State Department Spokesperson Ned Price has said the United States will not let “lies get in the way” of its bilateral ties with Pakistan, a relationship he stressed it values.Price made these remarks during a press briefing on Tuesday while answering a question about former prime minister Imran Khan blaming the US for his ouster from office and running an “anti-America campaign”.
It is well documented fact that the idea of forcible regime change continues to hold sway in U.S. foreign policy circles despite more recent disasters, including the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq championed by President George W. Bush in 2003 and the military intervention in Libya in 2011 spearheaded by Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, that left the North African nation effectively lawless.
The Pentagon and the State Department have always rejected the accusations, saying there is no veracity to them.In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century (see table).U.S. foreign policy in pursuit of short-term wins through covert regime change is a folly that policymakers should leave to fictional Jack Ryan plots and Cold War histories. These incidents involved the use of U.S. military forces, intelligence agents or local citizens employed by U.S. government agencies. In another 24 cases, the U.S. government played an indirect role. That is, local actors played the principal roles, but either would not have acted or would not have succeeded without encouragement from the U.S. government.
As evidenced in Albania, it is difficult to organize a national uprising against a government when the population dislikes the alternative just as much. This was the critical difference between the France, Italy, and Albania examples: Using covert support to prevent realignment is much more likely to succeed than using covert regime change to topple existing governments and install more pro-American leaders.
The failure of the United States to send clear signals that it is not interested in toppling foreign governments heightens foreign rulers’ fears for their own security. Instead of helping to distinguish between democracy promotion work and regime change, the U.S. government is calling for maximum pressure campaigns directly targeting regimes it dislikes, and contends that covert regime change activities should be pursued when possible.
This creates a persistent belief that the possibility of a coup lurks in all tools of U.S. foreign policy, which harms American interests and empowers peer competitors. For instance, Russia and China have said that they view American interest in regime change as a threat against which they need to defend.
When examining the supposed successes more closely, even if the covert mission succeeded in overthrowing the leader, it rarely produced a noticeable policy result. As Alex Downes and Lindsey O’Rourke have found, post-coup relations between the new leader and the United States are seldom better than relations with the toppled regime.
In addition to worsening relations with the United States, covert regime change operations also produce a greater probability of civil war, more human rights violations, and an increased chance of instigating international conflict.
The instability resulting from covert regime change can often spiral into a lengthy intervention that policymakers never intended or planned. And this is what is happening in Pakistan today.
