Compliance and Defiance in Patron-Client State Relationships: a Case Study of Pakistan‘S Relationship with the United States, 1947-2013
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COMPLIANCE AND DEFIANCE IN PATRON-CLIENT STATE RELATIONSHIPS: A CASE STUDY OF PAKISTAN‘S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE UNITED STATES, 1947-2013 A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY ALY ZAMAN AUGUST 2015 © Copyright by Aly Zaman 2015 Declaration I declare that this thesis is my own work and, to the best of my knowledge, does not contain material previously written or published by any other person except where due acknowledgment is made in the text or footnotes. Aly Zaman 2 Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my parents for their prayers and their unwavering faith in me even as I myself often struggled to overcome those twin evils of self-doubt and despair. It is also dedicated to my wife Sahar for the constancy of her love, encouragement and support, and to my daughter Fatima, my pride and joy. 3 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I must express my profound gratitude to Almighty Allah for having blessed me with the ability to complete this project. An undertaking of this magnitude inevitably throws up a variety of challenges, some of them quite formidable, of which I faced my fair share. Whatever success I achieved in overcoming them I owe overwhelmingly to Allah‘s boundless grace and generosity. I thank the members of my supervisory panel for their comments and suggestions, particularly my thesis supervisor, Professor Amin Saikal, who was always generous and forthcoming in providing advice, encouragement and support. Dr Samina Ahmed, my former employer at the International Crisis Group, was an advisor on my panel and provided valuable feedback and suggestions on many occasions. I am grateful to all those in Pakistan who agreed to be interviewed and who gave me the benefit of their insights. Several prominent area specialists that I was able to meet during my fieldwork in the US gave generously of their time and enabled me to benefit from their perspectives. I am particularly grateful to Stephen P. Cohen, William Milam, Shuja Nawaz, Robert Oakley, Teresita Schaffer and Marvin Weinbaum. I am also indebted to the helpful staff at the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration and the National Security Archives. A special thank you goes out to Armughan Javaid and family for making our stay in Washington D.C. such a memorable one. Amongst senior colleagues at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS), I would like to thank Dr Matthew Gray for his advice on research matters as well as for providing me a series of opportunities to develop my skills as a presenter/guest speaker. Dr Kirill Nourzhanov provided a welcome relief from the tedium of work by frequently inviting me to play tennis with him at his club. I had the pleasure of being taught Farsi by Dr Zahra Taheri, regrettably only for a single semester, but I thank her for introducing me to a beautiful language, one with which I hope to reacquaint myself whenever time permits. Amongst the staff at CAIS, there are several who are no longer working there but who were of assistance to me over the course of my programme. I would particularly like to thank Lissette Geronimo, Leila Kouatly and Kerry Pert. Amongst current staff members, I am especially grateful to Anita Mack and Pamela Lourandos for their assistance on a host of administrative and research-related issues. 4 I had the good fortune to form a number of close friendships with several of my PhD colleagues at CAIS. Yahya Haidar and I started off just a week apart from each other and have remained firm friends ever since. I am deeply grateful to Yahya for his advice and encouragement and extend my heartfelt thanks to him as well as to his family for the warmth and generosity that they displayed towards me and my family. Amongst my fellow inmates at the Graduate Annex, I would particularly like to thank Adel Abdel Ghaffar for his invaluable advice, generous support and warm friendship. Sa‘id Tehrani-Nasab was another friend who enriched me with his company and to whom I extend my gratitude, along with that of my family. A vote of thanks also goes out to Nematullah Bizhan, Aminat Chokobaeva, Hammaad Khan, Kate Quenzer, Heather Yeates and indeed to all my other colleagues at CAIS over the last three years. After Allah, I owe this thesis to the prayers and support of my parents, whose own love for books and scholarship has been an abiding source of inspiration for me. My brothers, Yusuf and Akbar, have also been pillars of support and encouragement. It would be unforgivably remiss on my part not to thank my family-by-marriage for their prayers and good wishes. In conclusion, I must thank the two individuals that played the most important role in motivating me to complete this project, my wife Sahar and my daughter Fatima. Without them by my side, this would have remained a pipedream. Sahar was my rock through the whole process and her belief in me remained steadfast throughout. I cannot thank her enough for putting up with my moods so patiently and for being a loving and supportive companion over the course of this journey. As for Fatima, I cannot thank Allah enough for giving me this greatest gift of all. 5 Abstract By employing the theoretical construct of patron-client state relationships, this thesis conducts a historical analysis of the relationship between Pakistan and the United States from Pakistan‘s independence in 1947 to its first successful transition from one elected government to another in 2013. Specifically, the thesis places particular emphasis on two conflicts with global implications in which the United States and Pakistan were closely aligned with each other: the covert war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979- 1989) and the ongoing war in Afghanistan since 2001 against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Throughout these two periods, the US provided billions of dollars in military and economic assistance to Pakistan in exchange for services deemed essential for the attainment of America‘s vital strategic and national security objectives. On both occasions, the client regime benefited from considerable latitude provided by the patron to pursue domestic and foreign policies aimed at consolidating its own hold on power and protecting what were regarded as fundamental national interests but not necessarily serving the avowed objectives of its patron. The US-Pakistan case study serves to highlight a fundamental contradiction that can characterise strategically driven patron-client state relationships. Instead of making the client more susceptible to the patron‘s influence, increased assistance by the patron can actually make the client less likely to comply with the patron‘s demands. This is especially true of relationships in which the patron regards the client‘s cooperation as vitally important for the attainment of the patron‘s core security interests. Paradoxically for the patron, the assistance that it provides to a strategically important client can end up undermining the very reasons that led to the provision of such assistance in the first place. Chief amongst those reasons are ensuring the client‘s compliance and maintaining its internal stability. At the same time, as long as the patron‘s own strategic interests necessitate a degree of client cooperation, it will find itself compelled to keep the relationship going, thereby giving the client continued room to deviate from the patron‘s script to an extent where it can pursue its own national interests with relative impunity, confident in the knowledge that while its defiance might lead to occasional tensions with the patron, its continuing strategic importance will prevent a complete rupture and the consequent termination of material assistance. 6 Table of Contents Declaration ........................................................................................................................ 2 Dedication ......................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... 4 Abstract ............................................................................................................................. 6 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 9 I. Purpose and Significance .................................................................................................. 9 II. Methodology ................................................................................................................... 11 III. Structure .......................................................................................................................... 14 CHAPTER ONE: INTERNATIONAL PATRON-CLIENT RELATIONSHIPS - THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS AND ANALYTICAL IMPLICATIONS ........ 15 I. Origins............................................................................................................................. 15 II. Characteristics ................................................................................................................. 18 III. Goals ............................................................................................................................... 23 Patron‘s Goals ................................................................................................................................... 23 Client‘s Goals ...................................................................................................................................