Imagine this! A Pakistani diplomat attached to its consulate in the “Big Apple” kills two white Americans on a Manhattan street and is taken into custody by the New York police department. Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, tries to get him released, claiming that he enjoys diplomatic immunity, and is brusquely told off. President Asif Ali Zardari then calls Hillary Clinton. Why Clinton? Doesn’t protocol require that a president should be talking to his counterpart and, therefore, shouldn’t Zardari be talking to Barack Obama?

No. Pakistan is a client state of the United States of America: so Zardari’s calls are usually routed not to Obama, not even to the vice- president, Joe Biden, but two levels lower — to the secretary of state, Clinton. Zardari then tells Clinton in his usual bumbling style that the Pakistani in jail in New York cannot be tried in a US court because of his diplomatic immunity and must be set free forthwith. Clinton tells Zardari that Pakistan’s president is lucky that he is calling from Islamabad. Had it been a local call, he would have been told to go jump into the freezing waters of the Potomac river flowing around Washington.

Such a glaring double standard, which Americans make no bones about, is partly the reason why shreds of what remains of Pakistan’s self-respect in its dealings with the US cannot allow for the release of Raymond Davis, a Central Intelligence Agency contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis while he was working undercover in Lahore. A third Pakistani was run over and killed by a US diplomatic vehicle which went to rescue Davis.

An incident in New York on the lines of the preceding paragraphs does not have to occur for Pakistanis — or anyone else for that matter — to realize that there is one set of rules under the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations for Americans who get into trouble abroad and a completely different set of rules for foreign diplomats who run into problems when they are posted in the US.

In January 1997, Gueorgui Makharadze, the deputy chief of mission at the Georgian embassy in the US, driving drunk, killed a 16-year-old girl in a five-car pileup in the heart of Washington. Nicholas Burns, a familiar name in India as the top diplomat who navigated the India-US nuclear deal through the American system, was spokesman of the state department then. Burns had this to say: “It is state department policy to request a waiver of diplomatic immunity if local prosecutors pursue criminal charges. The government of Georgia would have to give consent to lift diplomatic immunity if charges are brought.” Mind the words, “Georgia would have to.” And as another client state of the US, its president, Eduard Shevardnadze, meekly lifted the immunity of its second ranking diplomat in the US. Makharadze was jailed for up to 21 years.

Unlike in the case of the Georgian, the CIA contractor in Lahore was not entitled to diplomatic immunity under the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations because he was not working at the US embassy in Islamabad. Let us assume for the sake of argument that he was a consular employee at the US diplomatic post in Lahore, which, in fact, he was not. Under the Vienna convention on consular relations, Davis would then have been entitled to immunity only in the discharge of an official act.

When he was arrested after the cold-blooded murders, photographs of sensitive Pakistani military establishments, a sophisticated camera, a long-range radio, a small telescope and a handgun, among other things, were recovered from the American. Driving around in a rented car with these highly suspicious objects did not constitute the discharge of any consular work, and so Davis was not entitled to immunity under the Vienna convention on consular relations.

The Americans, however, quickly realized this. So they changed their statement made on the first day that Davis was employed at the consulate in Lahore and insisted thereafter that he was posted at their embassy in Islamabad. Had that been the case, he would, of course, have been entitled to blanket immunity under the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations.

There is growing agreement that the two men whom Davis killed were, in fact, after him. The CIA’s man may even be right in claiming that he acted in self-defence. But fewer and fewer people are buying into the claim by Davis that those two men were robbers trying to target the American. The world of spies is veering round to the view that the two Pakistanis who followed Davis were, in fact, agents of the Inter-Services Intelligence, who either wanted to eliminate him because he had found out too much or kidnap him in order to discover what he was really up to. And the difficulty in simply letting Davis go free now is that he actually killed two ISI men.

Under the circumstances, the present crisis in relations between the ISI and the CIA was inevitable. There is a consensus in the intelligence community that even if Davis had not precipitated this crisis by shooting dead two Pakistanis and causing the death of a third, it was long coming. That is because the CIA had become a state within the state of Pakistan, accountable to no one in authority in that country and engaged in operations which the ISI had no clue of.

Conservative estimates are that there were at least 50 undercover CIA agents like Davis at the time of his arrest. They were not even known to the ISI, a situation which no spy agency could have tolerated. But the American mistake was that when the Pakistanis attempted to have at least a semblance of accountability thrust on them, the reaction from Washington was one of arrogance and defiance.

About half of the clandestine CIA teams are said to have left Pakistan, maybe temporarily, in the wake of the Davis episode. The Pentagon is desperate to stop the slide in ties between the CIA and the ISI because conduct of the war in Afghanistan is fraught with uncertainties without cooperation from Pakistan.

Last week, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, flew to Muscat to meet General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan’s chief of army staff, in a fresh effort to find a solution. Earlier, General David Petraeus, commander of international security assistance force in Afghanistan, made a secret trip to Rawalpindi to see Kayani, but the Pakistanis were so angry at that time that they let it be known that Petraeus had visited Pakistan in the hope of freeing Davis.

Yesterday, the Obama administration rejected an offer from Islamabad to exchange Davis for Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist educated at the prestigious Massachussetts Institute of Technology, now serving out a jail sentence of 86 years in the US on a charge of conspiring to shoot agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and military officers in Afghanistan three years ago. Such swap proposals are reminiscent of spy exchanges between the US and the former Soviet Union, and provide a measure of how severely US-Pakistan relations are presently under strain.