National security adviser admits Pakistani foreign policy not free from US influence

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf on Sunday admitted that his country’s foreign policy was not free from the influence of the United States. 
Despite being allies in the war on terror, Pakistan and the US have had a complicated relationship, bound for decades by Washington’s dependence on Islamabad to supply its troops in Afghanistan but plagued by accusations that Pakistan was playing a “double game.” Pakistan denies this. 
Last year, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington would be looking at its relationship with Pakistan to formulate what role it would want Islamabad to play in the future of Afghanistan after it was retaken by the Taliban. 
In the first public hearing in Congress about Afghanistan in September 2021, Blinken had said Pakistan had a “multiplicity of interests some that are in conflict with ours.”
While the remarks were downplayed by a State Department spokesperson, Islamabad said they were “not in line with the close cooperation” between the countries. 
On Sunday, Yusuf said the problem with Pakistan was that it didn’t have “financial and economic independence.” 
“Right now, it isn’t,” he said on Geo News show Jirga on Sunday, when asked if the country’s foreign policy could ever be free of US influence. “I doubt there might be a country whose [foreign policy] would be completely free.” 
The South Asian nation has had to seek foreign loans to meet its expenses, which compromised its economic sovereignty and affected foreign policy, the Pakistani NSA said.
Speaking about Pakistan’s newly minted National Security Policy, he said it was centered around the economic security of the country. 
In December 2021, Pakistan’s National Security Committee (NSC) approved the country’s first-ever National Security Policy 2022-2026, putting economic security at the document’s core, according to a press statement issued after the NSC meeting. 
“As long as you don’t have economic security, you are dependent on the world,” Yusuf said. “If you are dependent, then the foreign policy is not independent and then all those issues which we are aware of.” 
The country could not achieve national security objectives without sustained economic growth in the medium and long terms, he added.