Former ambassador: Time for US-Pakistan 'breakup'

The United States and Pakistan have widely divergent interests in South Asia and should break up, the country's former ambassador to Washington said.

“Each country accuses the other of being a terrible ally – and perhaps both are right,” Husain Haqqani writes in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs.

“Honesty about the true status of their ties might even help both parties get along better and cooperate more easily. After all, they could hardly be worse than they are now, clinging to the idea of an alliance even though neither actually believes in it. Sometimes, the best way forward in a relationship lies in admitting that it's over in its current incarnation.”

The piece will be music to the ears of many lawmakers in Congress who have increasingly been demanding cuts to foreign aid to Pakistan. The Obama administration had hoped to improve relations with Pakistan with its choice of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) -- who tripled non-military aid to the country as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – to head the State Department, but Haqqani said those efforts were for naught.

“In the end, these attempts to build a strategic partnership got nowhere,” he writes. “The civilian leaders were unable to smooth over the distrust between the U.S. and the Pakistani militaries and intelligence agencies.”

While Washington now wants to see Pakistan focused on fighting terrorism – as it wanted Pakistan focused on fighting communism in the 1980s -- Pakistan's goal has always been to assert more regional power against arch-rival India, Haqqani writes.

He goes on to call for the creation of a “non-allied relationship” where the United States is free to pursue its interests in the region without excessive consideration of Pakistan's reaction. Unless the two countries learn to tamp down their unrealistic expectations about one another, Haqqani writes, “the new coolness between the two countries will eventually provoke a reckoning.”

Haqqani was ambassador to the U.S. from 2008 to 2011. He stepped down after an American businessman accused him of sending a secretary to Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asking for U.S. help in thwarting an alleged pending military coup.

Haqqani has said he is afraid of returning to his home country to testify in court about threats he's received. He is now a professor at Boston University and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.