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US-Pakistan ties 'heading for meltdown'

RaviVelloor
TEN years after the Pervez Musharraf government abruptly reversed Pakistan's policy of helping the United States topple the Taleban government in Afghanistan, Islamabad's ties with Washington are hitting new lows with each passing day.
The chief reason has to do with the Pakistan establishment's unflinching support for the groups of tribal militants loosely banded as the Quetta Shura.
Angered and frustrated at the repeated attacks on American and Nato forces by Pakistan-backed militants, the US is threatening to ignore Pakistani sensitivities and mount hot pursuits in the barely governed tribal badlands of Pakistan.
There are even murmurs of the unthinkable — Pakistan being branded a state sponsor of terrorism — if ties deteriorate further.
Meanwhile, the US is actively looking to expand alternate supply routes into Afghanistan to cut its dependence on the Pakistani port of Karachi.
Taken together, dark clouds tire looming over US ties with Pakistan, once so tight that US pilot Gary Powers, whose U-2 spy plane was brought down over Russia in 1960, had taken off from a Pakistani airfield for his mission. When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan two decades later, Pakistan was the staging point for the US-backed Afghan resistance.
Now, their interests are completely misaligned and as American frustration grows, hot words are flying.
Last week, US envoy Cameron Munter went on Pakistan radio to decry Islamabad's support for the Haqqani militant network, directly
The world economy many say now lacks global leadership. Others predict societal upheaval. What is greatly troubling is not just lack of confidence in the global economy, but also lack of confidence in global governance. This is more troubling.
accusing it of targeting US and Nato offices in Kabul in a bid to control Afghanistan's post-2014 future.
On Wednesday, his boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave her young Pakistani counterpart, the designer-clothed Hina Rabbani Khar, a dressing down.
And just the day before, Admiral Mike Mullen, the soon-to-retire chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pakistani state was using the Haqqanis as "proxies."
The US Senate Appropriations Committee also voted to make aid to Pakistan conditional on its cooperation to fight militants. Islamabad yesterday promised to take action against
the Haqqanis if Washington provides sufficient intelligence, but denied that they were in Pakistan.
Admiral Mullen said he raised the need for Pakistan's powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to sever ties with the Haqqani network during talks with Pakistan army chief Ashfaq Kayani last Friday.
"The ISI has been... supporting proxies for an extended period of time. I think that strategic approach has to shift in the future," he said.
The blunt remarks raised eyebrows because Admiral Mullen claims a personal friendship with General Kayani. But for those following the steady decline in US-Pakistani ties, it came as
no surprise.
"The US-Pakistani partnership has been steadily marching to a meltdown ever since it was resuscitated, thanks to divergent objectives, poor alternatives and endless illusions," said respected analyst Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"Although the US was aware of Pakistan's active support for the Taleban resurgence as early as 2003, and for anti-Indian jihadi groups even earlier, they did not receive serious attention as long as Afghanistan remained stable. The real strains emerged when the Pakistani backing of the Quetta Shura began to dangerously undermine US operations in
Afghanistan."
The Quetta Shura — shura means council — is a coalition of anti-US groups comprising the Haqqani brothers, Mullah Omar's Taleban and others. The Haqqanis were blamed for staging the 17-hour stand-off in Kabul last week when militants attacked the US Embassy and Nato headquarters. The US thinks the ISI directly ordered the assault.
Interestingly, the US has not yet classified the Haqqanis as a foreign terrorist organisation.
"The reason is that doing so would mean it will have to also categorise Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism," said aWestern diplomatic source.
"There would be many consequences and Washington has to think through all of them carefully. But this is something not to be ruled out for the future. Pakistan must decide whether it wants to be on the side of the problem or the solution."
Although some of the Shura's key leaders have been picked up by Pakistani forces in recent months, the US is convinced that it continues to be backed by the ISI.
A string of Indian consulates set up in Afghanistan — all allowed by the India-friendly Hamid Karzai regime — has exacerbated Pakistani insecurities. And it has not helped that India has excellent ties with Tajikistan, on Afghanistan's northern border, whose Ayni airbase is India's only foreign military asset.
Meanwhile, the US is desperately building up alternate supply routes.
This month, it was revealed that President Barack Obama was planning to push Congress to lift a seven-year-old arms embargo on Uzbekistan. The idea is to woo Tashkent into closer cooperation with the overland supply route from Europe to Afghanistan, called the Northern Distribution Network (NDN).
Currently, the dominant supply route is through Karachi, from where the supplies pass overland and through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.
But the US move suggests that Washington expects that route to get more and more dangerous. Hence the need to get the Uzbeks' cooperation, never mind that the NDN is a far more expensive route.
©The Straits Times. Reprinted by arrangement with Asia News network.
***Angered and frustrated at the repeated attacks on American and Nato forces by Pakistan-backed militants, the US is threatening to ignore
Pakistani sensitivities and mount hot pursuits in the barely governed tribal badlands of Pakistan.***