What has America done for Pakistan? by Faraz Aamer

What has America done for Pakistan? by Faraz Aamer

Osama bin Laden has been stolen, Raymond Davis exorcised, and the military’s ego has been hurt once again by men “dressed like characters from Star Wars”. “America is an unreliable ally,” the ISI chief is said to have told the Pakistani parliament in a closed-door briefing.

Pakistan’s ties with terrorists are strategic. Like al Qaeda, Pakistan refers to modern notions of national sovereignty and justice. Like Taliban, Pakistan is concerned less with the enemy and more with spies.

However, our ties with Washington are platonic. If reliability, trust and selflessness are the benchmarks, then the ISI’s evaluation of US foreign policy towards Pakistan is essentially a moral critique.

“What has America done for Pakistan?” parliamentarians asked before calling for a review of ties with the US. Inherent in that question are assumptions that need to be questioned themselves. Why should America do anything for Pakistan?

Pakistan was born a weak state. Soon after independence, Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah asked the US, in a letter sent with his emissary, for $2 billion in military and financial aid, including $170 million for the army, $75 million for the air force, $60 million for the navy, and $700 million each for industrial and agricultural development. He had made a cultural choice.

Pakistan’s first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan visited US president Harry Truman in 1950 to sell the country’s “geopolitical importance” to the super power. Pakistan’s decision to seek US help against the perceived Soviet designs to reach the warm waters of the Arabian sea was purely strategic.

What the US did for Pakistan consequently produced the conditions that allowed a state that was not expected to last very long when it came into existence, to develop robust agriculture to feed itself, one of the world’s largest militaries and the ability to produce nuclear energy and weapons.

What has America done for Pakistan’s armed forces?

From 1954 to 1956, the US gave Pakistan about $1400 million in military aid, helping an ill-equipped Pakistan Army develop infrastructure, mobility and firepower, and improve command, control, communication and intelligence capabilities for its newly raised divisions. Also in 1954, Pakistan began to receive more than 100 Sabre F-86F aircraft that made the core of its air force. Armed with Sidewinder missiles, these fighter planes gave the Pakistani air force a decisive edge over the Indian one.

Pakistan had also received several hundred M47 and M48 Patton tanks and artillery equipment that gave it tangible superiority over India. By 1971, Pakistan had lost this edge. During the 1971 war, a carrier task force of America’s Seventh Fleet that included nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Enterprise, several destroyers and nuclear-powered attack submarine Gurnard arrived in the Bay of Bengal in support of Pakistan. But Pakistan Army surrendered a day later.

In the 1980s, after Pakistan rejected a $400 million aid package as peanuts, more than $6 billion flew into the country along with weapons that included about a thousand Stinger missiles, as it fought a perceived Soviet threat in Afghanistan and developed a ‘strategic depth’. Since 9/11 (blamed on the ‘strategic assets’ that Pakistan developed in Afghanistan), we received more than $14 billion in military aid and reimbursements, 17 F-16 aircraft and artillery equipment despite substantial doubts on its commitment to the war on terror. Pakistan Navy received the PNS Alamgir frigate, boats, helicopters and two P-3C Orion surveillance and anti-submarine aircraft (with six in the pipeline) and assigned a key role in the Arabian Sea.

What has America done for Pakistan’s nuclear program?

Pakistan’s civil nuclear quest began with the American Atoms for Peace program. It was offered $350,000 to acquire a nuclear reactor in 1955. In 1965, years after scientists Dr Abdus Salam and Dr Ishrat Hussain Usmani traveled to the US, America gave Pakistan its first nuclear reactor. The reactor at Nilore near Islamabad was built by American nuclear engineer Peter Karter and supplied by contractors American Machine and Foundry.

It was only after Pakistan started to develop nuclear weapons that the US imposed sanctions on the country. American concerns of Pakistan’s role in nuclear proliferation eventually turned out to be true.

What has America done for Pakistan’s economy?

Pakistan’s major existential concern in its early years was that all its rivers came from India, and India could block them to cause famines in Pakistan. After negotiations between India and Pakistan failed, America intervened. With input from US public officials, the World Bank spent six years in talks with India and Pakistan to broker the Indus Water Treaty in 1960. After that, the US and the World Bank were major donors to Pakistan’s irrigation system, that included two large dams (Mangla Dam on Jhelum River and Tarbela Dam on Indus River) that added significantly to Pakistan electricity production, and a number of barrages and headworks (Sidhnai Ravi River, Rasul on Jhelum River, Qadirabad and Marala on Chenab and Chashma on Indus).

In the 1970s, American renaissance man Roger Revelle supervised the Salinity Control and Reclamation Program, American agricultural engineers worked with small-town machine shops in Pakistan to help them develop cheap local land-leveling equipment, and USAID’s agriculture chief Richard Newberg developed a fertiliser production and import policy for Pakistan convincing Washington to supply $100 million worth of fertiliser and invest in the Fauji Fertiliser plant.

American scientist Norman Borlaug, with his new varieties of high-yield seed, oversaw the Green Revolution in Pakistan. He received a Nobel Prize in 1970. By 1977, Pakistan’s production of wheat and other food grains had more than doubled and it became self-sufficient in food production. Decades later, Pakistan’s economy still depends on agriculture.

After the failure of its first five-year plan, Pakistan set up a Planning Commission in 1958. The second five-year plan encouraged private enterprise in areas where profits could be made, and government expenditure in less developed areas. It surpassed its goals and Pakistan became a model of industrial and economic development in what is known as the third world (for example South Korea modeled its capital Seoul after Karachi), mainly due to American input and financial aid. After 9/11 when Pakistan decided to join the war on terror, the US helped rescheduled loans of more than $12 billion with members of the Paris Club, allowed duty-free import of hundreds of Pakistani products, and gave Pakistan the biggest economic assistance program since the cold war.

The impact of thousands of Pakistani students, researchers and professionals who were sent on scholarships to universities in the US cannot be measured in financial terms.

And in that manner of argument, it might be appropriate in the end to ask a question that has not been asked so far. What has Pakistan done for the US? What has Pakistan done for the US if reliability, trust and selflessness are the benchmarks?

The author is a media and culture critic and a news editor at The Friday Times.

https://www.dawn.com/news/643731?fbclid=IwAR1Me7Oa54XEJv1PPwrR44G4-9Mq2_GLvEYavWJyRi7YdbJmDQoXyb-ScMc

The Dawn, July 13, 2011    

Pakistani establishment facing historic challenge, By IMAD ZAFAR

Pakistani establishment facing historic challenge, By IMAD ZAFAR

Sitting behind bars in Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore, Nawaz Sharif is fighting the toughest battle of his life against Pakistan’s security establishment of the country. But the same is the case with the establishment, which is facing the most difficult challenges of its 70 years of hegemony.

Sharif and his daughter Maryam have refused every single offer of the establishment to mend fences and strike a deal. The security establishment is also facing pressure from within the country after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s move to annex Kashmir. Retired Brigadier Ijaz Shah, a crony of General Pervez Musharraf, was brought in as interior minister to dismantle the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), but despite a brutal crackdown against the party, he has not been able to bring it down.

Meanwhile, a report prepared for the US Senate by the bipartisan Congressional Research Service has indicated that the Pakistani security establishment covertly manipulated politics before and during the general elections of 2018 with the motive of removing Nawaz Sharif and his PML-N from power. Sharif might not be in the good books of President Donald Trump’s administration for his tilt toward China and Turkey, but certainly this report will change the minds of many senators in the US.

This is another blow to the image of the Pakistani establishment, which is still trying to end the country’s global isolation on the diplomatic front. Perhaps this is the reason that according to reliable sources Nawaz Sharif has been reached out to again by the establishment, and this time his younger brother and PML-N president Shahbaz Sharif was also urged to abandon the anti-establishment stance and go into exile in London for a couple of months.

The PML-N itself is divided over this issue, as many of its stalwarts including Shahbaz believe that Nawaz Sharif should accept a deal and go to London along with his daughter Maryam Nawaz and, in return after a few months, the establishment will compensate him in the form of suspending his prison sentence and ending the current Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government. However, Sharif neither trusts the establishment nor is willing to leave the country.

If the whistleblowers are correct, Sharif has conveyed to the establishment that he will not leave the country and wants certain members of the establishment and the judiciary to confess publicly that they ousted him from power deliberately and rigged the ballot to keep him out of office. PML-N financial supremo and ex-finance minister Ishaq Dar, while talking to this correspondent from London on this issue, said: “Nawaz Sharif will not enter into any understanding which forces him or Maryam to leave Pakistan or politics.”

Dar also maintains that the establishment is not trustworthy, as in past it apologized to him after two brigadiers who were sitting in a joint investigating committee against him had falsely reported that he failed to file tax returns for 20 years but after that apology, instead of giving Dar a clean chit, the establishment forced him into exile.

Dar’s remarks clearly reflect the lack of trust between Sharif and the establishment.

So right now after not been able to persuade Sharif to make a deal, the establishment is left with very limited options. It can oust Prime Minister Imran Khan through an in-house change and make a “forward block” whereby the PML-N under Shahbaz Sharif with the help of the Pakistan Peoples Party can form a government in the center and in Punjab. However, the problem remains that Shahbaz and the other old stalwarts of the PML-N cannot attract the needed vote bank, and without the masses’ support a Shahbaz-led government would meet the same fate that Imran Khan’s is meeting in the form of a lack of political credibility both at home and abroad.

Another option for establishment is to cling to the current political discourse as long as it can and hope that Washington and Riyadh will keep injecting dollars and riyals to save Pakistan’s sinking economy. This option, however, is not a long-term solution, as with the begging bowl Pakistan’s economy may survive but it will never grow.

The last option for the establishment is a full retreat from its current stance, letting the PTI sink and holding a new general election, and after that returning to the barracks.

Nowadays the security establishment is under huge pressure to respond to Modi’s annexation of Jammu and Kashmir by waging a war against India, but on the other hand it is being criticized heavily in every nook and corner of Pakistan for being responsible for engineering the political discourse and bringing Imran Khan to power with a fractured mandate. So a tactical retreat could avert the pressure to wage war, something that in any case is impossible with the bleeding economy, and it would also lessen the criticism from the masses for its involvement in politics. This could mean that Imran Khan will be made the fall guy for not being able to garner international support on the Kashmir issue and for the economic turmoil in Pakistan.

However, for this to happen, Nawaz Sharif will need to make sure that the pro-establishment and old-school stalwarts of his party do not abandon him as they did when he returned to Pakistan with Maryam to allow himself to be arrested in July last year. On that day had Shahbaz Sharif and his son Hamza along with other party stalwarts shown some courage and led the mammoth gathering of PML-N supporters to the airport, the history of Pakistani politics could have changed entirely.

The PML-N missed that chance because genetically it was not a political party that was known for taking on the establishment. However, first Sharif and then his daughter Maryam Nawaz changed the narrative of the party entirely, and that is the reason that the establishment is trying everything to stop the pair from walking further on the anti-establishment path. The problem remains that the longer Sharif and Maryam sit in jail the more popular they will become, and with each passing day the economic turmoil and diplomatic isolation of Pakistan are getting worse.

It is almost game over for those characters who rigged the political discourse, and within a few months, Imran Khan or someone from the establishment will be made the fall guy for the political turmoil, foreign-policy failures and the economic meltdown of the country. The security establishment eventually will negotiate with Sharif and other democratic leaders for a face-saving exit from this failed undeclared coup.

Probably Khan and a few people from the security establishment will come hard at Sharif in a bid to regain the lost battle, but it is too late. If Sharif did not surrender in the toughest of times, he will never do it now when the writing is clearly on the wall that it is all over for Imran Khan and his backers in the establishment.

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/09/opinion/pakistani-establishment-facing-historic-challenge/