Pakistan Tries to Win Back the US, With Little Success

Pakistan and the United States completed high-level security talks in Washington in February. The dialogue was aimed at improving coordination on strategic issues and exploring various new areas of cooperation. With the recent engagement, Pakistan’s relations with the United States are seemingly back on track, but bilateral ties will be limited in range and intensity and not likely to move beyond the existing transactional, security-heavy nature of their cooperation.

Experts say there appear to be no prospects of the United States’ developing a broad-based economic or security partnership with Pakistan, as the latter doesn’t have much to offer after Washington’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Vanda Felbab Brown, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, told The Diplomat that for two decades, Pakistan-U.S. security cooperation centered on counterterrorism and U.S. frustrations with Pakistan’s support for the Taliban. “Washington kept asking and pressing Pakistan to sever that support, something Pakistan was not ready to do,” she said.

“But with the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the withering of the war on terrorism, and Washington’s focus on Ukraine and Asia-Pacific, Pakistan now finds itself mourning the lack of U.S. attention.”

Brown argued that Pakistan is no longer able to trade temporary security cooperation for large economic or strategic payoffs.

“The counterterrorism issue is still a key part of the security dialogue, including a U.S. desire to discretely and quietly use Pakistan for potential strikes in Afghanistan. However, the prioritization and significance of that issue for the United States declined dramatically,” she claimed.

Michael Kugelman, director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, said that in the ongoing security dialogue, Pakistan likely “wants to know how far the U.S. is willing to go with a security partnership.”

“With the U.S. out of Afghanistan, its need for security cooperation isn’t as great as it had been. And with security aid frozen, one can’t expect new security cooperation to go very far,” he said.

However, he believes still there are convergence on some areas of counterterrorism involving “shared concerns about the Pakistani Taliban and especially Islamic State Khorasan, about the Taliban’s unwillingness to cease ties with terror groups that threaten the U.S. and Pakistan, and about an increasingly hot Afghanistan-Pakistan border.”

Kugelman added that “Pakistan likely wants to see what the possible contours of security cooperation may be.”

Brown, on the other hand, said Pakistan only has limited capacity to present itself as a valuable interlocutor and go-between with the Afghan Taliban on security and counterterrorism issues.

She explained that is “both because the U.S. has its own direct, if lower-level counterterrorism engagement with the Taliban and because Pakistan itself is not able to shape the Taliban’s policy as it has envisioned.” As evidence of the latter, Brown pointed to “the Pakistani Taliban’s persistent ability to use Afghanistan as safe haven and the Haqqanis’ unwillingness and inability to restrain TTP attacks in Pakistan.”

Adding to Pakistan’s frustration, Brown said, is that the United States is focused on India as it seeks to build up a strategic partnership with New Delhi in the Quad and beyond to counter China.

When asked if the United States can use Pakistan’s weakened financial position to distance the country from China, Brown said that Washington has been warning “Pakistan about China’s debt trap diplomacy and Pakistan did not listen.”

“Pakistan is now suffering the catastrophic debt consequences. However, there is nothing immediate that Washington will trade for any distancing of Pakistan from China,” she maintained.

Kugelman said Pakistan’s ties with the U.S. have not warmed enough to have an impact on or be a concern for China. “What would worry Beijing is stepped-up Pakistani security cooperation with the U.S., but that's a space with much less forward movement than non-security spaces like climate change, health, and trade,” he said.

Certainly, Pakistan is experiencing some bumps in its relationship with China due to the slowdown of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and Pakistan’s inability to honor commitments made under the mega development project. Kugelman said that there may be some momentum in Pakistan-U.S. relations at the moment, but it is not “happening with enough intensity that China would start to worry that the U.S. may supplant it as Pakistan's key ally.”

“Let's be clear: The trajectory of Pakistan-China relations, warts and all, is much more positive than that of U.S.-Pakistan relations, which is fraught with uncertainty,” he said.

At the moment neither China nor the United States is ready to fully commit to Pakistan’s financial or security needs. Currently, “neither the United States, nor Gulf countries, nor, importantly, China, which holds 30 percent of Pakistan’s crippling debt, is rushing to bail Pakistan out,” Brown argued.

By all accounts, Pakistan’s bargaining chips vis-à-vis Washington have dwindled dramatically. It will be interesting to watch how Pakistan trades its security relevance in the coming weeks to win the United States’ attention.