US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Pakistan a day ago along with US Joint Chief of Staff General Joseph Dunford. This is the first high-level Pakistan-US political contact which will be showcased by the defining presence of the PTI-led ministers and government in the country. The US can take it as an opportunity to see how it can start afresh and develop new political relationship with the new Pakistani government in the office. It can and must do that because the current civilian government and its leadership meet all the key conditions that the military has for a long time wanted the political leadership to show, such as — indulge in policy-making not on personal whims but on the basis of national interests; incorporate if not necessarily include military’s advice in policy-formulating process; construct and compose the right set of social , economic and political conditions on which to build and sustain the country’s grand national strategy; and most importantly ‘put the genie of institutionalised political corruption back in the bottle’. To the benefit and advantage of the Americans, the current civilian government in Pakistan not only enjoys much harmonised relationship with the military but also as a start-up most of the government’s views on domestic and foreign policy are consistent with those of the military.
But no matter how favourable is the domestic politico-military environment of the country, no diplomatic benefit can be extracted from its usefulness if there is no change in attitude on the side of the Americans. Almost a year has passed since President Donald Trump announced “America’s revised vision of US war in Afghanistan”. He pledged to end the ‘strategy of nation building’ and substitute it with a policy that would squarely focus and aim at terrorist threat emanating from the region; no more ‘rebuild countries in our own image’ but address the security concerns ‘above all other considerations’. The change in American policy and its implementation in Afghanistan for the past one year have rather worsened the security situation in the country. Secretary Pompeo has come with great hope to align Pakistan with the American-crafted Afghan policy which is driven by the great ‘American expectations’. However, it’s not the American expectations but the ‘national and regional interests’ that are most likely to determine the success and failure of this policy. The most important component of this changed American policy was to win over the approval of the domestic as well as the regional audience, however, unifying the strategic audience who would support the American-sponsored Afghan strategic narrative should have been its primary goal. But neither has the strategic audience been unified nor has the American Afghan narrative sought a popular approval amongst the many stakeholders in the Afghan war — the most crucial amongst them are Taliban. We keep hearing that the Afghan peace process is Afghan-owned and Afghan-driven but the realities on the Afghan political and military landscape on ground have been quite different and include a resurgence of attacks by the Taliban, including attacks on military checkpoints, suicide bombings and the attempt by a large-scale Taliban attack to take over the City of Ghazni (75 KMs south of Kabul) in which over 200 Afghan security personnel were killed; and the Taliban leadership’s continued insistence and emphasis that ‘there will be no deal on their position on American troops withdrawal’. The Taliban’s rejection of President Ashraf Ghani’s offer of peace talks without any pre-conditions and their insistence on directly talking to the US suggest that the peace process that the Americans want to initiate can neither be Afghan-led nor Afghan-proposed. The ownership of this Afghan peace process became highly questionable when Alice Wells, the US Deputy Assistant Secretary for South Asia and Central Asia Affairs, met the Taliban leadership in June 2018 in Doha, Qatar, as just days before the meeting General John Nicholson, the US Commander of forces in Afghanistan, was denied any US contact with Taliban. It has also been a long-term US policy not to indulge in direct talks with the Taliban, but to circumvent this policy Secretary Pompeo had been giving statements in the past that reflects US willingness to ‘support, facilitate and participate’ in talks with Taliban. This meeting of the US official with the Taliban representatives in Doha may be a diplomatic step forward to engage the Taliban in the peace process but it is also a huge step backwards that undermines the very idea of the peace process being “Afghan-owned and Afghan-led”.
If the US secretary of state is here as part of his exploration of all avenues that can lead to and facilitate the peace process then he must understand Pakistan’s concerns as well. The ‘do more’ strategic narrative of the US has been rejected by Pakistan’s counter-narrative of ‘no more’. It is under the political umbrella of these highly-polarised strategic positions that the meeting took place. In the short term, it is $800 million that have been withheld by the US as part of the Coalition Support Fund (CSF) that undermines Pakistan’s ability to execute anti-terrorist operations and secure its western frontier but in the long term it is the US views on China’s $64 billion investment as part of CPEC. The US defence secretary’s statement that, “Washington cannot support connectivity projects that raise sovereignty concerns” visibly smells of Indian tilt and support when it comes to dealing with Pakistan. We know that India opposes CPEC because of the Kashmir dispute and the US officially toes the Indian diplomatic interests.
Considering that the last US National Security Strategy (December 2017) paper, prepared for the US Congress, outlined China and Russia as “competitors that challenge America’s leadership in the world and the international order”. It also singles out China for its ‘aggressive investments’ in and outside the Indo-Pacific region reiterating that the investment puts the future of political and diplomatic interests of both the US and Pakistan on cross purpose.
I am not sure about the success and failure of this Pakistan-US diplomatic engagement. But one thing that I am sure about is that when Mike Pompeo leaves with his delegation back home, he would surely consider that deteriorating relations with Pakistan will only green-signal the country to further fast-track its relations with other powers in the region — that neither serves the American interests nor is that a demonstration of successful American diplomacy.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 6th, 2018.
Source: https://tribune.com.pk/story/1796233/6-implications-pompeos-visit/
