Pak-US relations
The writer is the director of Islamabad Policy Research Institute. He can be reached at rwjanj@hotmail.com
Pak-US relations were born out of a transactional necessity. It was this logic that defined their engagement on four occasions despite regular estrangements on account of geo-political differences. In the 60s, it was the Cold War confrontation that kept both countries together, with the US using Pakistan as an anti-communist outpost while Pakistan extracted rents in terms of military and economic aid in order to build up its military and economic sinews against an implacable foe on Eastern frontiers. In the 70s, Pakistan helped the US reach out to China while the US helped Pakistan tide over the post 1971 difficulties. The 80s featured a US-Pakistan anti-Soviet alliance, generously bankrolled by the US, that helped the country build its military and strategic capability despite the gory consequences of a destabilised and militarised FATA region. With the start of the 21st century, it was again Afghanistan that tangled both estranged allies into a counter terrorism alliance, which was finally shelved under Donald Trump.
The Biden administration inherited the aborted alliance and went on to implement his long thought of Afghanistan strategy of abandoning nation building projects and bringing US troops home. He had studiously adhered to that policy ever since his days as Vice President in the Obama administration — a fact vouchsafed by Obama himself in his autobiography A Promised Land. Some with hindsight knowledge consider the US withdrawal hasty and unplanned that led to rapid capitulation of Ashraf Ghani’s government, paving way for a complete domination of the state apparatus by the Taliban. Pakistan had played a very important role in the Doha Agreement but was not given due credit for its mediatory and facilitative role. The snarky epithets being used for Pakistan after US withdrawal by some US analysts echoed US scholar Adam Weinstein’s views about the US’s favourite psychological coping mechanism of scapegoating Pakistan after policy failure in Afghanistan.
The US withdrawal with celerity from Afghanistan betokens a long-preferred penchant for statecraft in place of a grand strategy. It is this fixation with statecraft, which prefers ‘sensing, adjusting, exploiting, and doing’ instead of ‘planning and theorizing’ as per a grand strategy, that Eliot Cohen regards the new normal for US’s policy direction while dealing with crises. The ability to deal with global and regional crises needs a nimble foreign policy approach and an agile military strategy which the US has employed with dexterity in the present Russo-Ukraine conflict. The same however was absent while exiting Afghanistan. The withdrawal was justified on the grounds that the center of gravity of US strategic interests had shifted from South Asia to East Asia and the Indo-Pacific region.
US scholars like Daniel Markey believe that the US failure in Afghanistan also reflects the failure in the US’s approach towards Pakistan, which has remained too munificent in the past. He recommends a more nuanced approach wherein instead of all-or-none the US-Pak relations should be based on a narrow set of interests reflecting Eliot Cohen’s statecraft approach as against George Kennan’s grand strategy approach to use alliances against rival ideologies. The US administration at present is too consumed with Russo-Ukraine conflict to grapple with the question of the right balance between Kennan and Cohen’s approach. It does not really know whether to go for partial engagement or complete detachment leaving the stratus of the Afghan conflict to be swept by regional countries.
Should the US leave South Asia to its regional surrogate India to keep China and Pakistan engaged in a destabilissing Cold War or should it engage selectively with Pakistan and Afghanistan to serve its residual interests in the region? The above question needs to be answered by US foreign policy mandarins before the vacuum is filled by another competitor. Are US foreign policy interests in Afghanistan merely related to humanitarian assistance and counter terrorism surveillance? A deeper analysis of the US foreign policy interests in Afghanistan and South Asia would reveal that the US would never desire filling the vacuum left by its withdrawal from Afghanistan by China. Similarly, the US would never desire the region to fall to Chinese economic diplomacy.
The US’s desire to keep Iranian and Chinese ambitions in check cannot be achieved by a containment strategy — through India’s economic and military muscle — alone for two reasons. One is the Indian capacity deficit to sustain ‘managed chaos’ in the region; and the second relates to a new wind of geo-economics blowing in the region. Pakistan, China, Central Asian states and even India have slowly come to realise the economic potential of connectivity and trade, which is only possible through sustained peace and partnerships. Under such an emerging environment, should the US come forward and embrace Eliot Cohen’s statecraft model or follow Kennan’s grand strategy of containment. The logic of change ushered in by technology demands a statecraft model of engagement.
Pakistan and the US can cooperate in the fields of education, climate threat mitigation, food security, power sector development, and Information Technology. An East West Economic Corridor (EWEC) linking India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asian states to complement CPEC could give enough leverage to the US to maintain its presence in the region to achieve its strategic interests. This corridor could be financed by public-private partnerships enhancing US investment manifold and creating permanent stakes in the regional economy. America-Pakistan Educational Corridor (APEC) is another idea that has been mooted in the past by the name of US-Pakistan Knowledge Corridor. This would give the US a strategic clout disproportionate to its investment.
Since the US is the biggest destination for Pakistani exports, bilateral trade is another area where Pakistan could be bound in a strategic embrace through sheer force of economics. The above win-win formula however needs Wilsonian idealism wedded into Cohen’s agile statecraft to succeed. Any takers in the US?
Published in The Express Tribune, July 18th, 2022.
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