An American expert on South Asia urged the US to devise a long-term strategy that would balance American security requirements with Pakistan's development needs as pressure would no longer work on Islamabad. "Open conflict with Pakistan was not an option. It was time to roll back the pressure," Vali Nasr, a former senior State Department official said in an opinion piece posted on Bloomberg news services' web site on Friday.
Nasr, who is now dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, wrote that the US apology over the Salala incident means an end of Washington's campaign to "bully Pakistan into submission".
"The Pakistanis held firm in their insistence on an apology. Officials at the Pentagon thought the case didn't merit one," he said. "However, the main implication of the apology, a triumph of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over both the White House and the Pentagon, is that it ends the experiment of the US trying to bully Pakistan into submission," added Nasr, who is of Iranian origin and is also a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank.
"With that (apology), the US military is again able to use routes through Pakistan to supply its forces in Afghanistan without paying exorbitant fees. Plus the threat that Pakistan will bar US drone strikes is for now moot," he wrote. Referring to the American air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at a border post in November, Nasr wrote: "Pakistan, still seething over the US breach of its sovereignty in the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, closed US military supply routes to Afghanistan when the US initially refused to apologise.
The US, in turn, froze $700 million in American military assistance and shut down all engagements on economic and development issues. In a further deterioration of ties, the Pakistani Parliament voted to ban all US drone attacks from or on Pakistani territory. "Many (in the US government) had no sympathy for the Pakistanis, whom they regarded as double-dealers for stoking the insurgency in Afghanistan and providing haven to the notorious extremists of the Haqqani Network.
The White House feared that an apology would invite Republican criticism. Throughout the crisis, Clinton and her senior staff argued that the US should apologise. She supported re-engaging with Pakistan to protect a critical relationship while also holding Pakistan accountable for fighting the Taliban and other extremists, a point she has raised in each of her conversations with Pakistani leaders.
"Clinton's recommendations were contrary to the policy the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency put in place in early 2011. Relations had soured when the Pakistanis held CIA operative Raymond Davis after he shot two Pakistanis.
Frustrated with Pakistan's foot-dragging on counterterrorism, the two agencies successfully lobbied for a strategy to reduce high-level contacts with Pakistan, shame Pakistan in the news media, and threaten more military and intelligence operations on Pakistani soil like the bin Laden assassination. It was a policy of direct confrontation on all fronts, aimed at bending Pakistan's will. "It failed. Pakistan stood its ground.
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