Blocking aid is not enough, US must hit Pakistan harder
Judging by the sternness of President Donald Trump's repeated warnings and those by the vice-president, the secretary of state, the defence secretary, and the national security adviser that Pakistan's recalcitrance in eliminating safe havens and support bases to the Taliban, the Haqqani Network and others would invite retaliatory steps, the decision to suspend $1.55 billion (Rs 9,800 crore) of military and security assistance appears tame.
Aid threat
Pakistan has already declared that it can do without this aid, much of which it claims goes back to the Americans in one form or the other, and that combating terrorism has cost the Pakistani exchequer several billions of its own money, thereby implying that US assistance constitutes only a small compensatory amount. In any case, figures show that US aid to Pakistan has been steadily declining in recent years and to that extent Pakistan has already learned to live with reduced American munificence.
Pakistan would have presumably done its political homework and anticipated that the US would take this step because American warnings have spanned several months and during this period Pakistan's prime minister and its foreign minister have visited Washington for talks and the US defence secretary and the secretary of state have visited Islamabad, giving Pakistan through these parleys some clue of what the US might do as the first salvo. Islamabad would have calculated, not wrongly, that the US might choose the easiest option to start with, that of "suspension" of aid, which, if Pakistan seriously addresses US demands, can be restituted. If Pakistan has chosen to risk retaliatory US action it is because it believes it can eventually pull through the current difficult phase in much the same way as it has done in the past.
Pakistan believes that it too has cards to play. US commitment to Afghanistan is growing under Trump, which means that America's need for supply lines through Pakistan for its troops in Afghanistan would remain. That Pakistan had blocked these lines in 2011 is a reminder that it can be done again. US' claims that it is working on reducing this dependence by building in "flexibility and redundancy" in supply chains are open to doubt.
Of course, such a step by Pakistan would be highly risky given the mood of the Trump administration and the anti-Pakistan sentiment currently prevailing in the Congress.
Pakistan is regurgitating the old arguments that some lobbies in America have looked at with some sympathy or tolerance, namely, that Pakistan is itself a major victim of terrorism, that it has taken vigorous steps to combat it in the tribal areas, that it no longer shelters the Taliban and the Haqqani group who now operate from within Afghan territory, that it is the Afghans and the Indians who are now abetting terrorist actions by the Pakistani Taliban sheltered on Afghan soil, and that the US is making a scapegoat of Pakistan for its own failure to win the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan also reasons that the US cannot do without Pakistan for inducing the Taliban to negotiate if as America's generals themselves admit the Afghan problem can only be resolved politically and not militarily.
India card
Pakistan, of course, continues to flog the argument that India's presence in Afghanistan is an unacceptable threat to its security and that the Americans have to limit India's role in Afghanistan as a price for Pakistan's unstinted cooperation.
Pakistan's most important card is the nuclear one. US policy towards Pakistan has been heavily conditioned by the consideration that it is a large, internally weak and increasingly radicalised Islamic country with a nuclear arsenal, and if pushed too hard its fragile state structures might collapse leading to much bigger problems than its double dealing and duplicity on Afghanistan. Pakistan understands that its nuclear status protects it from the kind of punitive US policies towards Iran, for instance, that were intended to prevent a country from going nuclear, but for a country already possessing nuclear capability, as in the case of North Korea, US options are much narrower.
Critical factor
China has become a critical factor in Pakistan's defiance of US pressure. America is not investing in Pakistan but China's plans, as part of its Belt and Road Initiative of which the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a critical component, are massive. China is now far too much committed to Pakistan geo-politically and geo-economically to let US have its way with it. China is preparing itself for a power struggle with the US and this will include Pakistan. It jumped to Pakistan's defence to counter Trump's denunciation of its conduct in his New Year tweet by calling on the international community to acknowledge Pakistan's "outstanding contribution" to counter terrorism. It has now let it be known that it plans to establish a new naval base near Gwadar in Pakistan.
The US is no longer impressed by Pakistan's standard arguments to justify its unacceptable conduct, though the nuclear factor weighs with it as indicated by the reference in its National Security Strategic document of December 2017 to concerns about a nuclear conflict in South Asia that require its attention.
America must go beyond mere suspension of aid and impose biting financial sanctions to serve several objectives, that of changing Pakistan's rogue behaviour, curbing China's hegemonic ambitions in Asia by impeding the CPEC and mitigating India's strategic challenges so that the developing India-US strategic partnership can bolster the region's security.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)