Pakistan needs help: from where will it come?

T here are many great achievements of the Father of the Nation and given his achievements there is no way we can compare any leader, past or present, in Pakistan with him. One big leadership quality that Quaid-eAzam Muhammad Ali Jinnah demonstrated was his ability to see the future. All our past and present leadership has always been absorbed in the present and that is the reason they have not been able to set future achievable goals, let alone achieve them. Leaders who cannot see through the present make no meaningful difference in the lives of nation.

Almost eight to nine decades earlier, the Quaid had envisioned separate future of the two major nations in the Indian Subcontinent — Hindus and Muslims. And no matter how forcefully the Indians advocate Indira Gandhi’s post-1971 narrative that “the twonation theory got buried in the Bay of Bengal”, we Pakistanis consider ourselves extremely fortunate for having separated from India and carved ourselves a separate homeland. It is another debate on how we have followed up on the dreams of the Quaid but all Pakistanis must draw relief from the fact that we are still a young nation fighting to find the right political and economic models to run the affairs of our state. This we would be able to do not without something as bloody and as revolutionary as the glorious French, American or Russian revolution.

Paths are made by travelling and seven decades plus journey of travelling in the lives of a nation is not a considerable time. During the cold war all those countries that became part of the American bloc arguably achieved two objectives. They became safe and secure and they became rich. None of these two things happened to us despite being a close US ally during this period. We must ask ourselves: why did we miss out on this opportunity? Not only this but later on, not once but twice did the world’s sole superpower need our support in achieving its objectives and serving its national interests. On both occasions, our leadership willingly accepted the role of an enabling state; and had there been any other country with a visionary leadership, it would have taken full benefit of being in such a strategically important position.

But on both occasions, we blew this opportunity away. If today we blame the military leadership of General Zia and General Musharraf for failing to make the best out of this given opportunity, we should equally blame the civilian leadership under President Zardari’s PPP government for not rising to the occasion. Today the equation is simple — our country is in a state of political and economic mess and we need to find a way to get out of it as quickly as we can. Surely, we can never achieve the required economic and political stability without the external help. The big question is: from where will this help come? Americans have extended their support to us for the last seven decades but it has taken us nowhere. The Chinese have been our all-weather friend but when you look at the progress CPEC has made in the last ten years or 120 months, the entire project seems to be hijacked by issues that one can attribute to bureaucratic laziness and political disinterest.

Besides this, all these years we could not find a way to import cheap oil and gas from neighbouring Iran with whom we share over 900 miles of border. Smuggling of petrol, diesel and many other goods is rampant across our borders with Iran and Afghanistan; and unfortunately, we could not discover and implement a legal mechanism to instead make it a revenue generating activity for the state. The first principle of geopolitics is that the location matters; and squeezed between two very unfriendly eastern and western frontiers, we failed to figure out how to best draw the advantage of our location. So, if the American help was squandered and the Chinese are very slow to give our dreams the shape of reality; and with Iran, we could not persuade the world to bend its rules to allow us to import the much needed energy, we are left with only two other neighbours from where help and assistance can come.

Understandably, we cannot look up to Afghanistan, but what about India? Indian policymakers, think tanks and political and strategic analysts must be viewing the current situation in Pakistan with great concern. It’s not far back in history that the world witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Union as well as Yugoslavia. The world has also witnessed the civil war in Syria and how 6 million people out of a population of 22 million got displaced and became refugees. The brunt of the outpouring and spillover refuge effect created by the Syrian civil war was faced by the European countries. Even the people of Pakistan, in the worst-case scenario, may also end up taking that course. Hosting the SCO and G-20 summits and awaiting to welcome American President Joe Biden in September this year, India today showcases itself as a country in different league.

Being the fourth largest economy in the world which is soon to surpass China as the most populous country in the world, India has already become a regional power with ambitions to become a global power soon. It is being said that the world is past the ‘perfect moment’ (1985-2015) that it lived. The speed with which the global economy grew during this period has been unprecedented. Indians benefited from the opportunity that the world offered during this period while we missed the bus. All scholarly assumptions today suggest that the world which is already de-globalising will in next stages end up de-industrialising and de-civilising. This would first happen in the gap and not the core. The ageing producing world in the core will slow down to produce less, and the populous consumer world in the gap will have less and less available to consume.

The leadership of both India and Pakistan need to look at the future and determine what kind of world we want our future generations to live in. If our founding fathers could see the future and determine that we cannot live together as two nations, maybe the current leadership can also see the future and decide that despite living separately there is no other way but to interact, cooperate and integrate to find solutions to the problems that we may end up facing not as two separate nations but as a region.