Hassan Abbas, a fellow at New America and author of The Taliban Revival, told me Trump’s remarks fit into the context of deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Pakistan. And they may yet have the opposite effect than the one Trump intended. “This … will push them further away from any meaningful cooperation with the U.S. or direct meaningful cooperation with Afghanistan,” Abbas told me.

Many of the attacks Pakistan itself has suffered were carried out by Sunni groups on Shia, but the deadliest ones have been claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, which shares ethnic and some ideological commonalities with the Afghan Taliban. In recent years, the Pakistani Taliban has been weakened because the Pakistani military launched a major successful offensive against it in the group’s strongholds.

“On a bipartisan basis in the United States, I think nobody doubts that Pakistan has been a victim of terrorism,” Alyssa Ayres, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is an expert on the region, told me. “The problem is that at the same time they are very selective about which terrorist groups they actually try to target.”

Pakistan’s military sees an unfriendly Afghanistan as a major security challenge; Pakistan was, in fact, one of the few countries to recognize the Taliban regime, which was ousted following the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, because it viewed it as friendly to its own interests. The country sees itself largely surrounded by potentially hostile neighbors—Iran in addition to India and Afghanistan—and in recent years has looked to China for military, diplomatic, and economic support. The U.S. sees a very different picture: It has seen an ostensible ally, which is accorded non-NATO ally status, that received tens of millions of dollars in U.S. aid and weapons doing little to nothing to stabilize Afghanistan. Many in the U.S. view Pakistan as the single-biggest destabilizing force in Afghanistan.

Trump’s remarks reflected some of those concerns. Yet Abbas told me it’s unlikely they will have any impact on Pakistan’s policies.

“In my view, Pakistan has earned some of this criticism because their policy on Afghanistan, and their own counterterrorism policy has been flawed, has been defective, has been selective, which has cost many lives in Pakistan also,” Abbas said. “But if you think strong statements or mere pressure from the U.S., or … taking away the $300 million that is given to the military … will be sufficient to really convince Pakistan to change its calculus, that is like really living in a fool’s paradise.”

Michael Kugelman, the deputy director of the Asia Program at the Wilson Center, put it this way: “Pakistan has deep immutable strategic interests that entail maintaining ties to the Taliban.”

Meanwhile, Kugelman said, “the notion of India having a major footprint in Afghanistan is very alarming,” Kugelman said—and it is one that Trump welcomed in his speech. This, argues Kugelman, is one of the reasons Pakistan insists on providing support to the Afghan Taliban and its affiliates in the first place—fearing that India is using Afghanistan as a base from which to meddle in Pakistan, including support for separatist rebels in Balochistan Province, Pakistan supports other groups “that help promote Pakistan’s interest of keeping India at bay in Afghanistan.”