ARSHAD MOHAMMED:

Absolutely. There are two ways to look at this. On the one hand, the direction or the general direction of American policy had been clear at least since August. In August, President Trump gave a speech he made abundantly clear that he was going to get tougher on Pakistan and that he wanted Pakistan to do more to fight the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani group. So the general direction of a harder line was was obvious. On the other hand, you know the New Years Day tweet, stunned people across the agencies in the United States and you're right, it included you know DOD,the State Department, the intelligence community. There had been a longer timeline expected on this decision. We were told that an assessment of Pakistani compliance with American demands that they crack down on the militants was expected to be completed in January or February and that a full kind of policy rollout if they were going to cut the aid wasn't expected until March or April. What ultimately happened was basically, you had a bunch of officials who ended up having to work on their New Year's Day holiday and in four days come up with a with a policy to suspend aid. But the most telling detail for me was that Thursday night at the State Department to State Department officials briefed us and they were unable to say how much aid was actually going to get suspended. That is completely atypical. And a couple of officials told us that as of Thursday night, January 4th, the State Department didn't have a National Security Council decision memo. Normally that's a memo that's written that lays everything out in precise detail what's going to happen when and it's all sort of tied up in a bow. And as of Thursday night they were still waiting for that memo that shows that's the clearest indication of how surprised, caught off guard and unprepared the broader Washington bureaucracy was for the president's tweet.