What will become of the US-Pakistan relationship depends on both the countries’ handling of things after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Much of what we know of the relations today revolves around terrorism focused largely on Afghanistan. Pakistan’s involvement in sheltering and protecting the very forces it had joined hands with the US to eliminate after 9/11 led President Obama to concede that it was not Afghanistan but Pakistan where the actual trouble lay. Pakistan’s relations with the US have tended historically to be purely transactional. Both the countries’ penchant for coming together and falling apart once the basis for collaboration had ended ensued largely from the US policy to focus mostly on military relations with Pakistan. This ultimately led to a widening gulf in people-to-people relations and disconnect with the ordinary Pakistani who had come to hate the US for its intervention in our domestic politics. The Pakistani military’s rule for almost half of the country’s existence hardly justifies the US’s expediency to work with whosoever had been in power. Tolerating military rule and failing to support civilian governments in the wake of their ouster by the army led to the impression that the US has been only concerned with its own interests, even if it meant warming up to undemocratic forces. Nevertheless, the fact remained that Pakistan received a large sum of money over the years in the form of aid and grants to keep the wheels of its military and economy moving. Unfortunately though, most of this money went to consolidate the military’s power rather than to improve the economy of Pakistan. Relations unravelled once again during the war on terrorism when Pakistan, keeping to its policy of supporting its Taliban proxies in Afghanistan, contributed to the failure of the US to eliminate terrorism from Afghan soil. The Kerry-Lugar-Berman Act sought to change the US-Pakistan relationship from a purely transactional one to one that attempted to restrict the military’s role in Pakistan’s politics and directly benefit the economy and thereby the people. However, Machiavellian gambits such as Memogate undermined the effort. One of the results of the US’s suspicions about Pakistan’s role in supporting the Taliban has been that only 34 percent of the $ 7.5 billion has been dispensed under the Act and the rest by now has a shadow of doubt lowering over it. Daniel F Feldman, the US Special Representative on Pakistan and Afghanistan, could be publicly as positive about this relationship as he wants. But much depends on Pakistan’s desire to move away from its destructive policies of supporting proxies and the US willingness to work with Pakistan even after it is no longer needed in the context of Afghanistan quite as much as before. *