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High-level meetings canceled since new Afghan policy announced
Pakistan has called off three high-level meetings with Washington, as experts warn that President Donald Trump’s new Afghanistan policy risks driving Islamabad closer towards Beijing.
Alice Wells, acting assistant secretary of state, and Lisa Curtis, who serves on the National Security Council, were due to visit Pakistan this week as the US looks to explain its new position to the key players in the region.
But Islamabad has indefinitely postponed both meetings, as well as a planned trip to the US by its foreign minister Khawaja Asif, in response to Mr Trump’s announcement last week that he intends to keep US troops in Afghanistan and accusing Pakistan of harboring terrorists.
On Monday morning the US state department was still saying that the Pakistan visit was part of Ms Curtis’s three-country tour of the region but later confirmed it had been canceled.
“At the request of the government of Pakistan, that trip has been postponed until a mutually convenient time,” a state department spokesperson said.
Mr Trump had called on Pakistan to do more to tackle cross-border terrorism, saying the country had “sheltered the same organisations that try every single day to kill our people”.
Citing an erosion of trust, US secretary of state Rex Tillerson said future US support for Pakistan would be conditional on the country adopting “a different approach”.
Their comments sparked immediate anger in Islamabad. Over the weekend, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, the country’s interim prime minister, said in an interview: “From day one we have been saying very clearly the military strategy in Afghanistan has not worked and it will not work.”
Chinese labourers work on the Karakoram highway in northern Pakistan © AFP
But analysts also warn the US policy is likely to push Pakistan closer into the embrace of China, which is investing more than $50bn in its southern neighbour as part of its “One Belt, One Road” project to create a new silk road of trade routes across the world.
They point out that instead of going to the US, Mr Asif is travelling to China, Turkey and Russia.
One senior foreign ministry official in Islamabad told the Financial Times: “In this hour of need once again, we have China standing firmly with us as president Trump threatens to bring the Afghan war to Pakistan.”
The official added: “We have put further discussions on hold and need to decide first, exactly how the [US-Pakistan] relationship can proceed productively”.
Pakistan has proved an important ally to the US since the Cold War, when it helped support the mujahideen resistance against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
But since then, the relationship has wavered. Washington has been torn between relying on the Islamabad government to provide a bridgehead to Afghanistan and the wider region, and criticising it for failing to tackle domestic terrorism.
In recent years, Pakistan has allowed the US to use its territory as a supply route into Afghanistan and accepted increasingly frequent drone attacks by US forces.
In return, it has received hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, although twice in the last two years, a significant portion has been cancelled because of Pakistan’s perceived failure to tackle groups such as the Taliban.
At the same time, Islamabad has become increasingly reliant on funding from China, both in the form of soft loans as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, and in bailouts as it risks running out of foreign currency. Since the beginning of 2016 China has lent Pakistan more than U$1bn to help it stave off a foreign exchange crisis.
An official at the central bank in Karachi said, China’s role “is going to be very useful to avert a [balance of payments] crisis if there is one”.
For Beijing, the relationship offers a faster route to the sea for goods from western China, a new area of business for the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and an ally to support it in its fractious relationship with India.
Li Guofu, head of Middle Eastern research at the China Institute of International Studies, said: “Trump's new south Asia strategy, before it's been fully implemented, has already created a feeling of threat for Pakistan and aroused a strong negative response ... China has been actively trying to help the situation, and we are very concerned.”
But while Pakistan edges closer to China, analysts say it is unlikely to cut off ties completely with the US.
“Even China will tell Pakistan not to step away from talking to the US,” said Najmuddin Shaikh, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington. “Diplomacy needs cold blooded analysis and never a refusal to talk, particularly when it’s a relationship as old as Pakistan’s relationship with the US”.
Additional reporting by Katrina Manson in Washington
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/a1802446-8bdb-11e7-a352-e46f43c5825d
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