US-Pakistan relations are again at odds. Both the civilian and military leadership in Islamabad believe that the US has treated them poorly since the Special Forces’ raid on Abbottabad and the demise of Osama bin Laden.

Subsequently, the US’ use of drone attacks along Pakistan’s western borderlands has become yet another source of political contention. Most recently, the decision to convict and incarcerate the Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, who had helped locate Bin Laden, has further exacerbated an already strained relationship.
As this drama unfolds, it is intriguing to note that there is a distinct sense of injured innocence that pervades much of the Pakistani political landscape. The standard refrain that emerges from both the military establishment and the civilian government is that the US (and indeed much of the Western world) simply fails to recognise the huge costs that Pakistan has paid in blood and treasure as it has taken on Islamic radicals within its territory. This form of self-pity, however, blatantly ignores the consequences of the choices of a range of Pakistani regimes, both military and civilian, which had long nurtured and supported these selfsame organisations and individuals. Nor, for that matter, does it address the fact that the Pakistani state still remains unwilling to sever its ties with these entities as it sees them as strategic assets to be deployed to pursue critical foreign and security policy goals.
Some American policymakers, nevertheless, seem convinced that with the right combination of threats and incentives, their Pakistani counterparts may yet see the error of their ways. Sadly, this capacity for self-delusion has long roots and can be traced to the Cold War era. Historical scholarship has, for some time, revealed how deftly key Pakistani politicians inveigled a naïve Eisenhower administration into forging a strategic relationship during the early days of the Cold War. Pakistan’s success notwithstanding, the relationship was based upon a faulty premise from the outset. The US saw Pakistan as an invaluable ally in the anti-Communist enterprise. Pakistanis, on the other hand, saw the US merely as a bulwark against their principal adversary, India.
That said, at least in the early Cold War years, even though US and Pakistani motivations were not congruent, the relationship had a firm footing. Pakistan gave the US access to air bases which were used for critical reconnaissance flights over the erstwhile Soviet Union. Though the relationship was transactional, it yielded tangible benefits for the United States.
Most astute Pakistanis were aware that the relationship was not based upon shared values, ideological convergence or even common strategic interests. This realisation, however, did not prevent them from nurturing unrealistic expectations of their American ally. Pakistani choices precipitated both the 1965 and 1971 wars. In 1965, despite much evidence of Pakistan’s initiation of the conflict, the US remained neutral. In 1971, as is well-known, Nixon blatantly tilted towards Pakistan and exerted pressure on India. Nevertheless, since the eventual outcome of the war was disastrous for Pakistan, its elites felt that the US had let them down in their hour of need.
This curious ambivalence persisted even when the relationship was renewed in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It is certainly to General Zia-ul-Haq’s credit that he described the resurrected relationship as a “handshake not an embrace”, thereby highlighting its transactional features. While Zia may not have been dewy-eyed in the least, his successors managed to conjure up an image of Pakistani victimhood as the US cut off assistance and imposed nuclear sanctions on the country after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Pervez Musharraf, under significant American pressure, was induced to make common cause with the US. However, on this occasion, it were American policymakers and key members of the Washington, DC, policy community, who became mostly uncritical cheerleaders of the Musharraf regime. They argued with considerable force that the good general was truly secular, that he was an invaluable ally in the “war on terror” and that he had realised the dangers that Islamic extremism posed to his country and beyond. Indeed many took to heart Mr Musharraf’s much-vaunted claims of “enlightened moderation” even as he and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate maintained not-so-covert links with a plethora of extremist organisations for use in both Afghanistan and Kashmir.
Indeed, not until the last days of the second Bush administration did some scepticism start to emerge about Mr Musharraf’s commitment to curb if not end Islamist radicalism. Since then the Obama administration has slowly but surely started to lose faith in Pakistani professions of cooperation. Not surprisingly, despite the counsel of some within Washington’s policy circles, who routinely sound the tocsin about alienating Pakistan, the administration has chosen to pursue unilateral actions to achieve its strategic goals in the region.
As the US contemplates a withdrawal from Afghanistan it may behove policymakers, regardless of political persuasion, to re-examine the basic premises of US policy towards Pakistan. Professions of friendship and amity aside, this may be an apt moment to have a considered assessment of the strategic utility of the country to the United States.