The Awkward Dance of Loveless, Wary Allies

WASHINGTON —  Although proverbial Washington insiders insist that high-level visits drive decisions, proverbs have their limits. The visit of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to Washington earlier this month at best corrected some errors of history and policy. But until both countries change their ways of thinking and acting, they remain locked in a loveless embrace that has done disservice to Pakistanis and their neighbors for decades.

Sharif’s long-awaited lunch with President Bill Clinton finally led to the return of $467 million owed by Washington for the thwarted sale of 28 F-16 fighter jets. These funds, frozen since 1990 sanctions imposed on Pakistan for its nuclear program, stalled U.S.-Pakistan relations on a wide range of issues. Ironically, monies stopped for nuclear development are only now being returned--after Pakistan tested nuclear weapons despite stringent U.S. objections. All the symbols of a flawed relationship--failed sanctions, failed nonproliferation policy, swapping posturing for policy--are evident in an action that, for want of imagination, the United States and Pakistan both describe as success.

But even meaningful symbols cannot substitute for substance. Today, U.S.- Pakistan relations are dictated far more by fundamental disagreement than mutual admiration. Neither country does business as the other would like: nuclear nonproliferation, trade and investment, regional terrorism, human rights and critical questions involving the fate of Afghanistan. In all, the two countries are far apart in direction and demeanor. If even informal alliances are made on the basis of shared foreign-policy concerns, then this relationship defies its own long-professed history of amity and mutual benefit.

For Pakistanis, the United States plays concurrent, irritating roles as partial patron, protector, heckler and harasser. For more than five decades, the United States has provided armaments, agricultural aid and alliances; every promise has brought enduring difficulties. Military aid supported military dictators, foreign aid brought a huge U.S. presence and the Afghanistan war brought, and continues to bring, millions of refugees, guns and drugs. At the same time, critique seems to accompany every act of seeming generosity: U.S. statements are full of hectoring about the sorry state of Pakistan’s economy, democracy and foreign entanglements. For many Pakistanis, the U.S. has always been part of the problem, an inappropriate, self-appointed conscience.

The U.S. sees Pakistan as a state stuck in a mire of its own making. Corruptions of every size and shape typify the political and economic landscapes; politicians conduct business with only intermittent heed toward technical competence and professionalism; and the fate of the nation and its citizens seems far removed from the daily business of the state. The essential prerequisites for late 20th-century commerce and progress--open political debate, free press, education and toleration--are imperiled by arbitrary, personality-driven politics that compromise even tentative investments in the future. Since Pakistan’s own leaders treat their state as failing, how, Americans ask, should others respond?

For Pakistanis and Americans taking potshots, each offers the other plenty of target practice. But things are never quite so simple. U.S. foreign-policy priorities, which many Pakistanis believe are imposed with a vengeance, prompt government acquiescence. Every Pakistan government since the late 1970s has sought not to offend the United States. Anxious for future monies and access, and even more anxious to augment its own faltering powers, each government has bent over backward to appease the United States, often to the displeasure of its citizens. During the 1991 Gulf War, Pakistanis took to the streets to protest U.S. action while the army hovered along the back lines in Saudi Arabia. When U.S. cruise missiles landed on Pakistan’s border in August, Pakistan wavered, unwilling to jeopardize future U.S. financial aid even while its own misdirected Afghan policy was being dismembered.

This carefully choreographed dance of dependency is performed on a constrained diplomatic stage: Making policy on bended knees, after all, risks the long view. Most important, the dramatic distance between public opinion and government policy, and between government action and good sense, highlights the serious failings of Pakistan’s political system, and the self-defeating foreign policy it generates.

Pakistan today energetically supports the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan, though its support breaches Pakistan’s security and economic well-being, risks international opprobrium for its vigorous defense of human-rights violators and defies the opinion of its own citizens. It supports insurgency in Kashmir, though its patronage often limits the alternatives available to Kashmiris seeking peace. It barely supports a public health or education system but pursues an energetic policy of nuclear-weapons development, with the hope that a policy of deterrence will force its wobbly agenda on a recalcitrant region. And though the government takes few steps to correct its catastrophic fiscal mismanagement--Pakistan barely bypassed default this autumn--it blithely assumes the consequences of disorder are fearful enough to bring foreign donors to its door. Throughout, it hopes that political bombast will drown out demands from its citizens for the services they need and pleas from its diplomatic partners to moderate its behavior.

Pakistan’s foreign policy therefore underscores the state’s weaknesses rather than providing avenues to strengthen its capacities. Its policies are based on an illusion: that a state engaged in the world’s business will necessarily survive and prosper. Nothing is further from the truth. A state that cannot govern itself is not a vital member of the world community, but an accident waiting to happen.

Indeed, the world, and the United States in particular, has seen little reason to repair the damage that Pakistan does to itself. U.S. foreign policy rarely seeks to do well by its partners. Its concept of national interest is frequently insular, often dangerous to those implicated in it and far too generous in distributing blame when things go awry. Pakistanis are right to criticize U.S. policies, particularly when small favors--for example, lifting a few sanctions--are offered in lieu of significant commitments. They are right to fear their neighborhood, because they feel so ill-prepared to live in it. As expected, new Russian-Indian security arrangements have raised old Cold War specters again. Even more, Pakistanis are right to criticize their governments’ acquiescence in someone else’s designs. The greatest failing of Pakistan’s politics is the deaf ear it lends toward real participation in domestic and foreign policy alike. Pakistanis are doubly disenfranchised: They are victims of great-power politics, and of their own government’s disinterest in their views. The resulting politics of denial begets a foreign policy premised on defeat.

Washington may quietly celebrate the end of an annoying episode in its fractious relationship with Pakistan. But the grudging end to a spat that should never have happened cannot disguise much larger problems in the conduct of U.S. policy and the deep flaws in Pakistan’s governance. Until then, diplomatic shadow play will continue.