Tumultuous Year Strains US Pakistani Relations

December 22, 2011

Pakistan and the United States have maintained a critical strategic partnership for the past 10 years despite tense relations over the war in Afghanistan and U.S. suspicions that Islamabad maintains ties to militant groups.

But the past year was a particularly difficult one for the two uneasy allies

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The deterioration of an already-fragile relationship began in January, when police in Lahore arrested, Raymond Davis, a civilian contractor working for the Central Intelligence Agency, for killing two Pakistanis.

Davis claimed “self defense” and was ultimately released. But the incident unleashed public criticism against the Pakistani government over its oversight of CIA contractors.

Before the rift had healed, U.S. special forces conducted a unilateral raid and killed fugitive al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, a Pakistani garrison city.

The covert raid in May plunged the relationship to a new low. Outraged Pakistani leaders, like Pakistan's foreign secretary Salman Bashir, criticized it as an attack on the country’s sovereignty.

“The fact is that the Pakistani armed forces, they had not been consulted, they were not in the know," said Bashir.

For their part, U.S. officials questioned how the world’s most-wanted man was able to evade detection for years, living near a large Pakistani military base.