Several years ago, relations between Pakistan and the United States hit a post-9/11 low. The 2011 discovery of Osama bin Laden’s compound not far from Pakistan’s premier military academy left Americans seething and suspicious. For their part, Pakistanis fulminated over a series of American “violations” of their territorial sovereignty by stealth helicopter, armed drones, and CIA contractors.
But tempers gradually cooled, and both sides recognized that narrow cooperation would suit their purposes better than none at all. Since then, Washington and Islamabad have chosen to focus on areas of agreement, such as the security threat posed to Pakistan by homegrown terrorists, rather than to rehash their many differences. This has produced superficially normal patterns of diplomatic and military cooperation. Pakistan reopened supply routes into Afghanistan, U.S. aid resumed its flow to Pakistan’s military and civilian institutions, and public criticism—by either side—has generally been kept to a minimum.
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