Pakistan loses traction in US as Washington loses leverage over Islamabad

WASHINGTON: The United States has curtailed visa validity for Pakistani citizens from five years to 12 months in a reciprocal move that speaks to Pakistan’s declining traction in Washington. By the same token, the US too has diminishing leverage in Islamabad going by the defiant Pakistani military response to India’s counter-terrorism strike on Balakot in the face of Washington’s counsel for restraint.

The spiralling down of the storied partnership, which once earned the moniker “most allied ally” for Pakistan, has been evident on several fronts for many months now, starting with very few high-level visits and exchanges. But on Tuesday, it made itself felt on the people-to-people sphere when the US Embassy in Islamabad announced it was reducing visa validity period for Pakistani visitors to one year and hiking visa fees in other categories.

The decision was taken by the state department “because Pakistan was unable to liberalise its visa regime for certain visa categories, [hence] the United States was required by US law on January 21 to reduce the visa validity and increase the visa fees to match Pakistan’s practices for similar visa categories,” the US Embassy in Islamabad said on Monday, suggesting a reciprocal enforcement mandated by law.

But the diminished ties are evident even on the political and diplomatic front where US lawmakers weighed in heavily on India’s side following the Pulwama terrorist attack and the border clashes that followed.

According to a list compiled by the Indian Embassy in Washington, 64 US lawmakers, including Senators and Congressmen/ Congresswomen, issued individual statements urging restraint in the region, many of them asking Pakistan to deny safe havens and support to terrorist groups.

Not a single lawmaker endorsed Pakistani arguments about ''root cause'' of the terrorist attack or the need to negotiate on the Kashmir issue in the face of terror attacks. ''The United States stands with our partner India as it recovers from a terrorist bombing in Kashmir. Jaish-e-Mohammed and its state sponsors must face consequences for this attack,'' was the blunt statement from Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican Senator who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s not just the Pakistani people but Pakistani students too appearing to be paying the price for the Islamabad/Rawalpindi Pakistani establishment’s nurturing of terrorist groups going back nearly three decades.

The number of Pakistani students in the US, which stood at 7070 in 1989/90 (when India had 26240 students in US and Bangladesh 2470) when Pakistan put Kashmir on the front-burner, barely ticked past 7500 in 2017/2018, when Indian students in the US was nearly 200,000.

Figures from the Open Doors report detailing international student inflow to the U.S. show that Bangladesh now has almost as many students in America as Pakistan (both around 7500), while India has 25 times as many.

The outcome is evident in many areas in the US from the groves of academe in the US to think tanks to boardrooms of corporate America to the halls of Congress, where people of Indian-origin, all products of the US education system, dominate in disproportionate numbers. In fact, some Pakistanis privately lament that they are forced to subsume their Pakistani identity because of the policies adopted by their home country.

But the upshot of those policies and of Washington’s weakened ties with Pakistan, including cutting off aid, is that the US barely has any leverage over Islamabad – not that it could walk Pakistan away from terrorism even during the years it had.

''One unpleasant lesson is that the United States cannot meaningfully inhibit the sort of Pakistani risk-taking that might spark military escalation with its larger neighbour. Americans have tried for years to stop Pakistan from using proxy militants to frustrate India,'' Joshua White, a former National Security Council Director for South Asia wrote following the latest crisis, referring to ''a dizzying array of strategies'' Washington had used to bring Pakistan to reason -- and failed: increase security assistance and decrease security assistance; broaden diplomatic dialogue and constrain diplomatic dialogue; pursue cooperative counterterrorism strikes and engage in unilateral counterterrorism strikes; encourage international engagement and press for international isolation; threaten, cajole, praise, plead, and ignore.