Why Trump-Modi exchange will do little to affect how US handles Pakistan
It is a moot point whether the many exchanges at the highest level in recent years between India and the US on terrorism, religious extremism, Pakistan and Afghanistan have eased India’s security concerns. Pakistan continues to sponsor terrorism against India, directly and indirectly. Religious extremism is on the rise in Pakistan and the region at large. The situation in Afghanistan is worsening by the day.
Responsibility
Pakistan’s role and responsibility in disturbing peace and security in the region is clear, but it is not being held to account for this. On the contrary, it has China’s full backing and still receives US military and economic assistance.
These issues would have been discussed again during the just concluded visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the US. Experience shows, however, that US policy towards the region does not change fundamentally whatever may be said publicly or in joint documents.
US policymakers have a blind spot where Pakistan is concerned. They tolerate Pakistani activities that clearly hurt US interests. Public opinion polls show that America is the most hated country in Pakistan. While fully aware of Pakistani complicity with terror from which it has directly suffered in Afghanistan, the US deals very differently with Pakistan than, say, Iran.
It has overlooked the Pakistani establishment’s collusion in harbouring Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. The US is not unaware of Pakistan’s sponsorship of terror against India but is not ready to put any real pressure on Islamabad to end it. That US hands are tied because of reliance on Pakistan for supply lines for American troops in Afghanistan is not entirely true.
Despite terrorists operating from safe havens in Pakistan inflicting casualties on its forces in Afghanistan, the US has chosen to seek rather than extract cooperation from Pakistan by threatening it with sanctions.
Defence Secretary James Mattis recognises that the US is not winning the war in Afghanistan, but a tougher US policy towards Pakistan for its role in the spate of terror attacks being perpetrated there by the Taliban is still not visible.
Actually, we see revived thinking that a solution to America’s quandary in Afghanistan lies in pushing India to allay Pakistani security concerns about its presence there.
On June 16, an Op-Ed in The New York Times by Stephen Hadley, who was George W Bush’s National Security Adviser, and Moeed Yusuf, a Pakistani, makes several points that either exhibit the deep-seated bias that US security circles continue to nurture against India, or the puerility of political judgement of high-level US policymakers.
Its purpose is to counsel against slapping further conditions on assistance to Pakistan, imposing sanctions or listing it as a state sponsor of terrorism that some in US congressional and think tank circles have begun to propose.
Behaviour
Hadley believes that the use of “sticks” will not change Pakistan’s behaviour, though the US is using these “sticks” against Iran, North Korea and Russia. Much is made of Pakistan’s “existential concerns” in the article, though these were supposedly met when it became nuclear.
The US is asked to understand and address Pakistan’s strategic anxieties flowing from its rivalry with India, Afghanistan providing a second base for India to squeeze Pakistan, and India encouraging Afghanistan to contest the Durand Line.
Why Pakistan, despite being much smaller than India geographically, demographically and economically, wants to rival India is not questioned by Hadley. It is also not explained why a much stronger India has to use Afghanistan to squeeze Pakistan.
That India has studiously stayed away from Afghanistan-Pakistan differences on the Durand Line since 1947 has been ignored. Pakistan’s problem is that even the Taliban in Kabul under Pakistan’s tutelage refused to accept the Durand Line.
Concerns
If India’s supply of four helicopters to Afghanistan should worry Pakistan, should not India have concerns about Pakistan’s military ties with Sri Lanka or its massive defence relationship with China? Hadley should also then accept that US military supplies to Pakistan are also a source of worry to India.
If Pakistan persistently denies transit rights to India across land to Afghanistan, and India, Iran and Afghanistan support developing the Chabahar port as an alternative route to the sea for Kabul, why should that be objectionable?
The argument that the Pakistani security establishment sees the Taliban as a check on Indian activity in Afghanistan and that its political accommodation in Kabul would counterbalance Indian influence in Afghanistan resonates with Hadley. He bemoans the fact that US policies toward Pakistan have long underestimated the centrality of Pakistani security concerns about India in defining its choices.
This implies that Pakistani claims on Kashmir and promoting terrorism in India also stem from our neighbour’s insecurities that India must address. The article advocates linking efforts to enlist Pakistan’s support in Afghanistan to a strategy aimed at improving India-Pakistan ties and reducing Pakistan’s apprehensions in Afghanistan.
Accordingly, the standard Pakistani demand that the US should facilitate an India-Pakistan dialogue on all issues is endorsed. That such a dialogue has taken place intermittently over the last two decades, but that each time it has broken down because of acts of terrorism by Pakistan against India is being ignored.
The NYT article is important because it confirms that the blind spot for Pakistan and lack of empathy for Indian concerns perdure in US strategic circles. The Modi-Trump exchanges, however productive on some counts, will not change this reality.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)