Washington and Islamabad are in the midst of yet another geopolitical divorce. The US National Security Council’s South Asia man, Peter Lavoy, and the special representative for AfPak, Rick Olson, were in Islamabad last week in an attempt to salvage what is left.

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When Pakistan asked the US to subsidise the F-16s, as Washington has done in the past, it immediately ran into opposition. As Michael Krepon of the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank, noted, “The only choices Congress seriously considered were to block the sale or to require payment in full.” Senator Bob Corker of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee decided to opt for the latter as a compromise.

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