Pakistani military officers are in Washington this week to talk with their U.S. counterparts on coordinating action against Islamist extremists in the region along the border with Afghanistan.
It’s one of several signs of a thaw in the complicated relationship between the two nuclear-armed countries that comes at exactly the right time, as U.S. and NATO troops prepare to hand over operational control in Afghanistan to the new Afghan government. On Monday, the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command, which has handled day-to-day NATO military operations in Afghanistan for the past five years, formally furled its colors and ceased to exist.
“Tensions of the recent past are being removed and a new consensus is emerging,” a senior Pakistani diplomat, speaking on background, told the English-language daily Dawn. “Now there are more convergences than differences.”
The meeting of the U.S.-Pakistan Defense Consultative Group comes after Gen. Raheel Sharif, Pakistan’s army chief, made his first visit to the United States since taking office a year ago, and as Pakistani troops have launched a major offensive against extremists in tribal areas along the Afghan border.
Pakistani troops taking part in that offensive on Saturday killed Adnan el-Shukrijumah, a major al Qaeda figure wanted by the United States. The Saudi-born Shukrijumah, 39, who grew up in the United States, was indicted by a federal grand jury in 2010 in connection with a plot to attack the New York subway system and other targets in the United States and Britain.
Pakistan also has quietly continued to allow U.S. drone strikes on its territory, most recently, according to reports, on Sunday, when Umar Farooq, a key al Qaeda leader was killed in the tribal area of North Waziristan. For their part, U.S. officials over the weekend handed over three Pakistanis being held in Afghanistan, reportedly including Pakistani Taliban leader Latifullah Mehsud.
Pakistan’s cooperation is essential to minimizing violent attacks by the Taliban and other insurgents in Afghanistan as foreign troops work through 2015 to prepare the Afghan government to stand on its own against those threats. Most of the U.S. troops and equipment being withdrawn from the country also must pass through Pakistan to return home.
“There is a realization that the campaign must target terrorists on both sides of the Pak-Afghan border,” the unnamed Pakistani diplomat told Dawn. “Failure on one side will have repercussions on the other side too.”
But Islamabad has been playing a double game for years, simultaneously supporting extremists and fighting them, depending on where its interests lay at the time. Support from safe havens in Pakistan — and from elements inside the Pakistani government such as the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence — has kept the Taliban in the fight since U.S. troops ejected them from power in 2001.
Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen — who had been the Pentagon’s point man on relations with Pakistan until his retirement in September 2011 — vented his frustration with the relationship in his last hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“The support of terrorism is part of their national strategy. That’s got to fundamentally shift,” he said.
Just months earlier, the “frenemies” nature of the relationship had blown up in the face of both countries when U.S. Navy SEALs killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a May 2, 2011, raid in Abbottabad, a military garrison town just 35 miles from Islamabad. In the aftermath of the raid, it was revealed that bin Laden had been hiding there for years, and repercussions over how much — and whether — Pakistani officials were aware of his presence sent the alliance between the two countries spiraling to its lowest level since the Sept. 11 attacks bin Laden had ordered.
