Foreword: Under mercurial President Donald Trump, is America swinging back towards Pakistan? Or simply nettling India? In this mini-series, we do a fascinating replay of history since the 1940s – how the personalities of successive American presidents have had an outsized impact on the quicksilver, vacillating, even fraught, America-India-Pakistan equation. In six earlier episodes, we’ve covered the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George Bush Sr, Bill Clinton, and George Bush Jr.
Here, in the final episode, Part 7, it’s the historic 8-year tenure of America’s first black president, Barack Obama.
President Barack Obama’s administration continued to arm Pakistan, offering another $2 billion in military aid—even as it threatened to cut off funding for certain dubious factions of the army. And his administration dubbed its new strategy in the region AfPak, to highlight Pakistan’s critical role in resolving the Afghan conflict—a move which pleased Indians reluctant to be lumped with the area’s ‘problem children’.
Mumbai Attacks and the First Signals of a Strategic Shift
Still, in other ways Obama emphasised America’s bond with India from the moment he was elected. Even before he officially took office, he made his first significant presidential call to Manmohan Singh, though the reason was tragic: 10 Pakistani militants had just wreaked terror across Mumbai, killing scores and wounding hundreds. ‘I wish it was a happier time,’ Obama told Singh. ‘America is with you in these days.’
The prime minister informed the president that early indications pointed to Karachi as the source of the attack and emphasised the need for the two countries ‘to fight the curse of terrorism’ together.
‘I will work with you to ensure this tragedy is never allowed to happen again,’ Obama responded. The following November, the president welcomed Singh to Washington as his first visiting head of state, under much more festive circumstances.
Obama’s 2010 India Visit and a Strategic Tilt Towards Delhi
But the relationship really gathered steam when Obama travelled to Asia in November 2010. He spent three productive days in India but refused to stop in Pakistan, instead visiting South Korea, Indonesia, and Japan—like India, all relatively stable democracies with strong or developing economies. ‘It is no coincidence that India is my first stop on a visit to Asia, or that this has been my longest visit to another country since becoming president,’ he said during a televised address to the Indian Parliament.
"It is my firm belief that the relationship between the United States and India—bound by our shared interests and values—will be one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century."Barack Obama, Former US President
Amid tough but frank discussions on everything from climate change to trade, he announced that Washington would lift export controls on some defence technologies to India, and—in a crowning moment for Delhi—vowed to back India for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
That unnerved Beijing, always reluctant to share power with its Asian neighbours, as well as Islamabad, which urged the US to ‘take a moral view’ and stop basing such decisions ‘on any temporary expediency or exigencies of power politics’.
Drone Strikes and the Strain with Pakistan
It was hardly the only point of contention brewing between Washington and Islamabad. The two countries were increasingly at odds over the US‘ use of drone strikes to take out high-stakes Al Qaeda targets in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
Though Islamabad’s official policy was to condemn the strikes, it had tacitly agreed to their targeted use; one WikiLeaks document quoted Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani as saying, ‘I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.’
The Hunt for bin Laden: Spies, Compounds, and Growing Doubts
In August 2010, the CIA got a big break: a Pakistani ‘asset’ working for the agency tracked the bin Laden courier known as ‘the Kuwaiti’ from Peshawar to a mysterious house in Abbottabad. Surrounded by high walls, the house resembled a ‘fortress’; it had no phone or internet service, and its residents appeared to burn their own rubbish. ‘This is very strange,’ Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta said. ‘I want every possible operational avenue explored to get inside that compound.’
Spying on the Kuwaiti proved more fruitful. The CIA noticed that whenever he and his family travelled, they lied about where they lived, and they lied to their neighbours about where they were going and what they were doing.
A hazy figure they called ‘the pacer’ walked laps in the vegetable garden every day, but a tarpaulin shielded him from spying eyes and satellites. ‘For all we know this could be some sheikh hiding from one of his wives,’ Obama said during one briefing. While they had no confirmation that bin Laden was there, neither did they come up with any proof that he wasn’t.
Operation Abbottabad and the Fallout of the Raid
By early 2011, the US‘ faith in Islamabad had ebbed to a new low. Two liberal Pakistani politicians—Punjab governor Salman Taseer and minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti, the Cabinet’s only Christian—were assassinated, reinforcing Washington’s fears that Islamabad was at best ineffectual against and at worst supportive of Islamic extremism.
At the same time, Washington deemed the probability of bin Laden’s presence in the Abbottabad compound high enough to warrant some kind of attack; ultimately, consensus coalesced around an assault by Navy SEALs dropped by helicopter.
The complexity and risk of such a plan eliminated any possibility of involving the Pakistanis. ‘The premium is on the protection of our force, not on keeping the Pakistanis happy,’ President Obama said.
The Collapse of the US–Pakistan Relationship
The Abbottabad raid took out bin Laden and what was left of the US-Pakistani partnership quickly unravelled. The war on terror was a failure. Ten years on, Washington had spent more than $25 billion in military and economic aid to Pakistan; only Israel had received more in that time period.
And for what? Islamabad and Washington were barely on speaking terms.
Bin Laden had been killed, but Al Qaeda remained a persistent albeit weakened threat, and the Taliban was actually thriving in Afghanistan; in 2011, they staged 12,244 attacks—five times as many as in 2006. Unconfirmed reports that Pakistan had allowed Chinese military officials to inspect and photograph the wreckage of the Black Hawk downed during the Abbottabad raid only sharpened the bitterness.
Nuclear Anxiety and the “Loose Nukes” Problem
One of the tensest issues between them was nukes. As the only Muslim-majority country in the world with a successful nuclear weapons programme, Pakistan would be the first stop for Islamic radicals looking for a nuclear option. Satellite images showed at least 15 potential sites which experts believed housed at least 110 nuclear bombs.
"The single biggest threat to US security, both short term, medium term, and long term, would be the possibility of a terrorist organisation obtaining a nuclear weapon."Barack Obama in 2010
Even Pakistan’s biggest ally, China, worried about its potential for ‘loose nukes’: during secret talks with Washington, Beijing reportedly said it wouldn’t protest if the US sent forces into the country to secure them.
India, the Ally; Pakistan, the Pariah
Of course, nothing of that sort happened, but now India was among America’s closest allies, while Pakistan was far away and estranged.
Postscript: This brings us to the end of our special seven-part mini-series on the pendulum swings of the America-India-Pakistan equation through 12 presidents over seven decades, from the 1940s to the 2010s.