View from Pakistan | Tight rope walk

Usama Nizamani

The start of 2022 will go down as a year, at least for this decade, which drifted policymakers in Pakistan away from exercising prescient choices. The year coincided with the war breaking out between Russia and Ukraine, which impacted global supply chain configuration and forced countries, mostly in Asia, to play a delicate balancing act between great powers.

For Pakistan the challenges were multiple: grappling with uncertainty over Afghanistan; domestic politics fractured over the vote of no-confidence; subsequent domestic politics squabbles; and an approach of high-handedness by the central government to corner opposition and dissenting media; and lastly, the set off of disastrous floods, all of which have complicated choices for surmounting a fast-evolving geopolitical landscape. The course Pakistan takes will determine its position in the next two decades: either being adrift or astute at exercising strategic choices.

Road to Washington

The last plane to fly out of Kabul on 30 August 2021 with US officials, Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue and Ambassador Ross Wilson concluded the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Not only did it bring an end to the United States’ longest war, but it also left an indelible mark on the US-Pakistan relations, which were in search of a reset. Pakistan has long desired a strategic partnership with the US beyond Afghanistan and the confines of security-centred cooperation. For observers in the US, such an attempt was premature: the wounds over Afghanistan were yet not healed.

As much as this argument sounds old, the fact is simple. Pakistan and the US were actually pursuing parallel interests, despite overlapping interests. The wider common interests included fighting Al-Qaeda and other internationally designated terrorist groups that threatened Pakistan, the US and regional security. On things they diverged, the US blamed Pakistan for doing too little to coerce the Taliban and its Haqqani faction, while Pakistan feared being pressed from its western front, as on the eastern one by India, due to the presence of India’s security apparatus in Afghanistan. This in part motivated actions that often entangled both Pakistan and the US in protracted cycles of blame game, mutual distrust and pursuit of actions that ran in diame