THE QUEST for improvement in the deeply troubled relationship between the United States (along with its Western allies) and Pakistan focuses largely on Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan and on the country’s approach to governing. But this quest has not yielded much, and relations between Washington and Islamabad are spiraling downward. Lost in this American struggle to induce change in Pakistani behavior is a fundamental reality—namely, that there probably can’t be any significant progress in improving the relationship so long as the India-Pakistan conflict persists. For Pakistanis, that conflict poses an ominous existential challenge that inevitably drives their behavior on all things, including their approach to the West and the war in Afghanistan. But if the India-Pakistan confrontation could be settled, chances for progress on other fronts would be greatly enhanced.

That in turn raises questions about U.S. policy toward India. For years, that policy has been guided by the geopolitical thesis that the West needs to court India in order to counterbalance China’s growing power in Asia. Hence the United States has resisted the idea of pressuring India for concessions toward Pakistan in the ongoing conflict of nerves between the two countries. So long as that policy continues, prospects are high for ongoing tensions between the United States and Pakistan, which has ominous implications for America’s efforts in Afghanistan.

All this suggests that America may be pursuing an indirect strategy in its relationship with Pakistan. Instead of seeking to change Pakistan’s approach to the Afghan war and its own government, America should begin with the India-Pakistan relationship and reassess its view of India as a necessary counterweight to China. In short, what we need most is to consider the immediate issues concerning Pakistan and Afghanistan in the context of a much wider geopolitical reassessment.

IT IS widely agreed that the greatest threat to the security of the United States and its allies is the combination of terrorism and nuclear arms. The most likely place for terrorists to acquire such a weapon is Pakistan. Although Pakistan has adopted various measures to improve the security of its weapons, the West is concerned. Pakistan, suspicious of Washington, has rejected America’s offers to help further secure these arms, and Western powers realize they don’t know the locations of all of them. The 2011 attacks on a highly secure naval base in Karachi—which benefited from al-Qaeda penetration of the Pakistani army—raise concerns that similar attacks on facilities storing nuclear arms might succeed. Michele Bachmann, drawing on her membership in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, stated that: “We have to recognize that fifteen of the sites, nuclear sites are available or are potentially penetrable by jihadists. Six attempts have already been made on nuclear sites.”

Pakistan expanded its nuclear arsenal from sixty warheads in 2007 to more than one hundred in early 2011 and accelerated construction at the Khushab nuclear site, which will provide it with a fourth nuclear reactor as early as 2013.

Even if terrorists couldn’t capture nuclear arms or acquire them from supporters within the Pakistani forces, insurgents could topple the government. This raises Western concerns—accentuated by the fact that the government is weak and unstable and that anti-American sentiment in Pakistan is widespread and intense.

A “stable dysfunctional relationship” is one in which the parties damage each other but maintain the relationship because they also nurture each other. This certainly defines the U.S.-Pakistani relationship. Former defense secretary Robert Gates famously referred to it as akin to a “troubled marriage” and used the parlance of marriage counselors in urging the parties to “keep working” at it. The admonition took on added force in November 2011 after the killing of twenty-four Pakistani soldiers by NATO forces sparked a fresh crisis in the relationship. Pakistan quickly shut down supply routes through the country that NATO forces had used to replenish their war efforts in Afghanistan.

On the one hand, the Pakistani military is helping the United States fight the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda. It has allowed U.S. incursions into Pakistan and provided some of the intelligence on which drone strikes are sometimes based. On the other hand, the Afghan Taliban can hide, rest, regroup, rearm, train and organize in Pakistan, especially in North Waziristan. This greatly hinders the drive to end the insurgency in Afghanistan. Pakistan has publicly criticized the United States for violating Pakistani sovereignty, further inflaming anti-American sentiment in the country.

In the spring of 2011, Pakistan demanded that Washington remove most of its military trainers and reduce the number of CIA and Special Operations operatives in the country, but it also asked for more joint operations with the United States against the Taliban and more information sharing. While the Pakistani military often collaborates with the U.S. military, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) reportedly often lends a hand to the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban.

The complicated relationship led to an odd situation in June 2011 when Afghan prime minister Hamid Karzai traveled to Pakistan to seek assurances that Afghan Taliban leaders, who were in negotiations for a peace settlement with his government, would not be killed or detained by Pakistan. Previously, when such negotiations seemed to be succeeding, Pakistan was known to capture the Taliban commanders involved. Elements of the Pakistani government oppose the peace process in part because the Karzai government is leaving out those Taliban members controlled by the ISI on which Islamabad depends to be able to influence the future course of Afghanistan, especially after foreign forces leave.

Pakistan also worries that the United States will become more friendly with India as it pulls out of Afghanistan and no longer needs Pakistani supply routes. Helene Cooper observes in the New York Times that Pakistan wants to keep the Taliban in its “good graces” should U.S. forces withdraw and leave the Taliban to reassert control over Afghanistan. “What Pakistan wants most in Afghanistan is an assurance that India cannot use it to threaten Pakistan. For that, a radical Islamic movement like the Taliban, with strong ties to kin in Pakistan, fits the bill.”

Pakistan responds that it has taken many military and civilian casualties in fighting both the terrorists and the militants and that it has made progress in South Waziristan and the Swat Valley. Major General Nadir Zeb, inspector general of Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps, even claims that the tribal areas have been nearly cleared of militants since 2007; only a “very thin belt is left. The rest is all cleared.”

Some observers argue that because the Pakistani military wants to ensure the continued flow of billions of U.S. dollars in military aid, the military has a vested interest in not fighting militants and terrorists too vigorously. As author Lawrence Wright has noted:

What would happen if the Pakistani military actually captured or killed Al Qaeda’s top leaders? The great flow of dollars would stop, just as it had in Afghanistan after the Soviets limped away. I realized that, despite all the suffering the war on terror had brought to Pakistan, the military was addicted to the money it generated. The Pakistani Army and the ISI were in the looking-for-bin-Laden business, and if they found him they’d be out of business.

Pakistanis point out that the United States supported them strongly as long as Pakistan served as the major venue for organizing, arming and financing the mujahideen (the predecessors of the Taliban) to drive out the USSR. However, once this mission was completed, Washington lost interest in Pakistan and the flow of funds dried up. Pakistan received no American aid in 1992, down from $783 million in 1988. Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf argues:

The United States “used” Pakistan and then abandoned it: this was taken as a betrayal. The U.S. nuclear policy of appeasement and strategic co-operation with India against Pakistan is taken by the man in the street in Pakistan as very partisan and an act of animosity against our national interest.

Furthermore, the low ebb of U.S.-Pakistani relations is evident in the recent public expression of anti-American views even by military leaders. In November 2010, a Pakistani newspaper reported that a senior Pakistani military officer stated that his organization views the United States as seeking “controlled chaos” in Pakistan and to “denuclearize” the regime. In a gathering of military officers in May 2011, when a U.S. ambassador asked who constitutes the country’s top threat, more chose the United States than the other two choices: India or forces within Pakistan.

In short, the West and Pakistan do not trust one another. They comingle cooperation with conflict—sometimes helping, sometimes undermining each other—and both hedge against betrayal while drawing on each other’s resources. One could characterize the relationship as schizophrenic or byzantine. It may be stable, but it is dysfunctional. And nobody would call it wholesome.

SINCE THE war in Afghanistan started a decade ago, America and its allies have sent numerous high-powered representatives to Pakistan to cajole and pressure Islamabad to change its ways. These public lectures have been delivered by secretaries of state, foreign ministers, high-ranking military officials and special representatives (in particular, U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke). Military and civilian aid has been granted, and promises of more, coupled with threats to scale it back, have been made in order to compel Pakistan to mend its ways. These efforts have not all been in vain. Pakistan’s military did move some of its resources from the border with India and intensified its anti-insurgency drive, especially in North Waziristan. Also, Pakistan has improved security of its nuclear facilities, and the nuclear-arms proliferation network of A. Q. Khan seems to have been deactivated. However, the total effect of all these moves has been limited. In 2011, several members of Congress called for “getting tough” with Pakistan, and others suggested a “divorce.”

Such suggestions on how to move Pakistan in favored directions miss a central reality: Washington and its allies are much more dependent on Pakistan than Pakistan is on them. The nuclear arms of Pakistan pose a very serious threat to the United States and its allies; there is nothing in the West that poses a similar threat to Islamabad. Proliferation is a major Western concern but not one for Pakistan. When Islamabad closes the supply routes to Afghanistan, as it has done on several occasions when angry, it deprives Washington and its allied forces of crucial supplies. The West would cause much less disruption if it were to cut off help to Pakistan. China could quickly pick up the slack, as reflected in the fact that its investment in Pakistan has grown from around $4 billion in 2007 to $25 billion in 2010. (It remains an open question, though, whether China would be willing to write checks to the Pakistani military, as the United States currently does.)

Daniel Markey at the Council on Foreign Relations has noted that Pakistani officials talk openly about China as a “strategic alternative to the United States.” The government has described China as an “all-weather friend” (a pointed contrast to the United States, which is often characterized as only a fair-weather friend). Beijing would benefit from an alliance with Pakistan by gaining an alternate route for China’s energy supply, which currently bottlenecks at the Strait of Malacca in the Indian Ocean. In May 2011, China announced the sale of fifty fighter jets to Islamabad. (The fighter, known as the JF-17, was developed jointly by Pakistan and China.) Beijing is a major investor in Pakistan and a primary supplier of its weaponry (70 percent of Islamabad’s tanks are Chinese). China allowed Pakistan to test its first nuclear device on Chinese ground and aided it in transporting missiles purchased from North Korea. The two nations also conducted three joint military exercises. China has made investments in Pakistan’s infrastructure, including construction of the deep-sea port of Gwadar and the Karakoram Highway, a roadway connecting China to Pakistan. Islamabad is encouraging Afghanistan to court Beijing as well.

In short, America is unlikely to achieve its goal with threats to divorce itself from Pakistan, “get tough” or condition its aid on Pakistan meeting certain benchmarks in combating militants. Pakistan doesn’t need the United States nearly as much as the United States needs Pakistan, and Beijing is standing by to benefit from the West further alienating Islamabad.

A RATHER different approach, and an even less promising one than pressing Pakistan to change its ways, is to build the civilian government and its societal bases in Pakistan and reduce the role and power of the military, ensuring that it is under the control of elected officials. For example, Aqil Shah, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, calls for turning Pakistan into a viable state with a strong civil society dominated by civilian leaders rather than one overshadowed by the military. In this view, corruption would be curbed and the economy would grow, generating meaningful jobs, particularly for the large youth population. These changes are to be brought about by the United States shifting aid from the military to the civilian sector. Shah argues, “Militant extremism can be fought effectively only through serious governance reforms that ensure the rule of law and accountability.” He claims that Pakistan’s government may need a “multibillion-dollar Marshall Plan” but such “aid should be tightly linked to Pakistan’s economic performance, progress in combating corruption, and transparency and responsiveness in government.” Shah also argues that Washington should take a tougher approach with the Pakistani military and make clear that “interference in politics will not be tolerated and could have serious repercussions, including a downgrading of military ties, the suspension of nondevelopment aid, and broader diplomatic isolation.”

The thesis that the United States can build up Pakistan’s civilian elements and scale back its military ones is reflected in the Kerry-Lugar bill (named after Massachusetts Democratic senator John Kerry and Indiana Republican senator Richard Lugar), which provides $7.5 billion in aid over five years but demands that Pakistan cooperate with Washington on nonproliferation, make significant progress in combating terrorist groups and ensure that the Pakistani military is separated from the country’s politics.

This approach ignores the West’s poor record of long-distance nation building. As William Easterly has shown in his book The White Man’s Burden, the nations that modernized over the last decades had high growth rates and were politically stable. South Korea, Taiwan, China and Singapore made these advances on their own, with very little foreign aid. At the same time, the nations that received large amounts of aid, especially in Africa, often struggled. A 2006 World Bank study showed that fourteen of the twenty-five aid-recipient countries covered by the report had the same or declining rates of per capita income from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s.

The United States and its allies haven’t demonstrated much success in transforming Iraq and Afghanistan. A 2011 report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee shows that much of the aid to Afghanistan was wasted or remains unaccounted for, and the money’s positive effects were short-lived and distorted the Afghan economy, polity and society.

Some of the funds intended to assist Pakistan’s fight against terrorism have been used to purchase weapons to counter India. Much of the rest has been lost to corruption. As Wright notes, “The Pakistani military . . . submits expense claims [to be reimbursed for its fight against terrorism] every month to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad; according to a report in the Guardian, receipts are not provided—or requested.”

Anticorruption drives seldom succeed, and there is little reason to believe that civilians are less corrupt than the military. Moreover, the military is one of the few institutions in Pakistan that is widely respected, and the current civilian leadership is considered weak and divided. As Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, puts it, “The Pakistani military is destined to remain an important institution in Pakistan’s otherwise dysfunctional polity.”

In short, nation building (or “capacity building”) seems even less likely to succeed than muscular diplomacy.

THERE IS one major reason why the Pakistani army is reluctant to dismantle the militant groups, sever its alliance with the Afghan Taliban and accept a reduced standing in society: the country’s government and people view India as their first, second and third enemy. The term “obsession” is often used to describe this preoccupation. India and Pakistan have been archenemies ever since the 1947 partition. They have fought three major wars and engaged in several armed clashes, including some that have come close to nuclear war. Each nation has supported terrorist acts against the other. And their sizable armies are trained, equipped and centered on fighting one another. This conflict seems intractable, and the many attempts to settle it have failed. However, resolving this impasse would have major strategic consequences for all the issues at hand. It would not be easy, to put it mildly. But there has been progress on this front in the past.

In 2007, secret negotiations between the two countries reportedly came close to a wide-ranging and encompassing deal. Confidence-building measures at that time included the easing of visa restrictions between the countries and talks to work out the contentious border of Sir Creek. The two governments explored making a preferential trade agreement. Pakistan even considered granting India “most favored nation” status, conditioned on just a few minor changes in Indian policy. The time may now be ripe for another major conflict-resolution drive.

The main point of contention is the fate of Kashmir. Commentators often speak of this issue as implacable. However, there is an emerging consensus between India and Pakistan on how to proceed. Since the partition, various approaches to Kashmir have been suggested. They include granting it independence, dividing it between Pakistan and India along the Line of Control (LOC), and basing the decision on a referendum of Kashmiris. But the two countries seem to be moving toward a third way, sometimes referred to as a “soft” border, which would entail giving the two parts of Kashmir considerable autonomy and allowing its citizens free movement and trade between them. According to a report by researchers P. R. Chari and Hasan Askari Rizvi published by the U.S. Institute of Peace, “the governments of India and Pakistan have both repeatedly endorsed the concept.” Moreover, an opinion survey on both sides of the LOC reveals public support for peace and soft borders. And there are increasing calls on both sides for Kashmiri representation in negotiations and for demilitarization of the area.

Indeed, the 2007 back-channel negotiations between representatives of the Musharraf and Singh governments were moving well toward a settlement along these lines, adding a proposal to establish a joint body (comprised of Kashmiris, Indians and Pakistanis) to oversee issues affecting populations on both sides of the LOC. Unfortunately, both the Indian and Pakistani governments hesitated to codify the agreement, fearing the public reaction. By 2008, the opportunity to proceed was lost in the aftermath of Musharraf’s resignation and the abandonment of peace talks after the Mumbai attacks. Resistance to a settlement remains strong among some elements in the bureaucratic and military establishments of both countries. However, given the promising resumption of dialogue between India and Pakistan in early 2011 and the fact that the deal brokered in 2007 is still on the table, there is reason to suggest that if additional investments were made in the settlement of this dispute, significant progress could be made.

Settling the India-Pakistan conflict would remove a major reason Pakistan is keen to control the future government of Afghanistan and ensure that its allies in the Taliban would be a major force in Kabul’s leadership. Currently, Pakistan fears that Afghanistan will tilt toward India and India will use Afghanistan as a platform for a spy network. Islamabad also fears that because Pakistan is such a narrow country, if an Indian attack were launched from the east, its troops might need to retreat into Afghanistan. If India and Afghanistan were allies, Pakistan would be forced to fight on two fronts in the event of conflict. In addition, it worries about India stirring up ethnic tensions in Afghanistan that could spill over Pakistani borders. (India has historically supported ethnic minorities, which could create conflict with the Pashtun majorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.) Islamabad has also accused New Delhi of using its influence in Kabul to provide funding and training to terrorist groups such as the Baluchistan Liberation Army in Pakistan’s tribal areas with the goal of destabilizing the Pakistani government.

Normalized relations between India and Pakistan would also bring considerable economic benefits to both. For example, India needs cement, and Pakistan’s factories are close to the border. Currently, bilateral trade is a meager $2 billion a year (compared to India’s $60 billion annual trade with China, for example).

Visionaries even see a Pakistan and India following the example of France and Germany. After fighting each other for generations and causing more harm to each other than the two Asian nations, Paris and Berlin reconciled and formed a productive union. If Pakistan and India could one day find their way to such a union, they might even be able to scale back their military nuclear programs and join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which would do wonders for the treaty’s weakened state.

State Department sources privately confirm that “back-channel” negotiations are taking place between India and Pakistan and that the United States is fostering this dialogue. But the West needs to invest much more in them than it currently does. For instance, taking into account that Pakistan is worried about its lack of strategic depth and India’s conventional superiority, the West might favor positioning peacekeeping forces on the new borders, much as it did in Korea’s DMZ and previously in Berlin. These forces would be positioned only after a settlement was reached, and they should include troops from nations such as Indonesia and Nigeria, combined with forces from nations such as Canada and Norway, possibly with logistical and intelligence support by the United States.

Renegotiation of the U.S.-India civil-nuclear agreement seems a particularly good place to start. India (and Pakistan) was for decades barred from nuclear trade with the West because it did not join the NPT. The Bush administration moved in the opposite direction, providing American aid to India’s civilian nuclear-energy program and expanding U.S.-India cooperation in nuclear technology. This assistance was to be used only for nonmilitary purposes. However, by allowing the sale of uranium to India for its civilian reactors, the United States enabled India to move its existing supply of uranium to military use. (Before that, Indian power plants were operating at reduced capacity to make more nuclear bombs.) The Bush administration rationalized these steps by predicting they would improve relations with India, which it considered the West’s best counterbalance against China. However, rather than fostering a closer relationship between New Delhi and Washington, the treaty has been highly controversial in India. It took years of wrangling before New Delhi approved the final piece of the deal in August 2010.

In response to the Bush administration’s deal with India, Pakistan increased its nuclear program on its own by rapidly expanding its plutonium production, and China granted Pakistan two more reactors as part of an agreement parallel to the U.S.-India one. (Some may argue that the China-Pakistan deal was under way before the U.S.-India one. Although this is true, the China-Pakistan deal was not implemented until after the U.S.-India one.) The result is a case study in how the expansion of nuclear facilities in one country can spur the expansion of nuclear facilities in another—exactly the course that should be avoided. Given the great resistance to the nuclear agreement in India by the opposition and major segments of the public, Washington may find India quite willing to renegotiate the agreement. Scaling it back seems a particularly promising way to show that the West is no longer tilting toward India, thus perhaps convincing Pakistan that it need not expand its nuclear program. That would greatly ease tensions between the two nations.

It isn’t likely, however, that such moves will take place—or succeed if they do take place—unless the West engages in a major geopolitical reassessment of India. That in turn requires examining the West’s future relationship with China.

THE UNITED States believes it must court India to balance China. That is a major reason why Washington has not pressured India more heavily to come to terms with Pakistan and why Pakistan fears, not without reason, that America is turning toward India. During much of the Cold War, the West viewed India as leaning toward the communist bloc and Pakistan as a staunch anticommunist ally. Pakistan played a major role in helping the United States drive the USSR out of Afghanistan. Over the decades, Pakistan received considerable amounts of foreign and military aid as well as equipment and training from Washington. India, meanwhile, was largely spurned.

By 2000, however, the United States was increasingly concerned about the rise of China as a superpower and seeking ways to “balance” it. Washington believed that New Delhi could play a key role in this new geopolitical lineup. Additionally, India, as a democratic and economically successful nation, was held up as a countermodel to the Chinese brand of state capitalism, which had growing appeal in the Third World. As a result, the United States tilted toward India by expanding bilateral cooperation and investment in a number of areas. Washington capped these overtures by signing the landmark nuclear-cooperation deal in 2008.

Thus, just as it is difficult to see an end to the war in Afghanistan—and the neutralization of the Taliban sanctuaries more broadly—without a shift in the policies of Pakistan, it is equally difficult to envisage such changes occurring without shifts in the Indo-Pakistani relationship. The same holds for “rebalancing” the military-civilian relationships within Pakistan. In other words, instead of focusing mainly on what the West can gain from Pakistan or give to Pakistan, Washington should focus on the impact that changes in the U.S.-India relationship would have on Pakistan’s inner balance and its Afghanistan policies. The place to start is for the United States to reassess the geopolitical role it assigned to India as a China balancer.

This reassessment should center on whether China needs to be balanced; the timing of such balancing, if it is needed; and the costs of casting India in this role. Much has been made of the rise of China and the decline of the United States. Such commentary tends to overlook that any American decline starts from a very high level of military and economic prowess while China is rising from a rather low level. True, the size of the Chinese economy is expected to reach that of the United States by 2035. However, given that China has four times more people to feed, house and otherwise service, the more relevant figure is income per capita. China’s income per capita is quite low, about $7,400.

Assessments of China’s military power vary considerably. However, most experts agree that it would take at least two decades before China could win a major war against the United States. Many of China’s latest military acquisitions are either upgraded knockoffs of old Soviet equipment or purchased from the former USSR—hardly state-of-the-art technologies. Others are unlikely to achieve full operational capability for years, including the headline-grabbing Chinese stealth fighter, the J-20. And perhaps the greatest perceived Chinese military threat, antiaircraft (“carrier-killer”) ballistic missiles, have yet to be publicly tested over water against a maneuvering target. China’s yet-to-be-deployed first aircraft carrier was purchased from Ukraine in the 1990s. (The United States has eleven.) Beijing’s newest attack jet, the J-15, is an updated version of a Soviet one. It carries less fuel than a U.S. one and, as a takeoff method, requires flying off a ski-jump-style runway. When Russia refused to sell China nuclear submarines, Beijing attempted to build its own, producing subs that turned out to be noisier than those built by the Soviets thirty years ago.

Some hawks in the United States use the term “China hedge” to argue that the U.S. military ought to prepare for war with China, just in case it turns out to become a major adversary decades from now. However, given that Beijing will not pose a serious threat to the United States for decades, Washington can engage in the opposite kind of China hedge: an attempt to build peaceful cooperation, a case outlined in Henry Kissinger’s 2011 book on China.

Beijing may well prefer such a course over continuing to increase its military investment. After all, it worries about the large segments of its population now demanding the kind of affluence enjoyed only by a minority, to say nothing of other domestic tensions and major environmental challenges. Additionally, one should note that China does not have an expansionist ideology and has shown no desire to run the world or replace the United States as a global hegemon, although it is keen to play a much greater role in its region and to secure the flow of commodities and energy on which its economic well-being depends.

Taking all these factors into account, there seems to be ample time to first try what Henry Kissinger calls “co-evolution” and others have referred to as a China-U.S. partnership. Indeed, defining China as an enemy and moving to balance it could become a factor in making it into the kind of adversary it might not otherwise become.

Moreover, it is far from obvious what is meant by “balancing” in a twenty-first-century context—and whether India is well suited as a balancing power, even if there were a need and a way to balance Beijing. Economically, India and China have much to gain from increased trade and cooperation and from devoting their resources to economic development rather than to accelerated military buildup. Politically, India is rather ambivalent about the United States. Above all, Washington’s tilting toward New Delhi, especially the nuclear deal, is generating some rather negative side effects from a balancing viewpoint: It is driving Pakistan to a closer alliance with China, including a military one. And, worst of all, it is a major reason Pakistan is accelerating its buildup of nuclear arms. This fact alone justifies the suggested geopolitical reassessment.

MUCH ATTENTION has been paid to threats posed to major interests of the West by conditions and developments in Pakistan and its role in Afghanistan. Numerous attempts have been made over the last decade to convince Islamabad to close the Afghan Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan, cease supporting the insurgency in Afghanistan, better fight its own insurgency and better secure its nuclear arms. These efforts have not been particularly successful. Suggestions for the West to pressure Pakistan in various ways to change its behavior ignore the reality that the West needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs the West. And there is little realism in suggestions that the West can restructure Pakistan, build up its civil society and scale back its military.

The most promising route seems to be the one that appears the most difficult—helping settle the India-Pakistan conflict. Such a settlement would free Pakistan to focus its forces on the insurgency, reduce its sense that it must control the course of events in Afghanistan, possibly scale back its military nuclear program and better secure its nuclear arms. It would also reduce the importance of the military. Detailed and rather widely shared ideas have been put forth on how this conflict might be settled, and various tension-reduction moves and negotiations between the two nations have already taken place. That indicates this road can be navigated.

For the West to influence the conflict settlement, it will need to show Pakistan that the United States and its allies are no longer tilting toward India. Doing so will require a geopolitical reassessment, one which acknowledges that China is best treated as a regional power (although not a regional hegemon) with few, if any, global ambitions and a power with which the West can deal on many international matters. This reassessment, moreover, would recognize that balancing is a concept that applies poorly to the twenty-first-century age of weapons of mass destruction, cyberwarfare, long-range missiles, unconventional forces and terrorism. Thus there is no reason to try to cast India in the role of a China balancer.

In short, both the links between Afghanistan and Pakistan and Pakistan’s internal dynamics are affected by the India-Pakistan entanglement. This entanglement, in turn, is affected by the India-China-West relationship. Although at first it may seem far-fetched to argue that a promising way to break the persistent morass in Afghanistan and Pakistan is to reexamine Western assumptions about China’s course, this avenue might well be worth exploring in its own right and for the sake of all the parties involved.

Amitai Etzioni is a professor of international affairs at The George Washington University. He is the author of Security First (Yale University Press, 2007). He is indebted to Julia Milton and Marissa Cramer for research assistance on this article.

Image: Pullquote: Suggestions for the West to pressure Pakistan in various ways to change its behavior ignore the reality that the West needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs the West.Essay Types: Essay