Fareed Zakaria makes some excellent points regarding Pakistan in this Washington Post op-ed. He argues, correctly, that the Pakistani military is up to its old tricks:

Having been caught in a situation that suggests either complicity with al-Qaeda or gross incompetence—and the reality is probably a bit of both—it is furiously trying to change the subject. Senior generals angrily denounce America for entering the country. “It’s like a person, caught in bed with another man’s wife, who is indignant that someone entered his house,” one Pakistani scholar, who preferred not to be named for fear of repercussions, told me.

More than that, the Pakistani military is also once again manipulating and cowing the civilian government. “According to Pakistani sources,” Zakaria writes, “the speech that Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani gave at a recent news conference was drafted by the military. President Asif Ali Zardari continues to appease the military rather than confront the generals. Having come to power hoping to clip the military’s wings, Pakistan’s democratically elected government has been reduced to mouthing talking points written for it by the intelligence services.”

All of this analysis is crystal clear to anyone who is not on Pakistan’s payroll. The question is what to do about it. Zakaria argues that “the United States has considerable leverage with Islamabad,” because “the Pakistanis need American aid, arms and training to sustain their army.” Thus he believes the U.S. should condition its aid on major reforms including a “major national commission in Pakistan” to investigate the circumstances behind Osama bin Laden finding sanctuary in that country, the development and implementation of a “plan to go after the major untouched terror networks in Pakistan, such as the Haqqani faction, the Quetta Shura [Taliban], and Lashkar-i-Taiba,” and an increase in civilian control of the military.

But what if the Pakistanis pay lip service to these demands while continuing to play footsie with terrorists—as they have been doing since 9/11? What then? That is the hard question which Zakaria doesn’t grapple with. It is a question that I myself struggle with. Is the U.S. really prepared to cut off the Pakistanis? Ending aid has been tried that in the past. The Pressler Amendment in 1990 broke off U.S. aid to the Pakistani military in an attempt to pressure Pakistan to come clean about its nuclear program. Instead, Pakistan went fully nuclear and Islamists made greater inroads into the officer corps. It is now generally agreed that the Pressler approach was a disaster. It is doubtful that Congress will go down this road again especially at a time when the U.S. needs Pakistan’s cooperation on such issues as allowing supplies to move into Afghanistan and allowing drone strikes in its own territory.

So if not a total aid cut off, then what? Perhaps at least some of our aid—which, according to the Financial Times, has totaled more than $20 billion since 2001—should be conditioned on more progress on fighting terrorism and restoring civilian control. And that should be true civilian control, not the sham that exists today. As I have argued before, our current approach of unconditional support for Pakistan hasn’t worked and we need to try something else. But I am also cognizant of the risks of a new approach, as policymakers must be. There is no easy or obvious policy to take with a “frenemy”—a country like Pakistan that is neither friend nor enemy but somewhere in between (although closer to the latter than the former). It is truly the problem from hell.