What Pakistan needs to tell the US — II

The US strategy to control hydrocarbon resources of the Gulf and the Caspian Sea is understandable as is the strategy of containing Iran’s ability to upset Washington’s Arab and Israeli allies.  However, silence on India’s destabilisation of Balochistan has no relevance or impact on the Iran containment strategy. Pressure against the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline is being read in Islamabad as insensitivity to its economic needs and imperatives.

Pakistan must not be apologetic about its relations with China and Iran. China is a time- tested friend and the people of Iran and Pakistan share an intimate history. Pakistan’s and  America’s perspective on China and Iran are poles apart.

That leaves Afghanistan. The current aim of both Pakistan and Afghanistan is to see the end of US occupation of that country. The Pakistani imperative that a post-war Afghan government, weighted in favour of the Northern Alliance or India, will not lead to peace in the region must be clearly understood. The strategic aims of the US and Pakistan do not lend credence to any perception of a “strategic partnership”. America must come clean that it is here to contain China and Iran, and strengthen India. Those are not the strategic aims of Pakistan. As a superpower, the US claims licence to “control” the outcomes in Asia, but it has demonstrated a weakening economic and military capacity to do so.  This ‘burn-out’ will run its course. The countries of the region have problems amongst themselves that cannot be resolved if there is no external interference. All of them would prefer peace because it allows for economic advancement. But that has perhaps not been the demonstrated strategic aim of the US for this region.

The time to end the war has arrived. America is losing friends, its moral standing, and its image as a reliable partner, and may become marginalised from the emerging Asia if it continues its current strategy which few in the continent find acceptable. Europe has distanced itself from America’s strategy because it wants a future of economic cooperation with Asia. This distancing may signal the decline of Nato and this is something that experts are grappling with in formulating the strategic concept to be deliberated at the upcoming Nato summit on November 20 in Lisbon.

The US-Pakistan strategic dialogue, coming before the Lisbon summit, should end on a note of caution for America and Nato. A strategy of economic cooperation and political non-interference in Asia, including China and Iran, would pay the people of America and Europe far greater dividends in the future than the current self-defeating strategy of “control”.  In the new world, events are moving fast. The ‘American Century’ based on the anti-human strategies of imperialism has ended within a decade. Military superiority allows the killing of many people but cannot bomb their ideologies, cultures, and civilisation. Washington must understand this.

The Pakistan side must go into the dialogue understanding that it can no longer facilitate imperial strategy in Asia. Pakistan may also become marginalised from the emerging Asia if it continues its current suicidal strategy which few in Asia find palatable.

A strategic partnership for improving people’s lives should focus on ending the war and re-engineering political and economic relations with China and Iran, reconstructing Pakistan and Afghan economies which have been ravaged by imperial war games, and redesigning Pakistan and America’s relationships with the countries of this region.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 16^th, 2010.