During one of my visits to the US, I found from a trash-yard sale a book entitled ‘America’s Stake in Asia’ written in 1968 by Drew Middleton, a renowned foreign correspondent, first for the Associated Press, and later for The New York Times. He covered World War II from D-Day to V-Day and several other developments in Africa and Asia before returning to New York in 1965 to become The New York Times’ chief correspondent at the United Nations. A chapter in the book entitled “Pakistan: The Lost Friend” gave an incisive account of how Washington’s neglect of its close ally and partner’s legitimate security concerns had generated a sense of alienation among the people of Pakistan.
While deploring Washington’s nearsighted policies, Middleton presciently called Pakistan the ‘pattern’ for Asian nations of the future, independent, tough and opportunistic. In his view, “Pakistan’s geographical situation and a dozen other considerations made her virtually important to peace in the whole of Asia and the world at large”. This old book on ‘America’s stakes in Asia’ may have ended up in trash, but Pakistan, with its peculiar location has rarely disappeared for any length of time from America’s strategic radar screen. For 75 years now, it has loomed large in one form or another, as a staunch ally, or a troublesome friend, or even a threat.
Now, for the first time, it is all of these things. The war on terror may have provided the rationale for a long, unpalatable U.S. ‘engagement’ with Pakistan, but it neither limited the relationship’s scope nor exhausted the challenges it faced. No, Pakistan has never been a lost friend. It has, indeed, been a curious, if not enigmatic, relationship. It never had any conflict of interest, yet it also never developed a genuine mutuality of interests beyond self-serving expediencies, with each side always aiming at different goals and objectives to be derived from their relationship, with no conceptual framework nor a shared vision beyond each side’s narrowly based self-serving aims and objectives.
For Pakistan, the issues of security and survival in a turbulent and hostile regional environment were the overriding policy compulsions in its relations with Washington. U.S. policy goals in Pakistan, on the other hand, have traditionally been rooted in its own regional and global interests. Unpredictability has been a constant feature of this relationship which experienced regular interruptions in its intensity and integrity. Through those harsh Cold War years, Pakistan undertook historic errands on behalf of the US allowing the use of its air bases by U.S. spy planes in the 1960s (Gary Power’s U-2 mission from Peshawar). In the process, Pakistan earned the Soviet Union’s wrath and rage.
US-Pakistan relations dramatically deteriorated during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations because of Pakistan’s growing closeness with China. In 1965 and again in 1971, Pakistan fought India’s aggression all alone and in 1991 lost half the country, the worst that could happen to any nation in contemporary history. Despite the United States’ widely publicized “tilt” toward Pakistan during the 1971 war, Pakistan felt betrayed. Pakistan soon realised that even as an ally, it was being taken for granted by the U.S. Plainly, it was a letdown for Pakistan, while India was being rewarded by both the U.S. and USSR for ‘hunting with the hound and running with the hare’.
This, in fact, was a US policy trait that was to become a permanent feature of its dealings with Pakistan. With the loss of its eastern half, Pakistan was left with no locus standi in South East Asia; it thus withdrew from SEATO, and then disengaged itself from CENTO until the latter treaty died itself after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. In the mid-1970s, we were disappointed when the US and its Western allies failed to appreciate our apprehensions from India’s unchecked nuclear ambitions. They, in fact, hailed India’s first nuclear tests as ‘smiling Buddha’. At the same time, the U.S. pressurized France to cancel its deal for supply of a reprocessing plant to Pakistan in 1978.
Limited U.S. aid was then resumed, but was suspended again in 1979 by the Carter Administration in response to what was alleged as Pakistan’s covert construction of a uranium enrichment facility. Despite these hiccups, Pakistan’s strategic location remained pivotal to the dynamics of the Cold War era. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, Pakistan again became a key ally of the US and also a front-line state in the last and decisive battle of the Cold War. Pak-U.S. relations took a turn for the better when Ronald Reagan became the President of the United States in January 1981. His two successive terms secured Pakistan waivers from nuclear sanction.
During this period, Pakistan received U.S. assistance in economic aid and military sales totaling $3.2 billion in the first six years (1981-1986) and another $4.02 billion in 1986 for the following six years. The Reagan administration, however, was dealing with a non-aligned, a more realistic and assertive Pakistan, signs, of which were visible in Zia’s dismissal of Carters measly aid package as “peanuts”. Pakistan under Zia was a major player in dismantling, what the West used to call the ‘evil Soviet empire. Once the war was over and the Soviets pulled out, the U.S. just walked away, leaving Afghanistan and its people at the mercy of their own fate.
The writer is a former foreign secretary of Pakistan. He is an author and international relations expert. He can be reached at shamshad1941@yahoo.com
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