Pakistan lives in a difficult neighbourhood

In several of my earlier writings, I have treated Pakistan’s location as a positive feature in its economic situation. It could become a major transit route for the countries in its neighborhood. India could trade with Afghanistan and the countries in Central Asia. China could use the communication corridor it is building in Pakistan to bring in goods from the sea to its western provinces. That said, three of the four countries with which Pakistan shares its borders face difficult situations that could negatively affect Pakistan. All are related to their relations with the United States.

Beginning with Afghanistan, the most prominent feature of its governance is discrimination against women, especially those that were young and needed education and jobs. The Americans along with their Western partners tried to pressure the Taliban to follow a more accommodating policy towards women. They impounded billions of dollars of assets Kabul had on deposit in the Western central banks and also in commercial institutions, but the pressure did not produce policy change in Kabul. Every day brought new restrictions involving Afghan women. The latest is a ban on women from working in local and international nongovernment organisations. The ban was first announced by the Afghan Ministry of Economy on December 25, 2022. It was one of the many measures that have rolled back women’s rights and effectively erased them from many aspects of public life.

The reaction to this move should have been expected. The day after the government’s announcement, Save the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council and CARE said they were suspending their operations. “We cannot effectively reach children, women and men in desperate need in Afghanistan without our female staff,” the groups said in a joint statement. “Beyond the impact on delivery of lifesaving assistance, this will affect thousands of jobs in the midst of an enormous economic crisis.”

Looking at the way the United States is factoring Asia into its external affairs leaves one with impression that it has none or little interest in Pakistan. When Imran Khan was Pakistan’s prime minister, he was the only major world leader that President Joseph Biden did not get in touch with. Biden took residence in the White House, on January 20, 2021. Imran Khan by then had been Pakistan’s prime minister for two and a half years. But the new American president ignored the Pakistani leader and didn’t call him on the telephone as he had done with most other major world leaders. He did not even send any of his senior advisers to Islamabad to hold discussions with the Pakistani leadership. On the other hand, the Indian presence in Asia as a major power was fully recognised by the American president. In this area, he followed the policies adopted by his predecessor Donald Trump.

Biden took up the suggestion of Shinzo Abe, once the prime minister of Japan, about assembling Asia’s major powers into an arrangement he called ‘Quad’. This was made up of Australia, India, Japan and the United States. This was initially an informal arrangement, but President Biden made it formal by inviting the leaders of the Quad countries to visit him in the White House. He met them again on one of his visits to the Asian mainland. In May 2022, Washington launched a 13-counrty group that included, in addition to the United States, 12 Asian nations. Pakistan was excluded from the group. Working together, this group was to pursue policies to address global warming, share advances in technologies and to manage the complicated supply chains that were now part of the global industrial production system. The main focus of the group was to contain the growing influence of China in continent of Asia.

Why is the United States ignoring Pakistan? One answer has come from former prime minister Imran Khan. Washington punished Khan and the country that he then led because of Islamabad’s close relations with Beijing. Further, while the United States intelligence was predicting the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Khan went ahead with his planned visit to Moocow. He was in Moscow when Russian troops moved into Ukraine. On the same day – February 24, 2022 – he had a long meeting with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. Pakistan refused to condemn the Russian invasion.

Khan believes that his decision not to follow the line in external affairs that was being pursued by Washington led to his removal from office. Notwithstanding the cold shoulder that is being given to Islamabad by Washington, the American administration must understand that it has strong interests in the four countries that border Pakistan.

The most problematic is the developing situation in Afghanistan. With the Taliban having overtaken the government in Kabul – this happened on August 15, 2021 when Ashraf Ghani, then the country’s twice elected president fled from Kabul as the Taliban advanced – it is difficult to say the direction in which this particular neighbour is likely to go. Whichever way it goes, Pakistan will be impacted. Iran has a stable government following a well-defined governing strategy. Its difficulties with likely consequences for Pakistan are the country’s relations with the United States. Because of the way the United States is dealing with Iran, the clerics in Tehran are working on improving their relations with some parts of the Arab world.

And then there is India. The dispute over Kashmir has simmered ever since Pakistan and India gained independence from British rule but since 2014, another disturbing factor has been added to the relationship. This is the rapid move by the current leadership in India towards the adoption of Hindutva as the country’s governing philosophy. Since 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was first elected the country’s prime minister, the minority Muslim population has been assigned a low status. Muslim population is estimated at 200 million, one seventh of the Indian total.

It is only with China, the country’s fourth neighbour that Pakistan has had a close relationship. It has become closer since Washington began to see Beijing as a rival for global leadership. Washington has serious concerns about Pakistan having become such a close partner of China that it is using all the tools it can deploy to prevent the two countries from coming even closer.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 1^st, 2024.

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