Donald trump’s pak challenge

Donald trump’s pak challenge

President Donald Trump’s speech unveiling the US’s new strategy for South Asia ought to have focused the minds of Pakistan’s generals. “We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars, at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting,” he said at Fort Myers on Monday. “But that will have to change. And that will change immediately”. To the dismay of Pakistan’s military, President Trump even invited India to do more in Afghanistan — a prospect Islamabad has long railed against.

But the generals have heard these words before: From Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warning Pakistan that “you can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbours” to Trump’s own National Security Advisor, Herbert McMaster, advising them that “the best way to pursue their interests in Afghanistan and elsewhere is through diplomacy, not through the use of proxies that engage in violence”.

General Pervez Musharraf, we know by his own account, was told the country would be bombed “back to the stone age” unless it took decisive action against its Taliban and al Qaeda clients in Afghanistan after 9/11. He succeeded, however, in extracting massive aid from the US, all the while keeping his jihadist allies alive, as did his successors.

The acid test for Trump will be to turn words — a currency which his vaults overflow with — into an agenda for action. Here, his speech was understandably short on detail; no state, after all, would disclose its course of action. The tools at US disposal are well known, though, and past administrations have been loath to use them for fear of the consequences.

The US has the military resources to strike jihadist infrastructure deep in Pakistan, but that would bring it into direct conflict with a state armed with nuclear weapons. It could use economic means, but that might further destabilise a nation already teetering at the edge of economic collapse. The generals are likely to be banking on the prospect that Trump will be deterred by the potential consequences of destabilising a nuclear-weapons state, just as his predecessors were. It is a dangerous, potentially-suicidal gamble — but the generals have built their empire on just such gambles.