Terms of engagement

The region is once again in the spotlight. The only good news is that, during the US secretary of state’s visit to Islamabad, the two sides endorsed cooperation despite the obvious challenges facing Pak-US relations.

The not-so-good news is that the ‘ice-breaker’ didn’t really do much else. The terms of the reset are still profoundly unclear. The Pentagon’s cancellation of $300 million in security reimbursements owed to Pakistan and the prospect of support for an expected retreat to the IMF went unaddressed. The Americans also didn’t hide behind any pretext. The four-hour stopover merely underscored Pakistan’s continued hyphenation with Afghanistan. The inclusion of Dunford and Zalmay Khalilzad in the American delegation made this hard line amply clear.

Aside from the absence of a customary joint statement, the visit was also overshadowed by the more substantive discussions that followed in the Indo-US 2+2 in New Delhi, a new focal point for America’s strategic priorities in Asia and the Indo-Pacific. The joint statement out of New Delhi predictably black-boxed Pakistan as a regional spoiler and terror-sponsor, leaving many in Islamabad wondering at the FO’s positive spin on Pak-US interactions a day earlier.

At home, the fatigue of taking the blame for a bilateral expectations gap is well-known. America’s history of playing favourites in the region on the one hand, and its policy of expecting Pakistan to repair relationships and engineer endgames on the other, has left successive governments questioning the utility of the relationship, as well as America’s sincerity towards reconciliation in Afghanistan.

It is easy to see why. This week, the charge of the Nato war effort in Afghanistan was passed to the seventeenth US commander tasked with leading the mission since 2001. Losses incurred by Afghan security forces, meanwhile, are no longer publicly reported. Kabul’s control over the country’s districts has declined by 16 percentage points since the Trump administration announced its new South Asia strategy. En-masse resignations from Afghan President Ghani’s security cabinet in late August have left it threadbare, doing little to inspire confidence in Islamabad where badly-needed counterterrorism, border security, narcotics, refugees, and tribal mainstreaming outcomes are geographically contingent on events that occur west of a fragile border.

Over the next few months, the US will have to balance interpreting Pakistan’s new government with the expectation that Pakistan has the capacity to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. The difficulty here stems from America’s own lack of clarity and selective engagement with warring factions, which, in turn, has disincentivised an organic search for a political settlement. As far as regional initiatives are concerned, the US has either ignored or dismissed talks hosted by Beijing or Moscow. And on at least two occasions, it has backpedalled midway through a major reconciliation push.

In the interest of adopting a coherent strategy, the Pentagon also needs to moderate its demand for action against the Haqqani Network. Even Western observers now privately admit that the Haqqanis are integral to peace outcomes, and clumsy action against the network will only reduce the likelihood of ceasefire. With the network operating out of Afghanistan and cutting across the insurgency, getting reconcilables to the table requires carefully choosing rather than confusing fight and talk strategies. In the absence of this clarity, the Taliban will only gain further ground and ramp up attacks such as those launched on Ghazni this summer.

With our foreign minister travelling to New York later this month, there is a chance for both Pakistan and the US to continue to develop the diplomatic conversation that began this week. But for any meaningful headway, two things need to happen.

First, Pakistan urgently needs to see a fresh recommitment from the US that recognises the former’s role as a frontline state. Americans must know the reputational damage caused by the freezing of $2 billion in security assistance, the cancellation of CSF reimbursements, and the suspension of the International Military Education and Training programme for Pakistani military officers.

The eventual reinstatement of military aid, or a guarantee of access to high-tech weaponry that cannot be supplied by the Chinese or other top defence partners, could mitigate this – as could revising the embargo on the sale and transfer of AH-1Z Viper helicopters that are critical in providing support to Pakistani ground forces engaged in counterinsurgency (COIN).

Second, the new government in Islamabad should continue the outreach to Kabul started by previous civilian administrations. Direct, high-level engagement with Kabul and activating an already agreed upon bilateral verification mechanism for cross-border militancy is very much in Pakistan’s interest.

Greater intelligence-sharing with Kabul will help squeeze suspect targets on either side of the border; afford legitimacy to Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan; and improve trilateral coordination, particularly in eastern Afghanistan where the presence of TTP and Daesh soldiers is a source of serial national security anxiety for Pakistan. To the US, this would signal Islamabad’s commitment to regional stabilisation, and move the bilateral needle towards trust-based cooperation.

Having said this, the usual caveats apply. Confidence-building is unlikely to work if the new government in Islamabad fails to take opposition parties and other institutional stakeholders onboard in its search for a new Pak-US policy blueprint; or if its attempts to assert autonomy lead it to view Beijing or Moscow as superpower substitutes.

An unknown variable will be the extent to which a novice PTI government’s pledge of a firmer approach towards America self-calibrates in the face of economic and geostrategic imperatives. Insulating strategy from public ratings and reactionary impulses would be a good place to start. To this end, the foreign minister should emphasise the importance of continuity in the Pak-US Strategic Dialogue, and the need for a joint action plan for broad-based engagement when he travels to the US at the end of September.

Islamabad also needs advisers capable of making inroads into Trump’s America. This will help sequence the messages that need to be relayed to the US in the short- and medium-term, both to congressional committees and a media that views Pakistan in zero-sum terms. This will help prepare the ground for more substantive confidence-building at home, where distrust for the US runs deep.

Turning the page on any relationship is difficult but not impossible once both sides get onboard. The bigger challenge is building on that momentum in the long run.

The writer works for the Jinnah

Institute and is pursuing a PhD at Yale. Twitter @fahdhumayun