President Zardari may be forgiven for arriving in Washington this week a confused or worried man. Weeks of tough public statements from US officials and a slew of what appear to be deliberate leaks to the US media have, at the very least, undermined the image of the PPP-led federal government internationally. Looking over the record of recent weeks, three possibilities emerge.
The more positive scenario is that the Obama administration has deployed its officials to play a good cop/bad cop routine to force a Pakistani administration that is adrift to shape up and get serious about countering the threat of militancy and to improve its poor governance record. From this perspective, American impatience with Zardari’s PPP and overtures to Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N and the Pakistan Army can be read more as a shot across the bow of the PPP, a way of putting the party on notice that American support is not endless.
The second possibility is that the Obama administration is in fact already fed up with the weak PPP government and is genuinely looking at other options.
The third is that the Americans are themselves divided, unsure of what to do next in a neighbourhood where more American troops are on their way and where all US options in Pakistan appear equally good — or bad, as the case may be.
So which is it? President Obama will have an opportunity to make that clear this week. We hope Obama and his officials will send a clear signal that they support the democratic process in Pakistan, that they will in fact help ‘Pakistan help Pakistanis’, as Obama said last week, and that they will not let short-term security concerns trump the long-term interests of both the US and Pakistan.
If in fact US officials have deliberately been sending mixed signals to the Pakistan government in recent weeks that must stop. There is no doubt that the PPP-led government has done great harm to its own reputation with ill-advised political moves, especially in Punjab and over the judicial saga, but there is also no doubt that it is a genuinely and legitimately elected government with support in all the four provinces. And while the government has done little to focus on governance and seemingly regarded economic aid as a panacea, it is also a relatively young government that has inherited a country in a state of disarray after eight years of military rule.
Moreover, two wrongs will not make a right. If the Pakistan government is guilty of not living up to the basic standards of governance and policymaking, the US government has similarly failed to devise a credible policy towards Pakistan.
Alternating between expressions of support and dissatisfaction is not good policy. It is a recipe for failure.
