Diplomatic moves: The US needs a reset with Pakistan

For decades, U.S. policy toward Pakistan has been predicated on America’s goals in Afghanistan. Pakistan both helped and hindered the U.S. war on terror, making for a notoriously dysfunctional relationship. Now the United States is out of Afghanistan, and the relationship is on shaky footing. It’s time to reimagine it. 

The United States must treat Pakistan as a country in its own right, not as a fulcrum for U.S. policy on Afghanistan. That starts with America disentangling itself from the close military relationship with Pakistan. 

A reset won’t be easy: Resentment is rife. America sees Pakistan’s support for the Taliban as one reason it lost in Afghanistan; Pakistan sees the Taliban insurgency it faced at home as blowback for partnering with America next door. In Washington, the grim mood has led to talk of disengagement and sanctions. Neither approach will work or be satisfactory in the long run.

Pakistan, meanwhile, wants a broad-based relationship with the U.S. focused on geoeconomics — which is not realistic. Instead, the Biden administration seems to be defaulting to the status quo: largely limiting engagement with Pakistan to Afghanistan, mostly for over-the-horizon counter-terrorism options. 

This sets up a repetition of the old, failed cycle, missing the opportunity to steer Pakistan away from its own harmful over-reliance on the military to a more productive future. It would be smarter and safer for the United States to pivot to a multidimensional approach that acknowledges the realities of the country and its neighborhood. 

Pakistan faces immense domestic challenges, including governance and terrorism. The first and most important step to this pivot would be explicitly reducing American dependence on its usual partner in Pakistan: the military and intelligence services. While Pakistan’s military is perceived as more efficient than its civilian institutions, it has repeatedly shown that its incentives are not aligned with America’s.

U.S. reliance on Pakistan’s military has weighted the civilian-military equation — evidenced in how military spending accounts for about 16 percent of Pakistan’s annual expenditures. (U.S. military spending accounts for 11 percent.) Pakistan’s dominant military has kept active the specter of potential conflict with India, and its intelligence services have cultivated relationships with an array of dangerous non-state armed actors. 

A civilian-focused U.S. policy will help Pakistan begin to shift the balance away from its military and will, in the longer term, bolster Pakistan’s democracy. While that certainly won’t guarantee liberalism in Pakistan, it can in time curb approaches favored by the military — including relationships with jihadists — that have proved harmful for the region and Pakistan itself.

In practical terms, that will mean U.S. cabinet secretaries make fewer calls to Pakistani army chiefs and more to civilian ministers. It will mean that President Biden should finally make a long-awaited call to Pakistan’s prime minister to discuss China, India, counter-terrorism, and the economy, not just cooperation on Afghanistan.

There are risks to this approach. The military and intelligence services in Pakistan won’t be thrilled about this downgrade in their status, and they may choose to retaliate by reducing cooperation in areas like intelligence sharing or by limiting access to Pakistani airspace for counter-terrorism operations. 

This approach might also seem to be asking the U.S. government to overlook past issues with Pakistan (especially its support of the Taliban) and will require a level of generosity that some believe Pakistan does not deserve. But the benefits from such a reset — stronger Pakistani civilian institutions, which will mean a more reliable partnership both diplomatically and militarily for the US — will ultimately outweigh short-term risks.