A faithless ally

Having dragged its allies into what it claimed was a ‘war on terror’, the United States has now basically excused itself, leaving behind semi-failed states in Iraq and Afghanistan, North Africa in chaos and bomb blasts and mass shootings all over Pakistan. To be sure, there will be the occasional pinprick drone strike or even airstrike, but once again, President Obama assured his country that there will be no American boots on the ground. In addition, the US army is reducing its regular force by 40,000.
Pompous claims to the contrary, the US has withdrawn from the war on terror. Americans have gone back to their barbecues while Pakistanis deal with rivers of blood in their hot, darkened streets. In Pakistan, the war remains real, grim, and unbelievably costly.
When then-president Musharraf agreed to the US ultimatum to Pakistan to join the ‘war on terror’, a significant number of Pakistanis were upset, not because they were pro-terrorist, but because they had good memories.
The last time Pakistan had participated in such an American initiative, the country was a crucial factor in the Soviets’ defeat in Afghanistan. The US then lost interest in the region and left Pakistan holding a bag of refugee camps, drug addicts and myriad other societal problems that resulted from her involvement in this enterprise.
The current alliance has been, as expected, a one-way street ending in an American bug out.
There is just no honest argument that can be made by Washington that the books come anywhere close to balancing in this relationship. The alliance with the US resulted in massive societal problems in Pakistan. Most obviously, it left tens of thousands of Pakistani soldiers and civilians dead, tens of thousands more wounded, with countless internally displaced persons.
While Washington hypocritically blamed Pakistan for the Taliban’s resurgence, claiming that it found “safe havens” in Fata, the fact is that the Taliban rebuilt itself themselves on money from the opium trade that flourished in Afghanistan while Americans, both civilian and military, looked the other way. I don’t even like to think about how many of the bombs and weapons used by terrorists in Pakistan were bought with that drug money.
The military support to Pakistan that Washington politicians are always crowing about was always given grudgingly, after long public fights featuring humiliating slanders by politicians against the Pakistan Army. It was never sufficient to sustain the level of military activity that Washington was demanding. Pakistan has also had to live with the constant humiliation of being told that it wasn’t doing enough to fight terrorism by a country that was never anywhere near ‘all-in’ itself.
Worse, civilian aid from Washington has amounted to chump change – and that came only after a good deal of begging. It didn’t begin to offset the societal problems that the alliance with the US has caused.
The pressure that the war on terror has placed on Pakistan’s legal system almost beggars belief. Battles with terrorist bands in the countryside can be handled by the army, but when the terrorists come into cities and towns in small groups, it is a police matter. The police had been struggling with street crime before the war. Now they have been completely overwhelmed with the piling on of additional drug activity and terrorism. The resulting arrests have strained the prison system and the courts.
There were a million things that Washington could have done to aid the administration of justice in Pakistan. It could have assisted police efforts with training or modern equipment, or even by just providing money with which to hire additional police. It could have provided money and expertise for the building of prisons. It could have helped set up night courts, to help with the criminal case load or provided aid that might have enabled the courts already in existence to function more efficiently. It did none of these things. Not only that, it blatantly interfered with the setting up of the Qazi courts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which were set up to assume a small portion of the courts’ burden.
I’m not about to lay all of Pakistan’s electricity delivery problems on Washington’s doorstep, but it is a fact that Washington has done little to help. The drain on the country’s treasury from this war is a matter of fact, and lack of cash has been a contributor to the current power problems. It is also a fact that Washington just hasn’t been there with the technical assistance it might have offered on this front.
How anyone in the United States can have the gall to criticise Pakistan’s record when the US has been a faithless and ultimately cowardly ally itself eludes me entirely. Pakistan owes the US nothing but teeth-grinding resentment.
The writer is an associate at the Center for Security and Science. He has served in the New Hampshire legislature and as an election monitor in Pakistan.
Email: TGHatCSS@gmail.com