Hard Times Anew for the United States and Pakistan

As if to coincide with the five-year anniversary of the May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad complex, times grew unusually tough for the United States and Pakistan in May 2016. And make no mistake: this is a relationship that's largely used to tough love. Amid a botched deal for the sale of eight F-16 Block-52 fighters to Pakistan and a U.S. drone strike against the leader of the Afghan Taliban in Balochistan, relations between the two allies have reached a nadir largely unseen since May 2011, when the United States' most wanted terrorist leader was found nearly on the doorstep of Pakistan's premier military academy.

Unmistakably, at the center of both the F-16 affair and the drone strike is the issue of the Pakistani military and security services providing shelter for, and actively nurturing, armed groups with objectives inimical to U.S. interests in the region. In the case of the F-16s, U.S. senators opposed the use of U.S. public funds to underwrite the sale of the fighters on the grounds that Pakistan was inadequately targeting the deadly Haqqani Network. Similar hesitations on the part of the U.S. State Department last year threatened to suspend reimbursements for Pakistani military costs incurred fighting terror groups under the United States' Coalition Support Fund. (The Pakistani Army recently entered the final phase of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, a massive effort to clear out militant groups hostile to the state, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.)

The drone strike against the Taliban's erstwhile leader, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, had echoes of the bin Laden raid. Once again, the leader of a group actively involved in the deaths of U.S. troops in Afghanistan was taken out with a surgical strike. The differences matter. For instance, the United States hasn't designated the Afghan Taliban as a terrorist organization, in order to facilitate peace negotiations. Similarly, the drone strike against Mansour was a U.S. Joint Special Operations Command operation, unlike the cloak-and-dagger work of SEAL Team Six under the supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency that defined the bin Laden raid.

For Pakistan, these details are ancillary to the overarching narrative: the death of the F-16 deal demonstrates U.S. ungratefulness for the blood and treasure spilled by Pakistan in the fight against terrorism, and the strike on Mansour speaks to the United States' wanton disregard for Pakistan's sovereignty. Never mind that Mansour was found to be carrying a Pakistani passport, enabling him to cross the border into Iran. The Taliban leadership's base of operations in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan, had been an open secret for some time. After the strike against Mansour--the first-ever U.S. drone strike in Balochistan--the Taliban leadership may consider moving its operations back across the border into Afghanistan, perhaps settling into Helmand.

To ease over some of the tension after the strike against Mansour and the F-16 imbroglio, the United States dispatched Peter Lavoy, special assistant to the president and senior director for South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, and Richard Olson, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Islamabad. The two emissaries met with the usual cast of characters in Islamabad, including Sartaj Aziz, the Pakistani prime minister's adviser on foreign affairs; Nasir Khan Janjua, the prime minister's national security adviser; and, most critically, General Raheel Sharif, the chief of army staff.

Before the two U.S. envoys touched down in Islamabad, Aziz insinuated that Pakistan would seek to revise the terms of the difficult bilateral relationship, seizing on popular backlash against the U.S. drone strike in Balochistan. “Relations between Pakistan and the U.S. need to be reassessed,” he remarked at a news conference. According to a Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs readout of the meetings between the U.S. envoys and their Pakistani interlocutors, nothing fundamental appeared to have changed. Aziz reportedly "expressed his concern that the drone strike had seriously undermined the ongoing efforts for Afghan peace and reconciliation."

Aziz's remarks took on a particular irony in the middle of June when Afghan and Pakistani border security forces began exchanging fire at the Torkham border crossing. Following the Mansour strike, Pakistan implemented restrictive visa requirements on Afghans crossing the border, disrupting the economic livelihoods of thousands along the tense crossing that links Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with Nangarhar. (The requirements had been mutually agreed to in April, prior to the strike.) Afghan officials suspected that the border restrictions were retaliation against Afghanistan for the state's suspected complicity in facilitating the procurement of human intelligence inside Balochistan that facilitated the U.S. drone strike on Mansour. Both sides eventually agreed to a ceasefire, but blood had been shed and Afghan-Pakistani cooperation on peace talks with the Taliban suffered another grievous setback.

In addition to Afghanistan, India also took on relevance in early June, straining already bad ties between Pakistan and the United States further. For Islamabad, congressional intervention in the sale of the F-16 fighters stings particularly amid steady U.S. outreach to India. Just days before the F-16 deal was effectively declared dead by Pakistan's defense secretary, the Indian prime minister addressed a joint session of U.S. Congress, outlining an effusive vision for rapprochement and defense cooperation between Washington and New Delhi. To make matters worse for Islamabad, the United States designated India a "Major Defense Partner," conferring on New Delhi a bespoke bilateral status that would grant it access to sensitive military technology at the same level as the United States' other close allies, including Japan and South Korea. Washington and New Delhi additionally finalized the contours of a deal to facilitate cooperation on military logistics.

I'm hesitant to prognosticate that a broader schism between Washington and Islamabad may be on the horizon. After all, even after the difficult days of 2011, neither the United States and Pakistan saw grounds to file for diplomatic divorce. Pakistan will have the nuclear trump card to pull on Washington, stoking anxieties that without U.S. support for the military establishment, nuclear materials may find their way into the hands of terror groups. Washington, meanwhile, will need a baseline level of cooperation with Pakistan to enable its ongoing presence in Afghanistan, which appears to be pushing past envisaged expiration dates, turning America's longest war into a longer one yet.

Five years ago, it seemed that Pakistan may have crossed a line that would have led to a "reassessment" in the relationship, to use Sartaj Aziz's recent language. While the regional context has changed considerably since then, Washington doesn't appear to be pivoting away from Islamabad anytime soon. Instead, it appears that what the United States wants is a more acquiescent and understanding Pakistani security establishment. If history is any guide, that might be an unreasonable demand.