Cover Story 
 

Cover Story

Look in the Mirror First

It is time Pakistan and its leaders looked at themselves more closely before blaming other nations for their shortcomings.

By Robert M. Hathaway | July 2022

It’s no secret that relations between Pakistan and the United States have been frosty since Joe Biden was sworn in as U.S. president 18 months ago. Indeed, this chilliness reaches back over more than a decade; many Pakistanis overestimated the closeness of ties under Donald Trump after that mercurial president replaced his earlier public denunciations of Pakistan with something approaching bonhomie.
The irritant du jour rocking the relationship at the moment is the allegations leveled by Imran Khan that Washington had a hand in his fall from power earlier this year. The fact that the former prime minister has failed to offer even a shred of evidence to support his claims has not kept millions of his acolytes from believing him.

If Khan possessed even a scrap of proof to support his contentions, wouldn’t he be flaunting it? Instead, he is following a long-standing Pakistani practice of blaming others for his own leadership failings. Indeed, Pakistani politicians from all the country’s major political parties have regularly fobbed off their shortcomings by alluding darkly to conspiracies and hidden hands.

But Pakistanis do not have a monopoly on this predilection for pointing fingers at others as a way to escape serious soul-searching. Witness the discussion (“debate” would be too dignified a term) among American politicians, retired military officers, scholars, and a vast throng of commentators on the reasons for America’s failure in Afghanistan.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that four U.S. administrations – those of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, and Biden – made one misjudgment after another throughout the entire duration of the war in Afghanistan. Incredibly, Washington often had very little sense even of whom it was fighting, let alone why. An honest American reckoning about the war must begin at home.

Yet the American narrative of its Afghan debacle often focuses as much on Pakistan as on itself. True, there is a reason for this emphasis on Pakistan. Few informed observers question the proposition that Pakistan and its security establishment provided invaluable military, political, financial, diplomatic, and moral support to the Afghan Taliban for most of the two decades they were battling the Americans.
But Pakistani support for the Taliban, as important as it was, is not the reason the Taliban refused to quit. Pakistani assistance was not the cause of the Taliban’s steely determination, no matter the cost, to rid their country of a foreign occupier. And Pakistani aid is not the explanation for the Taliban’s vision that they could ultimately triumph in this contest with the world’s mightiest military.

It is entirely proper to examine the Pakistani role in America’s defeat and humiliation. But doing so must not keep analysts from asking why a generation of American leaders failed to understand that their vision for Afghanistan was not necessarily that of Pakistan’s. Or why, even in the face of considerable evidence that Pakistan was hedging its bets, did these American leaders double down on their belief that they could persuade or pressure Pakistan to “do more,” as the saying went. It’s far easier to talk of Pakistani duplicity than of American misjudgment and incompetence, but that doesn’t explain why the Taliban sit in Kabul today.


Imran Khan, of course, made no effort to mask his opposition to the American war in Afghanistan, or his disdain for the backing provided the Americans by a succession of Pakistani presidents, prime ministers, and chiefs of army staff. Undoubtedly this had something to do with the frostiness of relations between Islamabad and Washington in recent years.

But Khan’s judgments were not necessarily any shrewder than those of the Americans. Shortly after the Taliban triumph, Khan, in a statement widely noticed in Washington, congratulated the Afghans for breaking the “shackles of slavery” imposed by America and its Afghan partners. It seems unlikely that Afghan women feel liberated now that the Taliban run the country. Nor for that matter do most Afghan journalists, civil society activists, or those with western ties or values.

If the bilateral relationship between Pakistan and the United States is to be stabilized, a good place to start would be for both sides to move beyond their reflexive instinct to blame the other for their failures. This is not to suggest that the policies and actions of either toward the other have been blameless, only that clear-eyed introspection is far more likely than finger pointing to produce policy most suitable for advancing the national interest and promoting the well-being of the people of each country.

In the United States, the need for such introspection is widely recognized, even if less widely practiced. As Americans prepare to celebrate the 246th anniversary of their founding, their mood is somber. An historic pandemic, now in its third year, continues its killing spree, disrupting daily lives, impeding economic growth, and leaving anguished families with an empty seat at the dinner table. Soaring prices and shortages strain household budgets and prompt panic buying. Violence, often targeted at minority or marginalized groups, has shaken people’s sense of basic security. A defeated national leader seems more interested in demagoguery and vindication than in seriously addressing his country’s challenges. The political system features broken institutions that appear incapable of responding to the needs of its citizenry. Growing polarization renders civil discourse almost impossible. Climate change brings ever wilder storms, floods, drought, and life-threatening temperatures.

Pakistani readers may at this point wonder whether they misread the previous paragraph. Is it not their country being described? Is it not Pakistan that suffers this multitude of plagues?

This confusion is understandable, and underscores an important point that bears on the present and future of the bilateral relationship between Islamabad and Washington. In point of fact, there is much that drives our two countries together. We have focused on our differences and disagreements for so long that we have forgotten our shared humanity and the reality that we confront many challenges in common.

Take climate change, for instance. Pakistan is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to the ravages of climate change, while the United States has both the technology and entrepreneurs willing to invest that technology in Pakistan. Biden has indicated a desire to make combating climate change one of the signature focuses of his presidency, while Pakistan is eager to attract new foreign investment. Would not partnership here be preferable to continued bickering?

Energy, information technology, and public health, including the ongoing fight against COVID-19, are additional spheres ripe for collaboration between the two countries, if only the will to surmount the obstacles to partnership could be summoned. Renewed partnership need not consist of headline-grabbing spectacles; often quiet under-the-horizon effort achieves the longest lasting results.

But first, we must recognize the counterproductive nature of blaming one’s disappointments and failures on another country. In international diplomacy as in personal grooming, a good mirror is essential.

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