F-16 fiasco marks a new US-Pakistan divorce

NEW DELHI : Washington and Islamabad are heading for another geopolitical divorce. The US National Security Council’s South Asia man, Peter Lavoy, and the special

NEW DELHI : Washington and Islamabad are heading for another geopolitical divorce. The US National Security Council’s South Asia man, Peter Lavoy, and the special representative for AfPak, Rick Olson, were in Islamabad until Saturday in an attempt to salvage what is left.

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The US Congress’s decision last week to not subsidise the sale of F-16 fighters was another nail in the coffin. Pakistan responded by saying it wouldn’t accept the last batch of eight. This, in turn, follows the US drone strike that killed Mullah Akhtar Mansour, the Inter-Services-Intelligence favoured candidate for the leadership of the Taliban, in late May.

The US Congress soured on Pakistan after US soldiers found and assassinated Osama Bin Laden in Abbott a bad in 2011. The White House continued to bat for Islamabad. It had three reasons for doing so.

One, it saw Pakistan as the indispensable partner of its grand design for a negotiated settlement between the Taliban and Kabul. Two, it sought another deal over Pakistan’s tactical N-warheads which it saw as a “loose nukes” threat. Finally, it saw a pair of reasonable interlocutors with there-election of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and appointment of General Raheel Sharif as Pakistan’s army chief, both in 2013. On all three counts, US policy is at a dead end.

Rawalpindi has been especially two-faced over Afghanistan. The US has wearied, as Christine Fair of George Washington University has written, of Pakistan’ s“proving itself unable or unwilling to bring the Afghan Taliban to the negotiating table .” The Pakistani military has had no interest in the sort of negotiations that the US seeks as it feels Kabul wlll be theirs eventually. After the US persuaded Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to kowtow to Rawalpindi, the generals backstabbed him last spring with a new Taliban offensive.

When the US took out Mansour, a strike that took place inside Pakistani territory and which Rawalpindi was not forewarned about, it was a sign White House’s expectations on the Pakistan military delivering the Taliban are so low they didn’ t care about the fallout. The US had been trying to entice the Pakistani military to dismantle its tactical nuclear arsenal as its small, dispersed warheads were seen as prime targets for terrorist capture. It tried to entice Pakistan with a“nuclear deal” on the lines of one given to India in 2009. Pakistan military rejected six versions of the deal, insisting on a carbon copy of India’s. While Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had the right ideas but no authority to implement them, General Sharif is rigid adherent to Rawalpindi’s orthodoxy regarding the Taliban and India.