THE more things change, the more they stay the same. The proverb may not fully fit the situation in Pakistan after the May 2 events in Abbottabad, but it does sum up, for now, the attitude of the country`s powerful political and military elite since that fateful day.
The country`s ruling club continues to handle a grim national security scenario shoddily and without conveying any declared direction or vision. The much-praised marathon joint parliamentary session that yielded a resolution to protect national dignity and honour has not produced any concrete policy action.
Even seemingly procedural matters such as forming an inquiry commission to probe the 145-km trail of the US raid into Pakistani territory have appeared an intractable problem. The gushing enthusiasm of parliamentarians to take punitive measures against future violations of national sovereignty has been reduced to ashes by continuous drone attacks, one ironically on the day when the resolution was passed.
The call for reviewing ties with the US has proven to be most hollow. In the grand tradition of powerful emperors` envoys, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, came here, had a few meetings, and pushed the reset button on bilateral ties.
Since then, Pakistan`s military and political leadership has been deeply involved in negotiations with a string of visitors from Washington. The subjects under discussion are as diverse as ISI-CIA relations, negotiations with the Taliban, future US operations in the zone or Regional Command East, where the Haqqani network operates, US aid, inquiry into the presence of the Bin Laden network and its possible nexus with sympathisers in the rank and file of serving military officials.
While the tenor and tone of these meetings lacks the warmth and congeniality of the past, these are all taking place under the same pall of secrecy that was pulled over all previous interactions with Washington. The contents of these discussions are so secret that John Kerry himself refused to get into the specifics even though he was chairing a hearing of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Much of this is business as usual. This is in part because Pakistan`s ruling clique appears practically incapable of making the much-needed strategic shift from gross dependence on US support and goodwill to self-reliance. This incapacity is as much a function of the elite`s perception of US power as its own sense of weakness. But primarily this grows out of internal discord and a propensity to avoid taking tough and timely decisions.
Let us take the Pakistani elite`s view of US influence. Militarily, the relationship with the US has always been perceived as important to, one, mediate complex affairs with India and Afghanistan, and two, as a means to prevent the Afghan-Indo-US partnership from evolving into an anti-Pakistan nexus. Besides, the US is considered a reliable supplier of vital conventional arms and, of course, a convenient cash corner.
Military circles also increasingly believe that Washington`s secret operations in Pakistan have reached a point where they can create a third front inside the country through indirect funding of groups challenging the writ of the state. This paradoxical paradigm gives the US carrots and sticks larger than life in Pakistan. The hope of carrots alternates with the fear of sticks and everyone stays in line.
The political class has not challenged this relationship because they find Washington`s engagement with the military too well-entrenched to take on. But that is not all. The political class has also used the so-called Washington card to keep the military`s political ambitions at bay or to catapult themselves into power corridors. The fact that former army chief Gen Musharraf and the sitting president Asif Ali Zardari both at one time used US interlocutors to work out domestic political arrangements is a relevant example.
This sense among the ruling class that the US can make things good or bad things happen is connected with a low view of Pakistan`s own capacity to manage its complex strategic environment.
For all the grandiose talk of Pakistan`s centrality to global politics, the fact of the matter is that the ruling elite has reduced this country`s diplomatic potential to a sustained-dependency relationship with the world`s power centres. That is why now that Washington is baring its fangs, Pakistan`s decision-makers are increasingly falling back on China for additional support.
As the possibility of permanent US aid cut-off looms large, the standard response being considered is to ask for emergency assistance from the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It is almost as if the ruling elites have concluded that without begging or borrowing, or without having some sort of dependency relationship with an affluent provider, Pakistan can`t even flutter a fin.
And, seemingly, they are right. A country whose economy is growing at two per cent can neither feed its population nor protect it against foreign and domestic threats. It would always need crutches to walk on.
But beyond the present and immediate disabilities of Pakistan, which are forcing the ruling lot to stick to their set pattern of interaction with the US, there is the hard fact that there is nothing permanent about the country`s weakness.
These are all caused by a dithering, unthinking set of rulers who are keeping hostage the second-largest Muslim country of enormous and proven capabilities to their greed and incompetence. A rich country has been kept impoverished and made subservient to the whims of outsiders.
Just proper tax collection can yield seven times the yearly aid that the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill had promised but never delivered. It is this side of Pakistan`s mismanagement that explains why this country continues to be treated with disrespect by friends and foes alike. This is our real challenge. This is the real threat the country is facing.
0 comments:
Post a Comment