Pak-US equation and dynamics

A Pakistani scholar at an American think-tank recently penned a laudable piece on Pak-US relations for the NYT. Madiha Afzal is a graduate of US schools and a fellow at a prestigious Washington institute. The piece is as good as it can get. So, kudos to her. Except that it is patently written for and addressed to the policy elites in Washington. It looks at this complex dyad with an American eye and works its way into suggesting a modified approach replacing the G2M (Government to Military) — preferred US approach as perceived by the author — with a G2G (Government to Government) or civil-civil construct. Inalienably such a course imputes a separation between the Pakistani military and the civilian government which is neither helpful nor realistic. Even if unintended it infuses a misplaced nuance to what is essentially a domestic dynamic.

The piece in many ways complemented an announcement in Islamabad of a National Security Policy which placed at its heart geo-economics, the current fad word. The policy brings the non-traditional security aspects of our nationhood into governmental focus and for the first time places into equal measure the security of the state and the security of the people in a government document. It can help a government reorient its policy priorities and determine its budget outlays along those lines. Clearly it will depend upon a government’s spare fiscal capacity beyond repayment of debt, retaining an optimal defensive capability against multifarious internal and external threats, and running a government. Usually it spares only a modest outlay for routine development with current revenues. It was thus that Afzal suggests the US plugging into this dire need of Pakistan and look beyond the military-alone aspects of her relationship with Pakistan.

Clearly, the piece also nudges the US to outmanoeuvre China from her singular hold in Pakistan by making its economic presence felt through economic engagement that China has so adroitly leveraged in a Pakistan desperate for economic oxygen. Just as the US, China also has a significant defence relationship with Pakistan but of late she has diversified and broadened her arc of engagement to include economic planks in fulfillment of her global political and economic goals. The US may not fall for such a premise simply because it must too move along her own global and regional blueprint of interests. It would be a fallacy to assume that anything less drives American disposition; certainly not an assumed and misplaced acrimony bordering on enmity which Pakistani popular opinion tends to characterise with American distancing from the region. We as people are easy victims of a zero-sum mindset.

So then what is the rational and practical approach to this phase in the Pak-US relationship? Clearly the US wanted out of Afghanistan not because it could not spare a few billion a month to support its presence if it wanted to. But it essentially was a re-tweaking of American needs which weren’t being served by continuous presence. Hence, it called curtains. It though reflects that whatever were the conceived goals in Afghanistan were now no more. It also meant that any dream of an economic sub-block of this region composed of Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan did not enthuse the US much. China on the other hand finds such a development, were it to eventuate, of benefit though she will save her money and mirth for later when the promise is realised.

China has its own direct access to parts of Central Asia through Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and will not unnecessarily irk Russian sensitivity by expanding its interest unduly across the remaining Central Asia. But if other countries like Pakistan can create a nexus in the region China would have no qualms milking off it. CPEC may then develop some laterals. If not, China continues to meets its strategic need of connecting its western regions with a shorter route through Gwadar for trade and economic support. Oil and gas from Iran and minerals and metals from Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Balochistan can doubly benefit China. These are all matters of additional convenience if economic activity can gain such resurgence along CPEC and its tributaries. But to label China for grander illusions than its essential needs is misplaced as well as misleading. In its existing geo-strategic construct none is willing to invest in the region till the flux settles.

The US is thus an improbable partner to the region — even in competition with China. If an opportunity presents itself to spoil China’s progress the US can be a willing patron but to say that she may invest here to carve a space in pursuit of some ideational chimera is quite unlike the US. Their larger interests lie elsewhere. The role the US has for India is of a diversion of Chinese military and strategic effort. India is unlikely to enter war with China just because the US wants it to but will be the feint at the right price. Nor does one nuclear power act as a lackey for another — especially India, Pakistan, China and the US engaged in this modern version of Checkers in South Asia. India as a convenient prop only serves to divide China’s response along two axes — Tibet and Taiwan. What is currently happening on the western and northern extremities of India is China’s deterring response to the Indo-US feint. Call it a preemptive disabling of a possible threatening posture by India in the south to gain a most essential freedom to focus only where it matters.

So what about Pakistan and the US? There shan’t be much to gain from the US in the short-term because she has little interest here. Even Afghanistan is now reduced to a pro forma mention only. If someone offers an implicit gain so be it but the US isn’t expending its energies in a lost cause. Which really means that any amount of imploring to widen the base of engagement with Pakistan will only return a blank. Even a persuasion in the name of democratic and liberal ideals to relegate the military with a civil-civil plank alone in the relationship is unlikely to cut much ice. The two nations will thus have the freedom to focus elsewhere more critical to them in the interregnum. Would that mean that the US is a friend no more and by some extension an enemy or a friend of the enemy? That will really depend on how Pakistan will like to phrase the relationship. Benign distancing is far better than an agitated and inflamed tryst turning into unnecessary acrimony. We would have then caused one when none existed.

A nation of some 250 million in popular estimates and a nuclear power to boot isn’t a secondary player nor should it reduce itself to such a denomination in search for more popular allies or be seen to play a keen lackey. Zero-sum alternatives are a losing proposition in a world that has long changed its paradigm of engagement with each other. The US is a need-based patron/client. It is for us to exercise our independence from big-power enslavement.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 7^th, 2022.

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