Taking a harder look at #pakistan

Much of the nation was naturally focused on President Obama last week as he announced his drawdown schedule for U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

But the experts on the region were actually looking elsewhere — at Afghanistan's neighbor, the unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan, which has become an increasingly unfriendly and unreliable American ally.

Even after the 33,000-troop reduction in Afghanistan, there will still be 68,000 troops there. The question we have is why so many troops are still necessary.

There's an irony of a kind in discussing how much longer it will take to end the long, long war in Afghanistan. The al-Qaeda threat there has greatly diminished. And the present incarnation of the Afghan Taliban — for better or worse, and mostly worse — presents a regional problem more than a direct threat to the United States and our allies.

In a briefing to reporters before Obama's speech, a senior administration official said, "We don't see a transnational threat coming out of Afghanistan." The threat, he said, "has come from Pakistan."

It is no coincidence that Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan or that he had possible connections to some in the intelligence community there. It's also no coincidence that most high-level al-Qaeda targets are based in Pakistan.

In a Friday hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chairman John Kerry said Afghanistan is a "sideshow to the main event . . . next door." We're spending $113 billion on the Afghan sideshow this year and $2.8 billion on Pakistan. Even with the drawdown, we're set to spend $106 billion in Afghanistan next year.

If Pakistan is the main event, though, it doesn't make it any easier to figure out what to do there. Pakistan has, of course, been an important ally in fighting terrorists since 9/11, even as the Pakistani frontier next to Afghanistan has become the major source of Taliban supplies.

Pakistani military officials, meanwhile, complain they have lost 3,500 security personnel in fighting Islamic militants, but what they mostly hear from U.S. officials is that they're not doing enough.

In the aftermath of the Navy SEALs attack in Abbottabad, the relationship has grown even rockier. In fact, a Pew Research Poll found that 69 percent of Pakistanis see America as "more of an enemy" than a friend.

According to reports, Pakistan may no longer allow American drones to be launched against al-Qaeda from what is widely believed to be a secret base within Pakistan. This would be a serious setback, and the best replacement for that base would apparently be in Afghanistan.

That's why you can expect Americans will leave a significant force in Afghanistan — perhaps as many as 25,000 troops — even after 2014, at which point Barack Obama says most American combat troops should have left the country.

It's difficult to apply any direct lessons from Afghanistan to Pakistan, which isn't even the most dangerous problem in a region that also includes Iran. With the fighting in Libya and unrest throughout the area, it's hard to predict with anything like certainty what the region will look like even a year from now.

But what is increasingly difficult for the Obama administration to explain is why the Afghan sideshow remains the U.S. military's main event.