Who could have thought that a day would come when so prestigious an American think tank as the Council for Foreign Relations would perceive a “greater possibility in 2012 of a conflict between the United States and Pakistan than an encounter between traditional rivals, India and Pakistan”? After all, with the possible exception of the “all-weather friendship” between China and Pakistan, few partnerships between any two nations have been so enduring as the US-Pakistan one.

For 40 years through the Cold War, Pakistan was America’s “most allied ally”, in the words of Field Marshal Ayub Khan. The sophisticated weapons it received as part of the massive US military aid, it used against India in 1965 with impunity, despite repeated US assurances that this would not be permitted. Then, at a time when relations between the two allies were strained, partly because of the overthrow and execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan came as a godsend for Pakistan. Almost overnight it became the “front-line state” in the US-backed Islamic jihad against the USSR. The US rewarded it by looking the other way as it went ahead in its nuclear quest, with China’s abundant help.
As the last Soviet soldier withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the Americans lost interest in the region. Thus abandoned, Pakistan retaliated by enabling the Taliban to come to power in Kabul. It was only after the trauma of 9/11 that America rushed back to the region to launch the global “war on terror”. The US threat to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” compelled the then military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to fall in line.
An era of duplicity — hunting with the American hound and running with the jihadi hare — ushered in by Mr Musharraf has continued after him. For it is Army Chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani who calls the shots, not the flimsy civilian government, headed by President Asif Ali Zardari. Americans, never unaware of what was going on, reacted most curiously. They remonstrated with Pakistani military and civilian leaders in private but publicly went on hailing them as “key” allies. Notably, the just retired US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who eventually described the Haqqani network — hated by the US but indulged by Pakistan — as an “arm” of the Pakistan Army’s notorious intelligence agency, the ISI, was Gen. Kayani’s most ardent admirer for more than two years.
This kind of flip-flop on both sides has now yielded place to a rather prolonged period of not just acrimony but of rage, especially in Pakistan, actively encouraged by both the Pakistan Army and Islamic extremists. The process began with the case of Raymond Davies, a CIA operative who had shot two ISI agents in Lahore. But hardly had this bust up subsided when the US Navy Seals eliminated Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad, and all hell broke loose. In the prevailing fury the Army also came in for criticism. People accused it of being either complicit in America’s “crime” or too incompetent to do anything about it. Gen. Kayani adroitly turned this rage against the US. The civilian government and Parliament went along with him.
It was against this fraught backdrop that the US-Nato air attacks on two Pakistani military posts on November 26 that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers brought the troubled US-Pakistan relationship to its lowest depth ever. The rival versions of the incident are too well known to need recounting. More pertinent are the harsh statements the two allies have been making against each other. More startling are Pakistan’s actions. It refused to go to the Bonn conference on Afghanistan despite repeated pleading by the US; it stopped all supplies to the US-Nato troops in Afghanistan through the two transit routes (73 Nato tankers were torched); and it has bundled the Americans out of the Shamsi air base they were using for drone attacks within Pakistani territory.
For his part Gen. Kayani first announced that Pakistani troops would fire at any attacker without having to secure permission from higher authorities. He then followed this by declaring that he was sending the Air Force to the Pakistan-Afghan border, and added a day later that any drone or suspicious object seen in Pakistan’s air space would be shot down forthwith.
US President Barack Obama’s refusal to “apologise” for the November 26 air attacks, secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s stern warning to Pakistan, answered in kind by her Pakistani counterpart, Hina Rabbani Khar, and the demand by several US senators that aid to Pakistan be made contingent on its acceptance of what America wants have inevitably aggravated the situation.
It cannot be overlooked that the grim crisis in the US-Pakistan relations has coincided with the fallout of “Memogate” (reportedly a cry by the civilian government for US help to prevent a take-over by the military) as a result of which the Pakistani ambassador to the US has lost his job and President Zardari is in a hospital in Dubai. When asked by the BBC whether the Army was “more powerful” than the civilian government, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani replied: “That is a perception.”
In this interview, his latest, Mr Gilani also reiterated all of Pakistan’s grievances against, and demands on, the US. The present distrust, he said, was such that the relationship can be repaired only if “new rules of engagement” were agreed to. About the future of transit of US-Nato supplies, his position was that this would depend on overall developments. That, in some respects, is the nub of the matter.
Despite all the sound and fury, both sides need each other. Pakistan, with an economy so parlous that it could default in repaying sovereign debt in four months, cannot do without American aid. Nor can America sustain its presence in Afghanistan without transit facilities in Pakistan. Maybe, mutual needs would override mutual recrimination.