Pakistan is one of U.S. President Barack Obama’s foreign policy disappointments, former White House and Pentagon staffer Derek Chollet has said.
He spoke at Carnegie India earlier this week about his latest book The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role in the World.
Emphasising the de-hyphenation of India and Pakistan by the U.S., Mr. Chollet noted: “India-U.S. relationship is one of the few bipartisan foreign policy achievements of the US in the last few decades.”
“If I look at disappointments for President Obama, it would be Pakistan, given the amount of time and resources invested into the relationship particularly in the first year…,” the former Obama staffer said .
Mr. Chollet, at present with the German Marshall Fund of the U.S, was the Principal Deputy Director of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff before his current stint. He observed that one of the key conclusions that Mr. Obama made at the beginning of his first term was that Afghanistan and Pakistan needed to be seen together and that linkage was critical to understand that Afghanistan could not be solved alone.
‘Not as satisfying’Due to this, he said, the U.S. spent tremendous amount of resources to try and help Pakistan and influence its behaviour. “I think it’s hard to see how that has worked. Particularly given that the amount of energy we put into this, today it is not as satisfying as it should be.”
Countering the popular argument that putting in more resources would give greater leverage, he conceded that did not pay off.
Current moodMr. Chollet’s comments reflect the current mood in U.S.-Pakistan relations which have been on a decline due to the latter’s inability to reign in terrorists groups such as the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network, which have been getting stronger in Afghanistan.
Pakistan has been the largest recipient of U.S. aid under the Coalition Support Fund (CSF), a program under which allies are compensated for their support to the country’s counter-terrorism efforts. According to data from the Pentagon, the superpower paid about $14 billion to Pakistan since 2002.
However, the latest tranche of $300 million was withheld last month as Defence Secretary Ashton Carter has not certified to the Congress that Pakistan has done enough.
