Husain Haqqani was at once the benign face of Pakistan’s U.S.-friendly civilian government and one of his country’s most trenchant critics when it came to the enduring power of the Pakistani military. Now he has been forced to resign as ambassador to the U.S., the victim of allegations at home that he sought to enlist Washington’s help in forestalling a Pakistani military coup.
Haqqani’s departure marks yet another sharp downturn in the badly deteriorating alliance between Washington and Islamabad, as well as the latest severe blow to the tottering government of Haqqani’s patron, the deeply unpopular President Asif Ali Zardari. But more than that, his resignation could signal the beginning of a new and far more distant relationship between two countries whose interests now only occasionally overlap, a relationship that resembles a kind of cold war.
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