THIS is more or less what it looks like. When power begins to slip from your hands, like sand pouring from between the fingers, the picture looks more or less like what we see happening in Pakistan today.

There is no organised force standing in the wings or spearheading the resistance to a government growing ever more desperate. But there is a rising arc of challenges to its writ, its policies, its mandate, its underlying financial viability. And in responding to these proliferating challenges, the government appears conflicted internally, cutting compromises where it knows it cannot fight, and breathing fire and brimstone where it seems the fight is already lost.

All the while its finance minister, the key interlocutor between the state and its creditors, is struggling hard to juggle too many balls at the same time. The quantum of Pakistan’s external debt is less of a problem compared to the sprawling number of creditors the country has accumulated over the past decade, and the near overwhelming schedule of maturities that the state now faces on a routine basis.

I’m reminded of some conversations I’ve had with people in important positions over the years. One was with the late Usman Aminuddin, one-time senior oil and gas executive and Pakistan’s petroleum minister in the early 2000s. He had been part of a group that met Akbar Bugti and other tribal sardars in Balochistan to defuse simmering tensions at that time.

The government appears conflicted internally, cutting compromises where it knows it cannot fight.

In 2007, I........

© Dawn