From Jinnah to Munir, Pakistan has always been for sale — and America loves buying

When American journalist-cum-photographer Margaret Bourke-White interviewed Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Karachi in 1947, she was not merely recording the thoughts of Pakistan’s founder. She was actually witnessing the birth of a strategic doctrine that would shape that country’s foreign policy for decades. Barely a month after Partition, Pakistan had already begun presenting itself as a state whose primary value lay not in its institutions or its economy, but in its geography and its utility to great powers.

Jinnah famously told Bourke-White, “America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America.” His reasoning was simple: Pakistan, located close to the Soviet Union, was “the pivot of the world”. In his view, that geographic position alone entitled Pakistan to American military and economic support. The expectation was clear: The United States should fund and arm Pakistan because it could serve as a strategic outpost against communist Russia.

More from Opinion

Bourke-White was unconvinced as she wondered whether the Quaid-e-Azam viewed his new nation merely as “an armoured buffer between opposing major powers”.

History suggests she was right.

Pakistan’s self-perception as a frontline mercenary state willing to serve great powers in exchange for military and financial patronage became the foundation of its foreign policy strategy. It was a doctrine built on transactions rather than trust, utility rather than values.

At its core, this doctrine rested on a simple proposition: Pakistan would leverage its geography and perceived strategic importance to extract military and economic support from the United States. In return, it would present itself as a frontline state against whichever adversary Washington considered most pressing at the time. In 1947, that adversary was the erstwhile USSR. In the 1980s, it was Soviet troops in Afghanistan. After 2001, it became Islamist terrorism, though Pakistan remained the epicentre of global jihad. The actors and contexts changed, but the underlying transactional logic remained remarkably constant.

Even in the earliest years, Bourke-White noted how Pakistani officials assumed that “Surely America will build our army” and “Surely America will give us loans to keep Russia from walking in”. Yet there was a problem: there was no evidence of Soviet interest in Pakistan. When she asked officials whether Russia had shown signs of infiltration, they admitted, almost apologetically, “No.”

The threat was less real than it was useful.

By the 1960s, American policymakers were fully aware that Pakistan’s anti-communist posture was merely a cover for its deeper strategic obsession: Bharat. As Husain Haqqani admits in Magnificent Delusions, Pakistan’s eagerness to join US-led alliances was “motivated largely by a desire to strengthen its military position” vis-à-vis Bharat. The anti-communist alliance, thus, was just the facade.

Washington knew this. Islamabad knew Washington knew this. Yet the arrangement continued because it served both sides. America got a regional ally; Pakistan got arms and legitimacy.

Then came the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which transformed Pakistan’s bargaining power. Pakistan was no longer just a supplicant; overnight, it became the gatekeeper to one of the Cold War’s most important battlefields.

Billions of dollars and vast quantities of weapons flowed through Islamabad. The CIA partnered with Pakistan’s intelligence establishment to arm Afghan mujahideen fighters. But here’s the part Washington chose to ignore: the middleman was skimming heavily off the top.

In Ghost Wars, author Steve Coll recounts a striking episode involving Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. Despite being one of the most effective anti-Soviet resistance leaders, Massoud received only a handful of missiles from the thousands supplied by the CIA. Coll writes: “In their dim meeting room, (CIA man Gary) Schroen handed (Afghan fighter Ahmad Shah) Massoud a piece of paper. It showed an estimate of just over two thousand missiles provided by the CIA to Afghan fighters during the jihad. Massoud looked at the figure. ‘Do you know how many of those missiles I received?’ He wrote a number on the paper and showed it to Schroen. In a very neat hand Massoud had written ‘8’. ‘That was all,’ Massoud declared, ‘and only at the end of the fight against the communist regime’.”

Pakistan wasn’t fighting America’s war. It was running its own, shifting a major portion of American resources eastward to keep jihad running in Bharat.

Fast forward to 2001. After the September 11 attacks, America once again turned to Pakistan in anger and desperation. President George W Bush discovered a new “friend” in Gen Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan was designated a “major non-NATO ally”, and billions of dollars flowed once more.

The slogans changed — from anti-communism to counterterrorism — but the script remained the same. Pakistan officially joined the war on terror while elements within its own establishment continued protecting and nurturing jihadi networks. And again, Pakistani duplicity has been well documented. American experts such as Bruce Riedel have laid this out in cold detail. But Washington shrugs, and continues treading the same beaten path.

Even leaders who publicly condemned Pakistan eventually returned to the same arrangement. Donald Trump, who in January 2018 tweeted that his two predecessors had “foolishly” given $33 billion in aid attempting unsuccessfully to persuade Pakistan to change its policies protecting terrorists, now finds common ground with Pakistan’s military leadership, calling Gen Asim Munir, known for his jihadi instincts, his “favourite Field Marshal”.

This brings us to the central point: the US-Pakistan relationship is not an anomaly but a pattern. It exists because it serves a purpose, however flawed, for both Washington and Islamabad. From Jinnah to Musharraf to Munir, the Pakistani establishment has preserved the same operating principle: leverage insecurity, sell indispensability, and convert global crises into strategic rent. And America, despite repeated betrayals and disappointments, keeps buying.

Where does all this leave Bharat?

For Delhi, there is little value in reacting emotionally every time the US praises Pakistan, just as there is little value in celebrating every American criticism of Islamabad. Global politics, after all, is a marketplace of interests. And in that marketplace, Bharat’s currency must be power — economic, technological and military.

To its credit, the political leadership in Delhi has increasingly embraced this realism. It has focused on growth, diversified partnerships, and strategic autonomy rather than rhetorical confrontation. And history shows that states built on transactional dependence may survive for decades, but states built on self-confidence shape the century.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)