Daily Times

As if bilateral relations between Pakistan and the US could not get any worse at this point, the Pentagon’s latest annual report has irked our decision makers for holding Pakistan responsible for using proxies to influence and sabotage proceedings in Afghanistan and India. The report has come out at a crucial juncture, when the army chief is scheduled for an important US visit, on the back of a recent trip to Afghanistan. And before we could even be formally annoyed over the report, news broke out of an FBI investigation over allegations of counterintelligence against Robin Raphel, a veteran US diplomat and an expert on Pakistan. The onset of winter, it seems, is bound to leave unsympathetic hawks preening their claws and the watchful doves craving for the warmth of yesterday.

While these recent developments are not particularly ominous, a brief look at the history of Pak-US bilateral relations is sure to leave us folks dazed and confused. The relationship between Pakistan and the US has always been fluctuating between treacherous highs and even more perilous lows. After independence, Pakistan’s alignment with the US in the Cold War did not bear significant results until the Soviets decided to march towards Kabul in 1979. Consequently, Pakistan — always the self-appointed deliverer — decided to step in. With covert and overt support from the US, Pakistani-trained jihadists, amidst much fanfare, managed to thwart the Soviet advances.

The Pak-US nexus during those days was the talk of the town but, afterwards, when Pakistan decided to support the Taliban regime in the 1990s, things went south. Admonitions were hurled, and when even sanctions could not produce the intended results, the love affair between us and the US was all but over. However, little did we know that, like all great love stories, this one too had a horrible twist in store. When the world changed on that fateful morning of September 11 in 2001, the US decided to punish the men it had once welcomed in the Oval Office and the ‘freedom fighters’, in turn, decided to punish some more infidels east of the Durand Line. The resultant bloodletting, violence and sheer misery, as they say, is history. You see, as much as some of us would like to believe otherwise, just about the only thing you cannot do with a war machine is sit on it. Therefore, in the first years of this millennium, battle lines were drawn and when the men were being counted, some allege that Pakistanis got themselves counted on both sides, which is probably why we have been the target of much criticism by the US, even though we are supposed to be allies, fighting side-by-side.

A lot of experts have chimed in with their views about the unpredictable contours of the Pakistan-US alliance but one avenue has been left largely untouched: the importance of perception towards bilateral policymaking. To this end, we can apply Dr Robert Jervis’ framework that has been elaborated in his instrumental work, Perception and Misperception in International Politics. His work originally revolved around the US and the former USSR, but a few salient aspects of his expansive effort have been applied to relations between Pakistan and the US in the following paragraphs.

According to Dr Jervis, one way to look at foreign policy formation is to see how countries respond to newly arising challenges that might not have any precedents in the country’s repertoire of responses. In such situations, states more often than not rely on tried and tested techniques, and thus fail to take into account the evolved nature of events. This is because of a strong resistance to change and a preference for old methods to tackle new issues. The resistance itself can be thought of as a by-product of the cognitive dissonance the crisis creates and the averseness to putting in the effort required to engender new responses. Similarly, time and history also figure in the overall decision matrix of nation states. The end result is that, because of various constraints, states end up embracing zero novelty when push comes to shove.

Additionally, preconceived notions about the intentions of other states sometimes also create undesired situations. A corollary to this concept is the fact that sometimes good intentions result in bad policy, which only adds to the issue. Pakistan and the US fit the bill comprehensively in this regard and, hence, banal US aid and genuine Pakistani promises seem to have little impact on reducing the overall misperception between the two states. This problem is exacerbated further when religious undertones are attributed to crises that are political in nature.

Another fundamental factor in understanding the formation of policy is to look at its mechanics. A crucial mistake that states make is to assume that bilateral policy is either made in a political vacuum or that it is made by a single, homogenous institution. However, the reality could not be farther from this perception. In Pakistan, the responsibility of formulating policy towards important countries has been shared by the foreign office and the intelligence agencies, with all of the foreseeable caveats. Similarly, in the US, even with the president having major leeway over foreign policy, the State Department and the Pentagon provide their own inputs throughout the process as well. Similarly, the will of the US Congress cannot be neglected, especially since Congress holds sway in budgetary matters.

Finally, the current domestic situation in the US and Pakistan is far from being conducive to amicable gestures. Fresh from the losses in the recent midterm elections, the Democrats are distancing themselves from their president. Thus isolated, Obama is on the brink of being a lame duck for the rest of his term and a Republican majority in the Senate will only add to Obama’s woes. If we look at Pakistan’s position, the situation does not look so enviable either. The country is smack in the middle of a political maelstrom, economic dire straits and an extremist insurgency. As we can see now, the theoretical and practical aspects of Pak-US relations, when combined, create an aura of hostility and resentment.

Only time will tell what lies ahead for this cagey coalition. The recent Afghan elections have raised hopes for the prospect of (relative) normalcy to return to Afghanistan but enforcing the state’s writ in a huge territory with very little state infrastructure is easier said than done. One can only hope that the continued presence of coalition security forces in the region, combined with Pakistan’s ongoing insurgency eradication campaign, will yield noticeable changes. Until that happens though, interaction between a waning hegemon and a Delphic state is bound to cause nothing but misperception and distrust.

The author is a freelance columnist with degrees in political science and international relations