Don't forget Pakistan. Not now, please!

I worry that Pakistan seems to be rapidly fading from our radars.

A little over a year ago, the American population was keenly following the events in Pakistan, thanks to the reports of the very cinematic killing of Osama bin Laden in a compound only miles away from the capital city of Islamabad. But, since then, the media coverage of that country appears to have slowed down to a trickle.

It is not as if everything is all peachy on the other side of the planet. For one, even if it was bin Laden and Al Qaeda that we were fixated on, we need to keep in mind that the militant organization hasn’t been completely wiped out. Earlier this month, while in India, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton observed that Osama’s deputy, Ayman al‐Zawahiri, was “somewhere in Pakistan.” Of course, the Pakistani government quickly rejected the possibility, reminding us of how it used to consistently deny the odds of Osama ever being there!

We need to keep Pakistan in our minds because there is a lot more to the country than our own interests in going after Al Qaeda and the Taliban. For starters, it is a near miracle that the shaky government continues to be in power four years since it was elected, despite all the fears that the weakness of the leaders and the killing of Osama might trigger a military coup. The worries were justified, to some extent—ever since the country became independent in 1947, the military has directly ruled the country for a majority of its existence, and has exercised considerable influence over political matters even when democratically elected governments were in power.

Yet, the government has survived. Thus, the optimist in me views the current government headed by prime minister Yousaf Gilani and president Asif Zardari as evidence of a waning influence that the military has had in Pakistani civilian affairs. The four years that Gilani has served as the prime minister makes him the first leader to have served the longest continuous term in office in all these sixty‐five years. Further, this combination of democratically elected Gilani and Zardari will be the first ever civilian government to complete an entire term, if everything goes well, before the next round of elections in 2013. While an elected president serving the full term in office might be routine to us here in the United States, the completion of a full term will be a significant milestone in Pakistani politics and history.

A relatively stable Pakistani government does not automatically mean that life for the people couldn’t be any better there. The troubles relating to Afghanistan and India are far from over. It could easily be years before any sense of a geopolitical calm prevails in that part of the world. But, the path towards that peace is through the civilian government, which is all the more why the elections next year will matter a lot not only to Pakistanis but to the entire world too.

Internally, the Pakistani economy appears to be far from healthy. The decades of an existential anti‐ India obsession that translated to unsustainable military expenditures severely shortchanged the growth and development of a sophisticated economy. In the 1950s and 1960s, Pakistanis had higher per capita incomes than did Indians. Since then, and especially over the last twenty years, India’s economy has taken off while Pakistan continues to be in the doldrums.

It is perhaps because of a healthy confluence of urgent economic and geopolitical factors that now the governments of India and Pakistan are beginning to engage in normalizing trade relations. Of course, a number of things could go wrong, as they have many times in the past whenever these two neighbors attempted to normalize relations across their borders. But, hope springs eternal in the human breast!

On our part, here from the US, we ought to cheer these developments, and support them in every possible way we can. We definitely do not want to perpetuate a long‐held sentiment around the world, particularly in Pakistan, that the US quickly forgets as soon as its own selfish objectives have been met.