AS the world has been basking in the euphoria of the Egyptian revolution, an event on the streets of Lahore has evolved into an international relations nightmare.

Last month, while international news coverage was solidly focused on the streets of Cairo, a US consulate employee, was allegedly accosted by two men. Within minutes, two men were dead and Raymond Davis was in police custody.

Ensuing days have added to the grim details of the incident, with the wife of one of Davis’s victims committing suicide. In the following days, Pakistan’s foreign minister was denied his post after cabinet resignations, leaving no one to deal with American requests to release Davis on the basis of diplomatic immunity.

Meanwhile, the court ordered his continued detention. Immediately following this development, trilateral talks between Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US scheduled for the last week of February were indefinitely delayed, pointing to an alarming escalation of tensions between Pakistan and the US.

Another crucial point to note is that drone attacks in Pakistani territory taking place at the rate of two or three a week appear to have decreased since the incident.

Much has been said about the legal dimensions of diplomatic immunity in recent days, with Pakistani analysts carefully dissecting the provisions of the Vienna Convention and examining these against the demands of justice. The details of these discussions, most of which rely on examples of ills afflicting previous cadres of diplomats, Pakistanis, Americans or others who have found themselves on the wrong side of the law while serving at a foreign mission, deflect attention away from the particularities of the issue in the Pakistan-American context.

In the current situation, the Davis case mirrors the misgivings in the relationship between two circumstantial allies. Just as the case is with the countries themselves, it is challenging to find the good guy in the skirmish.

The Pakistani men in question, even in the rendition of some rabid anti-American anchors on Pakistani news channels, were in the process of committing a crime, one to which many hapless Pakistani citizens are daily subjected on the streets of Lahore and Karachi. Their victim in this instance turned out to be armed and trigger-happy.

For many, save for the fact that an innocent bystander perished, the incident was largely a confrontation of villains, each side equally sullied by the weight of unclear motives.

The murky details of the Davis case, and the rapidly changing nature of facts presented to substantiate one or the other version correlate exactly to the legal obscurities on which both Pakistan and the US have routinely relied as part of their partnership.

The issue of drone attacks is a case in point, even while UN officials like Philip Alston and other legal scholars have drawn attention to the illegality of such extra-judicial warfare, neither Pakistan nor the US have expended any effort on bringing such acts within the legal ambit.

A few months ago, attempts by a Pakistani attorney Shahzad Akhter to bring charges against American government officials on behalf of drone attack victims including journalist Karim Khan were denounced by the US as a ploy to destroy the cover of their chief CIA operative in Islamabad. And if the US has been uncooperative and dismissive, the Pakistani government was hardly a source of respite refusing to release any details about the attacks or the basis of their tacit agreement with the US that allowed for incursions into Pakistani territory.

The absence of clearly delineated rules was judged on both sides to be beneficial to the task of waging a covert war.

This lack of rules is now incurring a cost for both sides. According to former officials from the United States Foreign Service, the issue of diplomatic immunity is one decided prior to the deployment of an official. A list exchanged between missions includes the names of officials that possess immunity on either side.

Those not on the list, often contract workers, may have diplomatic passports but do not necessarily enjoy diplomatic immunity. But the question of whether or not Davis possesses diplomatic immunity is in fact a largely superfluous detail in the current impasse. The legacy of legal uncertainty, promoted by the persistence of drone attacks, extra-judicial killings and surreptitious rendition have all coalesced to make Davis himself the scapegoat of all sins past.

His acts, even while provoked by his victims, have become a crude allegory for the acts of the US itself with his vanquishing imagined as ultimate revenge against the devaluation of Pakistani lives so easily sacrificed in the course of a conflict largely perceived as America’s alone.

To many minds, both he and his victims represent the darkest side of their respective worlds: a mercenary contract soldier hailing from a society that wants perfect safety and young men committing crimes on city streets paved with despair suddenly cast in the fluid roles of victim and victimiser.

In the game of strategic necessity where both sides have revelled in the absence of explicit rules, Raymond Davis is collateral damage, the unfortunate target of the hatred of a population seething at the lack of recourse for crimes committed against them.

Davis, his victims and the bystander who died may have been brought together by a coalition of chance and circumstance but the action that day has now become magnified into a power struggle between two countries brought together by just as unlikely a collusion of history, geography and strategic necessity.Amid these realities, whetted by mistrust and fuelled by anger, the possibility of justice seems remote leaving only the stark lesson that covert warfare produces unlikely and unfair casualties on both sides. The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional history and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail