American expert sees opportunity to rebuild US-Pakistan relations
WASHINGTON: For the first time, there now exists an opportunity to build an enduring long-term US-Pakistan relationship on facts rather than on fiction, according to an analysis published here.
David O Smith writes in Strategic Insights, a publication of the Centre for Contemporary Conflict at Monterey, California, that both governments have subscribed to the common objectives of curbing extremism and international terrorism, building sustainable democracy, preserving the domestic stability of Pakistan, and promoting the vision of a moderate progressive Pakistan as an alternative to more radical schools of thought in the Muslim world. However, the two states have subscribed to common objectives in the past and yet been unable to sustain an enduring relationship because other issues, often unspoken and rarely if ever consciously addressed, poisoned the relationship and caused it eventually to collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions. The trust deficit is nothing new, having existed at the very beginning of the relationship and it exists today. Even if the US and Pakistan cannot resolve all their issues completely, they must at least consciously address and manage them at the highest political and military levels if the ninth act in the ongoing USPakistan drama is to have a positive conclusion, he maintains.
Smith, a former colonel in the US army, writes that doubts have grown over time in Washington about the sincerity of Islamabads commitment to the goals of the global war on terror, and, more specifically, concern about the role of its intelligence services in providing covert support and sanctuary to Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants on both sides of the Durand Line. One way to ameliorate many of these concerns and promote mutual confidence in the bilateral relationship might be to build on success and find ways to further advance an already robust defence relationship. But while it is relatively easy to identify ways to enhance various components of this relationship, it is a far more difficult task to solve the most fundamental impediment to a truly enhanced defence relationship, the corrosive and pernicious trust deficit on both sides that has always poisoned USPakistan relations and continues to jeopardise our agreed strategic objectives.
According to Smith, some in Pakistans military establishment, and a large number of senior US military leaders as well, often take a sentimental view and boast that the defence relationship has always served as a useful moderating function and communications back channel whenever political relations have been frosty. Even in the worst of times, when formal military-to-military relations were all but severed, the two militaries continued to cooperate in UN peacekeeping missions, exchanged small numbers of students in military schools, and received each others senior defence officials warmly. Unfortunately, an unintended consequence of this process may have been to mask the seriousness of divisive issues. No defence relationship, however warm it may be at the personal level, exists in a vacuum. Therefore, the key to enhancing defence relations must lie in identifying a strategy to alleviate or at least manage the trust deficit that has always existed as an unspoken part of the larger political relationship, he suggests.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\07\25\story_25-7-2007_pg7_13
