04 May 2013, 11:32 AM IST
Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's former ambassador to the US, recently suggested that the two countries sever their alliance. Is a 'break-up' even possible and will the election change anything?
What is the secret of Pakistan's hold on the United States that Washington slumbers over its reckless nuclear proliferation and its unceasing sponsorship of terrorism?
The story goes that when Pakistan's founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who had never been to the US (neither had Gandhi or Nehru at that time), wanted to choose an ambassador to the US, he picked Mirza Abol Hassan Ispahani, one of the initiators of the Pakistan movement who had toured the United States in the mid-1940 s to drum up support for an independent Muslim state. In a November 1946 letter to Jinnah, Ispahani explained what he knew of the American psyche. "I have learnt that sweet words and first impressions count a lot with Americans," he wrote. "They are inclined to quickly like or dislike an individual or organisation."
Ispahani and his successor Mohammed Ali Bogra, who would go back to become Pakistan's prime minister, worked relentlessly to bring Washington and Karachi (which was then Pakistan's capital) closer, according to a recent account by Husain Haqqani, till recently Islamabad's envoy to Washington (and Ispahani's son-in-law ). Jinnah gave several interviews to US journalists, the best known of them was Life magazine's Margaret Bourke-White, who also chronicled Gandhi's life. "America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America," Jinnah bragged to her. "Pakistan is the pivot of the world, the frontier on which the future position of the world revolves."
Like many Pakistani leaders after him, Jinnah's bluster was aimed at persuading the US to pour money and arms into Pakistan. And Bourke-White, like many Americans after her, was skeptical, writes Haqqani. She sensed that behind the bluster was insecurity and a "bankruptcy of ideas... a nation drawing its spurious warmth from the embers of an antique religious fanaticism, fanned into a new blaze." Bourke-White was prescient in her analysis, but that did not prevent Washington from falling headlong for Pakistan, helped to a great extent by Delhi's sense of self-importance.
At that time, India was clearly favoured rising star on the US firmament even though its ally Britain entertained misgivings. In some of the lesser-known chapters of US-India history, the founding director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, had lived in Allahabad in the late 1920s as a young man learning Sanskrit and teaching English, and had befriended Nehru and his sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit. Much later, a young American diplomat named Tom Reiner, who had gone to Birla House for a Gandhi Darshan in his first week of a Delhi posting, had physically apprehended Nathuram Godse after he shot the Mahatma. From Gandhi's own correspondence with Ford to Martin Luther King's idolising of the Mahatma, the personal connections and dynamics between India and US were all incredibly positive.
Nehru himself visited the US in 1949 with his young daughter Indira to meet President Truman, seeking aid for a famineprone country during meetings that were described as warm and cordial. There were expectations of greater US-India engagement despite Nehru's well-known socialist proclivities. But Nehru didn't conform to Washington's expectations, charting an independent course for India, and in US eyes, gravitating to the Soviet orbit, infuriating Truman and Allen Dulles' brother, the Cold War architect, John Foster Dulles.
By contrast, Pakistan played ball, and in fact, went on to become, in Husain Haqqani's view, "a rentier state". In fact, Haqqani used even more colourful language to describe his country's way of handling America. He liked it to "a nation of rug merchants," who would start by asking for the moon, but would settle for a dismal price, never letting a customer walk out of the shop without a sale. Another time, according to Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars, he compared Pakistan to a woman who is being wooed by man. "We all know what he wants from her, right?" Woodward cites Haqqani as saying. "But she has other ideas. She wants to be taken to the theater. She wants that nice new bottle of perfume. If you get down on one knee, and give the ring, that's the big prize."
The big prize is supposed to be recognition of Pakistan's nuclear status and a nuclear deal on par with what India's obtained. This is the prize that some Pakistan experts like Georgetown University's Christine Fair are now suggesting, in return for Islamabad giving up its jihadi assets. Not even Pakistani fingerprints in terrorism directed against US — from Daaod Gilani aka David Headley to Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad to Samir Khan, whose terrorist magazine inspired the Tsarnaev brothers to build their homemade bomb — has persuaded the bargain hunters to call off that gambit.
In Delhi's eyes, appeasement and buyouts, which they fear is the new Secretary of State John Kerry's preferred approach, just won't work. You can give the Pakistanis all the bargains they seek, surmises a senior Indian intelligence official, but they will not give up their jihadi card: They see it as an essential part of their survival kit. Even Fair, whose knowledge of Pakistani perfidy over the decades is unusual in a town of short-term memories and plans, seems to think that the time for bargaining is running out. "Pakistan has been able to monetise its insecurity by extorting funds from the international community based upon the argument that it is too dangerous to fail," she wrote in a recent Time article. "The United States should also be prepared to let Pakistan fail."
Haqqani himself, a persona non-grata in Islamabad and unlikely to return to his home country any time soon, seems to have given up on Pakistan and its record of fractured ties with the US. "Given this history of failure, it is time to reconsider whether the US-Pakistani alliance is worth preserving," he writes in a recent Foreign Affairs essay titled 'Breaking Up Is Not Hard To Do'. "Once Pakistan's national security elites recognise the limits of their power (without US support), the country might eventually seek a renewed partnership with the US — but this time with greater humility and an awareness of what it can and cannot get." No one is betting that the election results — whichever way it goes — will change anything.
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