The history of US-Pakistani relations is one of wild swings between feigned friendship and ill-disguised mistrust. When the US needs Pakistan, Washington showers Islamabad with money, weapons and expressions of high esteem.

Once the need wanes, the gratuities cease, often with brutal abruptness. Instead of largesse, Pakistan gets lectures, with the instruction seldom well-received.

The events of 9/11 inaugurated the relationship’s most recent period of contrived warmth. Proximity to Afghanistan transformed Pakistan overnight from a pariah — the planet’s leading proliferator of nuclear weapons technology — into a key partner in the global war on terrorism. Prior to 9/11, US officials disdained president Pervez Musharraf as the latest in a long line of Pakistani generals to seize power through a coup.

After 9/11, president George W. Bush declared Musharraf a “visionary” leading his country toward the bright uplands of freedom. But seldom has a marriage of convenience produced greater inconvenience and consternation.

Pakistanis don’t worry about Islamists taking over the world. Americans are untroubled by the prospect of India emerging as a power of the first rank. The US stayed in this unhappy marriage for the last decade in large part because Pakistan provided the transit route for supplies sustaining Nato’s ongoing war in landlocked Afghanistan.

In addition to exacting exorbitant charges for this use of its territory, Pakistan has closed that route whenever it wishes to make a point. No more: A recently negotiated agreement with several former-Soviet Central Asian republics creates alternatives, removing Pakistan’s grip on Nato’s logistical windpipe.

The Obama administration now seems ready to declare this troubled union (once again) defunct. With Pakistan no longer quite so crucial in an Afghan context, and still unable to explain how Osama Bin Laden found sanctuary on Pakistani soil, evidence that this US ally remains in cahoots with various and sundry terrorist organisations has become intolerable. During a recent visit to India, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta publicly stated that U.S. leaders were “reaching the limits of our patience” with Pakistan.

As with most divorces, the proceedings promise to be ugly. Already, the US is escalating its campaign of missile attacks against “militants” on Pakistani soil. US officials dismiss complaints that this infringes on Pakistan’s national sovereignty. “This is about our sovereignty as well,” Panetta has explained, thereby redefining the term to grant the US the prerogative of doing whatever it wants and can get away with.

Back story

Yet there is a back story to the crumbling relationship that goes beyond US frustration with Pakistani double-dealing (and Pakistani anger over American highhandedness). A larger reorientation of US policy is under way. Occurring in two spheres — the Greater Middle East and East Asia — that reorientation reduces Pakistan in Washington’s eyes to the status of strategic afterthought. In the Greater Middle East, the Obama administration has now abandoned any pretense of liberating or pacifying or dominating the Islamic world.

In East Asia, the Obama administration touts its proposed strategic ‘pivot’ as the emerging centrepiece of US national security policy. In Washington, however, ‘pivot’ is a code word, translated by those in the know as ‘containing China’.

Yet while a certain logic informs the coming US abandonment of Pakistan, there are massive risks as well. Mired in poverty, burdened with a dysfunctional government and weak institutions, dominated by deeply fearful military and intelligence establishments that have little regard for civilian control or democratic practice, Pakistan possesses one trump card: a formidable nuclear arsenal. This should give US policymakers pause before they give that country the back of their hand, as the US has done so many times before.

 

 

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.