The unmoved mover: our PM
The writer is associated with International Relations Department of DHA Suffa University, Karachi. He tweets @Dr M Ali Ehsan
Pakistan is facing difficult times. Clearly, the US is not happy and that is amply reflected in President Joe Biden’s decision not to call Prime Minister Imran Khan and also in Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s latest remarks about Pakistan made before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Pakistan’s troubles are likely to increase when there will be more clarity on how the world will respond to Taliban’s attempts to seek and secure international recognition as legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. Our Prime Minister may continue educating the world and insist on how ignorant the world is about Afghanistan, but one thing is certain: Taliban have no admirers in the western world and the recognition they are seeking may not come their way.
Our Prime Minister along with the other leaders of the world will be addressing the UN General Assembly later this month and if not President Biden than many media outlets and think tanks will be looking forward to our PM’s views on the developing situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s role in it. So, later this month the UN will become the broadcasting station from where world leaders will raise their voices of concern. But I am personally more concerned on what position our PM will take when he gets many opportunities for the whole world to listen to him.
‘The great leap backward’ is a recent column written by notable scholar Zahid Hussain on the subject of single national curriculum. He says the SNC is retrogressive, and links our great leap backwards in education not only to the introduction of this curriculum but to the mind behind it — our Prime Minister. He cites some of the PM’s quotes such as, “Studying English and adopting English culture is a reason for our country’s decline” and “English medium system has led us to mental slavery”. These can be the PM’s personal views but many distinguished scholars and academics, like Hussain himself, may not agree with him at all.
Not only is our PM’s unending tirade against western civilization extremely ill-timed but also the appearance of the honourable first lady in her typical attire during a visit to a psychiatric hospital in Lahore recently. Opinion-makers have no love lost for our PM’s conservative lifestyle, but is this what the people of Pakistan and the women in this country want? If the young girls in this country want to participate in Olympics or be part of women’s cricket team than they can’t put on the attire that our first lady does and that is where she, more than becoming a role model or a symbol of aspiration, drives women in this country away from a huge middle ground to the society’s polarised ends.
Pakistan is in a dire need of a leadership that can both preach and practise the need to stay in the middle ground. We don’t want a round two of Zia regime. ‘Unmoved mover’ is not the type of leader Pakistan deserves. Pakistan needs a leadership that can move in step with the world — the changing world of automation and science and tech that cares more about what it does than what it wears; the world that is being dominated by a super culture, the American culture; and the world that calls upon all the cultures to come forward and compete with it. These cultures are already competing on the android phones and the PCs and the laptops.
In such a world we can’t hope to veil ourselves from the outside world, build fences and try and protect ourselves by lowering the separating iron curtain like Soviet Union did and failed. The great story of the 21st Century for our country will be — did we rethink our assumptions? Did we re-imagine the kind of world that we wanted our children to live in and participate? Did we provide them with a huge middle ground free to make their choices or did we push them to polarised corners in the society?
If we continue to rush to our polarised corners then the world will stop engaging with us. If the world hates Taliban, why would it admire the promoters and facilitators of Taliban? Isolation in international system is perceived as a stage when the whole international environment alters so much that the choice you make allows you no room to keep up with it. And when that happens you are left behind and the accelerated world only looks back at you and labels you as a brand ‘that did not adapt’.
The world doesn’t leave you here, it punishes you further for showing dissent and the one foreign policy tool the US relies upon above all others is economic sanctions. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Iraq and many other countries are undergoing US sanctions. All these countries are non-conformists and challenge the American super culture and its world order of liberal internationalism — exactly what Taliban and their interim government is doing.
Many foreign policy experts, analysts, political science specialists in the west are working day in and night out to analyse Pakistan’s role in the fall of Ghani government in Kabul. The general opinion is that ‘the graveyard of empires’ wouldn’t have been able to bury yet another imperialist power without Pakistan’s support. Blinken has already said: “We will be looking in the days and weeks ahead: the role that Pakistan has played over the last 20 years but also the role that we would want to see it play in the coming years, and what it will take for it to do that.” The important part of this statement is “what it will take for it to do that” — which in simple words means carrot or stick.
The one-dimensional, polarised and conditional hope that our unmoved mover Prime Minister is giving to this country is not to the liking of the Americans. Unfortunately for him it is not to the liking of many people in this country as well. It is not the first time that Pakistan is experiencing a strong man rule. We have had Ayub, Bhutto, Zia and Musharraf. History tells us all of them showed remarkable audacity to make difficult decisions quickly but history also shows us that all of them made costly blunders too.
Politically only one party is in America’s good books and if Pakistan suffers that party may find room in the good books of the country’s establishment also. No wonder why Bilawal Bhutto despite the poor show in the by-elections keeps saying “we will win the elections in 2023”.
PS: The 11th hour postponement of the New Zealand tour of Pakistan is not a cricketing decision. It is a political decision and a response that not only furthers our international isolation but deeply damages the psyche of our nation. This is what we call fighting ‘war by other means’ and is definitely a trailer of a movie in making: Sanctions.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 19th, 2021.
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