Chicago summit — I

Almost the most revealing news photograph at the Chicago Summit caught President Barack Obama with two of his distinguished guests, President Abdul Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan, engaged preferentially with the former. It was a rare sight of the three presidents getting together, even if informally, on the margins of the Chicago Summit. As the two presidents, Obama and Karzai talk, the third, President Zardari, looks on as a mute observer. He must have been waiting for an odd friendly gesture or a good word from his American host that might have come through off camera. Even if only a figment of the onlooker’s own morbid imagination, the circumstance of the US president’s deliberately cold-shouldering his Pakistani guest would be sufficiently substantiated by the generally lukewarm reception to the latter.
Did President Zardari or Ambassador Sherry Rehman indeed make any formal request at all to the White House for such a meeting and was the same ‘rejected’ by Washington? Before the Pakistani president accepted the much-debated and overly delayed invitation at all, Ambassador Rehman might have pressed the American hosts to give her a clear outline of the programme of the president’s engagement with his American counterpart? Did the Ambassador have the vaguest idea about the way her president would be cold-shouldered? Her timely advice to our foreign office might have helped avoid much of the embarrassment that followed and was covered by the world media.
The host country and NATO’s impudence apart, for the president to go at all at such short notice, could have saved us a lot of embarrassment. There would be hardly another example of a head of state, and that too of an allied country and a frontline state, invited to the summit so late and with such a lack of standard protocol. The photograph and the adverse reaction it created in Pakistan brought forth only a churlish response from the White House. The spokesperson ‘rejected’ the ‘claims’ that President Obama had ‘refused’ to have an ‘exclusive’ meeting with President Zardari during the Chicago Summit. What then happened to prevent President Obama from having even a single one-on-one meeting from being formally scheduled and actually taking place with his Pakistani counterpart?
Pakistan’s reservations about re-opening the overland supply route all the way from Karachi to Kabul is briefly the main factor contributing to the crisis, together with its principled demand for an unqualified apology from the US for the November 2011, massacre of 24 Pakistani soldiers at the Salala post by random US land-air fire. The Salala post is well inside Pakistan’s territory, and the US saying ‘sorry’ is hardly a substitute for an unqualified apology. Thus for want of a mere word, the Summit was all but lost at a crucial level. While no such apology was forthcoming, the NATO high command could still take Pakistan’s help and cooperation for granted. The chief of the NATO forces, General R Allen of the US, grandly declared that ‘Pakistan was going nowhere….’ In other words, regardless of what has happened, and might still happen in the future, Pakistan would toe the NATO (the US) line, willingly or otherwise, as before. That was the last thing the general in command of an on-going operation, in a critical phase, should have risked. Much of that however, was more out of misplaced confidence than a brutal acceptance of things not going well and according to plan.
Not to speak of something as privileged as an ‘exclusive’ meeting with President Obama, even a formal invitation to President Zardari was made contingent to reopening the land supply route, practically without preconditions. The NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen went to the extent of telling President Zardari that the formal invitation to the summit would depend on his prior unconditional acceptance of re-opening the road to Kabul in spite of the Salala massacre of some 20 plus Pakistani soldiers in unprovoked land-air fire by the US.
Where do we stand after the deliberate show of a woeful lack of courtesy to Pakistan? What aggravates the pain was to find the host going out of his way to fawn on his newly made ‘strategic’ partner, President Hamid Karzai, talking to him one-on-one in a pre-scheduled meeting. On the other hand, aside from a couple of encounters en passant with the head of state, once ‘the most allied ally’ and a darling of both the White House and the Pentagon was all but ignored
As for Pakistan, it could not afford to repeat the costly blunder it committed by boycotting the Bonn Conference in December 2011. Thus Pakistan missed an opportunity to register its protest against the post-Abbottabad and Salala episodes respectively of May and November of the same year. The Salala killings barely a mouth old then could have been projected with a much greater force of conviction and argument while the iron was still hot.
What NATO and the US must accept is that without Pakistan actively engaged at the vital two-fold diplomatic and military levels, Afghanistan shall be a zero sum game. Pakistan’s isolation from the mainstream strategic and tactical war and peace operations might well be NATO’s debacle. Unless by some miracle, the Afghan war ultimately turns the Durand Line into a line of peace and amity, it would remain an abiding threat to regional peace and stability. Any bilateral, US-Afghan process like the ‘strategic pact’ of May 2, 2012 would well bring Afghanistan close to a confrontational, militant mode against Pakistan sooner than a fraternal embrace.

(To be continued)

The writer is a retired brigadier and can be reached at brigsiddiqi@yahoo.co.uk