A Case for Coherence as Analytical Tool: ISI’s Use of Taliban and Pakistan’s Foreign Policy

Coherence as a quality demonstrates logic, consistency, and unity between thought and action to create a unified whole. By extension, the testing of foreign policy coherence involves the evaluation of the congruence or divergence between the intended/expected and actual outcomes. This use of coherence as a diagnostic tool sees foreign policy as a product. While the testing of coherence using foreign-policy-as-a-product template gives us necessary clues about the implementation of a foreign policy, coherence can also serve as an analytical tool to provide us information about how the same policy came about in the first place. That is, coherence can also be used to evaluate foreign policy as a process. Using the case study of Inter-Services Intelligence’s (ISI) use of Taliban, this article will show that in evaluating the coherence of this policy, we can work our way backward to establish a genealogy of Pakistan’s foreign policy on the whole.