Pardee Fellow Presents on Pakistan-US Relations

Pardee Center Research Fellow Moeed Yusuf presented at a seminar on Pakistan-US relations at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University on October 23, 2009. The seminar titled, “Pakistan-US Relations: Militancy, Nuclear Weapons, and a Faltering Economy” featured, besides Moeed, the former Pakistani Ambassador to Afghanistan, Aziz Ahmed Khan, and prominent Pakistani international lawyer, Ahmer Bilal Soofi.

Moeed’s presentation, titled Pakistan-US alliance: A Rupture Waiting to Happen, focused on the divergent interests of the two sides in the War on Terror that, he argued, are likely to lead to a rupture in the relationship in the medium term. Moeed presented a strategic perspective contending that once Pakistan’s own threat perception and self-defined regional objectives are taken into account, it becomes entirely rational for it to avoid complementing the US objectives in Afghanistan wholeheartedly. The cumulative effect of the US policy towards Pakistan since 9/11 has been to create perverse incentives which rationally nudge Pakistan to avoid aligning its objectives and strategies with the US. To extract better performance from Pakistan, the US needs to change Islamabad’s cost-benefit equation by altering the incentive payoffs rather than hoping that the moral undertones of the discourse would somehow lead it to oblige fully. This requires a regional approach on US’ part whereby Pakistan’s insecurities vis-à-vis India and Afghanistan are addressed. Moeed’s presentation was based on a recent peer-reviewed paper he has published on the subject in the Defense Against Terrorism Review.

Moeed is also a Doctoral candidate and Senior Teaching Fellow at Boston University’s Political Science Department and is currently teaching a course on International Political Economy at the University’s Department of International Relations.