The bonhomie between Pakistan and the United States is once again growing on many fronts: From US’ approval of a $450 million F-16 fighter jet fleet sustainment programme to Pakistan to sharing of intelligence on Afghanistan between both countries. It is important to note, Pakistan’s proximity with the US increased after former Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted from power due to the army’s influence. Before his exit, Imran Khan publicly said a US official was involved in a conspiracy to topple his government. The reason he gave was that the US didn’t like his Russia’s visit soon after its invasion of Ukraine.
The fact is that contiguity between the Pakistan Army, who controls the politics of the country, and the US has been increasing after the regime change in Pakistan.
In the wake of unprecedented fall in the investment by China in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) as the latter is already struggling on the economic front, Pakistan needed an economic power to sustain its economic crisis. The big turn in the Pak-US relations took just after the killing of al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri in a US drone attack in Kabul in August 2022. Soon after the attack, Taliban’s acting defence minister Mullah Yaqoob had said it was Pakistan who allowed the US drones to use its airspace to access Afghanistan.
Interestingly, after this incident, Pakistan, who was struggling to get a loan from the International Monetary Fund for months, was given the approval immediately. This happened when Pakistan’s Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa was in the US. Also, during his visit to the US this month, the US Secretary of Defence Lloyd J. Austin hosted an enhanced honour cordon for Bajwa in the Pentagon. Not only this, Pakistan is reportedly providing weapons to Ukraine, who is fighting against Russia.
Notably, US support to Pakistan was also widely open even in the past. It was the US, who stood with Pakistan in 1971, when the latter was committing genocide in Bangladesh (then east Pakistan), in which millions of people were migrated, thousands of people were killed and thousands of women were raped by the Pakistani Army.
Here, it should not be forgotten that Taliban is the creation of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the early 1990s.
The history of the US’s double game has been around for decades. A newly declassified American government document posted in August 2021 revealed that the US had known about Pakistan’s nuclear programme. The report says that the then Jimmy Carter administration (1977 to 1981) deliberately didn’t take action against Islamabad. According to a New York Times report in 1998, the US provided technical training to Pakistan’s nuclear scientists from 1950s to 1970s and turned a blind eye to the nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s as Pakistan was helping the CIA in smuggling weapons to Afghan guerrillas who were fighting against the Soviet Union.
Having said this, the US might be using Pakistan for its interest in the region, but Pakistan has also been fooling the US for decades. The war the US was fighting in Afghanistan was against the proxy of Pakistan. The US invaded Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Ironically, Osama bin Laden, who was responsible for this attack, was killed in Pakistan’s Abbottabad by the US forces in 2011, and Shakil Afridi, the doctor, who helped CIA find Bin Laden is still in Pakistan’s Jail.
The fact of the matter is that the US has a habit of playing double game for its interest and India must remain conscious while dealing with the US.
The author is a Delhi-based journalist, who writes on Politics, Strategic and Military Affairs. He tweets @RaviMishra2029. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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