Expect a complete resumption
They blocked the routes and they can very well go and block them. This is set to be the government’s line on the Nato supply routes. Some tough love, now that the opposition isn’t ready to play ball. Oddly, however, this newer line of reasoning is exactly what some within the opposition were saying in the first place: you blocked them unilaterally, why did you have to pass over the decision to unblock to the parliament?
First of all, any decision as generally unpopular as that would have required the backing of all the major political powers in the country. That would have been the only way to control (minimise) the backlash. Secondly, it is, after all, an inclusive approach to governance.
The government’s probable decision to reopen the routes emerges from signs that the Americans are finding our delays rather troublesome and tiring. There is a feeling, stateside, that they have humoured us for more than they should. They have made all that explicitly clear by not inviting us for the moot in Chicago.
An interesting pattern has emerged on that front. Topping the list of those outraged at being slighted vis a vis Chicago, is the camp that had made emphatic cases for not going to the Bonn conference. How these two views – a disengagement from the west and an indignation when we are not catered to – are held at the same time must be a mentally tiring exercise.
The fact of the matter is that we are on thin ice here. Pakistan hasn’t made many actual friends over the course of its history and the reasons for this can be debated endlessly. True, we constantly point out the west’s ungratefulness regarding the sacrifices that we have given but we also have much to explain over the course of our history. Though the links of the deep state with militant networks are an open secret around here, more serious cases like the presence of Osama Bin Laden in the country, is indicative of the thin ice we are on. We scoff at the US Secretary of State’s assertions about Ayman Al Zawahiri being in the country just the way we did at similar claims involving Osama Bin Laden.