You cannot warn Pakistan against using insurgent groups as a tool to advance its strategic policy goals and simultaneously offer it to expand strategic partnership. President Barack Obama's two-page letter to Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, which The Washington Post reports was delivered earlier this month, seems to do precisely that.
Pakistan knows that if the U.S. is willing to offer it some semblance of strategic parity with India, it is because it is craftily used the very insurgent groups that the Obama administration wants Islamabad to disengage from. Without in some way patronizing these groups, there is no way Pakistan could have made itself potent enough to extract any strategic partnership. Why would anyone give up a winning strategy? Other than directly or indirectly controlling those groups and owning nuclear weapons, there is not a lot more going for the Pakistani military. To that extent they are playing their cards very well.
Notwithstanding the bluntness of Obama's fundamental message, Islamabad knows that Washington will have to do some delicate balancing when it comes to making that policy work on the ground. As far as the overarching goals in the region go, Afghanistan and Pakistan are geostrategically contiguous. One does not happen without the other. Subsequently the U.S. goals will be dictated by this fact. By extension that contiguity stretches even to India. Given the highly complicated bilateral dynamics among the three countries, the job is made even more difficult.
One does not want to dismiss the Obama administration's seemingly new approach out of hand because there is no other option but to keep trying to get it right. The consequences of getting it wrong are obvious.