Magnificent Delusions by Husain Haqqani Read Free Book Online Page A

bilateral wounds for years or decades. They must find ways to come together.” But in an allusion to Pakistan he said, “Some countries have turned to proxy groups to do their fighting instead of choosing a path of peace and security. The tolerance or support of such proxies cannot continue.”
    â€œI am committed to working with your government,” said the US president, “to ensure the security of the Pakistani state and to address threats to your security in a constructive way.” He asked for cooperation in “defeating Al Qaeda, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, Lashkar e Taiba, the Haqqani network, the Afghan Taliban and the assorted other militant groups that threaten security.” Obama then wrote of his “vision for South Asia,” which involved “new patterns of cooperation between and among India, Afghanistan and Pakistan to counter those who seek to create permanent tension and conflict on the subcontinent.” 13
    My interpretation of Obama’s letter was that it presented an opportunity for Pakistan to overcome past misgivings and build a real alliance with the United States. Since the 1950s Pakistan had wanted an American role in South Asia. Now it was being offered one. In the end Pakistan would have to negotiate the Kashmir issue directly with India. But at least now the American president was saying that he would nudge the Indians toward those negotiations. Pakistan could finally be a strategic US ally rather than an occasional transactional partner.
    But the view from Islamabad was different. In his meetings in Islamabad Jones had remarked that “US strategic interests lay East of Afghanistan.” He meant to assure his hosts of Pakistan’s centrality to US policy. The Obama administration was in the middle of its review of US policy in Afghanistan. Jones had hinted that Pakistan was the epicenter of that review and had also stated that the main issues relating to Al-Qaeda, extremism and terrorism, were in Pakistan. The Foreign Office asked me to convey Pakistan’s concern that it was being treated “as the problem.”
    In a meeting with me after his visit, Jones stressed that he had wanted to reassure Pakistanis that any perception that the United States was leaving the region was simply wrong. “Pakistan’s success is fundamental to America’s success in the region,” he told me. “The US is, therefore, counting on Pakistan in its efforts to eliminate the terrorist threat.” Jones said that if Pakistan was ready to make “a strategic commitment to common objectives,” the United States was ready to be “a partner for the twenty-first century.”
    The Obama administration had asked for “fundamental readjustments” before the two countries could be “partners for a long time to come.” But Islamabad was not ready for them. When Zardari’s reply arrived, it had clearly been drafted by a committee of Foreign Office and ISI bureaucrats, repeating old clichés about Afghanistan and the threat to Pakistan from India.
    Kayani had given Jones his own more-than-fifty-page-long thesis on Pakistan’s strategic threats and interests. I was allowed to read it in Islamabad, but no Pakistani civilian was provided a copy to keep. As I read it, it felt familiar; I wondered where I had read it before. Then I realized that its contents were remarkably similar to the paper President Ayub Khan had given President Eisenhower in 1959. Obviously, for Pakistan’s permanent institutions of state, nothing had changed in half a century. Pakistan had missed the opening for defining its partnership with the world’s sole superpower on more favorable terms than ever before.
    According to Bob Woodward, Obama told his confidante Tom Donilon in November that he saw the “cancer” of terrorism as being in Pakistan. “The reason we are doing the target, train and transfer in Afghanistan is so the