Editorials of The Times

Pakistan has long posed a dilemma for the United States — should America provide it with aid and treat it as an ally because of its potential to help fight regional extremists, or should ties and funding be restricted, or even severed, because of its connections to those groups?

The Trump administration’s announcement Thursday that it would freeze nearly all military aid to Pakistan, roughly $1.3 billion annually, is the latest of several times in the past 16 years that funding has been withheld or modified out of U.S. frustration with Pakistan’s support for certain terrorist groups. But President Donald Trump’s bombast and the precipitous way the decision seems to have been made have led to doubts that Trump has a serious plan for managing the ramifications of this move.

Almost every military flight into Afghanistan goes through Pakistani airspace. Most supplies travel along Pakistani roads and rails. Pakistan could shut down U.S. access at any moment, and some Pakistani officials are threatening to do just that. Pakistan could also ally more closely with China, which is investing in major new infrastructure projects and expanding its international leadership at America’s expense, and be more hard-line in its rivalry with India.

The president is good at venting grievances, as he demonstrated in his New Year’s Day tweet on the situation: “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years,” he wrote, “and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!"

But while, to some extent, Trump has a real point, he has given no assurance that he would not make matters worse.

Americans last cut off assistance to Pakistan in the 1990s after Pakistan tested a nuclear weapon and underwent a military coup, creating distrust between the two countries that has never dissipated. But after Sept. 11, 2001, the relationship was transformed overnight. The United States demanded that Pakistan choose sides in the fight against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as their extremist allies who sought a haven along Pakistan’s lawless border. Pakistan acceded, and it was given major new aid in return.

Since then, Pakistan has played a double game, accepting U.S. funding while backing militants who protect Pakistani interests in Afghanistan and Kashmir. In 2014, Pakistan’s army finally mounted a serious military campaign against the Pakistani Taliban, which threatens the Pakistani state, and suffered many casualties. But its security services continue to support the Haqqani network, a Taliban faction that has killed U.S. forces in Afghanistan and is behind many of the large-scale attacks on Afghan cities.

There are other perfidies. Pakistan’s security services support the Lashkar-e-Taiba, an extremist group that targets India and Kashmir. They failed to uncover or apprehend Osama bin Laden, who was killed by U.S. Special Forces in a stunning raid on a compound near Pakistan’s major military barracks in Abbottabad.

In November, a Pakistani court ordered the release of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, founder of the Islamist militant group behind the deadly 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, 10 months after the government placed him under house arrest. And after Pakistani forces this fall freed a Canadian-American family captured by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network, the government refused the Americans access to one of the abductors.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s willingness to give refuge to the Haqqanis and their allies is a major reason the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, where Trump recently agreed to increase U.S. troop levels, still drags on after 17 years. The Islamic State’s expansion in Afghanistan has complicated the battlefield even more.

Trump is not the first to call a spade a spade. In 2011, Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee that the Haqqani network was a “veritable arm” of the Pakistani security service. “Extremist organizations serving as proxies of the government of Pakistan are attacking Afghan troops and civilians as well as U.S. soldiers,” he said.

But Trump cannot afford to walk away from Pakistan, which has often provided vital intelligence and has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal. Whether Pakistan will cooperate after the aid freeze remains to be seen. Initially, some Pakistani officials reacted harshly to the announcement, which came as a surprise, but on Friday, a Foreign Ministry statement talked about the need for mutual respect and patience as the two countries address common threats.

Trump could marshal other diplomatic tools, like harnessing his new friendships with the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to shut down Haqqani and other Taliban fundraising efforts in the Persian Gulf.

This would, of course, require quiet negotiations, not shouting.

Encouraged by supportive signals from Washington and disarray in Israeli politics, Israeli right-wing politicians are enacting measures that could deal a death blow to the creation of a separate state for Palestinians, the two-state solution that offers what tiny chance there is for a peace settlement. That hope, however remote, should not be allowed to die.

Israeli nationalists have long sought a single Jewish state that would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has paid lip service to supporting the two-state solution, he has continually undermined it. Palestinians have also acted in ways that have thwarted their goal of an independent state.

The United States, Europe and a majority of Israelis have opposed such territorial expansion into the West Bank and have supported a negotiated peace.

But President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital,in contravention of long-standing U.S. policy, followed by the threat from the U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, to cut off aid to Palestinian refugees, was seen by those on the right as an opening to end any pretense of supporting the two-state idea.

These hard-liners, taking advantage of the political damage that corruption investigations have done to Netanyahu, have staked out positions to the right of his. The prime minister was not even present at a meeting of the Likud leadership that, for the first time, urged the formal annexation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The Israeli Parliament, meanwhile, voted to require a two-thirds majority vote for any legislation ceding parts of Jerusalem to the Palestinians, raising an obstacle to any land-for-peace deal involving Jerusalem.

This should be the moment for the United States, Israel’s strongest supporter in the world, to step in and say, no, that path can lead only to greater strife and isolation for Israel. But it is evident that for Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is supposed to be leading the president’s Middle East efforts, diplomacy is a one-sided affair.

Furthermore, the threat to cut the substantial U.S. contribution to the U.N. agency that supports more than 5 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria would foment a humanitarian crisis in refugee camps, threaten continuing Palestinian security cooperation with Israel and prompt more censure around the world.

Trump still claims he is in favor of peace talks. All he has done has been to create greater obstacles and fan the ardor of extremists on both sides. If he was really interested in a Middle East deal, as he claimed in his campaign, this would be a good time to reaffirm America’s long-standing commitment to a two-state solution and tell the Israeli right that it is going too far.