Opinion With ‘realism’ guiding its Pakistan policy, US credibility is diminished
Neither Delhi nor Islamabad should ever forget that this is not the start or end of any diplomatic reset. It is just a part of transactional “deals” where one loses or wins, depending on the situation. But the trust and credibility of the American word are lost in the long term
Today, the US administration is again willing to entertain and support the Pakistani “establishment” that accounted for so many US body bags in Afghanistan, that acts as a Chinese vassal state, that harboured Osama bin Laden in a garrison township, and that routinely strikes a dangerously anti-US line in its domestic politics of religious extremism. 
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Henry Kissinger was an ultra-realist, Cold War-era warrior, who is credited (and reviled) for stripping away woolly notions of consistency and morality in American diplomacy. If he thought that abandoning the same was in America’s interest, he’d renege on all declared stances. The Machiavellian architect of Pax Americana injected unpredictability as a tool of diplomacy. His infamous quote, “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests”, has resonance across the Indian subcontinent today. Pakistan in the early ’70s was led by General Yahya Khan, whose genocidal excesses in East Pakistan (now, Bangladesh) were well known. But the likes of Kissinger treated countries as pawns for the so-called greater good of America, as he ostensibly believed in the “limitations of righteousness”.
Since Pakistan was serving as the secret conduit for Kissinger’s overtures to China, the calculated price to support Rawalpindi, as it perpetrated the killing of over a million Bengalis and assaulting and injuring hundreds of thousands, made perfect sense to Kissinger. It was the same transactional diplomacy that enabled the US administration to generously support Pakistan under military dictator Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s. As Kissinger would rationalise plainly, “Ideology mattered less than alignment” or that “We do not have the luxury of dealing only with democracies.” The US hand in subsequently creating the global phenomenon of religious extremism is irrefutable.
So, as is inevitable with any transactional diplomacy, both trust and morality become expendable, as does the consequential impact on stability and consistency in sovereign relations. The entire framework of relationships between nations can be reduced to topical “deals”, where the so-called “deal” is judged by what is immediately gained or lost. Basically, short-termism triumphs over the long term. The current US administration is perhaps the most transactional and unpredictable in recent memory and not one given to upholding and respecting longstanding sovereign positions.
Like any other country, Pakistan has been subjected to extreme swings from outright ridicule to unjustified support by the US. The same Donald Trump who in 2018 lambasted Pakistan by saying, “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!” was to be proven right with Islamabad’s covert takeover of Kabul in 2021 through the Taliban. It is another matter that Pakistan was pursuing its own transactional and selfish agenda with the Taliban. That, too, is violently backfiring now. However, the Pakistani duplicity and unreliability towards the US has been proven, repeatedly.
Despite Delhi’s purported “strategic partnership” and “major defence partner” status with Washington and with Pulwama credibly attributed to the Pakistani “establishment” (read, military), the US administration recently took a brazen U-turn. In a shocking retraction from its own frustrations with Pakistan expressed by senior US Military Commanders like Admiral Mike Mullen (who said that the “Haqqani network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s ISI”), General David Petraeus (who called out Pakistan’s “double-game”), General Stanley McChrystal (who spoke about Islamabad’s “support for insurgent groups”) or even by Trump himself earlier, the current Commander of the US Central Command, General Michael Kurilla, has inexplicably lauded Pakistan as a “phenomenal partner in the counter-terrorism world”.
History is instructive: such retractions or shocking “accommodations” by US administrations are not new. The US has been particularly indulgent in giving a long rope to Pakistani Military leaders like Field Marshal Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan, Zia-ul-Haq and even Pervez Musharraf (architect of Kargil), as he was deemed necessary for America’s “war on terror”. Without batting an eyelid, the dark and unsavoury past of the Pakistani “establishment” was always conveniently forgotten.
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Today, the US administration is again willing to entertain and support the Pakistani “establishment” that accounted for so many US body bags in Afghanistan, that acts as a Chinese vassal state, that harboured Osama bin Laden in a garrison township, and that routinely strikes a dangerously anti-US line in its domestic politics of religious extremism, because yet again, the US needs Pakistan to do its possible bidding in neighbouring Afghanistan or Iran, with which it has little or no leverage. The indulgence of the Pakistani “establishment”, especially across the Line-of-Control in India, does not seem to matter to the US administration. The American suggestion that Delhi ought not to read too much into such moves is patronising, insincere, and amoral.
However, this does not change fundamental US positions on Pakistan conclusively, and must be viewed as a tactical “deal” by the Trump administration to secure leverage in a country that is vital for protecting the American foothold in the region. America’s “interest-first realism” was introduced by the likes of Kissinger, who didn’t hesitate to send the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, and perhaps even nudged the Chinese to move troops towards the Indian border in 1971. The hard lesson, as Brookings scholar Thomas Wright says, is “Trump treated US alliances like hotel contracts: Every relationship was up for renegotiation.” Neither Delhi nor Islamabad should ever forget that this is not the start or end of any diplomatic reset. It is just a part of transactional “deals” where one loses or wins, depending on the situation. But the trust and credibility of the American word are lost in the long term.
The writer is a retired lieutenant general and a former lieutenant governor of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Puducherry
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