The Foreign Service Journal, September 2010

ward-looking” China. In the short term, however, the United States re- mains heavily reliant on Pakistan, which allows more than 70 percent of U.S.-NATO military sup- plies to travel through its territory into landlocked Afghanistan. Moreover, Pakistan’s military relies on Pashtun militants as key informants in the tribal region, in turn providing U.S. intelli- gence agencies with vital counterter- rorism cooperation. In this respect, America’s short- and long-term secu- rity interests may collide as much as they coalesce. Because countries in the broader Asia-Pacific region are so firmly inter- locked, a shift in U.S. policy toward one could affect seemingly unrelated poli- cies toward another. Historically, when- ever the United States and India drew closer together, Pakistan and China did the same. Similar shifts are occurring today and could portend the emergence of two contending great power blocs in South Asia, with the United States and India on one side and China and Pak- istan on the other (see Fig. 1). An additional great power dynamic has been the revival of the India-Iran- Russia axis. Throughout the 1990s, these old partners supported Afghani- stan’s Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance against the Pashtun-dominated Taliban backed by Pak- istan and Saudi Arabia. Lately India, Iran and Russia have all been eager to secure their strategic and economic interests from the Hindu Kush to the Caspian Sea — inde- pendent of NATO and the United States. Further complicating these regional dyads is India’s growing development effort in Afghanistan. Regardless of how benign it is, this effort feeds wildly elaborate and highly dubious conspir- acy theories in Pakistan that the United States and India are colluding against their country. These suspicions en- courage hawkish elements in Pakistan to continue their self-defeating support of Islamist proxies. S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 0 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 39 Fig. 1