The fault in our stars!

Every country around the globe pursues a specific foreign policy that is in the best interest of the state and their interactions and behavior with other countries are solely dependent on this variable. And, to figure out what are the interests of a country, one needs to look into its history and the problems which are of its primary concerns. for instance, if we try to analyse the foreign policy of our country we can certainly figure it out that: a) the opinion of military is the most important when it comes to deciding our foreign policy, b) it is certainly affected by the actions and aspirations of the US (which might as well be in the interest of Pakistan). From the reading by Graham Allison and Morton Halperine we can imply that the foreign policy of Pakistan which has been formulated and adopted till now has been in its best interest Pakistan and its citizens and that it has been decided after consensus of our leaders to keep it in line with the domestic crisis which our country is facing. But still we see that most of the times our foreign policy is criticized by many, most of the times especially after the Soviet-Afghan war. In my view the main reason for this lackluster in our foreign policy is because of the fact that our foreign policy isn't in line with our problems. and this in turn could be understood by the domestic problems that we had in the past. Military influences our foreign policy because of the strong nexus between the military and bureaucracy which undermines the role of politicians in formulating the foreign policy. And to understand why politicians are so weak in such a populated democratic country we need to see our history and the internal circumstances at that time. At the time of independence, we had territorial threats from our neighboring country India which led to the strengthening of our army. Furthermore, the incompetence of our political leaders to formulate a constitution and not to hold general elections for a very long time validated the superiority of Army in deciding the future course of our country.