This thesis explains Pakistan’s strategic choices in the 1990s by examining the role of the United States in the shaping of Islamabad’s security goals. Drawing upon a diverse range of oral history interviews, the thesis explains the American contribution to Pakistani security objectives during the presidency of Bill Clinton (1993-2001). By doing this it addresses a gap in the relevant literature and moves beyond the available mono-causal explanations often distorted by a mixture of intellectual obfuscation and political rhetoric. By drawing upon the concept of the security dilemma in international politics as a lens to understand the nature of Pakistan’s India-specific security compulsions, this research investigates and explains the dynamics which drove Islamabad’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, its support for the Taliban and its approach towards the indigenous uprising in Indian Kashmir. In doing this, it highlights the extent to which Clinton’s foreign policy reinforced the immediate catalysts for US-Pakistan relations in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 and the end of the Cold War two years later. The primary argument of the thesis is that Clinton’s foreign policy contributed to the hardening of Islamabad’s security perspectives, creating space for the Pakistani military establishment to pursue its regional security goals; goals which were largely at variance with US global objectives in the 1990s. Secondly, it argues that US-Pakistan relations during this period were driven by a Cold War mindset, causing a fissure between US global and Pakistan’s regional security goals. The Pakistani military and civilian leadership utilized these divergent and convergent trends to protect Islamabad’s India-centric strategic interests.

The bilateral relationship between the US and Pakistan has been highly significant for the foreign policies of both countries. Since 1947 Pakistan has sought US support in its quest for regional security and the US repeatedly turned to Pakistan as an irreplaceable strategic ally in its quest for global power and security. Despite this the relationship became fractious and increasingly distrustful. Many accounts describe the relationship and analyse events which have shaped it but fail to satisfactorily understand why it became so difficult, particularly from the Pakistani perspective. This thesis seeks to bring a fresh perspective by analysing the whole of the relationship as a cumulative process shaped not just by events but by reciprocal behaviour and expectation. It is a diplomatic history examining episodes of the relationship since 1947 through existing primary and secondary sources but also contributing new material from 20 field-work interviews conducted in Pakistan with military, government, media and academic actors. The study finds an underlying contradiction in the relationship in which fundamental national interests have never converged sufficiently for sustained cooperation. As such relations have relied on transactional opportunism. Cooperation has depended on temporary wilful blindness by the US which cannot be maintained beyond episodes of crisis. Pakistan uses its geostrategic assets as a reverse influence on the US but consistently hedges its strategies against anticipated abandonment when the crisis episode has passed. Through this has evolved a cumulative legacy of mutual negative expectation and mistrust which has become deeply ingrained in the relationship. The study also finds that the strategic utility of the relationship has favoured the US but that Pakistan’s reverse influence has grown, making it more difficult for Washington to abandon the relationship it finds so frustrating.

This thesis explores the international politics of Pakistan’s conditional sovereignty through a comparative analysis of Pakistan-US relations during the Cold War (1979-88) and the War on Terror (2001-08). The thesis seeks to understand whether the end of the Cold War restructured, reshaped and reconfigured US attitudes towards Pakistan when caught up in a new geo-political conflict, namely the War on Terror. The thesis is constructed around three main arguments focusing on Pakistan’s sovereignty, US foreign assistance to Pakistan and Pakistan’s state failure. Firstly, the thesis demonstrates that US conditions on Pakistan’s sovereignty fluctuate according to whether or not the US is strategically interested in Pakistan. In both cases, different sets of conditions are applied to Pakistan’s sovereignty. The thesis also details Pakistan’s response to these conditions on its sovereignty. Secondly, the thesis argues that given the importance of the normative value of state failure in the post-9/11 US policy and its absence in the War on Terror as a condition on Pakistan’s sovereignty, it is expected that Pakistan’s state failure status will come to dominate the conditions on Pakistan’s sovereignty when the US is not strategically interested. Thirdly, the conditions on Pakistan’s sovereignty are a means to secure Pakistan’s compliance to US demands, by either withholding foreign assistance or disbursing it. In that case then, given the centrality of human rights and state failure in post-9/11 international relations, the thesis demonstrates that US statebuilding efforts remain pivoted on US political interests rather than human rights and development. The qualitative research includes elite interviews, unclassified documents and builds on existing literature, while the quantitative portion involves statistical data.