By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

A Better South Asia Policy Runs Through Islamabad

Washington’s South Asia policy is adrift. Since roughly the turn of the century, U.S. leaders have seen India as a democratic counterweight to China and sought to position New Delhi in a wider competition with Beijing. At the same time, U.S. officials have grown disillusioned with Pakistan, once an ally during the Cold War, and see Islamabad as an unreliable partner when it comes to combating terrorism in the region. They are also displeased with Pakistan’s growing closeness to China, which has become a key source of infrastructure investment and military equipment for Islamabad.

The United States bet on India, but that bet has not paid off. After two decades, India remains both unwilling and unable to align itself fully with U.S. preferences in the region and beyond. This year, the relationship between the two countries began to fray. New Delhi’s quixotic quest for multipolarity in the international system—that is, a world that is not structured around the hegemony of a single superpower or the competition of two great powers—has rankled Washington. And it has now earned India the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump. Citing ongoing Indian purchases of Russian oil, Trump raised tariffs on imports from India to 50 percent in August, the highest rate he has imposed on any country. To make matters worse, New Delhi reacted by signaling its intent to strengthen ties with Beijing, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited China for very public and amicable meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At the same time, relations between the United States and India’s neighbor and adversary Pakistan have experienced a surprising thaw. Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has warmed to Pakistan’s military. In March, he praised Pakistan for its arrest of an Islamic State operative suspected of involvement in a 2021 bombing in Kabul that killed 13 U.S. soldiers. Then, in May, he claimed to have brought an end to a four-day military clash between India and Pakistan that had threatened to escalate dangerously. “We stopped a nuclear conflict,” Trump declared. “I think it could have been a bad nuclear war.” He has repeatedly claimed credit for preventing a catastrophe ever since; Pakistani officials even nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. India, which rejects outside attempts to mediate its disputes with Pakistan, has denied that any such intervention took place. According to reporting by The New York Times, Trump asked Modi in June to echo Pakistani leaders and nominate him for the Nobel prize. Modi refused, and the two have not spoken since.

Over the summer, Trump courted Pakistan. He hosted Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, in the White House in June. And in July, he struck a deal with Islamabad that kept the tariff rate at a relatively low 19 percent in exchange for allowing U.S. companies exploration rights for untapped oil reserves in Pakistan. Pakistani and U.S. officials have also been discussing joint ventures in cryptocurrency and the mining of critical minerals.

More broadly, this thaw in U.S.-Pakistani relations under Trump augurs well for Washington’s South Asia policy. The United States’ myopic focus on and support for India has succeeded only in only driving many of India’s neighbors, including Pakistan, closer to China. It’s time for Washington to rebalance its commitments in the region. Without dispensing with its partnership with India, it could forge a closer relationship with Pakistan and find ways to productively work with China in South Asia, in particular by collaborating on improving regional connectivity. This would offer the United States a way to pragmatically coexist with China in the region rather than allowing South Asia to become a proxy battleground for great-power contestation. Tilted toward India, current U.S. policy will deepen fault lines in South Asia. It would not only make conflict between India and Pakistan more likely, but also prevent the United States from working with Pakistan to achieve their common strategic objective of combating the transnational terrorism emanating from the region.

Gathering on the eve of Pakistan's Independence Day in Lahore, Pakistan, August 2025

 

The Wrong Choice

Washington’s strategic bet on New Delhi had multiple goals, but none more important than helping put India in a position to counter China. Every U.S. administration since that of President Bill Clinton has viewed India through the prism of the larger geopolitical contest with Beijing. Washington has courted New Delhi with major economic, defense, and technology deals while insisting that it is in American national security interests to facilitate India’s emergence as what U.S. officials call a “net provider of security” in the wider Indian Ocean region. To buttress India, the United States secured an unprecedented civil nuclear deal with New Delhi in 2008 (even though India has never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty) and more recently waived sanctions on India despite its investment in Iran’s Chabahar port, purchases of Iranian oil, and acquisition of Russian S-400 surface-to-air missiles. Washington has also been a keen supporter of India’s bid for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Central to this approach was the American conviction that India would be committed to aligning with U.S. regional interests, specifically when it came to containing China. Driven by this belief, Washington gradually separated its relationship with India from its ties to other important countries in the region, including Pakistan. Senior U.S. officials met with counterparts from other South Asian countries less frequently as the number of forums for U.S. engagement with India grew. Washington also responded to Indian concerns about U.S. military support for Pakistan. In 2016, the U.S. Congress removed subsidies for Pakistan’s purchase of eight F-16 fighter jets, a move that effectively stalled the deal, even though the United States had initially agreed to the sale because the jets would help Pakistan support the U.S. counterterrorist campaign in Afghanistan.

Despite all these efforts, U.S. policymakers should be alarmed by the results. One should also count on India’s fixation on global multipolarity, which drives foreign policy choices at odds with American preferences. For example, India took a roughly neutral position on Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and has participated in efforts by some non-Western countries to shift away from trade in U.S. dollars. These divergences are not accidental; they are derived from India’s long-standing commitment to what it considers strategic autonomy in foreign policy. This posture is unlikely to change, especially in view of India’s resistance to recent Trump administration attempts at coercion over New Delhi’s relations with Moscow. Yet this growing rift with the United States bodes ill for India’s long-term desire to fend off China. Despite India’s remarkable economic rise in recent decades, it remains and will remain far less powerful than China and unable to truly counter its northern neighbor on its own.

But India is not the only country in South Asia that can help advance U.S. interests in the region. To be sure, Pakistan and the United States have had a peculiar relationship in recent decades: Islamabad has swung periodically from being the most allied of allies to facing punitive U.S. sanctions. The incoherent nature of this partnership was most evident in the years after the 9/11 attacks. Pakistan acted as a frontline ally in the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan while the United States accused it of supporting the Taliban insurgency against the Afghan government in Kabul. Islamabad, for its part, saw the U.S. policy of propping up the unpopular Afghan government as impractical and unlikely to succeed. It also felt that supporting the United States in this endeavor would ultimately produce a government in Kabul aligned closely with India—and against Pakistan. The United States seemed to care about Pakistan only in terms of the situation in Afghanistan, even as it helped India expand its influence in the region. The U.S.-Pakistani partnership in Afghanistan created immense mutual mistrust and made Pakistan extremely unpopular in Washington—especially after the discovery in 2011 that the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was sheltering in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, leading to a U.S. raid that ended in his death. The difficult marriage finally ended with the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. After the fall of Kabul and despite Pakistan’s full assistance in evacuating U.S. and other Western military and civilian personnel from Afghanistan, U.S. President Joe Biden immediately pursued strategic disengagement with Pakistan, downgrading ties to midlevel engagement at the State Department and White House and snubbing his Pakistani counterpart, then Prime Minister Imran Khan.

But after four years of relative disinterest in Washington, the relationship between Pakistan and the United States has begun to swing in the other direction. Energized by his role in ending the clashes between India and Pakistan in May, Trump has presided over a series of engagements, the most significant of which was his unprecedented lunch meeting with Munir, Pakistan’s army chief, in June. At the same time, Trump has taken a tougher stance toward India, bullying a partner that the United States has long treated more generously.

Riding past a poster of the Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan, Asim Munir, Karachi, May 2025.

 

Faulty Assumptions

That shift suggests that under Trump, U.S. policymakers have begun thinking differently about the region. For much of the last 20 years, U.S. officials have been troubled by Islamabad’s dysfunctional relations with New Delhi, its proximity to Beijing, and its checkered counterterrorism commitments. U.S. officials perceived those positions as inimical to Washington’s own interests. Yet the United States misread developments in South Asia. First, American officials presumed that India would keep on rising as a major power able to compete with China, no matter its relations with Pakistan. Second, they thought that Pakistan would inevitably become closely aligned with China. As a result, Washington would have to back New Delhi in its feuds with Islamabad in order to counter Beijing. And third, frustrated by Pakistani support for militancy in Afghanistan, U.S. officials believed that Pakistan could never be trusted as a dependable long-term ally again. Each of these assumptions has hindered U.S. policy aims in South Asia.

The United States’ decision to separate India from its dealings with Pakistan and other South Asian states satisfied New Delhi, which had long chafed at being yoked to Islamabad. India believed that its relations with Pakistan were bilateral and did not need the mediation of external powers or international bodies. The United States not only accepted India’s position and limited its own intervention to crisis moments to prevent nuclear war, as it did during a crisis in 2019 and again this year, but also pressured Pakistan on a number of fronts. This included blocking multiple Pakistani military purchases and slowing economic assistance to the country in recent years. Although many of these decisions were driven by Washington’s frustration with Pakistan’s actions in Afghanistan, they aligned neatly with India’s aim of keeping Pakistan weak and isolated. Washington’s inherent assumption, flawed as it turns out, was that India could continue marching ahead at the desired pace despite its disputes with Pakistan.

In reality, Washington’s support for India only emboldened India’s decision-makers, especially the present government under Modi, to pursue a more muscular policy toward Pakistan. That support encouraged India to take greater risks than it had in the past. During crises in 2019 and 2025, the Indian military struck targets deeper and deeper within Pakistan. Since 2020, according to various news reports, Indian operatives have assassinated 20 individuals inside Pakistan. India’s aggressive military actions have led Pakistan to seek even greater proximity to China, especially by acquiring Chinese military equipment and technology. The clashes between India and Pakistan in May laid bare the consequences of this policy. India was unable to outmaneuver Pakistan militarily, as Pakistani forces combined indigenous, Chinese, and Western technology and managed to repulse the Indian air force by shooting down multiple jets. This is the same Pakistani military that was almost solely reliant on Western technology throughout the Cold War. Today, 80 percent of Pakistan’s new arms imports come from China—the result of Pakistan’s desperation over its growing power asymmetry with a U.S.-backed India and the imposition of restrictions on arms exports to Pakistan by Western countries in recent decades.

Although the active crisis is over (Modi tellingly described the cease-fire as merely a “pause”), South Asia remains on the brink. Disturbingly, from a U.S. perspective, India will continue to expend significant attention and energy on its rivalry with Pakistan. Pakistan’s military performance in May will force a good deal of soul-searching within the Indian military and, quite likely, greater expenditures. New Delhi also fears the prospect of a two-front war with China and Pakistan that it is not well prepared for. Addressing such concerns will overstretch India’s military, further drain Indian coffers, and impede the development of Indian maritime capabilities in the Indo-Pacific. India’s great-power aspirations are also hampered by the entanglement of the government’s relations with Pakistan with domestic politics in India. Indian leaders and the country’s jingoistic media are constantly espousing hostile anti-Pakistani rhetoric, in a show of muscular posturing meant to appeal to a domestic audience. And yet, this fixation with Pakistan serves as a distraction from focusing on the kinds of policies and strategies needed to narrow India’s military and economic gap with China. A broken relationship with Pakistan also comes with economic costs. India could get greater access to Afghanistan and Central Asia through Pakistan, and better fuel its growth. Instead, it chooses a policy and rhetoric of hostility.

As long as India remains locked in a crisis-prone relationship with Pakistan, the two sides will continue to obsess over each other and waste precious resources in trying to outmaneuver the other. U.S. attempts to prop up India will produce the undesired outcome of keeping Islamabad wary of Washington’s intentions in the region while doing little to help India look beyond Pakistan and focus instead on China. To escape this invidious dynamic, Trump should encourage these South Asian rivals to engage in dialogue to address outstanding disputes that have sparked military crises in the first place, including differences over incidences of terrorism, the disputed territory of Kashmir, and now water (following Indian threats to abandon a treaty that has regulated water distribution between the two South Asian neighbors since the 1960s). India’s reluctance to start such a diplomatic process, either with external mediation or just bilaterally, flies in the face of American interests.

 

Coexistence, Not Competition

Pakistan has irked some in Washington by drawing closer to China, including by purchasing Chinese arms and winning significant Chinese investment in infrastructure projects. Such moves seem to confirm that Islamabad has chosen to drift into Beijing’s orbit. As a result, many U.S. officials have thought it prudent to double down on their bet on India and ignore Pakistan. But this approach constitutes a misreading of Pakistan’s position.

To be sure, Pakistan greatly values its economic and strategic relationship with China and would likely now tilt heavily in China’s favor were it left with a purely binary choice between Washington and Beijing. But it has been taking pains to signal to both American and Chinese officials that it does not want to be put in such a situation. In 2022, Pakistan released its first-ever National Security Policy, which insisted that Pakistan should resist joining geopolitical camps. Islamabad has stayed the course ever since, trying to patch up relations with Washington. That is why Pakistani leaders responded enthusiastically when Trump offered an opening earlier this year.

Pakistan’s stance is borne of sheer necessity. The country’s economy is too heavily dependent on both China and the United States to walk away from either. Moreover, although the warming of U.S. ties with India in the last few decades has increased Pakistan’s dependence on China, Islamabad continues to count on American goodwill for indispensable financial support through multilateral institutions, most notably the International Monetary Fund, to bolster its weak economy.

In truth, Pakistan’s relationship with China should not threaten the United States but rather offer it an opportunity. Pakistani officials nostalgically recall their country’s role in orchestrating the original breakthrough between Washington and Beijing during the Cold War, when Islamabad facilitated the secret 1971 visit of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to China, which paved the way for President Richard Nixon’s visit thereafter. Pakistan could again be a kind of fixer in the region, helping the United States and China see eye to eye.

Take, for instance, the realm of connectivity and transportation infrastructure. China’s investment in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a major plank of the global Chinese infrastructure program known as the Belt and Road Initiative, has alarmed the United States in that it promises to provide China a foothold in the Indian Ocean. Recognizing American concerns, Pakistan has insisted that its deep-water port in Gwadar, envisioned as CPEC’s outlet to the world, will remain a purely commercial facility with no military uses. Beijing, for its part, has been careful not to force Pakistan to choose between China and the United States.

On counterterrorism, too, the two powers could find ways to work together in the region. Both remain mostly concerned about militant groups that target their respective interests. A spate of killings of Chinese citizens in Pakistan over the years, many of which Pakistani officials have accused India of supporting, has complicated matters further by prompting China to seek permission to deploy private Chinese security personnel on Pakistani territory. At the cost of annoying Beijing, Islamabad has so far resisted, fearing that such a concession might only stoke suspicion and hostility in Washington.

Pakistan’s vision for the region offers a solution to prevent further deepening these fault lines. Its National Security Policy seeks to convert Pakistani territory into a crossroads for U.S., Chinese and even Indian economic interests. Although admittedly ambitious, such an approach could offer a transformational outcome for the two billion people who live in South Asia.

The principal arena in which great-power competition can be transformed into great-power collaboration is connectivity. American unease with CPEC could be assuaged by parallel investments by the United States in intersecting regional corridors that would share the same road, rail, and maritime infrastructure. The United States has long supported the goal of greater connectivity between South and Central Asia, for instance. And allowing Central Asian countries greater access to Pakistan’s ports would reduce their dependence on Russia. Pakistan would have a natural interest in ensuring that its territory does not become a zone of conflict for the great powers, and would discourage China and the United States from crossing each other’s red lines—for instance, through the deployment of a Chinese security presence in Gwadar or U.S. support for India’s claims that the CPEC is illegal because it passes through disputed territory and therefore violates Indian sovereignty. Moreover, improved relations between India and Pakistan would allow India to utilize Pakistan’s land corridor to connect with Central Asia, a long-standing interest of New Delhi.

Pakistan’s vast reserves of critical minerals should also draw U.S. attention. The United States has already expressed interest in the Reko Diq mine, home to some of the world’s largest undeveloped copper and gold deposits. Chinese companies are also invested in various projects in the area and interested in supporting operations at Reko Diq, which is located in Pakistan’s restive Baluchistan Province. bordering Afghanistan. Baluchistan has been wracked by terrorism and insurgency in recent years; combined U.S. and Chinese assistance could help Pakistan stabilize the province and prevent violence.

A pragmatic coexistence between the two great powers in South Asia may be the best outcome the United States can achieve in light of India’s limitations as a partner and as a hedge against China. As they consider this future, Washington and Islamabad would do well to set realistic expectations from the get-go. Pakistan should make clear to the United States that its current economic realities do not allow it to choose between Beijing and Washington; it needs both. The United States must accept that China will remain a critical partner for Pakistan—indeed, trying to push Pakistan away from China will only backfire. And Pakistan must accept that India will remain an important U.S. partner, no matter their current differences.

To be sure, such a reset in U.S.-Pakistani relations represents a significant departure from Washington’s approach in recent years. But Trump’s willingness to overturn the apple cart may, in this context, prove useful. After all, if the United States chooses to stick with its current India-focused policy, it could lose not just Pakistan but also South Asia in the years ahead.

 

 

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