Monday, August 27, 2018

Business Recorder Editorial Aug 28, 2018

Inauspicious beginning

An unseemly spat has broken out between Pakistan and the US to add to the already existing strains in the two countries’ relationship. A congratulatory phone call from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Prime Minister (PM) Imran Khan ended up with both sides portraying what was said during the conversation from divergent viewpoints. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and his ministry seemed to go into overdrive to contest the readout of the conversation as reported by the US State Department. According to the latter, Secretary Pompeo raised the importance of Pakistan taking decisive action against all terrorists operating in (or from?) Pakistan. Our Foreign Office contested this version, flatly denying that any such conversation took place during a positive first contact between the top US diplomat and the new Pakistani PM. With the State Department sticking to its guns and its earlier readout, this latest mini-quarrel only underlines the current distance between the two sides. US President Donald Trump is not known for subtle diplomacy. True to his style, in January 2018 he accused Pakistan of deceit and lies vis-à-vis its support to the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani Network, including safe havens on Pakistani soil, while pretending to be an ostensible ally of Washington in the War on Terror (WoT). Subsequently, and incrementally, Washington cut off security aid to Pakistan (including reimbursement of expenditures incurred in providing the US a route through Pakistan for supplying its forces in Afghanistan), stopped Pakistani military officers from attending a long standing training arrangement in the US, and broadly rejected any IMF bailout for Pakistan’s struggling economy that might end up paying back Chinese CPEC loans. The Trump administration having revealed its hand and, enjoying as it does a Republican majority in the US Congress, is unlikely to change its approach to dealing with Pakistan. This it will adhere to despite positive noises about working to improve understanding and bilateral ties between the two erstwhile allies with the advent of a new government. Nor should much hope of a turnaround be placed in the mid-term US Congress elections that may whittle down or even reverse the Republicans’ majority, since policy towards Pakistan appears to enjoy bipartisan support in the US currently. President Donald Trump’s legal problems and even talk of impeachment too does not therefore provide Pakistan with much leverage. The recent siege of Ghazni by the Taliban (in which foreign and Pakistani fighters are alleged to have participated) and other attacks throughout Afghanistan did nothing to assuage Washington’s belligerent mood. Although Pompeo’s stopover in Islamabad on September 5, 2018 on his way to India appears to be still on, how the face-to-face conversation will go is a ticklish question.

There was some initial hope that since Imran Khan has long argued that talks with the Taliban are the only solution and the US, after years of resisting the idea, is finally (if fitfully) itself talking to the Taliban, this might provide some convergence in the positions of the two sides. The US in the past, when it was heavily (in terms of troops) invested in the Afghan war, saw Imran Khan as having a soft spot for the insurgents, a perception that earned him the sobriquet ‘Taliban Khan’. His strident condemnation of US drone strikes inside Pakistan and shrill anti-US rhetoric in the context of the Afghanistan conflict and the WoT too did little to endear him to Washington. How far these past perceptions linger in the halls of power in Washington will be tested when Pompeo arrives. Our Foreign Office’s pains to deny the version of Pompeo’s talk with PM Imran Khan may also be motivated by the newly installed PTI-led coalition government not wishing to be seen as bending before US diktat. Be that as it may, Pakistan’s interests do not lie in a continuing confrontation with the US. It remains one of our major trading partners and one of the few countries with which Pakistan enjoys a trade surplus. The US is still the most powerful country in the world with multilateral (IMF, etc) and bilateral clout that Pakistan would not wish to be on the adverse receiving end of. Our sorry past of being a client state of Washington on and off may have run its course but the Pakistan-US relationship now needs to be redefined in terms of each side’s concerns in Afghanistan and how to bring these together, as well as the long term, post-Afghanistan conflict relationship that carries benefits for both sides, but now hopefully as an equal partnership.

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