In the early days of the Trump administration, the White House certainly talked tough on Pakistan,

vowing to apply more pressure to compel Islamabad to crack down on the terrorist groups on its soil
that threaten and target U.S. interests and troops in Afghanistan.

U.S. media reports, citing unnamed administration officials, said the White House was considering a
variety of new pressure tactics. These included increasing the number of drone strikes in Pakistan and
revoking the country’s status as a major non-NATO ally.

“We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the
very terrorists that we are fighting,” Trump thundered in an August 2017 speech laying out his South
Asia strategy.

But that will have to change, and that will change immediately. No partnership can survive a country’s
harboring of militants and terrorists who target U.S. service members and officials.”But Mr. Trump
deepened the rift in January 2018.

He tweeted that the United States had “foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid” and
accused Pakistan’s leaders of treating American officials like fools and giving safe haven to terrorists:
“No more!”Three days later, Mr. Trump suspended security aid to Pakistan, shutting down the flow of up
to $1.3 billion in aid each year with a demand that Pakistan’s government cut off ties with extremists.

One of its few punitive measures, implemented in early 2018, was a suspension of Pakistani security
assistance. But this isn’t new; Washington cut security aid to Islamabad in the past as well, such as in
the 1990s when it did so in response to Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons. The Trump
administration also placed new restrictions on the movement of Pakistani diplomats posted in the
United States, though these came largely in response to long-standing U.S. complaints about the
harassment of American diplomats in Pakistan. Additionally, the White House ended its military and
education training program with Pakistan.

Instead of using an iron fist, the Trump administration has generally treated Pakistan with kid gloves.
AND THE MAIN REASON WHY IS AFGHANISTAN

Washington knows that if it provokes Islamabad with overly harsh measures, Pakistan can use its most
powerful tool of leverage—suspending the supply routes on its soil used to convey materiel for U.S.
and other NATO militaries in Afghanistan. This happened once before, in 2011, after NATO helicopters
killed 24 Pakistani border troops. Islamabad kept the routes closed for more than seven months, until
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued an apology for the border incident.

America may have less to fear from such a retaliation now compared with in 2011, given that there are
tens of thousands fewer U.S. troops in Afghanistan. However, several other complicating factors are at
play today. First, the only alternative supply routes lie in Central Asia. Not only are these costlier and
more circuitous, but they’re also in Russia’s backyard—and Washington’s relationship is more fraught
with Moscow now than it was eight years ago. Second, U.S. forces in Afghanistan are stepping up
attacks on the Taliban to strengthen America’s bargaining position in current negotiations to end the
war.

And those negotiations most explain why Washington hasn’t sought to tighten the screws on Pakistat.

A senior administration official had told reporters that Mr. Trump appreciated Mr. Khan’s earlier
statements that Pakistan would no longer be a refuge for terrorist groups. But the official said the
United States remained concerned given that terrorist organizations — including Jaish-e-Mohammed,
Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Haqqani network — continued to operate in Pakistan with the tacit approval of
its national intelligence and military agencies.

on January 2018, the United States announced the suspension of nearly all security-related assistance
to Pakistan until Islamabad could prove its commitment to fighting terrorism and cut its ties with
militant groups such as the Taliban. This decision came just days after U.S. President Donald Trump had
accused Pakistan, on Twitter, of giving “safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan.” Pakistani
leaders responded with a familiar refrain, claiming to have moved against all militant groups without
distinction and pointing to the enormous costs in terms of money (over $120 billion) and lives (nearly
80,000 civilian and military dead) sustained by Pakistan in the fight against terrorism since 2001.

RECENTLY Trump coddled Khan in a bid to enlist Pakistani support for ongoing peace talks with the
Taliban and floated a vague {golmol }offer to restart billions of dollars in security aid in exchange for
Islamabad’s help with the diplomatic initiative.

{{{{{{Trump then went on to offer to mediate the conflict between Pakistan and India over the disputed
Himalayan territory of Kashmir—

insisting that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked him to mediate the conflict.The Indian
government immediately shot down the claim, which is at odds with decades of Indian foreign policy.“No
such request has been made by Prime Minister to the U.S. President,” said Indian government
spokesman Raveesh Kumar said in a statement. “It has been India’s consistent position that all
outstanding issues with Pakistan are discussed only bilaterally.”=======Pakistan is a complicated country
in a tough neighborhood. Its main strategic concerns are to contain the surging power of its neighbor
and rival, India, and to combat Islamist militancy inside its own borders—in particular, it wishes to fight
the Pakistani Taliban, which now operates from sanctuaries in Afghanistan. Pakistan launched a military
operation in 2014 to clear the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of insurgents, including the Pakistani
Taliban, many of whom escaped across the border into Afghanistan. Pakistan, however, is reluctant to
please the United States, which it considers a distant and fickle ally, by moving against the leadership of
the Afghan Taliban. The United States, for its part, regards Pakistan as a duplicitous {makkar,deceiful}
{partner that is willing to take U.S. funds but unwilling to cut ties with militant groups or eject Afghan
Taliban leaders, particularly those affiliated with the Haqqani network, a Pakistan-based
faction{group} that has orchestrated {organise ,arrange} high-profile attacks in Afghanistan,
particularly in Kabul.========
TO READ THE FULL ARTIC}}}}}}}

Khan’s visit to the White House on Monday focused on Pakistan’s role in the ongoing negotiations with
the Taliban. Trump wooed Khan by floating the possibility of restoring security aid to the country, which
the United States ended last year after Trump said Pakistan continued to shelter terrorist groups, such
as the Haqqani network, as well as maintaining its lingering ties to the Taliban. In a tweet at the time,
Trump wrote that Pakistan had “given us nothing but lies & deceit.”

On Monday, Trump sang a different tune, saying “Pakistan never lies” and raising the possibility of
restoring billions of dollars in security aid. “All of that can come back, depending on what we work
out,” Trump said.

Trump’s attempt to mend ties with Pakistan comes as he struggles to end the longest war in U.S. history
and reach a peace agreement with the Taliban. U.S. negotiators have in recent months made progress in
talks with the militant group, but the White House would still like to secure the support of Pakistan,
which has for decades provided covert support and shelter to the Taliban.

In the meeting, Trump suggested successful peace talks would be the best solution for a conflict that
could be won “in a week,” except he said he doesn’t “want to kill 10 million people,” a bewildering
reference to an overwhelming—perhaps nuclear—U.S. attack inside Afghanistan that befuddled many
in the U.S. Defense Department. Afghanistan is a partner country in Washington’s fight against the
terrorist group that hosted al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden when he carried out 9/11.

[[[[[[[[All sorts of policies were designed to change Pakistan’s behavior, but Washington ignored
Islamabad’s worries. Pakistan’s hesitance in communicating its lack of control of a notoriously porous
border with Afghanistan, let alone being saddled with the responsibility for large swaths of restive
Afghan territory while NATO and U.S. forces patrolled the rest of the country, triggered a spiral of
frustration on both sides. In rare instances when Pakistan publicly called out the International Security
Assistance Force or U.S. partners for their inaction in dealing with Islamabad’s own terrorist targets, such
as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, which had a sanctuary in southern Afghanistan—the best it got was
stony silence, at worst a sharp public rebuke.]]]]]]]]

The past should be a cautionary tale. Whenever Pakistan is locked into a world of back-channel
diplomacy, where decisions to cooperate are often made quietly and secretively, the outcome has been
suboptimal. Ever since Osama bin Laden surfaced in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, Islamabad has
remained on the defensive, systemically unable to call out its allies for not securing Pakistan’s end of an
often undocumented bargain.Ever since Osama bin Laden surfaced in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad,
Islamabad has remained on the defensive, systemically unable to call out its allies for not securing
Pakistan’s end of an often undocumented bargain. Whenever Pakistan’s military undertook costly
operations against terrorist redoubts in its own border territories, it was left hanging. U.S. promises to
help with more than a million internal refugees, displaced by joint operations on the border areas, never
materialized, nor did the U.S. Reconstruction Opportunity Zones, leaving hundreds of thousands of
Pakistanis homeless and restive.

Whenever there have been shared successes in the counterterrorism field—often at great cost in terms
of Pakistani military lives—they rarely got a mention. The wiping out of al Qaeda from South Asia by
2012—which could have otherwise reemerged as a threat—was rarely credited to Pakistan in U.S.
announcements until Pakistan’s government insisted on it.

From 2008 to 2018, Pakistan’s population absorbed the blowback from counterterrorism operations,
which took the shape of spectacular retaliatory explosions and bombings that rocked Pakistan’s cities,
villages, schools, hotels, and hospitals. The civilian and military death toll was upwards of 70,000 by a
conservative count. As the violence waned, most of Pakistan was either confused by their U.S. allies or
angry at the lack of acknowledgement from Washington.

In 2011, when up to 28 of Pakistan’s soldiers were accidentally shot and killed by U.S. forces’ friendly fire,
the government shut down the NATO supply lines that cut through Pakistan, in order to extract an
apology from Washington. Once it was reluctantly made by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, vital
communications links were restored, and U.S. air bases were closed. Pakistan was left shocked that
eliciting a simple expression of regret while it mourned required such a heavy lift.