Maybe Holbrooke had come with a message last weekend and Gilani was simply parroting the line demanded by the Americans in private. The prime minister

Is America our friend, our ally, our partner, our temporary lifeline, what? We have a superpower billeted in our backyard, it’s underwriting our economy and keeping the peace between our boys in uniform and the civilians.

And yet no two people will give you the same answer as to what exactly is our relationship with the US. The strategic confusion has cost us.

This week alone has brought two examples. Start with Iran. Maybe Gilani misspoke and confused the UN with the US when he was reported as saying that Pakistan would abide by US sanctions against Iran.

Or maybe Holbrooke had come with a message last weekend and Gilani was simply parroting the line demanded by the Americans in private. The prime minister isn’t the sharpest pencil in the bunch and probably wasn’t briefed properly about Pakistan’s traditional stance of abiding by UN sanctions, not those imposed by individual countries.

The PM’s keep-everyone-happy approach may work inside Pakistan, but appeasement isn’t necessarily the way to go in geopolitics — something he may not have realised until after he, allegedly, misspoke.

On Iran, the commonsense approach would be to start with the basics. Two things matter. One, Iran is a Shia country in a Sunni sea. Wary and suspicious of its sectarian rivals, Iran needs a bridge like Pakistan. True, the hawks in the Revolutionary Guard are uber-suspicious of Pakistan. The hawks believe we are tools of the Americans. They believe we support Jundallah, the militant Sunni/Baloch nationalist group whose leader Abdolmalek Rigi was executed on Sunday by Iran. Ultimately, though, that ‘reality’ is trumped by an even scarier one for Iran: being a Shia country in a Sunni sea.

Two, Pakistan is on the brink of an energy crisis that will make the power crisis of the last few years look like a walk in the park. By the end of the decade, the presently available reserves of gas will be gone. (Demand already outstrips supply, which is why CNG stations have to be closed temporarily and northern Pakistan must shiver in winter as gas heaters run dry.)

The long-term solution to our energy problem is a long way away — it may take a couple of decades to bring our energy mix to levels where there is a better balance between imports and local options and between expensive oil-based products and stuff like hydro and coal.

We can’t afford to sit on our hands until then, though. Stopgap measures to plug the worsening energy deficit will be needed. Enter the Iran-Pakistan pipeline. The Americans hate the idea of the pipeline because it will undercut their efforts to isolate Iran.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Pipelines cost money, truckloads of money, of which Pakistan has little. The American opposition ensures that the IFIs won’t finance it, while Pakistan’s weak standing in the international credit market means we don’t have access to affordable loans from there.

If we can’t assemble the finances ourselves, then why resist the American juggernaut in the first place? Especially since the Americans are dangling the carrots of helping with the financing for importing LNG and electricity from other countries in the region.

Except some familiar with the IP project question whether the price tag is really out of Pakistan’s reach. The number bandied about in the press is $7.6bn for the project, but Pakistan’s share of the cost could be much less, perhaps a little over $1bn. If we play it smart, we could even get help from Russia, which is keen to ensure that Iranian gas is not a competitor in Europe of the Russian Gazprom giant.

The financial and technical complexities are vastly difficult to explain, or even understand. But if the experts can find a way to build the pipeline efficiently and cheaply, our political response to the American opposition should be this: we need to do this because it is for our legitimate interests.

The enemy of your friend can be your friend in geopolitics. Let the US and Iran figure out their problems on their own. We have something important to offer Iran and Iran has something important to offer us, let’s focus on that. Of course, we can’t have a hostile approach towards the Americans: we’d have to pussyfoot around them, placate them, explain to them why an energy crisis here would undermine the fight against militancy.

Since Gilani’s gaffe there is some evidence that Pakistan is thinking about not wilting under American pressure and regards the IP pipeline as an ‘internal’ or ‘bilateral’ matter. That’s the right approach, but it’s not clear if that’s the line Pakistan will take when push comes to shove.

The reason in large part is the lack of strategic clarity here in the relationship with the US. If long ago we had figured out exactly what we owe each other, what we want from each other and what we are willing to give each other, the IP pipeline could have been fitted into that matrix and we could have staked out a position.

Instead what we seem to be getting is an ad hoc response from the state here, one that gives the Americans an opening and hope that we may cave in, even if the pipeline is otherwise a possibility.

The other example of strategic confusion is how the dots may be connected in GHQ over the McChrystal firing. A common fear among long-time observers of security policy here has been that the army has still not ‘got it’, that it still has not understood the nature of the beast that is militancy, that it still has not understood the potential for Afghanistan to destabilise Pakistan, the notion of ‘reverse strategic depth’.

True, the generals are aware of the dangers, but they seem too quick to discount them and focus too much on the ‘opportunity’ side of the threat coin. And few in GHQ would ever admit to confusion, least of all of the strategic kind. They believe they know what they’re doing, as surely as they have over the last 62 years.

But that, as the rest of us know, doesn’t mean there isn’t confusion. Already there was talk that there was something in Afghanistan before the Americans arrived and there could be that same something, with necessary adjustments, after the Americans leave. If you were a Pakistani general and that’s what you believed, then how could you connect the dots after the McChrystal debacle? Surely catching a glimpse of the disarray would reinforce your beliefs.

To potentially emerge from the crucible of the last decade only to find ourselves where we began — surely that would be an unmitigated disaster, at least for everyone outside GHQ.

Perhaps if someone had thought to sit down and figure out that if ‘victory’ against a superpower in the ’80s had cost us more than we gained, the second time round ‘victory’ would cost us even more, we wouldn’t keep flirting with the same ideas all over again.

But why sit down and think when there’s victory to be had?