US-dominated and priority-less Pakistan

Let us examine two statements to understand the direction Pakistan is heading to.

According to a story published in this paper, the IMF team recently visiting Pakistan was not aligned with the Rs5 increase in power tariff; in fact, the fund reprimanded Pakistan’s economic managers for buying expensive furnace oil and gas, leading to the new increase in the power tariff. That is one statement. The other relates to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur. He has told people to throw a brick at anyone asking for a bribe. Lest anyone hesitate, he encouraged them saying that this act of violence would take the father of the brick thrower to Heaven after death if he is not already dead.

What do these two statements tell us about Pakistan’s leadership and their sense of policymaking? It tells that Pakistan’s leadership at every level lacks the capacity to take that extra mile – endure hard work, find alternatives, get new options and make tough decisions – to make people-friendly policies. But then we have other priorities. Wait a minute. Do we really prioritise things? What is prioritisation actually meant in Pakistan? The answer to these questions was amply given by Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu in his testimony to a Foreign Affairs subcommittee in Washington, where he was asked to answer whether the recent general elections in Pakistan were rigged and whether democracy was still surviving in the country where 110 of the 240 million people were roiling in poverty and where political instability has become a norm rather than exception due to continuous and unstoppable military intervention in the political process.

Lu is no stranger to Pakistan. What, however, we never knew until the testimony was the level of closeness he enjoys with Pakistan Army because of the way he covered them for their interventionist policies during the testimony; perhaps no Pakistani could have done better. But that is not the purpose of bringing up Lu in this column today.

Speaking of priority, Lu told us exactly how Pakistan prioritises things. Imagine a country collapsing under the weight of 3,000 billion rupees of circular debt – a phrase used to explain the debt accumulated because the stakeholders within the energy sector are not paying their dues to one another. When asked if Pakistan would build the Pakistan-Iran pipeline, Lu said, “I fully support the efforts by the US government to prevent this pipeline from happening.” He added. “We are working toward that goal.” Now, let us switch to another imagery. Imagine a country seeing hundreds of its soldiers, on average, martyred every month, either from the TTP or BLA attacks operating from Afghanistan. When asked about Pak-Afghan relations, Lu said, “The US sees present Pakistan-Afghan Taliban with ‘suspicion’.” He also said the same thing about China’s investment, dubbing it debt. Remember, the BLA’s sole target is CPEC.

The picture that emerges from these two images is of a Pakistan expected to have a hostile relationship with Iran. A Pakistan expected to have hostile relations with Afghanistan. And a Pakistan expected to have hostile relations with China as well. In short, Pakistan is expected to have a hostile foreign policy towards all its major neighbouring countries. Given the context of terrorism and CPEC – the former a bane to Pakistan’s economy while the latter a trajectory to economic and political stability – Pakistan should have been expected to have good diplomatic relations with Afghanistan and China. Moreover, in the context of the energy crisis, Pakistan should have been expected to leverage Iran’s competitive energy products.

On the contrary, Pakistan is loaded with advice to mend its relations with India, where the BJP is trembling under its feet all democratic electoral norms to win the elections a third time. Like Netanyahu, Narendra Modi is a blue-eyed boy. Both are serving the US interests – Bibi in the Middle East by keeping it tense and obliterated and Modi in South East Asia to contain China.

The question, however, is: will Pakistan comply with the expectations? Haven’t we already?

Published in The Express Tribune, March 23^rd, 2024.

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