Gathering war clouds: are we ready to meet the challenges?

Having correct notions and making correct assumptions are the essential gifts of a truly great strategist. Without them strategising no more remains an art, in fact it becomes a burden that the ungifted leader must carry. Notion is considered as a particular belief or understanding about something that a leader must carry whereas assumption is something that a leader assumes to be the case even without any proof. ‘The US is weak’ and ‘Europe is divided and dependent on Russian energy’ were the notions that guided President Vladimir Putin to strategise his special military operations in Ukraine. On the other hand, ‘Putin wants to conquer the entire Ukraine’ and ‘later move into Europe’ have remained the Western assumptions that have guided them to militarily support Ukraine. Putin’s notions have stood the test of time whereas the Western assumptions are falling flat in the face of current circumstances and conditions in the war zone.

Western Poland was invaded by Hitler and Nazi German with a ground force of 1.5 million in World War II. The other half, Eastern Poland, was taken over by Stalin’s Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Considering that Poland is half the size of Ukraine and it took Hitler 1.5 million ground troops to conquer it, how on earth will Putin conquer the entire Ukraine with 200,000 ground troops and later move into Eastern Europe and overrun other eastern European countries too? Judging from the lesson of history, Russia would require a ground force structure of no less than 3 million to not only conquer Ukraine but also hold and retain it. In view of this, the entire set of Western assumptions is based on a wrong premise and is a Western propaganda that is leading its grand strategy astray in case of war in Ukraine.

Two ongoing and two potential conflicts dominate the global agenda: in eastern Europe, the war in Ukraine; in Middle East, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza; in Eastern Pacific, the China-Taiwan conflict and in Gulf, the most recent attempts being made to draw Iran into a wider Middle Eastern conflict. All these conflicts are creating turbulences in an international system that is already anarchic. With every passing day these actual and potential conflicts create panic and fear as the surrounding states and the world in general gets busy and absorbed in whataboutism if these conflicts escalate.

Currently China is the main rival of the US; and just as what it did to the Soviet Union in cold war, the US strategy is to strangle the economic growth of China and contain it. In Cold War, we had two orders: a Western order and a Soviet order. After the end of the Soviet order, the Western order survived and that is not acceptable to China and Russia. In fact, China is in the process of creating its own order and the unfolding of BRI and China’s actions in South China Sea and Western Pacific are indications of emergence of this Chinese order. Therefore, there is an intense economic and security competition between these great powers; and given Pakistan’s history of close economic and military collaboration with China, we stand in the middle of this security and economic competition. Under the current conflictual regional and global environment, Pakistan clearly needs to decide how it wants to manage its relationship with both the US and China. Without deeply committing ourselves to take any side, we must carefully view our relationship with both the great powers, utilising the correct notions to button up, thread and zip our relationship under assumptions based on correct premises. We must weigh our relationship with these great powers after viewing it from all three dimensions: security (military), economic and ideological.

From the military or security point of view, the US is a distant power but it has a deep stated interest in not allowing Pakistan to harbour and develop common strategic interests with China. From the US perspective the attack on the Chinese engineers and the consequent Chinese rollback of its dam construction activities in Pakistan serve the larger US agenda of forcing Chinese to roll back their strategic interests in our country. Despite the US promises of economic and military aid and continuity of the IMF programme which Pakistan so desperately seeks, our military and economic intercourse with China is deeply embedded in our long historic friendly relations which are time tested and which can easily be termed as Pakistan’s lifeline given the threats we face on both our eastern and western frontiers.

Economically our biggest problem is the shortage of energy and it is up to our leadership to urgently decide from where to seek the solution to this problem. Both China and Russia have developed deep strategic engagements with Iran. Today the Iranian drones and other military equipment help Russia fight in Ukraine and China is pushing to develop deep security and economic relations with Iran with a promised investment of over $400 billion in the next 25 years. Can we afford to antagonise the US and can our foreign policy Iranianise?

Considering our geopolitical threats, ideologically we need to decide which side is good to develop relations with for the next 25 to 30 years. We must consider the degree of anti-Americanism versus the degree of anti-Chinianism in our country and allow our people and our parliament to decide which side that may be. Not necessarily take an absolute side but if we finally make our foreign policy basing on the true wishes of the people we may as a byproduct get rid of some of the other ambiguities that dominate our politics — ambiguities like how we view liberty and how much we want to liberalise and in which timeframe; how we want to proceed with our relationship with the third great power in the world i.e. Russia; and what should be our standing on our relationship with the state of Israel — especially after what it has done in Gaza.

Just few days ago, Israeli warplanes have attacked the Iranian embassy in Syria. This has been followed by attacks on five military and security installations in the cities of Rask and Chabahar in Iran. Visibly, Iran is being provoked to attack Israel and war clouds are gathering in our neighborhood. Therefore, we must consciously read the potential escalation of two conflictual scenarios. Firstly, NATO is now deeply committed in Ukraine and if NATO literally joins the war, Russia will not have the matching conventional capability to defeat it. This NATO aggression right on Russian doorstep would be taken as an existential threat by Putin and in nuclear warfare there is no other time to use nuclear weapons except when your existence is threatened. Secondly, Iran’s attack on Israel would have great negative consequences for Pakistan. Being its neighbour, we would face the brunt of many spillovers as well as economic and political turmoil. Big geopolitical challenges are shaping the regional and global politics: are we aware and ready to do what we must to meet them?

Published in The Express Tribune, April 7^th, 2024.

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