Why Pakistan-US Ties Reset With Every Crisis — SkimNews
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- Pakistan went from facing US sanctions pre-9/11 to becoming a frontline partner in the Afghan war, offering ground-and-air logistical transit, intelligence, and military action in exchange for financial reimbursement and subsidized military hardware.
- Pakistan-US relations lost much of their urgency after the US withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, though institutional engagement in counterterrorism, trade, and health continued at lower levels.
- Pakistan has re-positioned itself as useful to Washington through mediation between the US and Tehran, alongside cryptocurrency deals, critical mineral investments, and counterterrorism cooperation.
- India-US ties built bottom-up constituencies — tech firms, universities, defense manufacturers, and diaspora networks — that have sustained the relationship through Trump's second-term trade, immigration, and Iran-war disagreements, per analyst Daniel Markey's description of a 'reversal of the motive forces.'
- The US and India signed a new 10-year Framework for the Major Defense Partnership in October 2025 and expanded the Biden-era iCET into TRUST (Transforming Relations into Utilizing Strategic Technologies) in February 2025, covering AI, semiconductors, quantum, biotech, energy, space, critical minerals, and pharma supply chains.
- Pakistan's bottom-up ties with the US remain demonstrably insufficient: the US is Pakistan's largest single export market, and groups like the Karachi-based American Business Council (55+ member companies, mostly Fortune 500) and Lahore-based American Business Forum (23 founding + 22 associate members) exist, but cannot determine the relationship's overall direction.
- Pakistan faces structural constraints — close strategic partnership with China, security problems discouraging tourism and investment, fewer sustained university think-tank partnerships, and a smaller economic and technological scale than India — that make replicating India's bottom-up model difficult.
Why it matters: Pakistan's leverage evaporates when the crisis that made it useful passes, because the relationship lacks the institutional constituencies — defense contracts, technology partnerships, diaspora networks — that keep India-US engagement running through political turbulence. Until Pakistan diversifies exports, attracts US grassroots investment through improved security and IP protections, and channels its diaspora into tech and commercial bridges, each revival will reset the same transactional clock.
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