Reading the fine print of Imran’s US visit

We were not wrong in expecting the visit to be a failure. President Donald Trump had tweeted on January 1, 2018 that the US was ‘foolish’ to give Pakistan more than $33 billion aid when all it gave were ‘lies and deceit’ by giving a “safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan.” Soon thereafter, US security assistance of $2 billion was stopped. Veteran Taliban expert Ahmed Rashid interpreted this as Trump's efforts to lean on India and “partner with it in Afghanistan.” 

US media found Pakistan defiant. The deadly January 27,  2018, Taliban suicide attack in Kabul City Centre, killing 150 by using ambulance vehicle as IED, was described as Pakistan's riposte to President Trump’s twitter. The Christian Science Monitor (February 9, 2018) quoted a Kabul official: “This is Pakistan giving a small taste of what it’s capable of.” That was before Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) was elected to power on August 18, 2018. Still, Trump tweeted on November 19, 2018 that America ‘no longer’ pays Pakistan “billions of dollars since they do nothing for us.” 

The last blow to Pakistan was the Orlando meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on June 21, 2019, placing it on the ‘grey list’. It narrowly escaped being downgraded to the ‘black list’ with help from China, Turkey and Malaysia. The deadline to show more progress is October, this year. 

This was the background to Imran Khan’s US visit. Perhaps, even Khan, in his meeting with the President, did not expect him to be so sympathetic by not mentioning Pakistan’s previous record in tackling terrorism. 

On the other hand, he extracted an incidental agreement from President Trump that he was prepared to ‘mediate’ on Kashmir, the sine qua non of every high-level Pakistani diplomatic visit. To his delight, Trump added that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had, in fact, requested him to mediate on Kashmir during his last meeting with him. Perhaps, this was the first time in history that any senior foreign leader had openly announced that India wanted a third-party mediation on Kashmir. 

How did this happen? To understand this better, we need to connect this conversation to what President Trump had told his Cabinet colleagues in January 2019 on his request to India, Russia and Pakistan “to take responsibility for Afghan security” and his disappointment with them: “I could give you an example where I get along very well with India and Prime Minister Modi. But he is constantly telling me, he built a library in Afghanistan. Library! That’s like five hours of what we spend (in Afghanistan).” 

Trump had always wanted to achieve major withdrawal of American troops before the 2020 election. The Military Times had carried Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s address at the Economic Club of Washington on July 29 that the President wanted “the number of US troops in Afghanistan drawn down before the 2020 presidential election.” The paper said that the comments came a few hours before two US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan during a ‘train-and-assist mission’. It is true that Pompeo ‘backtracked’ from his comments the next day while talking to reporters en route to a diplomatic trip to Thailand, saying that there was no deadline for the end of the military mission there. 

After the White House meeting, Imran Khan also made a dramatic public admission that Pakistan still had ‘30,000-40,000 armed people’ belonging to 40 terror groups “who have been trained and fought in some parts of Afghanistan or Kashmir.” 

Our government and media interpreted this as his tactical confession to the US government with a view to bailing him out of the present situation by blaming the previous governments for this mess. 

What we missed was that Khan had very cleverly connected this to Afghanistan, reminding his audience on the sacrifices made by Pakistan since January 1980 in helping the US-led coalition in accommodating, training and launching thousands of foreign militants and also what his country could do for America in Afghanistan even now. The deaths of 10 Pakistani soldiers fighting terrorists in northern Waziristan and Balochistan on July 27 substantiated his claim. 

Imran Khan’s visit to the US was described by London-based The Independent as ‘a resounding success’. On the same day, the Pentagon announced the resumption of $125 million technical and logistical support for F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan and notified to the Congress that this would be subject to 24/7 ‘end-use monitoring’. Simultaneously, the US assured India that this release did not mean any change in the policy of maintaining a freeze in military assistance to Pakistan. 

On July 29, Afghan media announced that Imran Khan would be visiting Kabul over the Afghan peace process “as Washington and Islamabad had come closer after long tensions.” Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said the Taliban were ready for negotiations and Pakistan was playing the role of a mediator for the restoration of peace in Afghanistan.

No doubt, this has posed a great dilemma for the Afghan government which believes, as presidential spokesperson Sediq Sediqqi had said on July 29, that the Taliban’s main resources and their training centres were still located in Pakistan. At the same time, President Ashraf Ghani is upset with the Zalmay Khalilzad mediation, which has not been able to convince the Taliban to involve the Kabul government in the peace process.

India has very high stakes in these developments. After being ‘marginalised’ in Afghanistan, as Eurasia Review & Analysis said on August 2, is India staring at an invigorated Pakistan-US axis in her neighbourhood?