The Trump administration’s escalating rhetoric against Pakistan in recent days has now led to a major policy change as the US State Department announced that it would suspend security aid to Pakistan until the country takes action against the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network. On the same day, Pakistan was also put on a special watch list for “severe violations of religious freedom”. The suspension of security assistance puts in jeopardy a total of $900 million that is given to Pakistan every year. The White House has not yet given details of which funds it will no longer give to Pakistan and the administration has wide leeway in which programmes it decides to suspend. The Coalition Support Fund, by which the US reimburses Pakistan, is most likely to be a casualty since the administration has to certify that we are compliant in dealing with militant groups, something Trump is hardly likely to do. The Foreign Military Financing programme, by which the US pays Pakistan to buy its military hardware may survive the initial suspension since most of the $255 million ends up going back in the hands of the powerful arms lobby. Smaller programmes like the International Military Education and Training and International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement programmes are more likely to survive since they directly serve US interests and amount to little more than a rounding error in the total security assistance the US gives us.
More than the loss of money, though, the significance of this move is the strain it will put on the relationship between the two countries. We can now clearly see that Trump is even more belligerent than his predecessors and is ready to give very little room for cooperation. The fact is that the current American aggression is coming from its failure to bring peace to Afghanistan after a decade and a half of war. The US’s refusal to introspect has been fundamental to the continuing war. The failure of a militarised strategy against groups that resort to guerrilla warfare is a historical fact that the Americans have more than enough experience to accept so as to change strategy. In Pakistan, though, the US has found a convenient excuse for its disappointments in Afghanistan. As a response to the US decision to cut aid, the Pakistan Foreign Office on Friday said that Pakistan has fought the war against terrorism largely from its own resources – which has cost over $120 billion in 15 years, and that cooperation with the US in fighting terrorism has directly served US national security interests.
The move to put Pakistan on the watch list for violating religious freedom shows the extent to which the Trump administration is prepared to go. It is surely no coincidence that the decision was announced to coincide with the suspension of security assistance. While Pakistan can hardly claim to be a model for how to treat religious minorities, the idea that an administration which has pushed for a Muslim ban and is rounding up undocumented immigrants in droves has any authority on this issue is laughable. While keeping the option of diplomacy open, we should not entertain any illusions about our relationship with the US. Pakistan’s fight against militancy – which has already cost the country tens of thousands of lives – must continue but because it is in our own interest and not to appease any country. The more important thing is to try and understand the consequences of a more permanent deterioration of Pak-US relations, and we can only understand it better if we stay away from issuing knee-jerk responses to US provocation.