Early in the negotiations to reopen NATO supply routes through Pakistan, a senior American official suggested to his Pakistani counterparts that they should engage in “carpet haggling.” “I give you a figure, you give me a figure, and then we’ll sit down and have tea and agree on a figure,” was how one participant in the meeting remembered the suggestion.
The remark annoyed some of the Pakistanis, who viewed it as a crude characterisation of a politically delicate process; others took it more phlegmatically. But as the talks between Pakistan and the United States drag into their seventh week, a haggle is what they have become over money, certainly, but also over roads, drone strikes and, the trickiest of all, intangible notions of honour and pride that play into electoral politics in both nations, New York Times in a report said Saturday. Peter Lavoy, a senior Defence Department official, arrived in Islamabad on Friday in a bid to inject momentum into the bargaining. But though the stakes are high, optimism that a deal may be struck is in short supply on both sides.
Until November, about 5,000 NATO trucks trundled up the bumpy road from Karachi to the Afghan border each month, carrying fuel and other non-lethal supplies for American and coalition troops. But then an American air strike killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in a disputed episode at the border; since then not a single truck has traversed the route. The dispute has slowed the flow of supplies to American troops, but what will soon matter more is its effect on traffic in the opposite direction. As the United States starts to withdraw troops from Afghanistan this fall, a huge quantity of military equipment will have to be extracted by road.
On the face of things, money could settle the argument. Pakistani officials initially demanded $5,000 per truck on each trip; after talks between the American deputy secretary of state, Thomas R Nides, and the Pakistani finance minister, Abdul Hafeez Shaikh, said the figure has dropped to a “much more realistic level,” according to a senior American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The precise figure remains secret, and the Pakistanis have not indicated whether they will accept it. The Americans are trying to close the deal with sweeteners, offering, for example, to repave the highways the trucks use from Karachi to the Afghan border, a distance of 1,000 miles on one of the routes used. That could be an elegant solution, allowing the Pakistanis to claim a major concession while the Americans write off the cost as a transportation expense.
But in these complex talks, money and asphalt only go so far. Both President Obama and President Asif Ali Zardari face elections in the next nine months, and neither can afford to cede too much at the negotiating table. Officials from both sides say that this week, Zardari has been sticking doggedly to his demand that the United States apologise for the November air strike; without that, they say, his group, the Pakistan People’s Party, will be vulnerable to defeat in the elections scheduled for early next year.
“There will be a crater the size of Jupiter in the PPP’s electoral prospects if they don’t sell this to the people of Pakistan,” a senior Pakistani official said. “And for that, they need an apology or something that looks like an apology, smells like an apology, tastes like an apology.” A senior American official said, “We’ve been several times very close, until ‘ghairat’ intervened,” using the Urdu word for honour. If the talks over the supply lines fail, the United States has a Plan B in place. On Monday, NATO concluded agreements with several Central Asian nations allowing tens of thousands of vehicles and other military equipment to traverse their territory by road, bypassing Pakistan as they carry matériel northward out of Afghanistan. But the political cost would be high: It would give a great deal of leverage to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who wields influence over the countries, former Soviet republics, that the trucks would pass through. The Pakistanis think that the Plan B may be a bluff by the Americans, like a prospective carpet buyer threatening to walk out of the shop. “The northern route costs so much more, that if we don’t do a deal this week, the Americans will happily do it one month, or three months, from now,” a senior Pakistani official said. Both sides say that whatever the outcome, the tough bargaining may ultimately drive them further apart, with negative repercussion for a diplomatic relationship that is already strained. “The real danger is that this could become the new normal for an extended number of years,” the senior American official said. “And we have to get past that.”
