Battles on Capitol Hill

These are extremely challenging times for Pakistan’s military and diplomatic strategists. In the first instance, Modi sarkar has wrecked any chances of reconciliation with Pakistan with an eye on winning the next general election on the plank of bellicosity vs Pakistan.

Secondly, it is refusing to acknowledge that its heavy-handed approach to Kashmir has boomeranged. The Indian Occupied Kashmir is reeling under India’s armed repression, leading to popular outcry in Pakistan to stand by the Kashmiris in their hour of need.

As if that was not enough, India is pursuing simultaneously a campaign to dupe the international community through deception and psychological war by exploiting incidents like the ‘attack’ on the Uri military base and calling for Pakistan to be declared a terrorist state. In that context, two of its lackeys on Capitol Hill have moved a draft resolution in the House of Representatives. This is the latest attempt by the Indian lobby in a series of moves to malign Pakistan and at the same time scuttle Pak-US ties.

The situation is complicated by the US’s tendency to act as a spokesman of India and Afghanistan when it comes to blaming Pakistan for terror attacks in the area, glossing over the presence of anti-Pakistan networks that are operating out of Afghanistan and have carried out horrendous attacks on our territory.

The US also chose not to condemn India’s operations to destabilise Balochistan and Karachi after the arrests of Indian agents. All the US has managed to grant so far is to ignore India’s claims of the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir as being an integral part of India.

The US administration appeared helpless while anti-Pakistan moves by the Indian lobby in the US Congress reached an alarming level, badly damaging cooperation in the field of defence. In this murky setting, it was a relief to hear about a small joint Pak-US military exercise in North Carolina, held to learn from each other’s experience in counterterrorism and IED treatment. This comes in the wake of some positive signals from Capitol Hill suggesting that Pakistan has not been written off despite the whipping exercises happening ever so often.

The government and its representatives in Washington were obliged to launch a counter-offensive after the hostile lobby went to extraordinary lengths to scuttle US ties with Pakistan. The extreme end was reached with calls to impose restrictions on Pakistan. All this was being done not to serve US interests but to mollify New Delhi and Kabul whose secret services plan and execute proxy wars and organise anti-Pakistan lobbying in US Congress.

Pakistan’s efforts were supported by its few friends who are not oblivious of the potential harm to US interests that can come from marginalising Pakistan in the region. Still there are disturbing signs of Washington’s myopic approach to long-term relations with its oldest ally in order to accommodate Delhi and Kabul. On the one hand, the Obama administration has gone ahead in setting up a trilateral US-India-Afghanistan forum while on the other it has signed a logistics exchange arrangement with India.

In parallel, there is a realisation by some in the US administration that a one-sided approach is not likely to win them any credit in a country they repeatedly acknowledge as pivotal to regional peace, particularly in war-ravaged Afghanistan. The first overt sign of that came in a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when experts cautioned that US support to India for joining the NSG could aggravate the nuclear race in South Asia.

It was recalled that sanctions imposed on Pakistan in the 1990s increased the country’s dependence on nuclear weapons and that the same would happen again if those restrictions were reintroduced. What was left unsaid was that the US’s infatuation with seeing India in the NSG was totally void of legality and morality. Washington had been arm-twisting whomever it could to break the NSG rules.

Panelists urged the US to maintain relations with Pakistan despite differences over the Haqqani Network. This was in sharp contrast to the vicious attacks on Pakistan at a hearing titled ‘Pakistan: friend or foe’, orchestrated by the Indian lobby to demand cutting off all US assistance to Pakistan. Zalmay Khalilzad, a known Pakistan baiter, went to the extent of calling upon the US to place Pakistan on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

The comments at the recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing were not only directed against India’s bullying on the NSG membership but were also aimed at damage control as far as US ties with Pakistan are concerned. This has been made possible by the combined efforts of Pakistan’s top diplomats and saner elements on the American side who are awake to an unprecedented tilt towards India.

We have come full circle from the heady days of joint Pak-US efforts to roll back the red peril in Afghanistan. A US delegation on a visit to Pakistan had asked Gen Zia if it was alright to sell some defence systems to India. The general reacted with his trademark chuckle, adding that the delivery would hopefully lead to some positive US influence on the Indians regarding Pakistan.

The victorious superpower of the Afghan jihad would like to hear nothing about the services rendered by its old ally as it courts India to make a common front against the new emerging superpower China. It does not havea word of sympathy for the Kashmiri people when human rights organisations condemn the atrocities there.

While the US has acknowledged the successes achieved by Pakistan in rooting out terrorism in Fata, divergences remain over tolerance for some militant groups. The latest criticism has come from Richard Olson, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Olson has essentially repeated the oft-stated US view that “Pakistan must target all militant groups without discrimination – including those that target Pakistan’s neighbours – and close all safe havens”. He concluded his testimony at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by recording that Gen Raheel Sharif had assured him of taking action against all militant groups. According to Olson, the army chief has directed “military commanders, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement agencies to take concrete measures to deny any militant group safe haven or the use of Pakistani soil to launch terrorist attacks in Afghanistan.”

Pakistan would be justified in asking Olson if he can one day enlighten US legislators about whether he tried to get similar reciprocal assurances from the Afghan side, which is prone to lumping its failures at Pakistan’s door, for extending cooperation on tackling anti-Pakistan terror network based on Afghan soil.

Email: saeed.saeedk@gmail.com