Pakistan seeks more mature relationship with US, ambassador tells Baker Institute audience

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

Pakistan wants the United States to be a reliable partner as it reforms its government, develops stable relationships with its neighbors and expands its economy.

	HUSAIN HAQQANI

“We are in the process of transforming our own country into a democracy while building a strategic partnership with the United States as a partnership between two democracies,” Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani told an audience Dec. 1 at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

Haqqani noted that after its creation in 1947, Pakistan quickly joined U.S. in its decadeslong confrontation with the Soviet Union. “Pakistan became an American ally, hoping to get American support and posturing itself and strengthening itself in relation to India,” he said. “We think we were very helpful and useful in America’s successes in the Cold War.” He pointed out that the ill-fated U-2 spy plane carrying U.S. pilot Francis Gary Powers took off in 1960 from a base in Pakistan. And he argued, “Afghanistan became the Soviet Union’s Vietnam because Pakistan was there to help.”

But the close ties have suffered repeatedly over the years for several reasons, Haqqani said. First, “Americans are never there with us over the long haul,” in part because of what he termed a “transactional relationship” in which each side gets something from the other but without a long-term commitment.

Second, during those phases when the U.S.-Pakistani collaboration was strongest, Pakistan was under military rule. During the reign of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, for instance, the Reagan administration backed his “Islamization” project for Pakistan as a bulwark against the USSR. That policy went hand in hand with the effort to help the Afghan Mujahedin in their war with the Soviets. In addition to being carried out by an unelected government, Pakistan’s Islamization led directly to the current turmoil in the region, Haqqani said, in the phenomenon now known as “blowback.” “The Taliban of today are essentially just second-generation Mujahedin,” he said.

The off-again, on-again problems between the United States and Pakistan are partially due to their differing views of the world and their place in it, Haqqani argued. “Pakistan looks at the world from the prism of its own region and its own circumstances,” he said, pointing to Pakistan’s overwhelming security concerns over its powerful neighbor, India. The United States, on the other hand, is a global superpower, which means it can afford to “walk away from” conflicts if it chooses. “We can’t,” Haqqani said.

The legacy of alternating between close ties and indifference has led to what Haqqani called a “psycho-political crisis in our relations,” with each side seeing the other as less than reliable.

One issue that seems to encapsulate that mutual lack of confidence is Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capability. In 1998 — 24 years after India detonated its first nuclear test — Pakistan joined the “nuclear club.” Official U.S. policy discouraged both South Asian powers in their quest for nuclear arms. Now that both nations possess nuclear capabilities, the United States had focused its attention on making sure Pakistan’s weapons don’t fall into the wrong hands. But reflecting Pakistan’s sensitivities on the subject, Haqqani bridled at a question from the audience about the country’s nuclear arsenal. “We will not accept nuclear apartheid — where you say, ‘Country A, B, C, D — it’s OK for them to have nuclear weapons, but you guys, you can’t have them because your skin color is not right,'” he said. “That’s not acceptable.”

Economic progress and the strengthening of democracy are the best safeguards against extremists seeking to seize control of the Pakistani government — and its nuclear arsenal, Haqqani argued. While Pakistan wants to help the United States effect a positive outcome in Afghanistan, he said, it is also working on “our transformation at home.”

Haqqani said he could foresee a time when Pakistan becomes a “crossroads of opportunity,” rather than a crossroads of conflict. He highlighted Pakistan’s strategic position between key producers of energy in Iran and the Arab world and growing energy consumers like China and India, a position that could result in Pakistan’s development of an “energy corridor” that would generate jobs and economic growth in the region.

Finally, Haqqani pointed to the centuries of hostility between France and Germany as an example of seemingly unresolvable problems that can be overcome. Someday in the not-too-distant future, he said, the dispute between India and Pakistan will be viewed in the same way.

To watch the entire presentation, go to http://edtech.rice.edu/cms/?option=com_iwebcast&task=admin&option=com_iwebcast&task=webcast&action=details&event=2365.