When three out of four Pakistanis consider the United States “the enemy,” it’s Mission Impossible to build an alliance worth the name. Retaliating for the accidental killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border, Pakistan closed NATO’s supply route into Afghanistan for seven months last year. It cost the United States an additional $100 million a month to detour supplies from German ports through Russia and former Soviet republics into northern Afghanistan. This month, a reverse flow of U.S. equipment, expected to last through the end of 2014, left Afghanistan homeward bound to the United States via the...

According to the latest Pew research, only a slim majority of them are aware it even exists. Observers of Pakistani politics say Pakistanis universally loathe the American drone strikes against Islamist militants in Pakistan’s tribal belt. The view is based on anecdotal accounts of Pakistanis, but not the ones most affected by the strikes who live in the tribal areas where the drones fly. Most of these informants have no personal knowledge of the tribal areas and the political situation that prevails there. Despite these limitations, observers such as Murtaza Haider confidently avow that “if there is a consensus in Pakistan on...

The Taliban have always had a one point agenda in their peace strategy: to get the maximum number of prisoners released as quickly as possible from Pakistani jails and US lockups at Guantanamo and inside Afghanistan. To their mind, only after a steady stream of important, battlefield-hardened prisoners is being freed, thus strengthening the insurgency in the field, can a serious discussion of ceasefires and other confidence building measure be held. And no one knows that better than Pakistan, which is beginning to exert its considerable influence over any Afghanistan endgame as the US and other coalition forces prepare to withdraw from the...