WASHINGTON: In a call to her Pakistani counterpart this month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated the Obama administration’s counter-terrorism “red line”: The United States reserved the right to attack anyone who it determined posed a direct threat to US national security, anywhere in the world.

Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar responded in kind, telling Mrs Clinton that Pakistan’s red line was the violation of its sovereignty. Any unauthorised flight into its airspace, Ms Khar bluntly told Mrs Clinton, risked being shot down. The conversation, recounted by US officials, was one of the few high-level exchanges between the two governments in recent months, and it illustrated the depths to which US-Pakistan relations have fallen after a November air assault by Nato forces killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Since then, Pakistan’s border crossings have remained closed to US and Nato supplies in transit to the Afghan war. At Pakistan’s demand, US personnel have evacuated a secret drone airstrip, and the number of American military trainers in the
country has been cut to a fraction of previous levels.

Marc Grossman, the administration’s top diplomat in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan, asked to visit Islamabad during a current trip to the region, but Pakistani officials responded that it was not convenient.

The “fundamentals” of mutual interest in destroying Al Qaeda and safely managing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal haven’t changed, said a senior administration US official, who, like several sources in this article, discussed sensitive diplomatic matters on the condition of anonymity.

But the two countries are groping their way towards what he called “a new normal”, somewhere between the strategic alliance that President Obama once proffered in exchange for Pakistan severing its ties with militants, and a more businesslike
arrangement with few illusions.

“It’ll be much more realpolitik,” another US official said. “It’s getting away from the grandiose vision of what could be to focusing on what is.”

A senior Pakistani military official said, “We’ve had some glorious times,” citing past interludes of intelligence and military cooperation in pursuit of Pakistan-based Al Qaeda and Taliban militants.

But the military official also spoke emotionally about the deaths of the 24 soldiers in November and said the incident would not soon be forgotten. The same was true of what he said were other insults in 2011, including the shooting deaths of two Pakistanis by a CIA contractor in Lahore, the US Special Operations raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad and the assertion by Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the Haqqani network was a “veritable arm” of Pakistani intelligence.

Pakistan, the military official said, wanted some “significant changes” in the way the two countries did business.

After the November air strikes, the Obama administration suspended its regular drone attacks inside Pakistan to avoid further unsettling relations, US officials said. And in a rare display of deference early this month, the CIA informed the Pakistani government that it planned a drone strike against a terrorist target in the North Waziristan tribal region and asked Islamabad’s permission.

When Pakistan declined, the strike was cancelled, officials said. But on Jan 10, barely a week later, the 55-day drone hiatus ended abruptly with a strike that killed four alleged militants in North Waziristan, followed by another strike two days later.

Although officials said Pakistan was notified in advance, permission was not sought.

A parliamentary committee, with input from military and civilian authorities, is conducting what Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Saturday called “a full review of the terms of cooperation” with the United States and the US-led international coalition in Afghanistan.

“Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are not negotiable,” Mr Gilani said.

A senior Pakistani official said the committee’s recommendations will probably include a demand for explicit US assurances that there will be no violation of sovereignty: no American boots on the ground, no more unilateral raids, no manned air strikes.

The official said there is likely to be some arrangement on drone attacks, with Pakistan calling for large reductions in their number and geographic scope, and demanding prior notification and approval of every strike.

Pakistan also wants more explicit compensation for US and Nato supplies transiting its ports and roads, perhaps in the form of taxes. And it wants more comprehensive information about CIA operations and personnel.

US peace talks with the Taliban are also a top issue for Pakistan.

A heavy US footprint needs to be maintained in the region, a senior Pentagon official said, because Pakistan refuses to crack down on the Haqqani network.

Pakistan also has snubbed US efforts to boost the Afghan economy with a gas pipeline that would run from Tajikistan through Afghanistan to Pakistani ports. Instead, it has reiterated its plans to proceed with an alternative pipeline from Iran.

Obama administration officials said they would resist responding until Pakistan’s parliament has finished its review of the relations. “We have views on where we’d like to see this go,” a US official said. But it will “take another week or two . . . for their internal process to come to some kind of formal communication that would be communicated back to us.”

US officials question whether Pakistan has the ability or the desire to shoot down US aircraft.

They said there have been at least two accidental violations of Pakistani airspace in recent weeks by piloted aircraft in Afghanistan, but both incidents were calmly defused by border coordination centres on the Afghan side.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service