The year that was 2020

There can be no doubt that 2020 was a year of extraordinary tumult and disruption. It was a year of great loss. Lost were not only millions of people who succumbed to Covid-19. Also weakened were the economic and political international orders that were put in place over a period of more than half a century. America was behind the building of those orders. The work on them began in 1945, right after the end of the Second World War. The foundation for that enterprise was laid at Bretton Woods resort in the mountains of the state of New Hampshire, in America’s northeast. It began to be dismantled 70 years later piece by piece by Donald J Trump, the 45^th president of the United States.

What made the year difficult for Pakistan? For the country what mattered the most were events and developments that were both domestic and external. Pakistan, like most of the developing world, was at the receiving end of the Covid-19 pandemic. After some debate, experts agreed that the coronavirus came from China and from there took two different routes — one to the religious sites in Iran and Iraq and the other to Europe. The virus originated with bats in southern parts of China. This region has a small community of Shias who visit the sect’s holy shrines in Iran and Iraq. These also attract pilgrims from the large Shia communities in Pakistan and India. They came into contact with the visitors from China, many of whom had brought the virus with them. Upon returning home, these pilgrims became vectors for the disease.

The change in Pakistan’s external environment was deeply affected by the Trump presidency. Although he had been in office for only four years, he left a mark that will last for several years into the future. He weakened the global order his country had led the victors of the Second World War to create. While he was holding the reins of power, he showed a distinct preference for authoritarianism. The Trump’s America was no longer the beacon of democratic hope for the world outside. The President preferred to deal with strong leaders such as Kim Jong-un of North Korea, Xi Jinping of China, Narendra Modi of India, Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, and Abdel Fateh Al Sisi of Egypt. His relations with the latter two affected political developments in the Middle East and mattered a great deal for Pakistan. Prompted by Jared Kushner, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, the President was able to persuade several small Arab nations to normalise relations with Israel. Trump left office having successfully reshaped the politics of the Middle East.

Before Trump could do more damage to the global system, the American electorate voted him out of office. Joseph Biden, his Democratic Party rival, defeated the incumbent convincingly. But Trump refused to accept the result, maintaining that the Democrats had pulled a massive electoral fraud on him and his party. By the end of 2020, he refused to call Biden the President-elect. He did not allow the Biden team full access to the departments and ministries in the government, either.

On the external side, most of Pakistan’s immediate and not-so-immediate neighbours were in serious turmoil. Afghanistan, Iran, and India faced a number of serious problems. They could be called existential. For the first two, challenges were largely the result of the posture taken by Trump’s America. The problems that India ran into were of its own making. Among Pakistan’s four neighbours, only China was moving towards what, from its perspective, could be called the right direction. It had strengthened its system of governance, embarked on a new economic development paradigm which no longer depended on exporting cheap manufactures to the markets in the West, and was improving connectivity with the countries and regions to its West.

Before leaving the US presidency, Trump ordered the pullout of most American troops from Afghanistan. This move is likely to plunge Afghanistan in an even greater chaos and instability than has been the case for the last four decades. Another external development concerns another Pakistani neighbour. During Trump’s four years in office, Iran was the focus of his administration. On several occasions there was fear that the Americans might take military action against the Islamic government that ruled from Tehran.

Then there is the matter of Pakistan’s relations with India. The sudden change in the way the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party is governing that country of close to a billion and a half people with a Muslim population of 200 million people has obvious consequences for Pakistan. Part of Pakistan’s India problem is the way the 70-year-old dispute over the state of Kashmir is beginning to take shape.

While Afghanistan, India and Iran are troubled countries in different ways, China, also a large neighbour for Pakistan, is making impressive progress. Pakistan’s relations with what is now the world’s second largest economy after the US go back to the 1960s when Field Marshal Ayub Khan was the country’s first military president. This relationship has greatly strengthened over time. The Beijing-funded CPEC investment programme was the only source outside the IMF for the flow of external finance into Pakistan.

But there were developments at home in 2020 that deflected the country from the political route it had begun to follow. I wrote in a paper published by the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies (NUS-ISAS) soon after Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) won the July 2018 elections. In it, I suggested that Pakistan seemed to be on the way to becoming a rarity in the Muslim world. In that universe of over 50 countries with a combined population of 1.6 billion, Pakistan as well as Indonesia and Malaysia were the only nations that seemed to be making political progress. It seemed to me that with the 2018 elections, Pakistan had turned a new political leaf. The elections brought a party, the PTI, very different from conventional parties to gain the control of the federal government and two of the four provinces. Traditional parties relied mostly on a few families to provide leaders while the resources needed for managing the political processes were obtained from corrupt practices when they were in office. As revealed by what came to be known as the “Panama Papers”, the Sharif family had acquired large assets in the West using the resources smuggled out of Pakistan. The Bhutto-Zardari family also invested abroad, in particular in the Middle East. This corruption-based politics could only be finished if the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) and the Pakistan Peoples Party drew their leaders from other than the two families — the Sharifs in the first case and the Bhuttos in the second. The year just ended saw Pakistan shaken by the struggle between political order and disorder.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 4^th, 2021.

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