WASHINGTON: The head of a United States congressional panel and a former Pentagon official, in a toxic article published on Thursday, urged the Trump administration to stop treating Pakistan as an ally.

In a joint piece they wrote for the National Interest magazine, Congressman Ted Poe and James Clad also referred to a closed-door meeting held for congressional staffers on Tuesday where Ambassador Robert Gallucci, a prominent nuclear weapons expert, urged US policymakers not to wait until Pakistani leaders changed their stance. “Instead, it’s time that the United States sets, unilaterally, the limits of its indulgence,” he argued.

Congressman Poe chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s subcommittee on terrorism, non-proliferation and trade, while Clad was a deputy assistant secretary of defence for Asia in the George W. Bush administration. The magazine is published by the Centre for the National Interest, a Washington think-tank founded by former president Richard Nixon.

Examine: Love US, hate US

The lawmaker and the former Pentagon official also rejected a suggestion that since Pakistan was a weak state, it needed continued US support.

“Unlike the impression of imminent dissolution (which Islamabad likes to give as an excuse for tolerating domestic extremism), Pakistan in important ways is actually a strong state,” they argued.

They suggested three immediate steps the US administration could take to reset America’s relationship with Pakistan: “Don’t let the next crisis in South or Southwest Asia deflect our focus. Don’t rush to shore up Pakistan’s balance of payments via the IMF or other intermediaries, as we’ve done in the past. Let China pay that, if the Pakistanis wish to mortgage their future in that way.”

They also claimed that China’s “one belt, one road” infrastructure plans for Pakistan were running into big problems.

Poe and Clad argued that for decades, the US had “acquiesced in a toxic relationship” with Pakistan, putting up with “this nominal ally, whose military and security leaders play a lethal double game”.

This dangerous “game,” according to them “involves headlong nuclear-weapons production and exporting Islamist terrorism”.

They argued that successive US administrations had failed to find a way out of this, “playing instead the theatre of ‘shared interests’ with Islamabad, even when Pakistan’s links with insurgents imperilled American lives in Afghanistan while feeding wider instability in Central Asia”.

Quoting recent congressional testimonies and expert analyses, the two claimed that Pakistan had become “a quasi-adversary,” receiving hundreds of billions of dollars through the years in direct and indirect US support.

They described this relationship as “a strange hostage-like arrangement in which we pay Islamabad to do what it should be doing anyway to protect its own domestic security and buttress Afghan stability”.

The writers claimed that successive Pakistani military leaders had held the country’s governments on a tight leash, “playing to its various constituencies in Washington very well, especially defence corporations, some residual voices in the intelligence community and parts of the foreign-policy establishment for whom ‘maintaining access’ in Islamabad edges out realism”.

Each new generation of senior US commanders thought it could ‘square the circle,’ relying on ‘personal links’ with Pakistani army corps commanders, they wrote. “Then some new Sub-continental crisis erupts, and the immediate need to influence Pakistan pushes aside longer-term goals.”

The two claimed that for years, the US looked the other way as Pakistan acquired nuclear-weapons capability, “going through the kabuki dance of annual non-proliferation certification”.

They noted that lawmakers from both Republican and Democratic parties, in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, tried to attach conditionality to successive aid packages for Pakistan, “which invariably fail”.

They also provided a brief history of this conditionality, noting that in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the US offered a grant of hundreds of millions to Pakistan, on the basis that the money would go towards education reform. “Our ally used it instead to write down some of its massive foreign debt. And few forget the wink-and-nudge annual certification that Pakistan was not developing nuclear weapons — which, of course, it was.”

Giving their arguments for reversing this arrangement, they claimed that over the years, the broad strategic balance had shifted against Pakistan, which failed to invest in human capital.

Poe and Clad acknowledged that changing America’s “reactive accommodating stance” towards Pakistan would not come quickly.

“But it must change — irrespective of trends in US-India relations… there’s a tendency to think of Pakistan as part of a troubling duality, with India and Pakistan in a death spiral. That’s out of date — and we have our issues with India too,” they wrote.

“Something must change in our dealings with a terrorist-supporting, irresponsible nuclear-weapons state, and it must change soon. Acquiescing in the current trends is not an option.”

Published in Dawn, March 10th, 2017