America’s disrespect for Pakistan

The Americans are being willfully “thickheaded” in their relations with Pakistan, said The Nation in an editorial. Our government has a few reasonable demands: End the drone strikes that keep killing our civilians, apologize for the unprovoked massacre of 24 of our soldiers in November, and hand over “the long-delayed payment” for expenses we’ve incurred in the fight against militants. Once all that is done, we can reopen the truck routes to Afghanistan that the U.S. so desperately needs to supply and, eventually, withdraw its troops. Yet Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has labeled our stance “extortion,” and Republicans in Congress are grumbling that Pakistan is more enemy than ally. They cite the jailing of the Pakistani doctor who helped find Osama bin Laden, as well as persistent rumors that Pakistani intelligence was involved in hiding the terrorist leader.

The Americans are not entirely wrong, said the Daily Times. Our leaders may not have helped al Qaida, but they certainly “saved the Afghan Taliban for a rainy day.” Assuming that the Taliban would return to power one day, Pakistan has played “a double game” and given the militants “carte blanche in operating for years from our soil.” The result is not pretty. Neither the U.S. nor Afghanistan trusts us the way they do our archrival India, which has restricted its involvement in Afghanistan to investing in development and agriculture. Our only sane choice is to cooperate more fully with the U.S.

Cooperation is hard, though, while the country is “seething with anti-Americanism,” said Moeed Yusuf in the Dawn. The government and the military have both been content to distract us from their own shortcomings by harping on the perceived sins of the Americans. U.S. drone strikes on our soil, for example, are deeply hated—yet they are “far more precise than the massive airpower” that Pakistani forces were using against the militants with much more loss of innocent life. Violations of sovereignty are another red herring: Why do we complain more about one cross-border raid to take out the world’s most-wanted terrorist than we do about the “thousands of foreign militants” from Arab countries and Afghanistan who operate from our soil?

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The truth is, the threat to our sovereignty “comes not from foreign countries but from our own political leaders,” said Asif Ezdi in The News. Just look at President Asif Ali Zardari’s behavior last week at the NATO summit in Chicago. Pointedly snubbed by President Obama—who is furious that Pakistan has raised transit fees from $250 to $5,000 per truck—Zardari made an unseemly show of rushing up to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and grabbing her hand. The international press mocked him. Zardari is now pleading with Washington to give him some “face-saving formula” so he can reopen the transit routes without provoking a political backlash. Pakistan’s attempt at extortion will end, once again, in our humiliation.