HAVING worked in the policy arena in the US for some years, I often find myself under the gun about all things Washington from colleagues in Islamabad. What amazes me is how precious little we understand about the workings of the world’s capital.

The issue is not as mundane as it sounds. We can’t draw informed conclusions about why the US makes certain policy choices vis-à-vis Pakistan unless we understand how Washington operates.

This lack of basic knowledge has contributed a lot to the distrust and conspiratorial thinking over the past decade.

Let me point to three beliefs I find most problematic.

First, the impression that Washington is somehow a super organised town where everything happens under some grand vision and moves in a set-piece manner on the direction of those in power. We seem to have a sense of Machiavellian town planning and plotting a global game and being fairly good at it.

Nothing can be farther from the truth. Washington is just like any other capital. If anything, it may be even less set piece than your average centre of power. There is no automatic consensus on anything; you have debate after debate, tussle after tussle, and multiple opinions on virtually everything.

Of course, it is no less susceptible to group think and imbalances within the various centres of power than any comparable town. But this is also to be expected of a ‘normal’ capital.

Importantly, none of this amounts to any sinister plot; there isn’t a conspiracy behind everything; and there isn’t a policy shop tasked to micromanage Pakistan on a daily basis.

Believing otherwise sends us deep into the conspiracy world: Washington is out to get Pakistan’s nukes, it wants permanent bases in Afghanistan to counter China (and by extension the Sino-Pakistan link); it handpicks Pakistani governments, etc. To be sure, the US has global interests that it pursues with some vigour. Does this mean it keeps a very keen eye on Pakistan? Yes. Has it influenced Pakistani decisions in the past? Yes. But is Pakistan special in this respect? No.

Second, the understanding of the US legislative process is non-existent (with some exceptions of course), even among those who should ideally be on top of it. For a country so dependent on US aid and thus on the decisions made on Capitol Hill, this is unexplainable. It matters tangibly.

Obvious example: the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill.

Very few Pakistani policy pundits and decision-makers understood how various drafts of the bill were produced, how they were to merge in conference, and that each iteration can produce very different texts. Even as recently as last year, I saw a famous TV anchor present an initial version of the bill that included language about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons on camera and insinuated insincerity on the part of Pakistani officials who negotiated it. In reality, that language had never made it to the bill.

There was also no understanding of the difference between an authorisation and appropriation bill. No one got the fact that a decision on the Hill to support Pakistan with assistance is not the same thing as prioritising and tagging money (which is an appropriation function) to the authorisation in any given year.

The fact that Islamabad never bothered to internalise this and educate the public meant that we hyped up the bill, created expectations that $7.5 billion was all but in the kitty and got upset when things moved differently than expected.

Third, the sense that Pakistani voices are unrepresented in Washington or only those that toe a particular line are entertained.

There’s a need to challenge the logic of this concern. When diaspora work in this space, their role is not to promote their country of origin’s views. Rather, they are useful because they are supposed to be able to explain the processes and context of their country of origin from an ‘immersed’ perspective rather than that of a foreigner’s. Done right, this should be invaluable for the host country’s policymakers to understand how leaders and citizens here approach things, why they react in ways they do, and what the most informed policy choice based on this understanding would be.

The number of diaspora working in Washington is not proportional to pro-Pakistan voices. It shouldn’t be. Equally, the benchmark for a Pakistani expert’s objectivity can’t be that he or she must start bashing their country of origin. Either pressure would kill diversity of opinion which is central to this enterprise of generating policy relevant ideas.

If we don’t make an effort to fully grasp Washington’s thought and decision-making processes and do not educate the wider audience about it, constant misunderstandings, angst and a tendency to assume the worst will be all but inevitable. Both sides have been guilty of failing on this count in the post-9/11 context.

The writer is a foreign policy expert based in Washington D.C.