Editor's Note: The following is an edited excerpt from a transcript of Fareed Zakaria answering viewer questions online.
By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
The United States just announced that it is going to suspend $800 million of military aid to Pakistan. Once dialogue between Pakistan and the U.S. improves, the aid will resume.
Is this the right way to deal with Pakistan?
It’s hard to say. If you don’t engage with Pakistan - if you stop trying to modernize the society and help the military – the country has a tendency of moving toward its most fanatical elements.
In the 1990s, America abandoned Afghanistan and isolated the Pakistanis. Pakistan then banded up with the Taliban. The Taliban entered Afghanistan on Pakistani tanks. Once in power, the Taliban let Al Qaeda in.
You don’t want to do that again.
On the other hand, when you give Pakistan money, they still refuse to forswear their militant ties. Pakistan feels that these ties have been useful as bargaining chips with India, Afghanistan and the U.S.
Pakistan assumes the U.S. is going to be gone in a few years and it wants an insurance policy - militant groups.
Whenever people tell me the Obama Administration doesn’t have a good policy toward Pakistan, I say, “Given realities on the ground, you devise a better one. When you give Pakistan money, it doesn’t work. When you don’t give them money, it doesn’t work.”
Ultimately, I’m in favor of qualified, conditional engagement with Pakistan.
But I would try a lot harder than we currently are to build up the civilian forces inside Pakistan.
What you need in Pakistan is for the civilian conception of national interest to triumph. You need the people running Pakistan to say, “Our goal is not to play these pointless mind-games and strategic games with Afghanistan and India. Our goal is to raise the average income of the Pakistani. In order to do that we need peace and stability. We need to trade with India and Afghanistan. If we can do that, we will have bettered the lot of the Pakistani people."
But right now Pakistan has a totally military conception of national interest focused on maintaining “strategic depth” in Afghanistan and “keeping India on the defensive” - whatever all that means.
What you really need is a bunch of businessmen running Pakistan instead of a bunch of generals.
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