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ANALYSIS: Did Clinton’s visit make a difference? —Najmuddin A Shaikh

There has perhaps in the weeks that have passed been a visible toning down of the anti-American rhetoric in the TV and press commentaries and to that extent one can perhaps say that the visit was successful

It would be fair to say that no other visitor in recent years has maintained as crushing a schedule as Hillary Clinton did during her visit to Pakistan. She was here, there, and everywhere, going to places that Pakistan’s own leaders have stayed away from. Apart from her official engagements she took on a formidable set of interviews with the local media, held what are known as town hall meetings and then went on to give a whole set of interviews to the American and international media. By my count she opened herself to mostly hostile questions on eight different occasions with Pakistani journalists or private citizens and gave another seven or eight interviews to American and other international media representatives.

She announced various aid packages that were aimed at helping in areas that the Pakistanis had identified as most crucial, including energy, poverty alleviation, the IDPs of Swat and the strengthening of our border surveillance capabilities, and participated in ceremonies such as the distribution of certificates for the Benazir Income Support Programme.

She acknowledged that the US was partly responsible for the current situation and that the trust deficit was also partly a result of the mistaken policies of the past eight years. She addressed questions regarding the US presence in Pakistan and while her answers were not always complete they did suggest that fears about the US seeking to micromanage Pakistan’s economy or creating a military presence in Pakistan were misplaced.

Repeatedly she made clear that the US was trying to get a resumption of the Indo-Pak dialogue but ultimately this was a decision that the two countries had to make. She said in answer to questions that she had not been given any evidence about Indian involvement in Balochistan and implied that she had no such evidence either about India’s allegations of Pakistan’s involvement in the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. She suggested that these were issues that the two parties needed to discuss and that the US would try to encourage movement in that direction.

She did, having faced a barrage of questions, take the offensive on two issues. First, that while she was prepared to address Pakistani misgivings and concerns, the Pakistanis must do likewise with respect to US concerns and misgivings and in this context she alleged: “Al Qaeda has had safe havens in Pakistan since 2002. I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to. And maybe that’s the case. Maybe they’re not getable. I don’t know.” She went on to say, “I ask in the pursuit of mutual respect that you take seriously our concerns so that it’s not just a one-sided argument.” The second point she made was that it was for Pakistan to accept or reject the assistance promised under the Kerry-Lugar Act but the fact was that there were always conditions attached to American assistance, be it aid to Israel or Egypt or Pakistan, that the Kerry-Lugar Act process had started more than two years ago as the Biden-Lugar Bill and had been reviewed by many in Pakistan and the US and it was therefore a surprise that this furore had been created now. On neither issue as far as I could tell did her Pakistani interlocutors provide a Pakistani defence.

There has perhaps in the weeks that have passed been a visible toning down of the anti-American rhetoric in the TV and press commentaries and to that extent one can perhaps say that the visit was successful.

But did we ask the hard questions and did we do the soul searching that Clinton’s questions should have prompted? Did we for instance raise the question of seeking American assistance in removing the refugee camps from the Afghan border with Balochistan? After all if the Quetta Shura is an issue, the first step should be to remove the camps into which the Taliban can move with minimal difficulty. Did we ask why the US cannot persuade the Afghans to accept the biometric identification system for legal border crossings at Chaman and Torkham? If borders are to be secured, surely you must start with the fact that border crossings have to be controlled. Did we raise the question of what the creation of a 400,000 strong Afghan security force (240,000 Afghan National Army and 160,000 Afghan National Police) could mean for the stability of the region after the departure of NATO forces from Afghanistan? A force of this size could not be supported by the Afghan economy and after the subsidy from the West ended, as it certainly would, this force would have to look to regional powers for handouts. On one occasion alone do I recall a question being asked about the removal of US and NATO forces from the Afghan areas bordering South Waziristan, and yet this should have been fundamental because it was against this anvil that the Pakistani military hammer should have crushed the Pakistani Taliban and their Afghan supporters. Was there really a joint military strategy if these NATO posts were abandoned just as the Pakistani offensive was getting underway?

On our side did we acknowledge that even while the US abandonment of the region in 1990 played a part, we ourselves did nothing to contain the monster that we had created? Can we acknowledge that our pursuit of “strategic depth” in Afghanistan both before and after 9/11 led to the growth of the Pakistani Taliban? Can we accept that there is a genuine convergence of Pakistani and US interest in “defeating, disrupting and dismantling the al Qaeda network” because without that there can be no defeating the Pakistan Taliban or the ideology that they espouse? Can we accept that the Afghan Taliban are not our key to maintaining influence in Afghanistan and that our interests in Afghanistan are best safeguarded by using our expertise and what ex-President Musharraf calls our “ingress” into various Taliban groups to work out a grand reconciliation between the Karzai administration (flawed though it may be) and the “moderate” Taliban?

Can we learn to be truthful with our people and tell them that even for the successful pursuit of the current and future offensives, apart from the tremendous sacrifice of life offered by our armed forces, we are making profligate use of munitions and machines for the replenishment of which we have to depend largely on the US? Can we acknowledge that even while we try to rebuild our institutions we remain hugely dependent on foreign assistance to meet our current expenditures let alone the needs of our development programmes and that we have been singularly unsuccessful in generating these funds from our own resources?

So short are we of resources that by my reckoning we will have to ask the Americans to waive those provisions of the Kerry-Lugar Act that prevent us from using US military aid for paying for the F-16s that we have bought. We did so last year and will have to do so again this year.

An anti-American mood prevails in Pakistan. It is not going to be helped by the fact that the Obama administration by moving away from its stated position of requiring Israel to freeze settlement activity as a necessary prelude to the resumption of Israel-Palestine talks has created new frustrations in the Arab and Pakistani streets. But this is also the time when American assistance and the goodwill of the Western world is indispensable. If we are thinking of “Pakistan first”, the US relationship is not the tool our politicians should use to score points against each other.

This is instead the time when all political forces and other power centres should make a cold blooded assessment of what our interests in Afghanistan are and how best they can be safeguarded. One can hope that from this assessment will come the conclusion that a stable neutral Afghanistan, no matter what the complexion of its government, best serves Pakistan’s interests and the sooner such a change can be brought the better it would be for a Pakistan that does not desire a large and potentially adversarial security force on its western border.

The writer is a former foreign secretary

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