It was never likely that David Cameron’s comments on Pakistan would go unpunished and today we’ve seen the first formal rebuke, with the Pakistani intelligence agency cancelling a visit to London, “in reaction to the comments made by the British Prime Minister against Pakistan”. The political fallout isn’t as bad as it might have been — President Zadari is still due to meet Cameron in England next week — but the Foreign Office old guard are unsettled.
There was something extremely refreshing about Cameron’s criticism of Pakistan (and Israel), which was entirely accurate and justified. As Tariq Ali wrote in the Guardian, no one doubts that Pakistan has aided and abetted various Taliban factions since the war began nearly nine years ago. But you don’t have to be a Kissingerean realist to agree, as David Miliband put it today, that while it’s “easy to make a splash” in foreign policy, it’s much more difficult to make a difference.
For now, I’m more troubled by Cameron’s habit of telling his hosts exactly what they want to hear. Criticising Israel in Ankara, where the Turkish political class is still furious about the Gaza flotilla raid, or Pakistan in New Delhi, where hostility towards its neighbour has been growing for some time, takes no effort at all. It would have been more impressive if Cameron had challenged Turkey over its continued occupation of northern Cyprus or its discrimination against minority Kurds. And in the case of India, there was no mention of the Kashmir question, the cause of much grievance in Pakistan.
With the coalition’s foreign policy still in the evolutionary phase, this is one defect that Cameron should address.
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