Stephen P Cohen, noted South Asia expert has described Pakistan as "America's most dangerous ally," and has said that while Islamabad "professes to be a democracy," it's most important allies are the most authoritarian regimes in the world, namely "the People's Republic of China, North Korea and Saudi Arabia."
Cohen, who heads the South Asia program at The Brookings Institution, said that Pakistan is not just a crisis state, but a "crises state," and "it is so because it's a paradoxical state."
"Pakistan is what Aristotle called a mixed-constitution -- part democracy and part military autocracy," he added, and argued, "hese kinds of states are very hard to predict."
Cohen, who was a panelist at a conference titled Pakistan: The Crisis State,' hosted by The Hudson Institute, said compounding this paradox as America's most dangerous alloy "is the nuclear paradox" within Pakistan.
"Pakistan like North Korea is too nuclear to fail," he asserted, implying that this is why it has got to continually propped up by the likes of the United States. "Yet nuclear weapons do nothing to advance the economy of deal with the many domestic problems" that beset this country, he said.
Cohen said that Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons creates the permeating perception that "it's important to others and to Pakistan's own population, but that's all it did -- it doesn't bring Pakistan many advantages."
"I do agree with A Q Khan (the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program who ran a virtual nuclear proliferating Wal-Mart diverting nuclear weapons technology to the likes of North Korea and Libya) that having nuclear weapons have kept the Indian out of Pakistan. But the Indians may not have been interested in invading in any case," he said.
Cohen said that even if there is a coup in Pakistan soon, "I would not be surprised, but I don't think it will change things at all. Pakistan will continue on the way it's going."
He said, "After (former military dictator-turned-president Pervez) Musharraf's failure of collapse as a leader, the hope of the Pakistanis gave way to deep pessimism."
Cohen argued that it is imperative that in the formulation of any coherent US policy toward Pakistan that "the US should be consulting with and should include India."
He claimed that "India's relations with Pakistan are better than ours and India has vital interests in the future of Pakistan -- more vital than we have."
Cohen said in this policy formulation, vis-à-vis Pakistan, the US should also consult with China.
Meanwhile, he said that Pakistan's double-game in its support and succor to terrorist groups within its territory "complicates its relations with China and with India as well as other countries. It's not just the United States."
Another panelist, Marvin Weinbaum, Scholar-in-Residence at The Middle East Institute, said, "I've been looking at Pakistan some 40 years now and as a Pakistan observer, I really don't know that there's been any time in that period when I would have characterised Pakistan as a 'normal' state."
"I know when you use the term crisis and you have a crisis all the time, the term crisis loses its meaning. So, I am asking here, whether there's something deeper involved here -- deeper in the body politic, deeper in the political culture of Pakistan, of which this is the latest and perhaps in the order of things, only of the most dangerous."
Weinbaum said that Pakistan today with all of its tensions between the civilian government and the military, the abounding conspiratorial theories, the thriving militant and terrorist factions, was not just "a paranoid state," but that "I'd go further than that and say, it's a paranoid society."
Lisa Curtis, former Central Intelligence Agency official and currently Senior Research Fellow for South Asian Affairs at the Heritage Foundation -- the conservative DC think tank -- said, "If Pakistan feels that it needs to force the US to choose between India and Pakistan to have a strategic relationship, it's not going to happen."
"Yes, there has to be an understanding that yes, the United States would like a strategic partnership or relationship with Pakistan, but it's certainly not going to choose between India and Pakistan," she said.
Curtis pointed out that "the US relationship with India is extremely important and will remain so. So, my fear is that if Pakistan uses as a litmus test the US relationship with India, that would be to Pakistan's detriment."
