WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- There is an elephant in the room of the relationship between the United States and Pakistan, which senior U.S. officials have up until now politely avoided mentioning in public. But last week, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte broke that silence.
Al-Qaida's core elements," he told a hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, "continue to plot attacks against our homeland ... from their leaders' secure hideout in Pakistan."
There. He said it. "Secure hideout in Pakistan."
Informed opinion, including that of U.S. intelligence analysts, has long been in consensus that al-Qaida's top leadership, including Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, are probably hiding in the mountainous and lawless tribal areas of Pakistan.
This thin strip of land along the Afghan border is divided into seven so-called agencies, governed, in theory at least, by traditional leaders -- tribal elders and senior Islamic clerics -- who subscribe to ancient and fiercely defended codes of loyalty to guests. It also includes some of the most inaccessible terrain on the face of the earth.
There have been at least two efforts to kill senior al-Qaida leaders in the area, home to a clan that Zawahiri married into, since the Pakistan government began inking a series of peace deals with local leaders, effectively confining the national military in the area to barracks last year, and handing security to tribal militias, seen as in league with or in thrall to Taliban extremists fighting U.S. and NATO troops across the border in Afghanistan.
But in public at any rate, senior U.S. officials have always maintained the polite fiction that bin Laden is "somewhere in the border region;" and have averred, with ever-ebbing credibility as the evidence to the contrary mounts up, that "the jury is still out" on the disastrous results of the Pakistani peace strategy in the tribal areas, which has led to a tripling of cross border attacks and created a sanctuary that, as Negroponte said (another first), is being used to hatch plots against the United States.
Nonetheless, Negroponte continued to echo the praise that U.S. officials have repeatedly heaped on Pakistan's cooperation with their war on terror, which has made President Pervez Musharraf the kind of top ally who is allowed to use a high-profile meeting with President Bush as an opportunity to plug his best-selling memoir.
But now, it seems, the silence about the elephant has at last been broken by Negroponte, who will shortly be deputy secretary of state. That is a very good thing. The troubled relationship between the United States and Pakistan, especially on counter-terrorism, needs a shot of honesty in the arm.
"A large part of the challenge (U.S. policy-makers face) in dealing with Pakistan is penetrating the curtain of denial," said Husain Haqqani, director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University, and a former senior advisor to three Pakistani prime ministers.
The Pakistani government "sees the issue as a (public relations) problem," said Haqqani.
Pakistani officials have long denied that al-Qaida leaders are hiding in the tribal areas. But then, they have long denied that elements within the notorious Inter-Services Intelligence are providing aid and comfort to Kashmiri groups involved in terror attacks in India. And they brazenly misrepresented the so-called peace deals, which were actually signed with local Taliban, and which have helped cement the extremists' infiltration and control of the previously traditional power structures through which the tribal areas' centuries-old system of self-governance used to work.
"The truth is that if any of these (al-Qaida leaders) or other individuals are in our territory, we will go after them, and we have no information (on their whereabouts)," Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told CNN. "If Pakistan had any knowledge, directly or indirectly, that they are in our territory -- which we don't think is the case -- we would go after them," he concluded, adding, "The fact is, nobody knows where they are."
Until now, that kind of brazen denial has enjoyed a certain degree of political and diplomatic cover from the coy refusal of U.S. officials to acknowledge the elephant in public.
But if Negroponte's comments really are to herald a new, more honest, phase in U.S.-Pakistan relations, it will be necessary not just to point at the elephant, but to do something about it.
And here the all-too resistible force of U.S policy-making comes up against the immovable object of figuring out where exactly the dividing line is between will and capacity in terms of Pakistan's failure to act against terrorist leaders and their sanctuaries -- and how to move it.
Since Negroponte's remarks, more than 100 hundred Taliban fighters were killed when they were pinned down in Afghanistan by NATO forces after crossing the border, and a senior Taliban official was arrested by the Afghanis as he crossed from Pakistan.
Both might well have been the result of tips from Pakistani intelligence. And the Pakistani military themselves used helicopter-launched rockets in an attack this week on a compound in the tribal areas, which they said was home to extremist fighters.
"U.S. policy makers would always rather see the glass half-full," said Haqqani, which is exactly what makes it possible for Pakistan to temporize responses to occasional spasms of interest or demand from Washington.
"Their thinking is, 'What do we have to give the Americans now to keep them from pointing at the elephant?'" said Haqqani. "It is short-term, tactical. There will be minimal policy change, minimal strategic change."
"Negroponte's comments were the threat of a stick," said Haqqani, but he added that the carrot was already visible, in the form of recent comments in Karachi by departing U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker.
A report in Pakistan's The News quoted Crocker, who will soon leave Islamabad to become ambassador to Iraq, as saying that democracy was Pakistan's "home ground affair" and there would be no U.S. interference on the question. "It is up to you to decide about the system of governance and democracy," the paper quoted the U.S. envoy as saying.
State Department officials could not be reached over the holiday weekend for comment on this story, but Crocker's remarks were widely interpreted in Pakistan as signaling that the United States would not object to Musharraf's winning election for himself to another term as president, while remaining head of the military.
"Musharraf continues to be criticized for remaining both the President and Chief of Army Staff," Negroponte told senators, "But there are no political leaders inside the country able to challenge his continued leadership."
And that in a nutshell, is the way U.S. officials see their dilemma: Musharraf's government has so far proved incapable of, or at some level unwilling to, close the sanctuaries. But there is no alternative to him.
Negroponte is a shrewd operator with a lot of experience dealing with U.S. allies in Latin America trying to manage Washington's perception of their counter-insurgency efforts.
He will need everything he can bring to the table if he is going to actually do something about the elephant.
