The Roots of Pakistan’s Rage

Walter Russell Mead
The American Interest

It’s been one disaster after another this week in Pakistan. The WikiLeaks documents opened raw wounds in Pakistan’s agonizing relationship with the United States. A plane crash on the outskirts of the capital of Islamabad killed 152 people. UK Prime Minister David Cameron ostentatiously attacked Pakistan for exporting terror and ‘looking both ways’ in the fight against religious extremism as he visited New Delhi to promote British trade with India. And now the worst monsoon floods in a century are ripping through the country, with more than 1,100 known dead already, and possible casualties in isolated and cut off communities several times as high. More rains are on the way as I write; rainclouds are sweeping in toward Islamabad across the Margalla Hills as the people downstream in Sind brace for swollen rivers to burst their banks.

Unusually, the United States has been a bit player in this latest deluge of disaster. While some Pakistanis suspect official involvement in the WikiLeaks, nobody much blames the US for the plane crash, or for David Cameron, or for the monsoon. But the longer I stay here, and the more people I meet, the more I understand that the gulf between Pakistani and American perceptions and priorities is deep. For both sides, the alliance is vital, but for both sides the alliance right now isn’t working particularly well. While American pundits and politicians express doubts over Pakistan’s loyalty and its longtime links to radical extremists, Pakistan is on the boil with conspiracy theories about sinister American plots and feelings about the US run the gamut from bewildered disappointment to burning rage.

I came to Pakistan already well versed in some of the standard American complaints about the alliance; being here has been one long crash course in Pakistan’s complaints about the US. They aren’t, in my opinion, all well founded, but they are important and they deserve to be heard. Over my next few posts, I’ll first lay out some of Pakistan’s concerns as I’ve come to understand them, then lay out American concerns about Pakistan — and then make some suggestions about what, given the tension between these two dissatisfied allies, we can do.

(More here.)

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