WHETHER it is going forward or back or just swaying from side to side, the relationship between the US and Pakistan seems to change from week to week. Just when Pakistan appeared to finally get its act together and moved towards direct negotiations with the US on the future of the relationship between the two countries, the US decided to go back on a prior understanding. There will be no apology for the Salala attacks, Ambassador Marc Grossman and his team are believed to have told Pakistani officials during their recent visit. Very well, there will be no resumption of ties without an apology was the Pakistani response. The dispute over the Salala apology is an elegant example of how to create an unnecessary mess. Initially, the US dithered, then Pakistan bargained and then events intervened. The apology over the Quran-burning incident in Afghanistan by President Obama meant that the quota of presidential apologies to difficult allies in an election year had been used up. So the apology was downgraded to diplomatic and military principals and was to come once Pakistan was done with its parliamentary review, with officials here apparently preferring that sequence of events. But then the insurgents attacked several provinces, including Kabul, on April 15, and the Haqqani connection was back in the limelight. No apology, the Americans appear to have decided as a result.

What seems clear by now is that it is unwise to link issues in these negotiations or else an impossible-to-resolve chain will result. Making a Salala apology a prerequisite to reopening the supply routes runs the risk of the Americans linking the participation of Pakistanis in the Chicago summit to something else and then on and on it will go. As has been the case with the drones, hard negotiations behind the scenes with Pakistan offering a menu of alternatives that would substantially reduce the frequency of unilateral strikes is a more promising route than a blunt rejection of something the American side is almost certain to never give up. Given that there are several important phases in Pakistan-US ties ahead, an interconnected link of conditionalities would only serve to complicate, perhaps even jeopardise, the ultimate aim of winding down the war in Afghanistan and ensuring a peaceful and stable country there and the decline of militancy here.

Perhaps what Pakistani officials must also keep in mind during these negotiations is that saying ‘no’ to the Americans at present amounts to spurning many of its allies who are active in Afghanistan. International isolation is never in Pakistan’s interests, especially at this juncture in its history.