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| Bob Work meets General Raheel Sharif (Image: Wiki Commons) |
By Michael Kugelman
As Raheel Sharif visits the United States, it’s worth taking stock of how little has changed in U.S.-Pakistan relations.
Imagine you’re the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, and you’ve been tasked to draft a cable to prepare American officials in Washington for the visit of General Raheel Sharif, the Pakistani army chief who has arrived in town for a five-day trip.
So what would you say?
First, you’d counsel some conciliatory comments: “We should recognize growing Pakistani casualties in the fight against militants … [and] reiterate the long-term U.S. commitment to support Pakistan.”
Soon thereafter, however, you’d urge your Washington counterparts to get down to business: “We need to lay down a clear marker that Pakistan’s Army/ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency] must stop overt or tacit support for militant proxies.”
And then you’d get to the heart of the matter: “The single biggest message … is that this support must end. It is now counterproductive to Pakistan’s own interests and directly conflicts with USG objectives in Afghanistan—where [the] Haqqani [network] is killing American soldiers and Afghan civilians,” and in the broader region, where the Mumbai terror attacks of 2008 “exposed the fruits of previous ISI policy to create Lashkar-e-Taiba and still threatens potential conflict between nuclear powers.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat