Meeting Pakistans Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, in Paris on Tuesday, French President Nicholas Sarkozy expressed his countrys desire for a strategic partnership with Pakistan. This remark supplemented the earlier verbal commitment given to President Asif Zardari that France would provide civilian nuclear technology to Pakistan the same way the United States had to India. Pakistani officers and their French counterparts discussed plans to provide training for Pakistani officers at NATO training centres, and reviewed the status of NATOs main supply route to landlocked Afghanistan.
Is this some kind of fallout from the distancing of the United States from France and possibly Germany in the European Union, signalling a differentiation of global perspectives within the Atlantic alliance? Is this a continuation of the bad blood created in Europe by the Bush administration when it attacked Iraq in the face of some of the most lucid and determined opposition from France inside the UN Security Council? Or is this a sharing of the burden between two NATO allies? (Note reference to NATOs supply route to Afghanistan.) What President Bush achieved with India with the nuclear deal was not universally acclaimed inside the US. Has it been decided to let France bear the burden of balancing the US-India strategic partnership with a Pak-French strategic partnership?
In Pakistan, many commentators would be inclined to read transatlantic rivalry into the development. This will go very well with the grooves of practice developed by Pakistans management of foreign policy during the Cold War: build military muscle by siding with one of the two global rivals and keep the relationship going by always appearing to reserve the option of switching the relationship through the doctrine of bilateralism. Needless to say, this Cold War opportunism was in tune with the doctrine of realism in the United States and its European partners. Would this be a correct either/or approach, based on the various theories of ditching and switching?
France, no doubt, is one of the many American partners who criticised the 2006 Indo-US nuclear deal, more or less on the lines that former President Jimmy Carter laid out: [The deal will send] uncertain signals to other countries, including North Korea and Iran, and may encourage technologically capable nations to choose the nuclear option. The only substantive commitment among nuclear-weapon states and others is the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), accepted by the five original nuclear powers and 182 other nations. Its key objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology...and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament.
Pakistan will recall that in the 1970s, France had to bow out, under American pressure, of a contract to build a nuclear enrichment plant in Pakistan. But in 2009, things have changed. President Sarkozy has ridden to victory on the promise of reducing French antagonism towards America and to prune down Frances state-dominated socialist economy. At the same time, however, he wants to assert the difference between how the Europeans (especially France and Germany) think about the laissez-faire capitalism of the Washington consensus. On the other hand, on the question of Western values, there is no difference, and Frances relations with Pakistan will not therefore be on any either/or basis. Linking up with France will not mean causing the US to ditch Pakistan or to punish it, as often happened during the Cold War.
The US Secretary of State, Ms Hilary Clinton, after clinching $110 million for Pakistani refugees this week, has repeated her charge against earlier American administrations that it ditched Pakistan after using it in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. A big Kerry-Lugar package of economic assistance is in the pipeline in the US, apart from the US-mediated $5 billion from the Friends of Pakistan group of countries. As for France, its ambassador has voiced the strongest objection in Islamabad to Nizam-e Adl in Swat while President Sarkozy has pledged more French troops for the NATO forces in Afghanistan.
It is too early to say what next steps will be taken. Pakistan is a non-NATO ally of the US. Some may think that this will bring Pakistan close to the status of the European states and Turkey who count as allies. Others may think India has moved closer to the US by becoming its strategic partner. Will there be a Pak-French nuclear treaty and will it separate Pakistans military and civilian nuclear assets? Will the nuclear suppliers club exempt Pakistan the way it did India? All these are questions waiting to be answered.
