Breaking Up Is Not Hard to Do

Why the U.S.-Pakistani Alliance Isn't Worth the Trouble

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Coming to America: Bogra, October 1954. (Getty)









From Pakistan's founding onward, the two countries have tried to paper over their divergent interests and the fact that their publics do not trust one another with personal friendships at the highest levels. In 1947, Pakistan's leaders confronted an uncertain future. Most of the world was indifferent to the new country -- that is, except for its giant next-door neighbor, which was uncompromisingly hostile. The partition of British India had given Pakistan a third of the former colony's army but only a sixth of its sources of revenue. From birth, therefore, Pakistan was saddled with a huge army it could not pay for and plenty of monsters to destroy.

British officials and scholars, such as Sir Olaf Caroe, who was the pre-partition governor of the North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), and Ian Stephens, the editor of The Statesman, encouraged Pakistan's founding fathers to keep the country's large army as a protection against India. Lacking financing for it, though, Pakistani leaders turned to the United States, reasoning that Washington would be willing to foot some of the bill given Pakistan's strategically important location at the intersection of the Middle East and South Asia.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the country's founder and first governor-general, and most of his lieutenants in the Muslim League, Pakistan's main political party, had never traveled to the United States and knew little about the country. To fill the role of ambassador to the United States, they chose the one among them who had, Mirza Abol Hassan Ispahani, who had toured the United States in the mid-1940s to drum up support for an independent Muslim state in South Asia. In a November 1946 letter to Jinnah, Ispahani explained what he knew of the American psyche. "I have learnt that sweet words and first impressions count a lot with Americans," he wrote. "They are inclined to quickly like or dislike an individual or organization." The Cambridge-educated lawyer tried his best to make a good impression and became known among the Washington elite for his erudition and sartorial style.

Back in Pakistan, Jinnah attempted to befriend Paul Alling, the newly appointed U.S. ambassador in Karachi, then Pakistan's capital. In one of their meetings, Jinnah complained about the sweltering heat and offered to sell his official residence to the U.S. embassy. The ambassador sent him a gift of four ceiling fans. Jinnah was also at pains to give interviews to U.S. journalists, the best known of whom was Life magazine's Margaret Bourke-White. "America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America," Jinnah told her. "Pakistan is the pivot of the world, the frontier on which the future position of the world revolves." Like many Pakistani leaders after him, Jinnah hinted that he hoped the United States would pour money and arms into Pakistan. And Bourke-White, like many Americans after her, was skeptical. She sensed that behind the bluster was insecurity and a "bankruptcy of ideas . . . a nation drawing its spurious warmth from the embers of an antique religious fanaticism, fanned into a new blaze."

The visceral anti-Americanism among many Pakistanis today makes it difficult to remember how persistently Jinnah and his ambassadors lobbied the United States for recognition and friendship in those earlier years. Yet the Americans were not convinced. As a State Department counselor, George Kennan, for example, saw no value in having Pakistan as an ally. In 1949, when he met Pakistan's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, Kennan responded to Khan's request to back Pakistan over India by saying, "Our friends must not expect us to do things which we cannot do. It is no less important that they should not expect us to be things which we cannot be." Kennan's message was reflected in the paltry amount of U.S. aid sent to the new country: of the $2 billion Jinnah had requested in September 1947, only $10 million came through. That dropped to just over half a million dollars in 1948, and to zero in 1949 and 1950.


Pakistan finally got what it wanted with the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. His secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, embraced the idea of exchanging aid for Pakistani support of U.S. strategic interests. He saw Pakistan as a vital link in his scheme to encircle the Soviet Union and China. The aggressively anticommunist Dulles also relished the thought of having a large army of professional soldiers with British-trained officers on the right side in the Cold War. Influenced by earlier descriptions of Pakistanis, Dulles believed them to be especially martial: "I've got to get some real fighting men in the south of Asia," he told the journalist Walter Lippmann in 1954. "The only Asians who can really fight are the Pakistanis." 

Muhammad Ali Bogra, who had taken up the post of Pakistani ambassador to the United States in 1952, was also eager to cement the friendship. He was as successful as his predecessor at cultivating American elites, especially Dulles, who was already leery of India's leaders due to their decision to stay nonaligned during the Cold War. Bogra ensured that his own anticommunist sentiments were well known to Dulles, as well as to the journalists and politicians with whom Bogra went bowling in Washington. Meanwhile, Eisenhower tasked Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with earning the respect of powerful Pakistanis -- particularly the military commander General Muhammad Ayub Khan, who would rule the country by the end of the decade. Ayub Khan was instrumental in installing Bogra as Pakistan's prime minister in 1953, after a palace coup, in the hope that Bogra's friendship with the Americans would expedite the flow of arms and development assistance to Pakistan. Indeed, military and economic aid to Pakistan began to rise rapidly; it would hit $1.7 billion by the end of the decade.

In return, the United States got Pakistan to join two anti-Soviet security arrangements: the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, in 1954, and the Baghdad Pact (later called the Central Treaty Organization), in 1955. But there were already signs of trouble. Any notion that Pakistan would join either alliance grouping in a war was quickly dispelled, as Pakistan (like many others) refused to contribute much money or any forces to the organizations. Dulles traveled to Pakistan in 1954 looking for military bases for use against the Soviet Union and China. On his return, he tried to conceal his disappointment in the lack of immediate progress. In a memo he wrote for Eisenhower after the trip, he described U.S.-Pakistani relations as an "investment" from which the United States was "not in general in a position to demand specific returns." According to Dulles, the U.S. presence in Pakistan meant that the United States could expand its influence over time, leading to "trust and friendship." 

Ayub Khan, for his part, assumed that once Pakistan's military had been equipped with modern weapons -- ostensibly to fight the Communists -- it could use them against India without causing a major breach with the United States. In his memoirs, he acknowledged that "the objectives that the Western powers wanted the Baghdad Pact to serve were quite different from the objectives we had in mind." But he argued that Pakistan had "never made any secret of [its] intentions or [its] interests" and that the United States knew Pakistan would use its new arms against its eastern neighbor. Still, when Pakistan tested Ayub Khan's theory in 1965, by infiltrating Kashmir and precipitating an all-out war with India, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson suspended the supply of military spare parts to both India and Pakistan. In retaliation, in 1970, Pakistan shut down a secret CIA base in Peshawar that had been leased to the United States in 1956 to launch U-2 reconnaissance flights. (Although Pakistan had made the decision to shut down the base right after the 1965 war, it preferred to simply not renew the lease rather than terminate it prematurely.)



The next time the United States and Pakistan tried to work together, it was to expand a relatively small Pakistani-backed insurgency in Afghanistan at the United States' request. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in 1979, the United States saw an opportunity to even the score following its poor showing in the Vietnam War and bleed the Soviet army dry. The Afghan mujahideen, which had been trained by Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and funded by the CIA, would help. Pakistan's military ruler, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, made his sales pitch: "The Soviet Union is sitting on our border," he told an American journalist in a 1980 interview. "Has the free world any interest left in Pakistan?" Later, Zia even surprised the U.S. State Department counselor, Robert McFarlane, with a sweetener: "Why don't you ask us to grant [you] bases?"





Acrimony continued to color the relationship until 2001, when, after the 9/11 attacks, Washington once again sought to work with Islamabad, hoping that this time, Pakistan would fix its internal problems and change its strategic direction for good. But there was little enthusiasm among Pakistan's public or its military elite, where the country's decision-making power lay, for an embrace of the United States or its vision for the region. Meanwhile, Pakistani diplomats in the United States spent most of their time responding to Congress' criticism of Pakistan's double-dealing in regard to terrorists. The role of ambassador during this period was first held by a former journalist, Maleeha Lodhi, and then by a career foreign service officer, Ashraf Qazi. They worked to build the case that Pakistan was the frontline state in the war on terrorism by reaching out to the U.S. media and lobbying Congress with the help of the growing Pakistani American community. With support from the George W. Bush administration, the ambassadors were able to fend off criticism and get huge aid packages approved. But skeptics, such as the journalist Selig Harrison, pointed out that Pakistan was selling "bad policy through good salesmen." These particular salesmen were succeeded by two retired generals, Jehangir Karamat and Mahmud Ali Durrani, who attempted to work more closely with U.S. military officers, assuring them that reports of continued Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban were exaggerated. On the U.S. side, Anthony Zinni, who had been commander of the U.S. Central Command at the time of Musharraf's coup and remained in touch with Musharraf after his own retirement, spoke publicly of the benefit of being able to communicate "soldier to soldier." Still, the soldier-ambassadors were unable to overcome the negative press about Pakistan's involvement in Afghanistan.

U.S. ambassadors to Pakistan during this period focused on forging close ties with the country's leader, Musharraf. When Musharraf's control weakened toward the end of the decade, Anne Patterson, who was U.S. ambassador between 2007 and 2010, tried to reach out to civilian Pakistani politicians by meeting the leaders of all of the country's major political parties. To cover the waterfront, Admiral Mike Mullen, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pursued a personal friendship with Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani. Mullen held 26 meetings with Kayani in four years and often described him as a friend. But by the end of his tenure, Mullen expressed frustration that nothing had worked to change Kayani's focus: "In choosing to use violent extremism as an instrument of policy, the government of Pakistan, and most especially the Pakistani army and ISI," he said in a speech to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2011, "jeopardizes not only the prospect of our strategic partnership but Pakistan's opportunity to be a respected nation with legitimate regional influence."









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