The US agenda included transformation of Pakistan’s armed forces and their mission.
Relations with Pakistan would not have plunged so low if Washington had not embarked upon a policy to tame Pakistan’s military establishment. The coercive approach ran into a major crisis with Nato’s fateful air attack on the Pakistani border post of Salala. The Pakistan Army has since demonstrated that it can leverage its strength better than the hapless civilians devoid of popular support.
Given the present realities, the iron law of necessity demands that Pakistan and the US successfully negotiate the parameters of their future relations.
In Pakistan, the project is endangered by two sets of people: a powerful lobby in the political class, diplomacy, economic ministries and the media that yearns to get back to a golden past that never existed and agitational groups that thrive on pathological anti-Americanism. In Washington, the threat comes from segments of the establishment that are still not willing to factor into policy Pakistan’s strategic concerns and the aspirations of its people to achieve a semblance of what the political scientists fashionably call ‘sovereign equality’.
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