Michael Rubin
A week earlier, he had slammed Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement that the United States would reassess its relationship with Pakistan. Such comments are rich given Pakistan’s support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, its sheltering of terror leaders such as the late Osama bin Laden, and the billions of dollars in support Washington has provided Pakistan annually.
There should be no debate about where the Pakistani government and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency sit.
Thousands of Americans are now dead because successive U.S. administrations trusted their Pakistani counterparts or turned a blind eye in exchange for Pakistan’s logistical assistance in Afghanistan. Over the years, however, Pakistan has also changed its diplomatic orientation. Beginning with former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and continuing under Khan, Pakistan’s leaders have transformed Pakistan into a vassal of China . For all of Khan’s talk of Islamophobia , his fealty to Beijing is such that he not only ignores China’s genocide against its Muslim Uyghur minority but also actively endorses it.
The irony is that as Pakistan aligns itself with China, it continues to enjoy the legacy of former President Pervez Musharraf’s cooperation with the U.S. In 2004, the U.S. designated Pakistan to be "a major non-NATO Ally," a status that made Pakistan eligible for “loans of material, supplies, or equipment for cooperative research, development, testing, or evaluation purposes," offered "priority delivery of Excess Defense Articles," made a research partner for military technology, and even allowed the designee the "purchase [of] depleted uranium ammunition."
Pakistan 2021 is not Pakistan 2004. Even in 2004, ISI behavior made Pakistan undeserving of such a designation, even as the Bush administration looked the other way in order to maintain supply routes and overflights into Afghanistan.
Given Pakistan’s turn toward China, perhaps it is time to strip Pakistan of its beneficial designation. This would immediately make military-to-military cooperative development and cross-servicing agreements more difficult, but it is not as extreme as some Pakistan apologists suggest. It would merely put Pakistan on par with almost every other nonallied World Trade Organization member country. But it would allow both the State Department and the Commerce Department to stop sales to Pakistan on a case-by-case basis.
It may be wise to go further. The U.S. might model interactions with Pakistan on those with China. Section 1211 of the 2006 National Defense Authorization Act , for example, put limitations in place to prohibit U.S. reliance on goods or services from Chinese military companies. Congress has itself targeted some Chinese companies through the so-called Huawei provision, found in Section 889 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act . Perhaps similar provisions are necessary to forbid any dealings with any Pakistani military or ISI-linked companies. At a minimum, Congress must recognize that any military equipment the U.S. provides or allows to pass through Pakistan becomes vulnerable to China.
There is no magic formula to resolve the Pakistan problem. Within the Pentagon, those who deal with Pakistan quip that the country "is too nuclear to fail." Recalibrating relations, however, does not condemn Pakistan to state failure. Nor should a nuclear arsenal make Pakistan immune to the consequences of its own behavior any more than it should North Korea or Iran. While Washington need not bribe Pakistan any longer to maintain supply routes through Pakistani territory, Islamabad will still likely pressure the U.S. for concessions in exchange for overflight access to Afghanistan.
The bigger debate may be whether treating Pakistan like China would effectively cede Islamabad to Beijing. But this debate was before Sharif sold Pakistani sovereignty to China in 2013. The U.S. might work to make China’s alliance with Pakistan more expensive for both. But the solution to this is not to treat Pakistan as an ally when it is in reality a state sponsor of terror. Nor is it to give Islamabad preferential military trade when it is in reality a liability.
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