Faisal Ahmad
Washington’s relationship with Islamabad used to run on a single track. Now, it’s running on at least three, and the order in which this year’s events unfolded says something about which one now leads.
It started, fittingly, with diplomacy rather than defence. In February, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the sidelines of the inaugural Board of Peace summit in Washington. The two sides discussed critical minerals, energy, counterterrorism and investment, in that order, according to the State Department’s own readout. Rubio welcomed Pakistan’s participation in a recent Critical Minerals Ministerial; Deputy PM spoke afterward of advancing economic and trade ties. A relationship once introduced to the world through drone strikes and troop surges was, for one afternoon, introduced through a mineral ministerial.
That emphasis wasn’t accidental. Days later, the Office of the US Trade Representative opened formal public consultations towards a “Plurilateral agreement on Trade in Critical Minerals”. It is an initiative aimed squarely at reducing American dependence on Chinese-processed minerals, and one in which Pakistan’s copper, iron ore and coal reserves make it a plausible, if unproven, partner. Unlike Pakistan’s past bids for Washington’s attention, this one isn’t contingent on a war, a manhunt or a ceasefire. It’s driven by an American industrial-policy problem that exists whether or not Pakistan is stable, cooperative or even mentioned in the news that week. That’s a structurally different kind of relevance than Islamabad has had in Washington for over twenty years.
The security relationship didn’t vanish alongside this pivot; it simply stopped being the only story. Look back further and the throughline is visible. Pakistan’s handover of Sharifullah aka Jafar in 2025 remains the clearest recent evidence that counterterrorism cooperation still delivers concrete results Washington values. That cooperation continued into August 2026, when officials from both countries held the fourth round of their Counterterrorism Dialogue, reaffirming joint efforts against ISIS-K, Al-Qaeda, the TTP and the BLA. It is a lineup that reflects a real and documented resurgence of militant violence in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, not just diplomatic boilerplate. Pakistani officials have separately put the toll of two decades of counterterrorism operations at more than 90,000 lives and over $150 billion in losses. These numbers explain why security cooperation still carries weight domestically even as trade dominates the diplomatic headlines.
The trade numbers arriving alongside all this are genuine, if modest. USTR estimates put total US-Pakistan goods and services trade at around $11.5 billion in 2025 — roughly $8.5 billion in goods, $2.9 billion in services, with DPM forecasting a climb towards $20 billion within five years. Compare that to Pakistan’s trade with China, and this framing looks more like an opening bid than an achieved fact. The stronger signal is narrower: Pakistan’s IT and ICT services exports grew 18.3 percent to $3.8 billion in FY25, growth that owes more to Pakistani software firms than to any Washington meeting.
What none of this year’s announcements addresses directly is the elephant already in the room. Pakistan’s deepest economic entanglement remains its deep relationship with China – notably the CPEC. Courting American mineral investment while managing Chinese capital is not, on its face, an issue Islamabad has to resolve immediately. But it is one that will eventually force a choice, or at least a clarification, and neither government has yet said out loud how the two relationships are meant to coexist. Until that’s addressed, the recent reordering of priorities (minerals first, security still present, trade catching up) is a sequence worth watching, not yet a settled hierarchy.
The writer is a freelance columnist who is an alumnus of QAU and FUI He can be reached at [email protected]
