much. I'm going to turn over the mic now to Steve Cohen and then we'll open the floor. I'll be very brief because I want to let the audience ask as many questions as possible. I'm sorry Steve, I did forget to mention that the forward for this book has been written by Steve. Yeah, I was one of the anonymous readers of the book and after I was just a little bit of the way into it, I realized that this is going to be one of the best books written on Pakistan ever. I'd say it's one of the top four or five books about Pakistan. So if you have a little Pakistan library, this should join it. It's really an amazing accomplishment and insightful and useful. But don't forget Steve's books. Yeah well. I would say that the first point is accurate except that put it as simplistically as I can, if this was an undergraduate audience, I would say some of this. Nations are ideas and states are bureaucracies. And the book is primarily about bureaucracies in Pakistan. Of course, bureaucracies in states help create and sustain the identity of a nation. And of course, the Pakistani bureaucracy and the Pakistani nation are both in trouble. I think that's the core of the problem is in a simple way. Let me just say a few points. First from the larger perspective, politics is the arena in which real differences are reconciled or they're not reconciled. And diplomacy is a subset of politics. A lot of hope that great American philosophers said that a diplomat is somebody who can describe Jane Russell. A lot of moving his hands. I think that the book captures the diplomacy of Pakistan in its essence and a critical aspect of that that it's negotiating. It's a unique book because it's the only book that tries to do something different. It does a brilliant job. I'll just say one more comment, I think, of the audience. The current cliche of the US-Pakistan relations, instituted by Pakistan and possibly the friend of mine, is that there's a trust deficit. And I trace this back to Mahbudurana and I email to Mahbudurana back and forth about this. So that's immediately a way of putting the Americans on the defensive. There's a deficit of American trust in Pakistan. We won't talk about the Pakistan trust of America. That's another issue. But from an American perspective, and I think this goes to the heart of the way in which American people that see things, there's a verification deficit. And for Dick and I, we're for president who coined the phrase, trust but verify. And I think that one absence in the relationship is our inability to verify the things that Pakistanis are telling us, whether it's the support for Taliban in Pakistan, whether it's the integrity of the DGW program. Well, a whole range of subjects. Because in some ways, it's an amazingly non-transparent country. And so I think that between the, you know, and I do share the shapeless hope that it's an irretrievable situation. And I agree with Akbar at the point that the idea of Pakistan, the Jinnah idea of Pakistan is really a workable idea, but it's got to be made to work. It's under challenge and competition from a whole range of other other sources, whether it'll survive or not. I think it's one of the biggest questions we'll face in the modern era. There's Pakistanis, everybody else. It's not a trivial state. It's an important state. It's in a terrorist production line. It's got a lot of nuclear weapons. It's going to be in the world's third or fourth largest nuclear weapons state. So it can't afford to fail, comprehensively. I think that's the workable and able American satellites and American scholars to understand this better. I think it'll also be very important for Indians to read. At the recent Bellagio conference I had, many of us agreed that one of the key variables Pakistan's region will be the India-Pakistan relationship, because that's where the army looks. And India stirs the Pakistan army, and the Pakistan army stirs Pakistan. So if we're going to take it with variables, if we're going to make a change in policy, how Pakistan negotiates with India is critically important to us. Let me stop there. Thanks. Thanks, Steve. Brief and crisp as always. Let me ask the authors again if they have any directions to what has been said before we open up. I didn't want to comment on some of the things that Akbar said. The idea of China, the idea of Pakistan, I think that one of the problems American diplomats face is an unfamiliarity with Pakistan. We find this situation, I think, getting worse now that Americans are ordinarily assigned posts in Pakistan for only a year. When they're there, they find themselves behind the walls of embassies or compounds. They have very little opportunity to find out very much about Pakistan. They don't have much time to learn about Pakistan before they go out. And it's hard, I think, for some to take very seriously their assignments there when these assignments are so truncated. This really gets to the broader question of getting to understand Pakistan and Pakistan culture. We hope that our book makes a contribution in that regard. But in the final analysis, it's very important that we have people on the ground who can establish those important personal relationships on which US-Pakistani negotiations are possible. We'll open it up for questions. There are mics on both sides of the room. So if you could just walk up and introduce yourself before asking a question. May I just state the advantage of sitting here before I ask the floor and just raise two questions if there are any responses. One provocative and one not so much. The not so much part is this question you'd mentioned Raymond Davis and this issue on how that was negotiated. Pakistan has gone through a transformation in one area at least, which is the media and the importance of public opinion. Whether it's artificially inflated or not. Are we seeing a paradigm shift now whereby you know the prime ministers and the presidents of Pakistan can no longer deliver even if they want to. Traditionally, I think that the book also makes this point and negotiations take place between governments and Pakistanis have a way to negotiate. What about now when it seems as if governments simply cannot push public opinion beyond the point. The second point I had was I often wonder how much the narratives that are set about different countries. Pakistan certainly being one with a very hard narrative in this town. Matter to American diplomats when they negotiate with these countries. Diplomats are also individuals taking some context out of where they belong. So if Washington, the public sphere think tanks set a certain narrative about particular countries, right or wrong. How much does that impact when diplomats actually go out and negotiate on the other side? Okay, let me start with your first question on the media. I think that the two recent incidents shed some light on your question. One was the uproar in Pakistan over the Kerry-Lugar bill, which as you recall was supposed to provide a billion and a half in economic assistance to Pakistan every year for the next five years, but which sparked a tremendous outcry because buried in the congressional fine print of which the Pakistani government was perfectly well aware as the legislation was being drafted were some provisions that angered the army, including a reference to the U.S. government needing to report to Congress on what was happening by way of civilian control of the military. The second example was the Davis case. In both cases, the uproar in public opinion and in the media really boxed in the government. Does this mean prime ministers and presidents can no longer deliver? Not necessarily, but you have actually in both of those cases a civilian government that was widely regarded as weak, a situation that infuriated the army, and that had all of the ingredients, particularly the Davis case, to infuriate a lot of people in the arena of public opinion. I don't mean to suggest that the reports, particularly in the Davis case, were created by the army, but they certainly, the claims were certainly fanned by the army. And in the case of the Kerry-Lugar bill, I think there was an even stronger army role because I don't see that as having generated the same spontaneous outrage. So when you have the media available for amplification, and when it is a mostly free media that's available for the army to amplify, it becomes very difficult for a weak civilian government to prevail against the wishes of the military. But notice that in both of those cases, once a decision was made that included both the civilians and the military, the media quieted down, and so apparently did public opinion. It took a few more, I mean there was some some unrest after Davis was released, it didn't last terribly long. It wasn't terribly large-scale. Do you want to tackle the question of how conventional wisdom affects how the U.S. negotiates with Pakistan? Oh yeah, I think conventional wisdom certainly affects the way the United States negotiates with anyone. But the conventional wisdom with regard to Pakistan, I think, is in a constant state of change. That is, Pakistan is constantly on the front pages. You can't avoid learning about Pakistan. You can't avoid coming to conclusions about Pakistan. And surely this has got to affect American diplomats and the way they deal with the issue. I think this has been true particularly at times of crises. Pakistan appearing on the front pages being very much in the forefront of the news has got to have affected the way they deal with it. I'd make one other point. The easiest thing for a U.S. government official to do is to focus entirely on the world inside of government. The good ones, the energetic ones, look outside and talk to other people. But I would say the narratives that matter most are those that have roots inside the U.S. government. They may also have echoes outside. And there are really two competing narratives about Pakistan. There's the Pakistan is an essential ally in trouble. It's doing its best narrative. And there's the Pakistan can't be trusted narrative. And these alternate for prominence depending on what's happened in the past few months. Those that were doing the negotiating are probably trying to make the first narrative dominate because they're trying to achieve something. Thank you. Tom Lynch from the National Defense University. Thank you ambassadors. I look forward to reading the entire book. I had a question for you, though, that perhaps extends a bit of your research, but I think is a powerfully important right now is as you just said, Tessie, this competition in this town for the narrative over, you know, which Pakistan is we're dealing with continues to play out. And that is how in your research and your work and time and country have you found the Pakistan needs to take a different negotiating tact with respect to two other countries, one, the British. And how does that contrast with the Americans? And second, with the Chinese, who they refer to as their all weather friend. And here I think the importance for us and the Americans in thinking through where Pakistan is and where it's headed is perhaps most important with the latter. So I'd ask you to take that one on. But I ask you to take it on in the context of some limited work that I'm doing right now indicates that, you know, President Zidari has traveled seven times to China since he came into power less than two and a half years ago is due to travel again. And this has been declared the year of Pakistani China friendship in Pakistan. And the extensive interactions between the Pakistani military and Chinese military, which have gone on for decades, are, if anything, as robust if not accelerating. So I'd appreciate your thoughts on whether or not there is a contrast there and to what extent that may be significant in terms of us pursuing negotiations going forward. Thank you. Well, there certainly is a contrast between the way Pakistan deals with the United States and the way Pakistan deals with China. China is seen as Pakistan's enduring friend. They speak for the Pakistanis during an all weather alliance. Pakistanis welcome Chinese, the difference between Chinese willingness to let them have their own domestic political world and the tendency of the United States to intervene or at least to comment. It seems to me that over the years, Pakistan has been far more willing to allow the Chinese to in a way get away with policies which have been pursued by the United States or have been the subject of considerable criticism. One example of that is the shift in the Chinese position on Kashmir, which had originally been a four square support for Pakistan, and now takes a line which is not that far removed from ours that India and Pakistan should settle the problem bilaterally and peacefully. One interesting aspect is that the Pakistanis are prepared to heed of the Chinese when the Chinese do have something to say about developments in Pakistan. I think the best example of that came at the time of the Red Mosque incident in Islamabad, when Islamic extremists attacked Chinese citizens in Islamabad and the Chinese promptly got in touch with the Pakistanis to protest in a far more effective way than I think we could have under similar circumstances. In any event, this was I think one of the developments which led General Musharraf to attack the mosque. But by and large, over the years, the Pakistanis have looked to the Chinese support and, as I tried to say, have been willing to cut the Chinese far more slack than without us. I would add two thoughts. First of all, with the Chinese Pakistan, as far as we can determine, doesn't play hardball. But also, the negotiations with China are carried out with the utmost discretion, even when the last year he went to China during the Kargil crisis, six-day visit, lots of delicious dinners. When he left after a day and a half raising a lot of eye grounds, there was nothing in the joint communique that screamed a problem. There was a rather bland reference to the line of control, but it didn't have any imperative verbs attached to it. So the Chinese style with Pakistan makes it a lot easier to bury problems, and of course that's reinforced by the relatively close Chinese society. You asked about Britain. Frankly, the relationship with Britain no longer is critical to Pakistan's international posture. Britain is not one of the big outside balancers, so that most of the negotiations they carry out with Britain are likely to have to do either with immigration or with trade. We didn't do the interviewing that would give us a basis for answering a year-specific question, but I think you have a contrast between two relationships that are intensely important and one that is considerably less so. Hi, my name is Nadia Shah. I'm a graduate student from American University and I had a question that's kind of similar to Moeids. I was wondering, have you seen the negotiation tactics change or intensify with the introduction and rise of independent media in Pakistan? Very good question. What's happened, I think, is that a lot of things which might not have been carried out in public now are, and that definitely complicates life that does so in any diplomatic undertaking. It hasn't yet had a major impact on how Pakistani negotiators deal with the international media, but it has meant that they're very conscious of their own media environment. And again, if you have a civilian government that is weak and that is widely perceived as playing second fiddle to the army, they're going to be very gun-shy about their own media environment. Let me add to that that Pakistani diplomats make use of this much freer media in arguing points. That is able to say, how can we do this, we might have to do this, but how can we do this given that editorial appeared yesterday and not while you walked. It's a useful diplomatic tool, which I must say was certainly not available to the Pakistanis when we served in Pakistan a long time ago and when there was no free media to speak of. I'm Seth Oldenmickson. I write the blog AmericansforPakistan.com, and I'd kind of like to continue on this discussion of media and narratives and public diplomacy. But I want to ask, yesterday, Huma Yusuf spoke at the Woodrow Wilson Center on Pakistan's media and something that came up at the very end that I thought was very interesting was she observed that the U.S. does not really have Urdu speakers in Pakistan available for media discussions. And so in the Pakistani media, you have a lot of this sort of one-sided discussion. And especially in taking the recent example of the Raymond Davis case and the way that the public opinion was able to box in the government to a certain position, I'm wondering what impact public diplomacy has on the ability for high-level negotiators to negotiate positions openly. I was at Huma's talk yesterday, so I will take that one. Let me talk first about the language issue. We both learned, we both converse fairly easily. I would observe that it's a long step from easy conversation to easy interviewing. I mean, I could probably do an interview in Urdu, but only if I spent two days really boning up on what exactly I wanted to say and thinking about terms of phrase that were professionally satisfying, as opposed to the relatively sloppy language that gets you past a congressional, i.e., a conversational situation. I don't think the U.S. has a whole lot of people in the foreign service whose Urdu is at that level. It's got, I mean, with short tours in Pakistan and with security restrictions, it probably has relatively few people who can reach our level of Urdu. I think that is a disadvantage. I think it would be an advantage to the United States to be able to field more American-looking faces, American officials who can articulate a policy position in Urdu, but I'm not sure it would really revolutionize things. What I'm thinking of is the experience we had a couple of years ago when we agreed to do an interview in English for one of the new TV channels. The style of interviewing is to ask nasty, nasty questions. They aren't necessarily difficult questions, especially if you're working in your mother time, but they are designed to constantly put the interviewee on the defensive and to make the interviewee look bad and inept. And so consequently, I think, I mean, I would have to really think about how much additional exposure to that style of interviewing would really benefit the United States. I think you would want to have perhaps some of it, but you'd also want, as long as you're trying to get into the electronic media game, you want to think about whether the setting is such that your words have a fighting chance of being heard. This interviewer started off his interview. This was, what, three years ago, two years ago? Two years. Two years ago, by saying, well, why doesn't the United States just leave Pakistan alone and go away? And we said, well, is that really what you want? But all of the questions were of that sort. And whatever you say is probably not going to sound like you've hit one out of the park. Yes, that was not a very happy experience for us. Because after that first question, it went on me down here. But we ended up saying a few words with personal words. And I think that still can have a beneficial effect to know that Americans care enough about Pakistan as a culture, as a people, to make some effort to learn the national language. A very difficult moment to do that. Tasi has mentioned these very short tours of duty. Who is going to learn Urdu for a year and then just to serve a year in Pakistan? Who is prepared to train someone in Urdu for a year and then for that policy to serve only a year at the embassy or consulate. But I think that we need, more broadly, to look at the whole question of assignments. We're trying to find some way, typical as it may be, to have longer assignments and full offices, at least a few of them, to be in the Urdu language. I do think both of you are being quite harsh on your Urdu skills, knowing how well you speak Urdu. I think that this is a whole problem. I think what Mr. Davis has his movie will find out whether he speaks Urdu or not. I suspect he didn't know any language, maybe even English, and was there to try to verify our suspicions about what Pakistan was up to. But again, the lack of transparency in Pakistan forced the American government, I think, to send people like Davis over there. They're like, well, swatter people. And mentally in Pakistan, he's a society who want to kill somebody or several people. But I'm sure he had no language skills whatsoever. There's certainly a very funny clip. Yes, there's certainly a very funny clip on YouTube of him being investigated first time by the police where he seems to have absolutely no clue because they keep on speaking in Urdu. I'm very Jacob's, I've known Ambassador Schaefer, particularly Tessie for some time. And I know Steve since I was public affairs officer at the American Embassy in New Delhi from 1985 to 1988. My question is Ambassador Howard Schaefer, in dealing with or in defining the underlying premises for much of Pakistan's view of the United States, how strong is the belief that when push comes to shove, the United States prefers India and always will. And I must say I had 12 years with the American Jewish Committee where I worked closely with the Indian American lobby in the Congress and others. And I suspect that they're right, if that is their underlying belief. And I would only add in the Chinese changing their position on Kashmir, how much of that do you think is because they're interested in economic relations with India, which kind of proves the point? I think that concern about US sympathy for India and its being a cause for the United States to treat Pakistan harshly has grown a great deal over the years. I think it's been particularly acute since the end of the Cold War when we have made such advances in our relationship with India. But it's always been a problem. I think it's a more acute problem now. And I think that the great fear on the part of Pakistan is that we will shift to a robust relationship with India. And that will inevitably have a deleterious impact on our relations with Pakistan. But I don't see it looking back as the pattern in Pakistan's concern. I think more broadly it's just been a question of the United States no longer needing Pakistan, dumping Pakistan, discarding Pakistan as some Pakistanis have put it to be like a used Kleenex. The India aspect becomes more important in recent years. Let me talk about that. The China position on Kashmir is actually a little bit more complicated. How we said that China had moved away from a position of stout support for Pakistan on Kashmir and towards a more even-handed position, they subsequently didn't express a change in their Kashmir policy but began making life difficult for India in ways that touched on Kashmir, for example, by refusing to issue Chinese visas to residents of Kashmir in their passports and insisting on doing it separately on a separate piece of paper. Moreover, there have been a number of other things which have made the strategic rivalry between India and China brought it much closer to the surface in recent years. So I think that what's happening is that China's economic relationship with India matters more than did, but China is also playing both to India's great discomfiture. So I don't think that the Pakistanis are likely to be very discomfited by that, but I can assure you that if they were, Americans would be the last to hear about it from them. Now, I talked to Pakistan Army friends before, during and after the U.S. opening to India, and that opening, which I supported, persuaded them, proved to them that we were relying with India against Pakistan. So from their perspective, China is a natural ally. China provided them with nuclear technology, military technology of all sorts, so their distrust of the U.S. is actually a good grounding. And on our side, we're unable to see either the Bush administration or this administration. That's South Asia, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are integrated strategically, and you can't treat them if you don't develop strategic plans for them. My bureaucracies, which have different bodies, are part of our problem of seeing the region strategically as an organizational hang-ups in the division. Zahra Zaman, Voice of America. My question is, you have covered the themes of how Pakistan negotiates with the U.S., but do you feel there is any understanding on both sides, Islamabad and Washington, about how the two negotiate with each other, and has there been any evolution in their tactics to better respond to the other side in terms of getting better results or at least having more effective negotiation? What we've tried to look at is the characteristics that have endured over a long period of time. And I think that, as we've described in the book, there is a very strong common element that has been around with minor modifications for 50, 60 years. Now, have things evolved over time? Absolutely. The circumstances change. You've had civilian governments and you've had military governments. You've had periods when the kind of the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy was right in Pakistan's neighborhood and other periods when it wasn't. And this affects how both sides manage the relationship. The biggest question I have about the evolving tactics for how Pakistan deals with the United States and vice versa, at this point I guess is twofold. First of all, what's going to happen to the agency-to-agency relationships in the wake of the issues that we discuss between the intelligence agencies that fall out from what you might call the aftershocks from the Davis case. Second and much more important is what is going to happen in Afghanistan. Now, I'm one of the many people who believe that Pakistan is fundamental and much more important than Afghanistan. But what is likely to drive the way both countries manage their relationship is the end game for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Pakistan is determined to be at the center of that negotiating process, something which has led to problems between Pakistan and the U.S. more than once already. Once U.S. troops leave, assuming that they do, which I do assume, whether or not the dates that have been talked about are an accurate reflection of that, then I think both countries are likely to recalibrate their relationship, particularly on the security side. And that's going to affect how they deal with each other. You will notice that we've said relatively little about negotiations that took place during the periods when all Pakistan and the U.S. were estranged. And the one major exception to that was our discussion of the unsuccessful U.S. effort to persuade Nawaz Sharif's government not to test a nuclear weapon after India had done so. I think that would probably have been an unsuccessful effort, no matter how you rearrange things. But certainly 1998, eight years after the United States cut off all military ties and all economic assistance, the U.S. relationship didn't really have enough in hand nor did the U.S. team offer enough to even think about dissuading Pakistan from that kind of a decision. So that if you have a serious estrangement, that's going to affect what both sides expect to get out of the relationship. I think one interesting aspect now, in contrast to the other periods where we've had a close political, economic, and security relationship with Pakistan, is the absence of a strong personal relationship between Pakistani leaders and leaders of this country. Certainly Zia, Mousheh, and you had all consumed and very successfully, as I said, these close relationships. They don't exist now. We can talk about strategic dialogues. God knows American military and intelligence leaders move back and forth, but there isn't any longer, as far as I can see, that same connection at the top, which was such a distinguished characteristic of the periods when our relationship with Pakistan flourished. And that's a very important point. If you're looking at the civilian side, the two candidates for building that kind of a relationship would be President Zardari, who has a kind of a problematic past. And Prime Minister Gilani, who is a lovely guy but whose first official visit to Washington after becoming Prime Minister, was a disaster, because he didn't seem to have very much to say, and he therefore made the idea of civilian Prime Minister, has a lot of residents in Washington, but this particular guy didn't get the same kind of residence, partly because he was badly advised on how to structure his trip, but partly because he's a player from a different kind of stage. He's more of a district politician. My name is Dick Rosen. I'm with the Council for a Community of Democracies. And my question is prompted by what was said about the tradition of Jinnah in Pakistan's culture and values. And it occurs to me that the common interest in democracy and the role that it has in playing an element of building commonality between the two countries would obviously be a very important factor in negotiations between the two countries. And so I would like to know what role that has or has not played and why it has or has not in our negotiations with the Pakistani. Let me also take this question and then I'll give the three panelists the last one. Realize we have to leave. I wonder if you could maybe Tizi say whether you, to what extent would it be useful and to what extent would it be counterproductive if the U.S. in effect put out clearly its interests in Pakistan. What are, what is it, for example, with respect to India, that it's clearly not going to abandon India for Pakistan, that on nuclear issues, on Afghanistan, et cetera, would that be helpful or would that undermine, because of the culture, history, et cetera, et cetera, would that undermine our ability to make deals with leadership? On the community of democracy question, the idea of democracy and of democracy in Pakistan is important to everybody. And I would include in this the Pakistan military. Although if things get bad enough in Pakistan, I don't think the military would refrain from coming in to clean things up as they would see it. But I'm not sure how far it takes you. Should we, clearly, and I assume, Jerry, you mean publicly, spell out what U.S. interests are in Pakistan and where India and Pakistan fit into the U.S. scheme of things? We had in a sense addressed for that an unintended one when President George W. Bush went to Islamabad while the U.S. was working out the nuclear deal with India, and somebody from the press asked him, what about a similar deal for us? And he gave a textbook answer, which is India and Pakistan have independent relations with us. They each have their own history, so we're basically not going to go that route with Pakistan. And this was an incredible downer. I don't think he said anything that his audience didn't know, but having it spilled out right there in front of everybody was an incredible downer. I think you can seriously ask whether we should have a more candid conversation with Pakistan in private. I don't see much value in doing it in public. And in private, it becomes valuable only if the United States is thinking about a more direct diplomatic involvement between India and Pakistan, which at the moment it is not. And the question, of course, arises with whom will you have that conversation at a time when quite clearly the military call the shots on India and Pakistan relations? In that connection, I'm connected with the question about democracy. I think it's important for the United States to do what it can to foster stronger civilian political institutions in Pakistan. We talk a lot about, but we've got to play a better game, I think, than we do. There's always a tendency when we need something in Pakistan to look to the military. The military help what we Americans admire as a can-do attitude. They get things done in contrast to the civilian side. We saw that most recently at the time of the of the floods last year. We have got to restrain ourselves from being too egregiously dependent, visibly dependent on the military and pay greater public attention to the civilian side. However much we may not attire the kind of leadership that they are providing Pakistan. Steve, I promised you would have the last word. Just one sentence or two sentences about democracy. Jinnah's idea of Pakistan was about minority protection. It was not about democracy. The Muslim League forced a immigration of Pakistan because democracy worked against Muslims in India as they saw it. That is, there were always going to be two or three Hindus for being Muslim. So democracy was not embedded in the leadership's calculation of what's good in the world. Whereas we assume that one man will vote it. One vote is a good thing. But Pakistanis don't come out of that tradition. Of course, they come out of a tradition of the Raj government which has been taken over by the military. The military favored democracy, but a democracy which is sufficient that leaves the military alone. I talked to Kiani a couple months ago. I said, you know, your dilemma is that you can't run the country. He agreed to that, but you won't let anybody else run it either. So that's where Pakistan is. It's not between a military which knows it cannot run Pakistan, or certainly cannot run Pakistan in the modern world, whether it has trouble letting what they regard sometimes correctly as incompetent civilians around the state. I talked to Moshad right after he was killed when I said, what you really should do is allow the system to let democracy function. Let people judge. Let people shall judge. You know, when they're bad guys, let people throw them up. Don't you know? He said, no, no, we're going to fix these jammies once and for all. I knew that was the end of his research. Steve, thank you. Thanks again to the ambassadors and Steve for a very, very interesting and elaborate discussion. Again, I would remind all of you that there are books outside for sale. Please join me in thanking the panelists once again.