Reopening Nato supply routes

Debate over the subject will arouse a lot of passion, make it difficult for the ruling coalition to reopen the routes.

Defence Minister Ahmad Mukhtar has put his hand in the hornets nest by saying that “reopening of Nato supply routes after negotiating a better deal with the US was possible”. There is rage in the reaction of citizens to his statement on the internet, and the Difa-e-Pakistan Council is yet to launch its attack on him. No one, of course, took another look at an earlier Foreign Office indication that “the routes would be reopened once the parliament approves new terms of engagements with the US”. The ban was an act of forgivable rage after the November 26 American attack on the Salala checkpost that killed over two dozen Pakistani soldiers. Pakistan asked for an apology; the Americans offered only regrets. Then, an investigation by the US Army found that the attack was unintended and that Pakistan, too, was partially to blame. Finally, it came down to semantics: regrets don’t sound like an apology. Strangely, Washington too, abandoned its much vaunted ‘realism’ and stuck to its guns and did not ‘apologise’, which meant that Pakistan was spared the humiliation that comes from policies moulded by passion. Thereafter followed the even more damaging American accusation, via a leaked Nato report, that the ISI was fully in charge of guiding and helping the Afghan Taliban who were killing American and Nato soldiers in Afghanistan.

Defence Minister Mukhtar is showing ‘pragmatism’ in a national milieu drenched in passions. He says that Pakistan should get better terms and conditions following a review of its ties with America and should profit by the reopening of the routes. The Americans are going to leave but some residual presence of US-Nato forces is expected to continue, which means that the northern route through Russia and Central Asia will be used if we don’t budge. Islamabad is obviously scared and Interior Minister Rehman Malik has immediately forestalled the barrage of condemnation expected from the opposition by saying that Prime Minister Gilani has already said that “only Parliament’s decision” on this issue will be implemented. The moment of anger in Washington, too, seems to be subsiding. More and more advising elements are telling US President Barack Obama to apologise and be done with it: Pakistan is too important to set aside and that the apology would be nothing more than mere words while the drones were substantial and continuing to kill al Qaeda leaders in Fata. An American compulsion came to the fore when Pakistan was included in the Qatar talks where the other interlocutors are the Taliban of Mullah Umar, the Haqqani network and Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami. The Northern Alliance is out and all the Pakistani pawns are in play, with Prime Minister Gilani acting like a statesman in Doha.

Observers, especially in the media, dedicated to taking on the US-India-Israel combine, are already counting the money Pakistan actually lost fighting America’s war and what Pakistan actually gained from America in recompense. Their conclusion: say goodbye to the US and get nothing for fighting your own home-grown terrorists and win kudos from an impoverished nation. The American press, too, is anticipating a pragmatic closure while reporting that General James Mattis, the head of the US military’s Central Command, will meet an already somewhat appeased post-Qatar General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and pacify him further. Meanwhile, parliament is mulling over what the politicians think should be the proper content of US-Pakistan relations with an obvious, though unrealistic, reference to sovereign equality. It is expected that the debate over the subject will arouse a lot of rehearsed passion and make it difficult for the ruling coalition to reopen the routes. Any country’s foreign policy needs flexibility of response and pragmatism. It needs to be shielded from populist politics because when passions reign supreme, the policy that results from such an environment can be self-defeating and damaging for the state itself. Out on the streets, the masses are moved more by hatred for America than about the state of the economy or the fact that the country’s education and healthcare systems are in the doldrums.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 9^th, 2012.