KARACHI: Former Prime Minister Imran Khan is following a long-standing Pakistani practice of blaming others for his own leadership failings. This was stated by Robert M. Hathaway, an American scholar and a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, Washington, in his exclusive article that appeared in the US award-winning magazine South Asia July 2022 issue.
Titled ‘Pakistan-US Relations - Blow Hot, Blow Cold,’ the cover story in South Asia also carries articles by former Foreign Secretary, Shamshad Ahmed, former Senator Javed Jabbar and Shahid Javed Burki, former caretaker Finance Minister.
In the article titled ‘Look in the Mirror First’, Robert M. Hathaway talks about the key factors behind the uneasy relationships between Pakistan and the United States and the ups and downs witnessed in different periods. According to Hathaway, Pakistani politicians from all the country’s major political parties have regularly fobbed off their shortcomings by alluding darkly to conspiracies and hidden hands.
“If Khan possessed even a scrap of proof to support his contentions, wouldn’t he be flaunting it?” asks Hathaway.
He says it’s far easier to talk of Pakistani duplicity than of American misjudgement and incompetence, but that doesn’t explain why the Taliban sit in Kabul today.
“Imran Khan, of course, made no effort to mask his opposition to the American war in Afghanistan, or his disdain for the backing provided to the Americans by a succession of Pakistani presidents, prime ministers, and chiefs of army staff. Undoubtedly this had something to do with the frostiness of relations between Islamabad and Washington in recent years.”
“First, we must recognize the counter-productive nature of blaming one’s disappointments and failures on another country. In international diplomacy as in personal grooming, a good mirror is essential,” Hathaway says in his article.
In his piece “Beyond Compliance”, Shamshad Ahmed, former Foreign Secretary, discusses the fragile state of US-Pakistan relations that still have room for improvement. He says the war on terror may have provided the rationale for a long, unpalatable US ‘engagement’ with Pakistan, but it neither limited the relationship’s scope nor exhausted the challenges it faced.
Shahid Javed Burki, Pakistan’s former caretaker Finance Minister as well as former Vice President of the World Bank, shares his views about the leading factors that decide the fate of US-Pakistan relations. He says Pakistan’s relations with the United States have always been subject to the way Washington interpreted its strategic interests in the geographic area of which Pakistan is a part.
“Pakistan will have to operate on its own, depending more on China than it did on the United States for the first seven decades after independence,” says Shahid Burki.
Former Senator Javed Jabbar has dwelt on the cultural aspects of the relationship between Pakistan and the United States. In his article titled “ Cultural Connect,” he says the cultural connect is shaped by geopolitics, respective states’ self-interests, technology, trade, travel, broader altruistic frameworks and the specific interest taken by particular Governments in office at given times in the subject of promoting conventional cultural exchange.
“America’s generous, friendly interest in cultural exchanges with Pakistan do not divert attention from America’s excessively self-centred, insensitive approach to relations with Pakistan in the geopolitical context,” writes Senator Jabbar.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022