After the payback time

While testifying before the 9/11 National Commission on Tuesday and Wednesday, senior American officials, past and present, acknowledged that the two sets of sanctions imposed on Pakistan during the last decade prevented successive US administrations from taking any action against the Taleban and al Qaeda.
They said that the US pressed two successive Pakistani governments to demand that the Taleban cease providing a sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda outfit.
They also proposed that Pakistan cut off its support for the Taleban if the latter refused to stop supporting al Qaeda. But as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage explained, "an unbelievable number of sanctions left Presidents Clinton and Bush without the much-needed leverage."
The US slapped stringent sanctions on Pakistan, along with India, after the two countries carried out nuclear tests back in May 1998.
It imposed another set of sanctions on Pakistan after the military takeover in 1999. Both these sets of sanctions were preceded by the blatantly discriminatory Pakistan-specific Pressler Amendment, which placed restrictions on arms sales only to Pakistan because of its pursuit of a nuclear programme while letting India go scot-free even though it had led the way to nuclearization of South Asia.
Clearly, Senator Pressler had moved his bill under the influence of anti-Pakistan lobby in Washington rather than acting on his own as a concerned anti-nuclear lawmaker.
His efforts soon resulted in the US withholding the release of 40 paid-for F-16 aircraft, causing much resentment in this country.
But events of 9/11 brought about a sea change in US' attitude towards this country. Washington could not launch its punitive campaign against the al Qaeda and its Taleban hosts without Pakistan's help. So help was sought and given under George Bush's "with us or against us" ultimatum.
Pakistan graduated from being a near pariah state to a close ally of the US. Consequently, most of the nuclear related sanctions were lifted.
Last week, as per Secretary of State Colin Powell's announcement in Islamabad, the US has further upgraded Pakistan's position from being an ordinary ally to a "major non-Nato ally".
Which necessitated the removal of the remaining sanctions so as to clear the way for the provision of military supplies as well as a $3 billion aid package to Pakistan.
Accordingly, Bush issued a special waiver on Wednesday for the democracy related sanctions, saying this "would facilitate the transition to democratic rule in Pakistan, and is important to US efforts to respond, to deter, or prevent acts of international terrorism.
As is evident from the second part of this statement, Bush has announced the waiver for his own purposes.
Yet what will be noted with greater attention about this statement in this country is that in saying that the waiver would facilitate transition to democratic rule in this country Bush has affirmed that the current political set-up falls short of universally accepted definition of democracy, and needs to change.
So far as sanctions as a tool of political pressure are concerned they have seldom worked.
The US has subjected Cuba to a stringent sanctions regime for more than six decades now, yet that has not deterred Havana from pursuing the path Washington had hoped it would abandon.
Iraq withstood crippling UN authenticated sanctions for over a decade but refused to compromise.
Iran too has refused to change because of US imposed restrictions. Libya has finally buckled under, but it has other considerations than just the sanctions to change its policy vis-à-vis its issues of conflict with the West.
All these examples show that a constructive engagement rather than punitive measures are the way forward in situations where the US or other powerful nations seek change in the policy of a particular country.
In the case of Pakistan, during the recent years, the situation was further complicated by the regional factors.
Concurrent with the sanctions regime the US had reverted to its usual policy of using Pakistan when in need, (such as at the time of its first Afghan war) and ditching it during no-need periods.
Nonetheless, for appearances' sake Washington has been publicly saying that its relations with the two sub-continental rivals, Pakistan and India, are independent of each other.
Hence even if they did not like it, it was perfectly understandable for the people in this country to see Washington forge a strong strategic partnership with India.
Pakistan, it was said, had its own importance due to its strategic location and its status as the most important military power in the Muslim world. But that was not what the US policy makers based their plans on.
They had established a linkage in their country's relations with Pakistan and India with a heavy tilt in the latter's direction.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell confirmed this when he told the 9/11 panel that initially the Bush administration did not want to mend its relations with Pakistan at the cost of its ties with India.
Which partly explicates why Pakistan opted to seek "strategic depth" in Afghanistan by helping install the pro-Islamabad Taleban government in Kabul.
That policy generated the lethal blowback which both the US and Pakistan are now trying to stop and stamp out in and around Afghanistan.
Hopefully, the US has learnt some useful lessons from its single dimensional policy towards this region. So far as our own policy makers are concerned, one expects they too have come to realise, as a matter of conviction rather than compulsion, that it is in our own interest to root out extremism.