This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 8th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown. The President wants to cut aid to Pakistan, but his tone and rhetoric suggests that even mere diplomatic relations may not be all that important to him.

The Cato Institute's Sahir Khan discusses how the United States ought to proceed in getting cooperation from Pakistan in a very troubled region.

During the ramping up of the War on Terror under President Bush, George W Bush.

He, we had a really good relationship, at least with the leadership in Pakistan,

but that relationship itself seemed to have been sort of counterproductive in a way that

the public in Pakistan didn't like the fact that the leadership of Pakistan had such a positive relationship with the US.

We gave them tons of money.

They did some stuff for us, but all in all, how do you evaluate Pakistan as helpful to U.S. efforts, whether we can talk about whether those are good

efforts or not, but how helpful were they in the last 20 years?

Well, I think Pakistan and the United States have always had a troubled relationship.

And so to say that they haven't been completely helpful is also an incorrect assessment.

I think Pakistan has been helpful in the sense that they are the most efficient

way to get resources to U.S. troops in Afghanistan and they have been helpful in that regard.

They've opened up their land bases, they do

intelligence coordination, they have also done joint operations with US

forces within Pakistan and also in Afghanistan. So the military's, both sides, have a relationship.

And every time the political aspect has a disagreement,

it impacts the ground reality and so even when the

United States has singled out Pakistan for supporting the Hakani network and

the Afghani Taliban Pakistan has shut down supply routes

to U.S. troops in Afghanistan, which have of course

negatively impacted U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.

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