Jun 09, 2026 16:03 pm IST

Opinion | Why Trump's Attention Is Quickly Becoming Pak's Biggest Headache

Pakistan's real challenge may not be winning Trump's attention - that it has certainly been successful at. It may be surviving the consequences of that.

Syed Zubair Ahmed Syed Zubair Ahmed Columnist

Syed Zubair Ahmed Columnist

I think it was April or May 1993 when the United States was seriously considering and publicly threatening Pakistan to place it on its list of state sponsors of international terrorism after concluding that Islamabad had failed to adequately address American concerns over Kashmir.

It coincided with my trip to Washington DC. At the time, I was a reporter with a leading Indian newspaper and had arranged an off-the-record meeting with a senior State Department official handling South Asia to gauge how serious the American threat really was.

I began by asking whether Washington genuinely intended to back its warnings with action. Quite unlike a typical diplomat, she was blunt. Her answer was an emphatic no. She then explained why the US could not afford to sanction Pakistan. Drawing an imaginary crescent on a map, she said the arc stretching from Central Asia to the Middle East formed an "Islamic crescent" because most of the countries were Muslim-majority states and Pakistan sat right in the middle of it. "It disrupts that crescent," she said, arguing that Pakistan, as an old American ally, was more useful to Washington than any other Muslim country in the region.

"Then why threaten Pakistan? Was it only for India's consumption?" I asked.

She replied that repeated American warnings had forced Pakistan to shut down some militant camps in Muzaffarabad, something she said was confirmed by satellite imagery. "The threats did work," she added. According to her, Pakistan had also cut ties with certain suspected militants and removed a senior intelligence official linked to operations in Kashmir. Ye,t she admitted, doubts lingered, particularly over 'possible Pakistani involvement in the March 1993 Bombay bombings'.

Pakistan thus escaped the immediate threat of sanctions and a serious rupture in relations with the US. But the episode revealed an unpalatable aspect about the nature of US-Pakistan ties: the US called the shots, and Pakistan acted not like an ally but a client state; it also revealed that Washington was simultaneously pressuring Pakistan, distrusting Pakistan and yet refusing to completely abandon Pakistan because of its geopolitical usefulness

Sycophancy As Diplomacy

More than three decades later, much has changed, and yet very little has.

Pakistan has once again found a diplomatic sweet spot, courted simultaneously by the US, EU, China and key West........

© NDTV