THE PAKISTAN-US relationship is far from happy, and shows every sign of getting worse. Last week Washington infuriated Islamabad when chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen publicly implicated Pakistani intelligence in the June kidnapping, torture and death of local journalist Saleem Shahzad. The latter had been reporting on the role of the ISI intelligence service.
And over the weekend the New York Timesrevealed that the US has put on hold some $800 million in aid and reimbursements to the country's military in response to the cancellation of visas for US military trainers and continuing concern about Pakistani ambivalence if not outright collusion with the Taliban.
Bad feelings came to a head in the wake of the US killing in May of Osama bin Laden, an operation the distrustful US did not pre-warn Islamabad about, let alone seek its sanction for. It was followed by public speculation by senior US officials that Pakistan, or at least sections of the ISI, must have known about his presence in the country. Defence secretary Leon Panetta further claimed on Saturday that al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is hiding in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Pakistan has repeatedly said that it is the US, particularly the CIA, that should be faulted for not sharing intelligence. Last month, however, US papers reported that Panetta had taken Islamabad to task with evidence militants had vacated bomb-making factories in Waziristan after the US shared intelligence. Pakistan has also been publicly critical of the increased US use of drone strikes in tribal areas of the country.
US assistance to Pakistan last year came to nearly $4.5 billion, more than half to the military, and the withheld cash includes $300 million for reimbursement of counterinsurgency expenditures including some of the costs of deploying more than 100,000 soldiers along the Afghan border, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in training assistance and military hardware. The withheld aid is only a small part of the huge Pakistan military budget but may hurt its counterinsurgency operations.
That longstanding US diplomatic pressure on its key regional ally in the war on terrorism, increasingly public and at the highest level, should now be ratcheted up to financial pressure, is hardly surprising. Whether, however, it is likely to prove helpful in changing attitudes in Islamabad is another matter. Public opinion is strongly against the US role in the country, while the “unfriendly” act may do little more than fuel the military’s sense of being put upon.