Pakistan hoist by its own
petard By Karamatullah K Ghori
ISLAMABAD - United States President Barack
Obama assembled an impressive array of his peers
on the international scene in his hometown,
Chicago, on May 20-21.
Sixty fellow
leaders traveled to the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) summit to endorse an exit plan
from embattled Afghanistan; their people mostly as
weary of the conflict as the American people.
However, there was one peer of Obama -
Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari - who
arrived empty-handed and not bearing the gift that
was expected to put the icing on the cake his
gracious host had baked with meticulous care.
The choice of Obama's hometown for the
much-ballyhooed conclave of NATO and the
International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) under
American auspices had as much a domestic angle as
an international one.
Obama wanted his
votaries, as well as his detractors, to know that
he is a global player, an international peacemaker
and a statesman poised to put an end to the
longest overseas military engagement in US in
history - remembering that American voters go to
the polls in November to either re-elect Obama or
choose Republican Mitt Romney.
Zardari had
been given a late ticket to the summit; up until a
week ago the signals from both Washington and
Brussels, the NATO headquarters, hinted at
Pakistan being excluded.
That got the
Pakistanis worried. They had boycotted the
NATO-ISAF meeting in Berlin in December last year,
in a huff to register their anger over the deadly
American air raid against a Pakistan military post
a week earlier that killed 24 soldiers.
Pakistan had also as a result stopped
trailer convoys ferrying vital supplies for NATO
and ISAF forces from passing through Pakistani
territory on the way to Afghanistan, forcing these
to take the much more expensive and longer
northern route through Uzbekistan. Both moves were
hailed by the people of Pakistan.
But much
had changed since those retaliatory moves; the
Pakistanis didn't fancy the idea of being left out
in the cold from the Chicago gathering and thus
excluded from a role in the future of next-door
Afghanistan, where Pakistan is desperate to
enhance its strategic depth.
A Pakistani
no-show at Chicago would have been a slap in the
face by a country whose leadership - of any
stripes, civil or military - has traditionally
taken great pride in being the most steadfast ally
of the US. Pakistan's first military dictator and
"Bonaparte", Field Marshal Ayub Khan, boasted in
his autobiography Friends not Masters that
Washington would never find a friend more
trustworthy than Pakistan.
However,
relations between the two "all-weather friends and
allies" have been in a deep chill since the
fateful US raid and there are few signs of a
warming. All the same, being scripted out of
Chicago was deemed, in Islamabad's power
corridors, as an ultimate insult that could doom
relations forever.
So the Pakistanis went
scampering to their Turkish friends - with whom
bonds of camaraderie and fraternity pre-date the
birth of Pakistan in 1947. The Turks are also cozy
with the Americans and have been part of the NATO
brigade in Afghanistan. There couldn't be a more
effective and credible middleman than Turkey to
bail Pakistan out of the very tight corner in
which they seem to have painted themselves.
Frantic phone calls to President Abdullah
Gul, who led the Turkish team to Chicago, and
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is in
Pakistan as these lines are being written and who
is receiving a rapturous welcome, melted the ice
in Washington and Brussels - Zardari was given the
green-light to board a plane for Chicago.
The ice, however, didn't simply melt
because the Turks had waved a magic wand. The
Pakistanis assured their Turkish interlocutors -
who then relayed the message to Washington - that
the Pakistanis were ready to play ball and revive
transit facilities for NATO. This was interpreted
as a conciliatory gesture and enough for the
welcome mat to be rolled out.
It was
anticipated that Pakistan would have lifted the
ban before Zardari boarded his flight to Chicago.
But that wasn't to be, and he landed without
bearing the gift everybody was expecting.
In obvious pique, Obama refused to meet
Zardari one-on-one, while he bestowed that favor
on Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai. That was
like rubbing salt into the Pakistani wound.
NATO secretary general added his own
insult to the Pakistani injury when he, too,
wriggled out of a planned one-on-one meeting with
Zardari claiming "scheduling problems".
Why Zardari didn't deliver on Pakistan's
commitment is still a subject of intense
speculation, with pundits scurrying to their
crystal balls to see if they can make some sense
out of Zardari's "no-show".
Sophistry
aside, it's obvious that Zardari and company got
cold feet at the last minute and decided not to
bite the bullet, at least not yet.
The
explanation from the American side that progress
on working out a deal has been stymied because of
Pakistan's exorbitant demand of a US$5,000 transit
fee of every container using its facilities -
against the previous fee of $250 - may have some
merit, but is not quite convincing and doesn't get
to the bottom of the issue, or the nuances
involved.
The Pakistanis have a point in
saying the price tag has good logic behind it;
they need money to fix the roads and highways torn
up because of heavy NATO trailers plying them.
Besides, they argue, why should NATO and the
Americans be making such a big deal of it when
they are running up excessive bills of up to $85
million a month on the alternative routes through
Russia and Central Asia?
No, transit fees
are not the real issue. The fee being demanded is,
at best, a bargaining counter and could easily be
negotiable. It isn't an insurmountable problem.
The real issue is that the Pakistani
leadership has painted itself into a helpless and
unenviable situation. It looks more and more like
a high trapeze artiste marooned on a perch at the
top but with no safety net spread out below.
The Pakistani leadership - both civil and
military - is to blame if it now finds itself
hoist by its own petard. The leaders made the
error of lobbing the episode of last November into
the people's court and losing their grip on it.
It has been a fight between the people of
Pakistan and the Americans ever since the US raid
that killed 24 soldiers. In Pakistan's
traditionally feudal culture, a man in uniform is
still looked up to with awe, if not with
reverence, notwithstanding all the misery and
suffering that Pakistan's frequent flirtation with
military rule has brought to its people.
There was uproar, already, in the country
over American drone attacks, seen by laymen as
targeting civilians. The killing of Pakistani
soldiers was the last straw on the back of the
people to snap their patience.
Survey
after survey of public opinion in Pakistan has
found no dilution of the people's demand for an
unconditional apology from the Americans for the
killing of their soldiers and an end to the
nightmare of drone attacks. That's the public's
absolute minimum price for resuming normal
relations with US and its allies.
So that,
in a nutshell, is Zardari's dilemma: how to square
this circle.
Obama can't afford to tender
an apology to a client state; that would be
politically risky, if not suicidal, for him in an
election year with his nemeses breathing down his
neck.
Zardari also has a general election
to deal with in early 2013. He should be as wary
as Obama of being seen as a wimp.
It isn't
such a riddle to guess which of the two will blink
first. Pakistan's army needs US weapons and funds
to keep rolling. Pakistan's civilian government,
riddled with corruption, needs American assistance
to feed its people; it can't even put together a
national budget without US and other Western
input.
It's only a matter of time before
Pakistan buckles under these enormous pressures.
Karamatullah K Ghori is a former
Pakistani ambassador and now a freelance analyst,
commentator and columnist. He can be reached at
K_K_ghori@yahoo.com
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