Will Pakistan Ever Change its Foreign Policy?

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Abstract

Since its independence in 1947, Pakistan is confronted with a lot of domestic threats and international challenges. Starting with the state-building process with much limited institutional capacities and financial resources, the leadership of the newly founded Muslim nation developed an extraordinary - occasionally described as paranoid- security dominated mind-set resulting in quite peculiar policies to maintain its sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as to ensure its foreign policy interests. Some of the key features are: the continuation of colonial policies (like the Political Agent System/PAS and Frontier Crime Regulations/FCR in the Federal Administered Tribal Areas/FATA), extraordinary repressive policies in areas perceived as restive like Balochistan or former East Pakistan (today Bangladesh), or a remarkable aggressive foreign policy which finds its expression not only in persistently recurring border skirmishes with its Afghan neighbor but also in three wars with India (1947, 1965, 1971) and a perfidiously assault at the Indian administered Kargil in 1999, just a couple of months after New Delhi started a peace process with Islamabad.