The Pakistan foreign policy has been languishing in a Principal-Agent relationship with the US over the decades. The needs of aid dependency and counter-terrorism have essentially weakened national sovereignty to the point where the strategic interests of the Islamabad government are subjected to the regional ambitions of Washington.
Key Points
- It is characterized by Principal- Agent relationship whereby US security imperatives determine the policy decisions of Pakistan, especially in Afghanistan.
- US military aid, particularly Coalition Support Funds (CSF), was more transactional than an assistance and was made sure that Pakistan was on its frontline to align itself.
- Certain imperatives like the US wishing to relocate back to bases in Afghanistan are some of the examples of strategic subordination of the decision-making process of Pakistan.
- This congruence, punctuated by US actions by itself, has shown to wreak havoc on domestic cohesion and regional stability of Pakistan in the long term.
- Pakistan now needs to seek a geo-economics change to regain strategic autonomy and shield its foreign policy against foreign conditionality.
In the history of bilateral relations, there is not an example of as defined bilateral relations with as much transactional need, distrust, and volatility as the one between the United States and Pakistan. This relationship has always delivered one catastrophic consequence on Islamabad: the loss of strategic sovereignty, which is dubbed as an alliance of necessity. The foreign policy of Pakistan, especially its attitude towards the western border, has been over and over again co-opted, ordered around and in Washington, the needs of counter-terrorism and great-power have served as the whip. This submission can only be explained with the help of Principal- Agent Theory in the field of political science. US (the Principal) offered huge financial rewards and military assistance, more than 20 billion dollars since 9/11 with much of the funds coming in the form of the controversial Coalition Support Funds (CSF) to Pakistan (the Agent) to carry out its war agendas. This financing, which was to compensate Pakistan over anti-terror mission, proved to be a powerful leverage weapon compelling the Islamabad to make its fundamental security policies according to the wishes of Washington. The submission of the foreign policy of Pakistan has seldom been more evident than it has been the case during the time of the US exit out of Afghanistan. The transactional relationship was revealed, even twenty years after it became necessary to cooperate costing Pakistan tens of thousands of lives and billions of economic loss.
The fact that US President Donald Trump met with the Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan was symbolically an inflexion point. Although Pakistan had categorically denied the possibility of providing the US military with over-the-horizon capability to conduct its operations, President Trump, representing a long-standing strategic ambition, publicly brought up the possibility of re-establishing a US presence, citing Bagram Air Base, in Afghanistan. This episode was not about Bagram as such but about the ingrained attitude of Washington that no matter how Pakistan protested its sovereignty, its strategic position was on sale or on command. The ongoing pressure of the US on the operational latitude, whether in the drone strike, carried out most of the time in unilateral operations on the Pakistani territory, or demands of the military offensive in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), had shown a deep negligence of Pakistani territory. Whether in the form of the 2011 raid to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, unilateral actions were the final physical breach of sovereignty, done without prior approval of Pakistan, and revealing the boundaries of its control over its own territory. Financial conditionality was the main tool used to exercise this outside control. The majority of the assistance package, the Coalition Support Funds, was vital since it was conditional on the ways the Washington evaluated the performance of Pakistan against the militant groups.
According to the Integrated Country Strategy provided by the US Department of State, the aid is tailored to motivate Pakistan to eradicate safe havens of terrorists and to bring its security apparatus to the US regional interests. Pakistan was seen to be inadequate in its work (e.g., against Haqqani network or some of the Afghan Taliban groups), so aid was cut off or postponed as witnessed in the military funding cut in the late 2010s. This developed into a strategic trap: the foreign policy was no longer based on its own long-term interests, which might include the focus on achieving the state of economic stability and regional integration, but on the need to continue receiving the US aid tap and in that way the role of a “frontline state” in a conflict that it began to desire to leave. Even following the withdrawal of the US troops in Afghanistan in 2021, the US interests still determine the Pakistan policy in its western frontier. The US emphasis has changed to counterterrorism dialogue and stability using its diplomatic leverage to bully Pakistan on the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) problem.
The US focus on getting the Pakistani military leadership on board at the expense of democratically elected civilian regimes also contributes to the problem. This is the preference that is reportedly observable even on the high-level visits in 2025, circumventing the civilian institutions of democratic accountability and strengthening a security-centric foreign policy machine, therefore, enhancing the Principal-Agent dynamic at the cost of civilian control. We have witnessed the consequence of this in Pakistan, which is unable to establish its relationship with the new Kabul regime on its own and is in constant fear of scrutiny by the US security expectations. It is this outside pressure that compels Pakistan to deal with a complicated regional security challenge the TTP in such a way that it meets first US counter-terrorism standards, and not in a holistic, geo-economic approach which would stabilize the trade situation and bring Afghanistan into the regional economy. The sovereignty is compromised not only in the military sense but in the sense of the ability to make its own way towards the regional prosperity.
Conclusion
Pakistan has had a prolonged association with the US, as it has acquired the necessary economic and military assistance, but this has led to a considerable structural betrayal of its strategic sovereignty. The Principal-Agency relationship, which was applied as prerequisites to conditional aid and security demands at transactions, resulted in the Pakistani foreign policy being recurrently sold out to the part-temporary regional requirements of the Washington. To stop this crippling cycle, Pakistan needs to restructure its priorities on the geopolitics to geo-economics. It can be possible by reducing its reliance on security assistance and focusing on unilateral, multilateral connectivity within the region that Islamabad can eventually regain its strategic autonomy and establish a foreign policy that can be based entirely on its long-term national interest.
Bio
Jawaria Atiq is an International relations scholar currently doing MPhil from National University of Modern Languages (NUML) Islamabad. She is also working as a Research Assistant on HEC funded projects.
Key References
- Trump suggests US troops could return to Bagram base in Afghanistan – AP News
- Renewed US–Pakistan relations stand on shaky ground | East Asia Forum
- The Limits of U.S. Assistance to Pakistan – Center for American Progress
- S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO PAKISTAN