Pakistan Turns Against the West

[Shah-i-Kot]

http://www.aei.org/article/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/india-pakistan-afghanistan/pakistan-turns-against-the-west/

Pakistan Turns Against the West
Islamabad is now openly opposing the U.S. Former leaders knew better.
Sadanand Dhume | The Wall Street Journal Asia
May 30, 2012



If there were an award for committing international public relations suicide, Pakistan would be a perennial frontrunner. Last week's effort: the sentencing of Shakil Afridi, a doctor who helped the CIA track Osama bin Laden last year, to 33 years in prison for treason. In response, the U.S. Congress docked a symbolic $33 million from Pakistan's annual aid budget, or $1 million for every year of the doctor's sentence.
Washington's anger is understandable. In the year since bin Laden was discovered in a fortified mansion in the garrison town of Abbottabad, Pakistan has done little to dispel the widespread belief that the world's most wanted terrorist was sheltered by elements in the country's army and its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence. Nobody has been punished for aiding bin Laden, part of a pattern of omissions whose beneficiaries certainly include the rogue nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan and Lashkar-e-Taiba's Hafiz Muhammad Saeed.
But as U.S.-Pakistan relations continue to nosedive, the risks for Islamabad run deeper than a mere PR disaster. For the first time since the country came into being in 1947, Pakistan is in danger of being seen as implacably hostile to the West. Should the U.S. switch from a policy of engagement to active containment, Pakistan's economic and diplomatic problems, already acute by any measure, may become unmanageable.

[Shah-i-Kot]

If anyone has a subscription to the Wall Street Journal online, please post the rest of the article here. I was able to read a free pass, but then as I refreshed it locked because I do not have a subscription.


In any case, the writer, Sadanand Dhume is taking issue with the fact that Pakistan has shut down the ground supply lines to NATO. For the last 10 years, Pakistan has been supporting the NATO war/occupation/Karzai regime in Afghanistan with these supply lines. There would not have been a NATO war/Karzai regime in Kabul without these supply lines.

Pakistan's government and army only continue this habit of supporting the NATO war as long as the situation (domestic/and external) allows it.

What the pro-War hawks from these institutes such as the American Enterprise Institute seem to want to ignore is that the situation in Pakistan does not allow them to continue to support the NATO war. It has created instability. Supporting the NATO war is in fact for Pakistan national suicide. Not the other way around.

There is a realization of a Pashtun backlash.