Will visiting Tillerson and Mattis pile on the pressure?
President Trump’s new Afghan policy spelled out in August heaped fire and brimstone on Pakistan for its alleged sheltering of ‘agents of chaos’ while reserving honeyed words for India and calling for its expanded role in Afghanistan, anathema to Pakistan, and this one-sided rhetoric has established the pattern which is being inflexibly followed by senior US officials. On Thursday the CIA chief played the new, or partly new, record before a think tank: the US wants the Taliban to negotiate peace, but only after they are diminished militarily, and for this to happen, it is essential that Pakistan cooperate by denying the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network their alleged safe havens across the Durand Line. Although Pakistan’s support is held crucial for the success of the latest American Afghan venture, he sounded pessimistic about the former’s sincere response.
Defence Secretary Mattis also ominously offered giving Pakistan ‘one more time’ to make the new strategy work, Secretary of State Tillerson who is visiting next week, expected the scapegoat ‘to take decisive action against terrorist groups’ and Nicki Haley, the American UN representative, rubbed salt in the wound by her provocative statement regarding the Indian role of ‘keeping an eye on Pakistan’.
While Tillerson’s assurance of deeper relations with India not affecting ties with Pakistan will be taken with scepticism in Islamabad, his remarks on helping to ease some of the tensions bedevilling Pak-India –Afghan border situation will be more welcome. Two other positive development’s hold out the possibility of a change in direction for the better: the death by drone inside Afghanistan of the notorious militant Omar Khalid Khorasani, the mastermind of the December 2014 Peshawar school massacre, and the rescue, also last week, of the kidnapped US-Canadian couple by Pakistani forces inside Pakistani territory. In the latter instance too, US-Pak distrust lingers, as the CIA chief maintained that the family, kidnapped by Haqqani group in 2012 from Afghanistan, was since kept in Pakistan. Islamabad and Rawalpindi urgently need to hammer out a unified, sound and clearly-defined strategy to confront the formidable challenges ahead.
