Pakistan’s former Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani has claimed that President Barack Obama had in 2009 made a secret offer to nudge India towards negotiations on the Kashmir issue if only Islamabad cooperated in defeating all militant groups, including lashkar-e-Tayyeba, Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
But the Pakistani leadership spurned the “grand bargain” that included an offer of “a long-term strategic partnership” to Islamabad, Haqqani writes in his book “Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding,” released on Tuesday.
The so-called offer to nudge India on Kashmir was reportedly made in a letter from Obama to the then Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari that was hand-delivered by the then US National Security Advisor James Jones.
The purported “nudge” offer on Kashmir, however, is not anything close to Pakistan’s vociferous demand for decades that the United States assume a mediatory role. The Obama administration, like its predecessors, has categorically rejected any third-party mediation, asserting from time to time that it is for India and Pakistan to determine the “pace, scope and character” of their dialogue on this matter.
Disclosing the purported contents of the Obama communication for the first time, Haqqani writes in his book: “Since the 1950s Pakistan had wanted an American role in South Asia. Now it was being offered one. In the end Pakistan would have to negotiate the Kashmir issue directly with India. But at least now the American President was saying that he would nudge the Indians toward those negotiations.”
The Obama letter, dated November 11, 2009, with its thrust being the offer of long-term strategic partnership “even hinted at addressing Pakistan’s oft-stated desire for a settlement of the Kashmir dispute”, writes Haqqani.
As he puts it in his book, “Obama wrote that the United States would tell countries of the region that ‘the old ways of doing business are no longer acceptable’. He acknowledged that some countries — a reference to India — had used ‘unresolved disputes to leave open bilateral wounds for years or decades. They must find ways to come together’. But in an allusion to Pakistan, he said, “Some countries have turned to proxy groups to do their fighting instead of choosing a path of peace and security. The tolerance or support of such proxies cannot continue’.”
While reportedly expressing his commitment to work with the Zardari Government to ensure Pakistan’s security, Obama sought Islamabad’s cooperation in defeating Al-Qaeda, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, lashkar-e-Tayyeba, the Haqqani network, the Afghan Taliban and other militant groups, writes the former Pakistani envoy.
Known to be a trenchant critic of Pakistan’s military-security establishment, blaming it for the degradation of relations with Washington, Haqqani writes: “I sought to overcome the bitterness of the past in order to help lay the foundations for a long-term partnership. But major power centres in my own country resisted my vision for a broader US-Pakistan partnership rooted in mutual trust.”