During his fiery address to Congress in February, President Donald Trump delivered an unexpected moment when he recognized Pakistan’s role in capturing Mohammad Sharifullah, the alleged mastermind behind the 2021 Abbey Gate bombing at Kabul International Airport, where 13 U.S. service members were killed while participating in the hasty American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and more than 170 Afghans also died.
For a fleeting moment during Trump’s address, it seemed like the window of opportunity that the Pakistani authorities had been waiting for had arrived. After years of receiving a diplomatic cold shoulder following America’s exit from Afghanistan, Trump’s words signaled renewed hope within Pakistan’s civilian-military government for engagement with Washington. But that hope was short-lived, as reports in the following days suggested that the Trump administration might add Pakistan to its travel ban list, citing security concerns.
This sequence of events revealed an uncomfortable reality for Pakistan: In a geopolitical moment when its traditional strategic value has diminished, it is now a nation searching for its identity. “Since the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pakistan has found itself less relevant in Washington, and this has caused quite a lot of consternation in Islamabad across the different governments that have been in power since then,” Wilson Center Pakistan Fellow Syed Hassan Akbar told New Lines.
When the Trump administration was set to take office, the Pakistani establishment lost no time upping its efforts to court the new powers in Washington. These attempts, however, have seemed rather desperate. For instance, right after Trump’s inauguration in January, Mohsin Naqvi, Pakistan’s federal interior minister and a prominent official in the military-backed government, hurried to Washington to meet with U.S. lawmakers and members of the Trump administration. But his meetings did not deliver the results that the Pakistani administration was hoping for. Instead, after their meeting with Naqvi, Rep. Joe Wilson and Rep. Jack Bergman posted “Free Imran Khan” on X. For a Pakistani administration trying to keep the former prime minister out of the political spotlight, the posts, many analysts concluded, represented a colossal diplomatic failure.
Khan’s fractured relationship with Pakistan’s military establishment led to his ouster and eventual imprisonment in 2023. But his popularity has not waned; there have been regular mass protests for his release in the past two years, and in 2024 candidates backed by his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), won the most seats in Pakistan’s parliamentary elections, even though Khan was in prison. Ironically, Pakistan’s relationship with the U.S. became strained, in part, after Khan accused the U.S. of orchestrating a regime change and ousting him from power by collaborating with the military in 2022.
While the military has continued to face scrutiny at home since Khan’s ouster, it has tried to rebrand its image abroad. One method was to set up a think tank in Washington. But rather than investing in researchers and policy professionals, the military establishment came up with a rather curious strategy. According to an investigation by Drop Site News, Beltway Grid, a “think tank” run entirely by artificial intelligence, appeared to be part of “a covert effort to shape U.S. policy in Pakistan’s favor by spreading disinformation” against Khan and in favor of the military establishment. It seems that the online effort has been shut down, since the last post on the website was in January 2025.
Another report by Drop Site News said that the Pakistani military — in its push to engage U.S. leadership — had devised a large counterterrorism operation against the Islamic State group in Afghanistan, hoping to drag the U.S. back into the region militarily. Although Pakistan conducted small-scale airstrikes in Afghanistan earlier this year and late last year, plans for a broader operation have not been publicly announced.
Other senior Pakistani leaders have also offered ways forward for the Pakistan-U.S. relationship, with former Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto saying that Pakistan could act as a “bridge builder” between the U.S. and China. This raises a central question about Pakistan’s foreign policy strategy: Why is it desperately courting the U.S. while the country has significantly strengthened its ties with China?
Beijing has become the leading supplier of conventional weapons, strategic platforms and more sophisticated offensive strike capabilities to Pakistan. China has also invested around $68 billion in the country as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a massive infrastructure project that is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and aims to improve trade and cooperation between the countries. So it was no surprise that during his recent visit to China, President Asif Ali Zardari called Pakistan’s relationship with China the “cornerstone of its foreign policy.”
Overdependence on China is becoming a point of concern within Pakistani security circles, however. “This imbalance in the Pakistan-China strategic alliance has led to a situation in which Islamabad’s autonomy is increasingly curtailed,” wrote Naade Ali for the Middle East Institute. “Local reports from key interlocutors in Pakistan suggest that China has previously made certain asks that Pakistanis have resisted, including a port call for a Chinese naval vessel at the Gwadar port,” according to an Atlantic Council analysis by Uzair Younus. The port is one of the flagship features of CPEC and is managed by a state-run Chinese company.
The port incident signaled China’s military intentions in the region, and Pakistan’s resistance to it indicated a certain degree of distrust of Beijing within Islamabad’s national security apparatus. Having a Chinese military presence in Gwadar would completely isolate Pakistan from the United States and place it in China’s orbit — a strategy that Pakistani policymakers are becoming wary of.
A major reason for this resistance is Pakistan’s economic model. First, Pakistan’s economy is tied to its geostrategic leverage, which brings foreign aid to the country and creates a model of dependency on external patrons, argued Pakistan’s former national security adviser, Moeed Yusuf, and Rabia Akhtar, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Lahore, in a 2023 report for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation titled “Pakistan’s Geoeconomic Pivot.”
Pakistan cannot afford, therefore, to fully align itself with China, because that would mean completely alienating the U.S., which would be highly detrimental to Pakistan’s foreign aid-based economy. The U.S. has historically been the largest foreign aid donor to Pakistan and also maintains considerable influence over multilateral donors such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. In 2023, the IMF bailed Pakistan out when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Last year, it approved a $7 billion loan to the country.
“Pakistan’s largest export market remains the United States,” Akbar told New Lines. “It’s not China.” Pakistan’s U.S.-bound exports amount to $5.1 billion, or 14.5% of the country’s annual total. So even with a stronger trade relationship with China and reciprocal tariffs introduced by the Trump administration, Pakistan cannot afford to ignore the U.S. “Pakistan needs both countries. It needs both countries for different reasons,” Marvin Weinbaum, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told New Lines. “Pakistan really has most of its ties to the West and the United States — economic ties, cultural ties also still run in that direction.”
Pakistan’s shaky relationship with the United States has been a consistent feature of its global identity. The country has historically positioned itself as the West’s net security provider in South Asia. It played an important role in executing the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan during the Cold War, acting as a bulwark against Soviet expansion. After 9/11, Pakistan became America’s contractor in its global “war on terror” and was on the front lines of the U.S. fight against the Taliban.
Despite this history, the U.S.-Pakistan relationship has also remained fraught, with American officials deeply suspicious of their purported ally — particularly its intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence. They have accused Pakistan of duplicity: supporting the Taliban while simultaneously collaborating with the U.S. to thwart them. Despite this pervasive mistrust, American policymakers couldn’t afford to sideline Pakistan, and in turn, Pakistan skillfully leveraged its strategic position to secure billions of dollars in economic and military aid.
The U.S. partnership with Pakistan has “always had a transactional nature,” explained Akbar, but after the fall of Kabul, the Biden administration “wanted to have a very specific relationship that focused on just a few elements” centered around security and counterterrorism, as explicitly laid out by Wendy Sherman, a senior U.S. official from the Biden administration.
Before her trip to Pakistan in 2021, Sherman stated that her visit was for “a very specific and narrow purpose,” adding that the United States does not foresee “building a broad relationship with Pakistan.”
The “low-level equilibrium” between the two countries seems to be continuing under Trump, argued the Brookings Institution’s Madiha Afzal in the publication Lawfare. “This diplomatic aloofness with an undercurrent of military coordination may well be the new normal in the U.S.-Pakistan relations.”
There are a few reasons for this “diplomatic aloofness.” One of them is Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, which focuses on countering China by bolstering New Delhi as a net security provider in the region. The same strategy sees Pakistan as China’s chief ally in the region, due to its historical and current opposition to India, according to Yusuf and Akhtar.
But there are also other reasons for Washington’s critical view of Pakistan. The Trump administration has “many harsh Pakistan critics in its ranks,” wrote Michael Kuggleman in Foreign Policy. “The memory of disagreements over the war in Afghanistan and its eventual outcome continues to taint U.S. perspectives on Pakistan, its motivations and Pakistan’s role as an ally,” said Akbar.
As such, even hopes of a pragmatic relationship based on economic partnership may prove elusive. The Trump administration’s reported consideration of including Pakistan in an expanded travel ban suggests that, far from seeing Pakistan as a potential partner, Washington still views it primarily as a security threat.
Another reason that all this outreach has yielded little success in resetting the Pakistan-U.S. relationship has been Pakistan’s domestic strife, which includes a volatile political climate, overwhelming pro-Khan public sentiment — in Pakistan and among the U.S.-based Pakistani diaspora — and the rise of militant attacks in the region.
The military establishment and the government it backs are deeply unpopular in Pakistan as they came to power after the country’s February 2024 elections, which were marred by rigging allegations and a severe crackdown on Khan and his PTI party.
Khan remained in jail and was barred from running in the elections, while his party was stripped of its official logo. Thousands of party members were jailed, and almost all its senior leaders were pressured to quit politics. Despite these challenges, PTI-backed candidates still managed to win the most seats in Parliament without winning an outright majority, which gave way to the current coalition government.
Despite the government’s efforts to suppress them, Khan and his party maintain strong popularity in Pakistan and among its diaspora communities. The U.S.-based diaspora has undertaken “a vigorous lobbying campaign” advocating for Khan’s release, according to The New York Times. Just days before the U.S. election, Atif Khan, a senior PTI leader in the U.S., met Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara, to discuss concerns about Khan’s incarceration.
This campaign gained notable traction in Washington, with high-profile Trump advisers expressing pro-Khan sentiments. For instance, Trump’s Special Missions Envoy Richard Grennell has publicly advocated for Khan on multiple occasions. In November 2024, in a now-deleted post on X, Grenell wrote: “Watch Pakistan. Their Trump-like leader is in prison on phony charges, and the people have been inspired by the US Red Wave. Stop the political prosecutions around the world!” Matt Gaetz, a former Trump nominee for attorney general, also posted “Free Imran Khan” on X.
Recently, these efforts seem to have yielded a significant diplomatic victory when the “Pakistan Democracy Act” was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. The act called for promoting democracy in Pakistan, sanctions against its military leadership and the release of all political prisoners.
These diplomatic inroads show the influence that the Pakistani diaspora has been able to exert in U.S. policy circles, and the way in which Pakistan’s internal politics play out in Washington.
Khan also remains popular among Trump’s aides because the president himself had a good relationship with Khan, calling him a “very good friend” during his first term. The combination of Trump’s personal relationship and a strong pro-Khan lobby has raised concerns for the Pakistani military establishment, forcing it to look for ways to increase its engagement with Washington.
An added barrier to any deepening of Pakistan-U.S. relations and a major concern for the military is the resurgence of militant attacks in Pakistan. Data from the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies shows a dramatic 70% increase in such attacks between 2023 and 2024, with the return of the Taliban government in neighboring Afghanistan one of the likely reasons for this increase.
In addition, Pakistan’s political instability has emboldened militant groups, including the Balochistan Liberation Army, a separatist group that conducted one of its most significant attacks ever last month, hijacking a train and killing 31 civilians and security personnel.
For over 70 years, the political elite in Pakistan has allowed the country to live beyond its means by bartering its security role in the region for external patronage. However, a new world order — one in which Pakistan’s strategic value has deteriorated — means its traditional benefactors, including the U.S., are no longer interested in bankrolling Pakistan’s economy.
In their search for a new patron, Pakistani policymakers have struggled while the West — as part of its containment strategy against China — has made India its strategic priority in South Asia. While Pakistan has support from China, Beijing has shown that it is much more inward-looking, focused more on its own economic growth than on becoming Pakistan’s benefactor.
For this reason, Pakistan must make a case for “constructive multi-alignment,” finding ways to be a strategic asset to both the U.S. and China, argued Yusuf and Akhtar. But it cannot do that while it continues to be mired in political instability, economic degradation, surging violence from nonstate actors and a hostile neighborhood.
That, argue analysts like Akbar, is why Pakistan needs to focus inward. “This obsession with trying to be relevant in Washington is not healthy. Pakistan’s solutions do not lie in Beijing or Washington, D.C. Pakistan’s solutions lie in Islamabad and in our immediate region,” said Akbar.
As news of a potential travel ban spread, Pakistani travelers rushed to airports, desperately trying to return to the United States before restrictions took effect. The United States had once again made its intentions clear, yet somehow the Pakistani authorities remained caught off guard by the announcement, still wondering where it all went wrong.
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