Major power relationships in Pakistan’s neighbourhood

The full significance of developing geopolitics in Pakistan’s neighborhood needs to be grasped by those responsible for making foreign policy in Islamabad. At the international level, geopolitics is the study of foreign policy to understand, explain and predict international political behaviour through geographical variables. These include area studies, national strategic interests, topography, demography and climate of the region being studied. Looked at foreign policymaking from this perspective, we see significant changes occurring in Pakistan’s immediate neighborhood. The regime change in Kabul is of obvious interest for Pakistan but so should be the evolving relations among four large states — China, India, Russia and the United States. Two of these are Pakistan’s neighbours.

The week of December 4 brought a number of developments that Pakistan should be watching carefully. There were high level contacts between Russia and India on the one side and the United States and Russia on the other. The first of these involved a visit by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to New Delhi, the Indian capital. The visit to Delhi was the first foreign trip taken by the Russian leader in several months. The second was the telephone call made by Joe Biden, the American President, to discuss Russia’s moves involving Ukraine. Biden’s call to Putin was made after careful review by senior American officials of developing relations with Putin’s Russia.

On December 6, India and Russia announced expanding defence ties between the two countries that included the purchase by New Delhi of the highly sophisticated missile defence system, the S-400. It is one of the most advanced defence systems in the world, having the ability to reach multiple targets as far as 250 miles from its location. It is also more affordable, costing half of that of the US Patriot system. Indian military officials have called it a ‘booster dose’, using the term that had gained currency in the use of vaccines to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. The Indians have struggled to modernise their defence systems because of financial constraints. This is the same system the Turkish government purchased in 2017 which led to the near severing of relations between Ankara and Washington. In 2020, the Trump administration issued sanctions against Turkey for going outside the NATO system for making important defence purchases. The Indians were betting that that would not happen in their case since China was a factor in the way the Americans would look at the Moscow-Delhi deal. “S-400 deal doesn’t have only a symbolic meaning,” Russian Foreign Sergei Lavrov was quoted as saying. “It has a very important practical meaning for an Indian defense capability.”

India has had a long-established defence relationship with Russia which dates back to the days of the Cold War. At that time, India had proclaimed itself to be a ‘non-aligned’ nation which really meant not getting close to the United States that was busy crafting a number of defence pacts India wanted to stay out of. India was then led by the long-serving Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who was very impressed by the Soviet-style economic system. He believed that the Communists had found a way of achieving two objectives that were dear to him: a high rate of economic growth and better distribution of wealth and incomes. It was shown by a number of scholars that in fact neither of these two objectives had been achieved by the Soviet Union.

In welcoming Putin to Delhi, Prime Minister Modi said that “in the last few decades, several fundamentals have changed” — no doubt referring to the rapid rise of China and the emergence of the Taliban-led government in Kabul, Afghanistan. “New geopolitical angles have emerged. Amidst all such variables, Indo-Russian friendship has been constant.”

In addition to the S-400 missile defence system, Moscow and Delhi signed a $600 million deal to locally manufacture hundreds of thousands of Russian AK-203 rifle which would be made by a joint public sector enterprise located in the state of Uttar Pradesh, a highly priced political space for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bhartiya Janata Party. The AK-203 would replace the older Kalashnikov rifle which was a standard issue for the Indian soldiers. Modernisation of India’s defence capability was overseen by General Bipin Rawat, the country’s defence chief. He was killed in a helicopter crash on December 8.

The second move involving Russia was made by President Joe Biden when, on Tuesday December 7, he had a long telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin. The subject of the call were two fears: on the part of Russia the United States and its allies were boxing it in by using Ukraine that had a long border with Russia and was once an important part of the Soviet Union. Putin was of the view that Ukraine posed a threat to Moscow. The other fear was on the part of the West. The American intelligence community had concluded that Putin had massed his country’s troops on Ukraine’s eastern border to attack it in the early part of 2022.

In the two-hour-long conversation, Biden was direct and gave a clear message that any such action would result in sanctions that would personally hurt Putin and his close associates and completely isolate his country. Russia would not be able to use the international system to do any financial transactions. Its access to SWIFT code used by banks to do business with one another would be totally blocked. In the press briefing given by Jake Sullivan, the American National Security Advisor, it was indicated that the American president came away with the impression that the Russian leader had not made up his mind whether he would order the invasion of Ukraine. After the conversation with Putin, Biden called major European leaders and briefed them what had transpired in the talk. This time around, the West was not going to sit idly by as it did in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed the Crimean Peninsula. The only major action taken then was to remove Russia from the membership of the Group of Eight, the G8.

In the post-conversation statements, it was not indicated whether the two leaders also discussed Afghanistan. Putin made his first public comments on the Afghan situation at a joint press conference on August 22, 2021 in Moscow with Angela Merkel who was preparing to retire as German Chancellor, a job she had held for several years. He said that he knows Afghanistan well and understood that it was counterproductive to impose external forms of government. “Any such sociopolitical experimentation has never been crowned with success and only lead to the destruction of states, and degradation of their political and social systems.” He said that “it is necessary to stop the irresponsible policy of imposing other people’s values from outside, the desire to build democracy in other countries, not taking into account either historical, national and religious characteristics, and completely ignoring the traditions by which people live.” He was speaking not just about what Americans and the West had attempted to do in Afghanistan but had in mind the interference in the countries of Eastern Europe that were once part of the Soviet Union.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 13^th, 2021.

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