Is Trump driving Pakistan deeper into China’s orbit?

In the first foreign policy announcement of his presidency to be announced on live television, Trump this week abandoned his earlier plans for a withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan and warned Pakistan that failure to meet his demands could turn its alliance with the United States into enmity.

“We can no longer be silent about Pakistan’s safe havens for terrorists, the Taliban and other groups that pose a threat to the region,” Trump said in a speech at Fort Myer, a US army base next to the Arlington cemetery where thousands of America’s war dead are buried.

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The American president provided no details of US plans to reinforce the 8,400 troops it has deployed in Afghanistan or what steps he would order to force Pakistan to capitulate. But his options include the cessation of US military aid for Pakistan’s massive ongoing counterterrorism campaign against Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), al-Qaeda and Islamic State militants, which involves some 200,000 security personnel or nearly a third of its standing military.

Arif Rafiq, a fellow at the Centre for Global Policy and the Middle East Institute, two Washington think tanks, said the Pakistan Army did not see itself as facing a “you’re either with us or against us” moment, as it did in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on the US. The attacks were planned by terrorists based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was subsequently killed by US special forces in May 2011. Nor is Pakistan as vulnerable to US pressure as it was in 2009, when TTP insurgents overran much of northwest Pakistan, he said.

It took 200,000 troops until 2015 to quell the insurgency, although TTP insurgents continue to launch terrorist attacks from new havens in eastern Afghanistan.