Pakistan Acting like Neglected Girlfriend

Pakistan's relationship with the United States has long defied easy categorization — too important to abandon, too frustrating to fully trust, swinging between tactical alliance and barely concealed mutual suspicion depending on the pressures of the moment.

The metaphor of a rocky romantic partnership has been applied by analysts on both sides: each party convinced they are giving more than they receive, each quick to dramatize grievances, each unable to walk away despite repeated disappointments.

And no moment illustrated the dynamic better than Barack Obama's November 2010 visit to India. The American president spent three days in Mumbai and Delhi, endorsed India's bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and was welcomed as a partner in a rising power. Pakistan watched it all from across the border — and from the president's itinerary, which did not include a stop in Islamabad.

Pakistan's public reaction was a study in aggrieved boyfriend behavior. Officials and media pointed out that Obama had pledged during his campaign to visit Pakistan early in his presidency. They noted that the United States had spent years asking for Pakistan's help against the Taliban while showering attention on the rival next door. They demanded — not unreasonably, and not for the first time — the kind of civil nuclear cooperation the United States had granted India in 2008.

The neglected-girlfriend performance is theatre, but the insecurity underneath it is real. Pakistan provides supply routes for the Afghanistan operation and has absorbed enormous costs in the American war next door. The United States provides billions in military and civilian aid. Neither can afford the alternative, so the drama continues: the grievance, the performance of hurt, the refusal to leave.

What the relationship resembles most is an arranged marriage between parties who share strategic interests but increasingly little else. The trust deficit has become structural. American officials speak of Pakistan in private with a frankness that never makes it into diplomatic communiqués. Pakistani officials have built a domestic political constituency around anti-Americanism that limits what any government can publicly agree to.

The neglected girlfriend metaphor captures something true: the drama, the grievance, the inability to leave.