Pakistan’s relations with the United States are changing in the new global environment.
By Shahid Javed Burki | July 2022
President Lyndon Johnson and President Ayub Khan.Pakistan’s relations with the United States have always been subject to the way Washington interpreted its strategic interests in the geographic area of which Pakistan is a part. Those who study foreign relations have a term for this: they call it geopolitics. Over the last 75 years, the United States had interest in Pakistan only when the country could deliver what Washington was seeking. At times Pakistan became what some analysts in the United States called Pakistan the most allied nation for the United States. There were three times when that happened. The first one was during the Ayub Khan period (1958-69) when the United States was building alliances around the world to stop the advance of Communism into Asia. What was then the Soviet Union posed the greatest threat to the West and the United States, leading the West, to build three alliances aimed at containing what it saw as the growing influence of Moscow. The North America Treaty Organization, NATO, was the first of these multi-country alliances. Then came the Central Treat Organization, CENTO, which included countries from Europe and Asia. The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, SEATO, was the third of these three alliances. As its name suggests, it was focused on the countries that belonged to the Southeast Asia region. Pakistan joined the last two of these three alliances.
The second time Pakistan became a close ally of the United States was during the rule of another military general, General Ziaul Haq, who like Ayub Khan had usurped power and gone on to govern Pakistan for eleven years (1977-1988). Under General Zia, Pakistan took up the fight against the troops the Soviet Union had sent into Afghanistan. Using Islamic radicals who collectively were called the Mujahedeen, Pakistan was able to provide advice and equipment to help these irregulars to expel the Soviet troops from the neighbouring county.
When Pakistan was no longer needed for these two endeavours, the United States left and returned only when it needed to fight what it called the “war on terror.” This time another General Pervez Musharraf, was in charge and the United States was led by President George W. Bush. The American president was traumatized by the attack mounted by Muslim extremists on his country on September 11, 2001. Although most of the attackers reportedly were Saudi Arabians, they had been trained by a group called Al Qaeda headed by a former Saudi prince, Osama bin Laden. The group had been given a sanctuary by the Taliban leadership governing Afghanistan from Kabul. President Bush wanted to punish Afghanistan for what came to be called 9/11. Once again, Pakistan’s cooperation was needed and was provided by President Musharraf. On all three occasions, Washington’s cooperation with Islamabad involved Afghanistan. Once Washington’s strategic aims were achieved it abandoned Pakistan.
In the world that has emerged since these events, Islamabad should be mindful of two developments that would profoundly affect its relations with Washington. Both are the result of the policies adopted by President Trump but were continued with even greater vigour by his successor, Joe Biden. The first was a part of what can be best described as the “contain China policy,” as that country grows in economic, political, and military strength. China’s rise is viewed by many analysts as occurring while the United States is declining. Washington has adopted what was once suggested by former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe as the formation of a semi-formal “quad” arrangement. This was an alliance among Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. Under President Biden, this approach was formalized to some extent. He invited the leaders of Australia, India, and Japan to meet with him in the White House. The second meeting took place in May 2022 when the American president met with the other three Quad leaders during his brief, three-day, two-country, visit to East Asia
The second development also has its origin in the Trump era. This was the decision to end America’s 20-year involvement in Afghanistan by pulling out its fighting forces by May 1, 2021. This was one of the major concessions made by Washington in the treaty it concluded with the Taliban on February 29, 2020. The May deadline passed as the Taliban did not reduce the promised level of violence. However, President Biden decided to pull out without imposing any conditions on the Talban. End of August 2021 was the new deadline and serious withdrawal began. The Taliban took advantage of this and reached Kabul in early August and took over the country on August 15.
In both developments Washington completely sidelined Islamabad. Imran Khan, at that time the prime minister of Pakistan, was the only major world leader Joe Biden did not call on the telephone after taking office. Thus ignored, Pakistan drew even closer to China. Afghanistan is likely to see much greater presence of China in the region of which Pakistan is a part. With the ongoing developments in Ukraine, Russia may also develop closer relations with the country it once tried to occupy. We are most likely to see the emergence of a counter-quad made up of Afghanistan, China, Pakistan, and Russia.
There is one major difference in the way Joe Biden is conducting foreign affairs and the way Donald Trump had behaved on the world scene. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and “America First” approaches implied that Washington would act alone and not bother to use multilateral institutions to operate on the world scene or look to other large nations to get them on America’s side. Biden is spending a great amount of time cultivating the world outside. This was fully evident in the ongoing Ukraine crisis when Biden was constantly on the phone to have the European nations on his side. That approach would be difficult to work in confronting China.
Current world affairs are once again subject to several serious ideological conflicts. What distinguishes them from the previous episodes is that two of these are the product of domestic struggles which at times have flowed into the international arena. There is conflict among what some analysts have called liberalism when the extreme left and the extreme right have turned on each other, especially in the United States. This has taken a dangerous turn in the United States. But America is not the only Western nation where this struggle is being waged. Hungary and Poland are two other Western European nations that are engaged in defining their democratic future. There is also an ongoing struggle between extremists and modernists in several parts of the Muslim world.
On-going developments in Afghanistan are likely to have serious consequences for Pakistan. They will undoubtedly bring religion into politics in Pakistan more than ever before. Although Pakistan was created to provide British India’s Muslims a homeland of their own, I don’t believe it was religion that made Muhammad Ali Jinnah to create the Muslim nation. For him culture was more important and culturally British India’s 100 million Muslims were very different from 300 million Hindus that made up the rest of the population. “While Hindus worship the cow, we Muslims eat it,” Jinnah is reported to have said to explain why his community of Muslims needed a country of their own. That ethnicity was more important than religious affinity was vividly demonstrated when Pakistan’s Bengali citizens parted company with the rest of Pakistan to create their own county, Bangladesh.
The arrival of the Taliban state in Pakistan’s neighbouring country, Afghanistan has brought religion into governance in a pronounced way. A senior Taliban leader has said that democracy is not compatible with Islam since those who subscribe to the Islamic faith believe in God’s sovereignty while the western notion of democracy is built on the notion that sovereignty lies with individuals. Islam has a greater say in human behaviour among the Pashtun people than is the case with other ethnic groups in the country. While the Pashtuns are not the majority population in Afghanistan, they are by far the largest ethnic group in the country. However, that said, there are many more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. There are also Pashtuns in the country who have bought western ideas of democratic governance.
With America now totally disengaged from Pakistan and concerned only with its position with respect to China and now also with Russia on account of the war in Ukraine, Pakistan will have to operate on its own, depending more on China than it did on the United States for the first seven decades after independence.
The writer is a professional economist who has served as a Vice President of the World Bank and as caretaker Finance Minister of Pakistan. He can be reached at sjburki@gmail.com
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