Look at it this way: Pakistan's final decisions on foriegn policy and its internal policy have since the time of Bhutto's decline and Zia been with the "Establishment". It is the Army, various interests within the bureaucratic and industrial elite.. and so on that combine to make this decision making collective..it is not an illuminati for Pakistan so much as an inherited thought process. Previously and traditionally, this collective has always preferred to stick to the US camp whenever the chance arises. This was due to the fact that China has not as such been a source of ire for the US nor has India been so close to the US.
However, since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the follies of Musharraf the realization has dawned upon the establishment that the tilt towards the west is simply not beneficial for Pakistan in the long run. When I mean tilt I do not mean that Pakistan will abandon ties with the US, just that it is to be a gradual "warm parting". There is also a realization that an all out conflict with India has been staved off for the time with the nuclear weapons and that the extremist threat presents a much stronger problem for Pakistan than India does for any foreseeable future. It was also in this regard that a good rapport had been developed between the backchannels links and a solution was all but there had it not been for elements in both India and Pakistan who sabotaged it..and then the cell within the free lance workers that reside within Pakistan who made 26/11 happen.
It was along these times that the movement to get away from the US so to speak took hold within the Pakistani Military leadership and the fruits of which can be seen with the rapprochement with Russia. A more balanced bowl of allies is being developed rather than an attempt to have two strong ties. The idea that friends or not friends is as correctly put by
@Syed.Ali.Haider nonsense in world diplomacy. Even China and Pakistan are NOT friends, just very good allies whose traditional interests and long term reliability is established well enough to scratch each other's back more often than not.Neither are the US or Israel friends, it is just that their interests align very well.. and yet they spy on each other.. eavesdrop... be suspicious. The only friends that you have is your own state..and even within that state there are elements that work against each other(wittingly or unwittingly).
While not related It would behove people to do much more digging with an open mind and realize that those who harp about OBL and 26/11 and Dawood Ibrahim and Iran.. and so on. To get the idea that the intelligence community ..the "spy game" as it is is very blurred but has a lot of links to events diplomatically. Recently, a member of the "axis of evil" was taking part in bombing ISIS positions alongside US and its Arab allies..the same Iran which was threatened to be bombed as recently as a year ago. Just the same way, the US and Pakistan... or rather the CIA and ISI were cooperating and working with honesty towards the capture of OBL... but these were elements of the CIA and elements of the ISI. At the same time, there were other elements of CIA that (unknown to the other CIA teams) came in guise of this cooperation to try and identify the locations of Pakistani nuclear assets, or contact the Baloch insurgents or help send information to India on LeT.. or create a bomb blast to cover an extraction of a defector. In that very light, there are elements.. old hands within the ISI who may be part of one division that had nothing to do with the OBL team.. and perhaps were kept on a seperate task.. who might have had a soft corner for OBL..and may have instructed their old free lance assets to bring him and keep him here.. along with the Haqqanis. One need to read the history books to hear of people like "Kim Philby" and understand how a few elements supposedly trusted with a nation's security turn out to be its worst enemies.
I would recommend a read of some good books to get an idea of how important the current avenues of diplomacy are intertwined with the intelligence world.I remember my first one at the age of 10 (Only bought then from Sunday Bazaar because it had details of the SR-71 and early drone operations
).. but it was a very informative book.. dont know what happened to it.. but it was titled something along the lines of "The intelligence game" or something.
Hollywood may all be fiction.. but not all of it is derived from fiction. Certain thrillers do come well researched.. and if anything, offer a look into the duplicity of the diplomatic or spy game for those who cannot spare the time to read a few books but are still interested in the subject. A nice two hours would be the "The Spy Game" or the recent "Syriana" by Clooney... to just get an idea of how operatives of the same agency work and act against each other and the directives of their superiors at times if they decide that they have benefits(generally never as noble as shown in hollywood) from undertaking their interpretations of diplomacy.
