The U.S. and Pakistan: Fairweather Friends

Labour Party Pakistan activists shout slogans during a protest in Lahore against the US President Barack Obama's Afghan policy. Although Pakistan is central to US strategy for the region, Washington has had a tough time dealing with a skittish military and political establishment in Islamabad that is wary of Washington's goals in neighboring Afghanistan. (AFP/File/Arif Ali)


Christopher Hitchens has an outstanding article on the U.S. relationship with Pakistan. From a COIN perspective, he asks a simple question with no simple answer, "Who is in charge of policy in the area?" Unity of command is one of the basic COIN principles most often cited from Robert Komer's Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S.-GVN Performance in Vietnam.

Hitchens goes on to describe the poisonous nature of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

This is, and always was, a sick relationship, and it is now becoming dangerously diseased. It's not possible to found a working, trusting, fighting alliance on such a basis. Under communism, the factory workers of Eastern Europe had a joke: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." In this instance, the Pakistanis don't even pretend that their main military thrust is directed against the common foe, but we do continue to pay them. If we only knew it, the true humiliation and indignity is ours, not theirs.

This will continue to get nastier and more corrupt and degrading until we recognize that our long-term ally in Asia is not Pakistan but India. And India is not a country sizzling with self-pity and self-loathing, because it was never one of our colonies or clients. We don't have to send New Delhi 15 different envoys a month, partly to placate and partly to hector, because the relationship with India isn't based on hysteria and envy. Alas, though, we send hardly any envoys at all to the world's largest secular and multicultural democracy, and the country itself gets mentioned only as an afterthought. Nothing will change until this changes.

You can read the full article here.