OF late in a retaliatory mood, Pakistan has been playing the ‘no more’ song to Washington’s ‘do more’ mantra. After blocking Nato supply lines through its territory and getting the Shamsi airbase vacated, Pakistan has mulled barring US aircraft from using its airspace.

After 10 years of the US-led war on terror Islamabad is seriously considering revisiting its national security paradigm. This period of a decade has been replete with incidents that have constituted a breach of Pakistan’s sovereignty including last November’s deadly Nato attack on Pakistani military outposts that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. Islamabad in retaliation cut Nato supply lines, boycotted the Bonn conference on Afghanistan and ordered the US to vacate the Shamsi airbase. This is for the first time in 10 years that the country reacted to such an attack so vehemently.

There is so much fuss about the violation of sovereignty today. But the fact is that Pakistan itself allowed the US to violate the country’s sovereignty under covert and clandestine ‘deals’ and ‘understandings’ regarding the security situation after 9/11.

What sovereign nation would allow its ally to fly aircraft from its airbase over its airspace to attack targets inside its own territory, killing its own people in the process?

Islamabad ceded to many of Washington’s demands, but has been asked to do yet more. Pakistan’s sovereignty was violated in hundreds of drone attacks, while the May 2 raid inside Pakistan by American special forces that killed Al Qaeda chief, Osama Bin Laden was also a blatant violation of sovereignty.

True, the Americans did vacate the Shamsi airfield in Balochistan last month, complying with the deadline set by Islamabad in the aftermath of the Nato attacks. And Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar said that Pakistan would not compromise on its sovereignty and would take over the Shamsi airbase, and that “no drone will be allowed to fly from here after the deadline”. But the real issue is not the airbase but the airspace which has been used by US drones to attack targets inside Pakistan. The US can always use airfields in neighbouring Afghanistan to launch the drones.

What can actually be a setback for the US and Nato forces is to bar their aircraft from flying over Pakistan. If Islamabad bars US aircraft from flying over its airspace, it will convey the message to the US that a non-cooperative Pakistan can make it difficult for Washington to end the conflict on its own terms in Afghanistan.

There has been a lot of resentment in many quarters, with people from a wide cross-section of society showing anger at what has been seen as Pakistan-bashing by the US including criticism of the country’s security establishment (and November’s Nato attacks), when there should have been recognition of the sacrifices rendered in the war on terror. Mike Mullen, the former US chief military officer, had linked Pakistani intelligence with the bomb attack on the US embassy in Kabul last September, reflecting the perception that Pakistan was not a partner but in fact the problem in the ongoing conflict.

Pakistan’s frontline role in the US-led war on terror has hit the country in the form of a human and an economic disaster, in which thousands of Pakistani soldiers and civilians have been killed. The country’s war on terror bill has exceeded the amount of aid received from the US. The latter has disbursed $8.5bn as civilian and military aid to Pakistan since 2002, whereas the Economic Survey of Pakistan 2010 estimated that economic losses accruing from the war on terror stood at over $43bn between 2001 and 2010. Indirect losses came in the shape of lost exports, damage and destruction to infrastructure, diversion of budgetary resources, capital and human flight and exchange rate depreciation.

A US-controlled base on our soil reflected the chink in our own armour. After the May 2 attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound, Pakistan asked the Americans to leave the airbase but later backed off. The government denied that the airfield was being used as a base for US military operations.

“The Pakistani public has the impression of a base that operates extraterritorially but in reality it operates because the Pakistani army helps it to operate,” AFP quoted Bruce Reidel, a former CIA officer, as saying. While briefing a joint in-camera session of parliament in May 2011, the Pakistan air chief disclosed that Shamsi airbase was under the control of the UAE and not the air force. Washington and Islamabad announced a few days later that drone operations from the airfield had actually ceased in April 2011.

It has taken the country 10 years to respond to Washington’s ‘do more’ mantra with ‘no more’, and the period since 9/11 has led to questions being raised about whether Pakistan stands to gain anything from the conflict or whether it is really an American war that is being fought to serve Washington’s long-term strategic interests in the region. What is clear is that the 10-year US-Pakistan alliance in the war on terror has been a troubled one, featuring as it does a deep trust deficit, scepticism about each other’s moves and a consistent blame game. What will be the fate of the so-called war on terror, in fact of the alliance itself, when the allies are not on the same page?

The writer is a development analyst.

sfazlehaider05@yahoo.com