WASHINGTON: Labelling Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism would be a profoundly unwise move, says Michael Krepon, the co-founder of a leading US think tank, the Stimson Centre.

Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation, another Washington think tank, also does not want “Pakistan (to) be declared a State Sponsor of Terrorism this year” but urges the Trump administration to “keep the option open for the future”. But in the interim period, she suggests “enforcing conditions on military aid and revoking Pakistan’s Major Non-Nato Ally Status.”

Former US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Daniel Feldman says that stopping assistance to Pakistan has been tried in the past as well and it failed to bring the desired change in the country’s attitude.

“The leverage this threat provides would be lost with its execution, along with the likelihood of remedial steps,” says Mr Krepon while opposing a suggestion that Pakistan be declared a state sponsor of terrorism.

Trump administration urged to ‘keep the option open for the future’

“The terrorism issue, as important as it is, is less consequential than the nuclear issue. Rawalpindi has figured this out, which helps explain why it doesn’t deliver on promises to take more than cosmetic action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad leadership,” he writes in a recent post on this issue.

John Gill, an associate professor at the National Defence University, Washington, cautions against “starting all over again” and suggested altering the current United States policy towards Pakistan in such a way that it encourages Islamabad to do more in the war against terrorism.

The views expressed in recent posts and in discussions at various US think tanks follow media reports that President Donald Trump’s administration, which came to power on Jan 20, is preparing a new policy for the Pak-Afghan region.

So far, the administration has been intentionally silent on this issue but it has started consulting lawmakers, experts and scholars.

Earlier this month, former ambassador Husain Haqqani was also invited to the State Department for consultation.

Ms Curtis, who co-authored a study paper on Pakistan with Mr Haqqani last month, could also have a major influence on the new policy. Some media reports suggest that the Trump administration may hire her as the new assistant secretary of state for South Asia.

In the joint report, Ms Curtis and Mr Haqqani argue that “the objective of the Trump administration’s policy toward Pakistan must be to make it more and more costly for Pakistani leaders to employ a strategy of supporting terrorist proxies to achieve regional strategic goals. There should be no ambiguity that the US considers Pakistan’s strategy of supporting terrorist proxies to achieve regional strategic advantage as a threat to US interests.”

The two authors, and other experts, have suggested bringing pressure on Pakistan to force it to change its Afghan policy. They argue that Pakistan continues supporting the Afghan militant Haqqani network, which prevents the US from fully implementing its own policy on Afghanistan and from restoring peace to the war-ravaged country. The Pakistani policy, they argue, also has caused the death of hundreds of US soldiers in Afghanistan.

Mr Krepon counters this argument by saying that “the future of Pakistan is more important to the United States than the future of Afghanistan. Any US policy that seeks to sacrifice the former for the latter, as some Pakistan squeezers and bashers seem to demand, is folly,” he writes.

“One of Washington’s pipe dreams is the belief that Pakistan can be muscled into subordinating its own perceived interests in Afghanistan to those of the United States,” he argues.

Published in Dawn, March 16th, 2017