It might seem that Pakistan had launched a diplomatic blitz to win over the USA, though this was only a coincidence of timing. As Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi called for a broad-based strategic partnership with the USA in New York, where he had gone to attend the UN General Assembly session that had met to stop the Israel-Palestine conflict, newly-appointed National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf was meeting US counterpart Jake Sullivan in Geneva to discuss bilateral matters. This comes in the backdrop of the Foreign Office’s denial of any US bases on Pakistani soil, and the Pentagon’s saying that Pakistan afforded access and overflight.
The first caveat necessary is that all this US interest maybe because of Pakistan’s importance to peace in Afghanistan. The USA wants that peace so as to be able to withdraw from that war-torn country, while Pakistan will be more concerned about what will happen after the withdrawal. Pakistan does not want to be left in the lurch, as it was after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, with no political settlement in place to manage the peace. The second caveat is the more sinister one that the USA is preparing for its impending clash with China, and would like to break off one of its closest allies, Pakistan, on the basis of its old ties with Pakistan.
However, Pakistan should not forget that the USA has grown closer to India in the recent past, and hopes to prop it up against China in the region. Pakistan has faced this situation half a century ago, before the Sino-US rapprochement that followed US President Nixon’s visit to Beijing, and it must resist all efforts, from whichever quarter, to choose between two countries which are both of great importance to it, and must give both the importance they have in its foreign policy framework. Both have their individual importance to Pakistan, and thus neither can be allowed to dictate to Pakistan how it is to interact with the third.
