Not yet, in any case
The customer with the knife is always right. The US has an assessment of Pakistan’s performance in the war on terror. And it has to be the correct one, regardless of whether it actually is. Debate endlessly as we might any unfavourable judgment on us by citing this sacrifice or that achievement, it is their review that matters, specially when it comes to footing certain bills.
There is some hilarious fuming from amongst the hawkish circles at the recent US proposition in Congress (defeated 39 to 5, though) to cut off all aid to Pakistan. The how-dare-they-think-about-not-giving-us-their-money indignation.
The problem here for those who huff and puff is that they can’t exactly ask for due wages; the war against terror is, after all, Pakistan’s own declared policy.
On the proposed bill itself: the new American intelligence czar warned the legislators not to push Pakistan too hard; that they’d already poked “a lot of short sticks into hornets’ nests.” The spiel worked. It is unlikely, given the relative openness of at least the American legislative process, that this was a good-cop-bad-cop. The legislators there are, in these financially lean times, mandated to put any expenses incurred under greater scrutiny. And their constituents would have been fed more than enough news stories about Pakistan’s alleged duplicity in the war against terror, specially in the aftermath of the Abbottabad episode.
Even in its current form, the bill makes future aid contingent on progress made by Pakistan in the war against terror. The congresswoman who proposed the elimination of the aid was, in particular, insistent upon Pakistan’s crackdown on the nuclear weapons black market, the elimination of the rest of Al-Qaeda presence in the country and the carrying forth of “common counter-terrorism objectives.”
It is the last of the three, liberally defined, that will prove to be the most prickly. The deep state views the US overtures to the Taliban in Afghanistan as a carte blanche as far as its relations with the Pakistani Taliban are concerned. The US needs to clearly present a case for why this isn’t, in fact, a case of doing one thing while preaching another in its official and well as public diplomacy.
