ONE lesson I learnt from years of gambling in my misspent youth is that if you are bluffing with a weak hand, make sure you have a big pile of cash on the table.

This is something our leaders have not yet absorbed. If they had, they would not have closed the Nato supply corridor, and demanded an end of drone strikes and a formal apology from President Obama in the aftermath of the Salala tragedy last November.The reality is that according to Wikileaks, everybody from Zardari to Kayani to Gilani had privately given the green light to drones. Musharraf even authorised them to operate from a secret base in Balochistan. And to expect Barack Obama to make a public apology over a controversial incident in an election year is to reveal total ignorance of American political realities.

To be sure, the tragic death of two dozen Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border by US forces sent a wave of outrage across the country. Clearly, the government had to respond to the incident. However, by rejecting an American offer for a joint inquiry, our high command sent out a signal that it had not been entirely blameless in the affair.

In any case, to drag out the closure of supply routes for six months, we not only added to Nato’s costs of conducting operations and sustaining its forces in Afghanistan, but we also spelled out that our role in the alliance is transactional and transient. Increasingly, Pakistan is being viewed as part of the problem, and not part of the solution to the Afghan imbroglio.

We in Pakistan have been so brainwashed by the notion that the whole world is against us that we forget how much we have contributed to anti-Pakistan perceptions abroad. By continuing to use militants to further our dodgy (and well-documented) agenda in the region, our defence establishment has made it difficult for most of its foreign counterparts to trust us over any issue.

For Americans, the discovery that Osama Bin Laden was living in Abbottabad for years was proof of Pakistani connivance with Al Qaeda. Fortunately, nothing in the documents and computer discs recovered from Bin Laden’s compound has confirmed any links with Pakistani intelligence. But ordinary Americans as well as most politicians are convinced that he could not have lived for years under the military’s nose without tacit official approval.

Writing at the time, I had stuck my neck out and suggested that the whole fiasco was due to incompetence rather than connivance. However, when I gave this explanation to the media and university audiences in the US when I was there for my book tour last November, my words were met with polite disbelief.

As a result of the perception that Pakistan, far from helping the US in Afghanistan, is actively trying to hinder it, legislation has been moved in the American Congress to place severe restrictions on US aid. Once it becomes law, the administration will have to certify Pakistan’s good behaviour on a host of issues, ranging from nuclear proliferation to terrorism.

When one state makes public demands of another, it should have the means to reach a compromise that is at least halfway to its starting position. But when we demanded a public apology and the cessation of drone strikes, we had no way to force the Americans to deliver on either.

And to get an invitation to the Chicago summit to discuss Afghanistan, we were forced to reopen Nato supply routes. Had we bowed to the inevitable months ago, we would not be viewed as a carpet seller who lowers his price when the customer threatens to leave.

The late Amarillo Slim, the world poker champion in the 1970s, and the man largely responsible for popularising the game, always advised students “not to play the cards, but play the man”. In other words, a successful poker player should read his opponent, and not just focus on his cards. In our case, the US has read us pretty accurately.

Basically, Washington sees a punter who is playing with borrowed cash, and is determined to bluff on every hand. This is a no-brainer for even a greenhorn: call the bluff every time. In a transactional relationship, one side basically says to the other: ‘You can have this if I can have that.’ In the troubled relationship between the US and Pakistan, there has been little in common in terms of values or goals.

We have sought to collect the highest rent possible on our strategic real estate. But if you get greedy and jack up your rent unreasonably, the client has the option to walk away. This is what happened when we denied passage to Nato supplies, and the US was forced to pay a higher price for sending supplies through alternate routes.

Being dependent on US financial and military assistance while simultaneously attempting to thwart its strategic goals in the region displays schizophrenia and duplicity of a high order. Above all, it leads to confusion at the highest decision-making level.

So while the military seeks stability, its actions lead to instability. And while our civilian leadership attempts to present a united front to the world, in reality it seeks to cover up and deny our support for extremists.

Any sane foreign policy is about winning friends and forging alliances. In our case, we do everything we can to achieve the opposite. By blocking supply routes, we thought we were punishing America; but the fact is that some 40 other NATO countries are involved in Afghanistan. By our action, we made no friends in Nato capitals.

Both Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif have demonstrated that they have a far better understanding of how the world works than our military leadership. Our generals are convinced that they can ratchet up their demands indefinitely, and the world will play along because of our geo-strategic location.

However, once western forces leave the region, we will be of marginal interest, and then only for our nuisance value. Our attempts to bluff and bluster will cut no ice. We really, really need to wake up and smell the coffee.

The writer is the author of Fatal Faultlines: Pakistan, Islam and the West.

irfan.husain@gmail.com