Between Alliance and Abandonment: Pakistan–United States Military Relations, the Pressler Amendment, and Strategic Realignment in South Asia, 1990–2001

Abstract

The 1990- 2001 period in Pakistan–United States relations is a key era that has been less studied than the Cold War alliance and the post-9/11 partnership. This study examines the bilateral military and strategic relationship during this period, focusing on the Pressler Amendment, the Brown Amendment, the military balance between India and Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kashmir, and the strategic realignment after 9/11. This study uses a qualitative historical-analytical design drawing on legislative records, official documents, political speeches and memoirs, contemporary reporting, and scholarly literature. To put the regional security environment in perspective, the study uses data on comparative military expenditure from SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). The research results suggest that although Pressler's sanctions strongly affected Pakistan–U.S. military collaboration, they failed to produce the desired change in Pakistan's nuclear policy. Instead, the sanctions made Pakistanis feel strategically vulnerable and doubt America's commitment to security assistance. In 1995, the Brown Amendment loosened restrictions on importing military equipment that had applied before the embargo. It allowed some degree of "diplomatic re-engagement," but it did not restore the prior alliance relationship. At the regional level, the large gap between India's and Pakistan's military spending accentuated the conventional asymmetry in Pakistan's eyes. The study also indicates that bilateral cooperation was still hamstrung by issues of Afghanistan, Kashmir, nuclear proliferation, and civil–military relations. Thus, the post-9/11 realignment was strategic re-engagement driven by significantly altered international security dynamics, not a renewed, stable shared strategic partnership. The study contributes to the literature by recognizing, rather than dismissing, the 1990s as a single, insignificant period in Pakistan-U.S. relations, when it was actually a significant era preceding and leading up to the post-9/11 era. Travels by Suttow and Lavine sparked subsequent diplomatic maneuvers that collapsed after attempts to secure definitive answers from Islamabad on whether or not it possessed a nuclear weapon met with indifference. The visits by Suttow and Lavine led to other diplomatic moves, which imploded when Islamabad showed little interest in giving clear answers to queries on whether or not it had produced a nuclear weapon.