Pakistan Caught Between Regional Wars And Domestic Crises |
The greater Asian region has turned volatile, given the unfolding axis of Israel, India, and Afghanistan, the defiance of the Afghan Taliban to end terrorist sanctuaries on its soil, and, rather, their audacious attack on the border security posts of Pakistan. The brutal war unleashed by the USA and Israel on Iran has created violent tremors in the Middle East and beyond.
Pakistan is, indeed, in the eye of the storm, squeezed by two hostile countries on its east and west, and weakened by intensifying political confrontation and an aid-dependent economy. As the war in the Middle East prolongs, the political, economic, and strategic challenges of Pakistan will leapfrog to a precarious situation. Do we have any realisation of the situation?
The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for oil ships; the oil supply to the world market has drastically dropped, with Brent crude oil prices soaring to over 88 dollars, sending shockwaves through non-oil-producing countries. Saudi Arabia, prominent among the OPEC members, has shut down its biggest oil refinery. The economy of all the Gulf States, being dependent on oil, gas, and tourism, has been worst hit by the Iranian strategy of widening the war.
Airspaces are closed, and thousands of flights have been cancelled. The affluent people, both local and foreign, from the UAE have started looking for safer places to transfer their investments, park their illegitimate wealth, and relocate to safer regions. It seems this war will change the world more drastically than 9/11.
How do we plan to address this challenge? A known columnist has appropriately commented on our situation. He says that our deep internal political divisions and self-centred conflicts — a government lacking legitimacy due to a fraudulent election; an underdeveloped, shamelessly extractive, and debt-ridden economy; falling real incomes and unemployment not seen in the last 21 years; rising poverty; deteriorating living conditions; ongoing terrorism in two provinces; and an insurgency gathering strength in Balochistan, which has a long border with Iran.
And now, we have a war with Afghanistan on the north-western front; Iran burns to our west; while India, to the east, still licking its wounds from last May, is ever ready to harm us.
We have the largest portion of our remittances from the Gulf States. The yearly remittances of some 40 billion dollars are the backbone of our economy. Our exports have already been shrinking for a variety of reasons, including the shortage of energy. The private sector is too small to absorb the unemployed youth.
Iran has not collapsed like a sandcastle; no Iranian is willing to assume the role of supreme leader at the behest of the USA
Iran has not collapsed like a sandcastle; no Iranian is willing to assume the role of supreme leader at the behest of the USA
The agriculture and services sectors will not help in addressing the daunting challenge of unemployment in the country. The chances of the youth seeking livelihood abroad were already dim and will further shrink given this war in the Middle East and beyond. It is nightmarish to think of our compatriots losing their jobs in the Gulf States and returning home to face poverty and hunger, and the indifference of their own people and rulers.
Have our rulers made contingent plans to face the economic and social repercussions of this war? The situation in South Asia is combustible and only needs a small spark. We have been unable to address our internal challenges. Wars are fought by nations remaining at the back of their soldiers.
I do not think Pakistan has ever been in a more difficult situation — facing two hostile neighbours on the east and west, with another neighbour enveloped by the flames of a brutal war, a full-fledged insurgency in Balochistan, militancy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and rigid political stances of rulers and opposition fueling political confrontation.
All counsel for sanity has fallen on deaf ears. It seems the constitutional delineations between the organs of the state have been erased like lines in the sand, and the national institutions are trespassing on each other’s jurisdiction freely for cross purposes in the name of the state, without any regard for the people of the country.
What the state is, is largely an academic question. The people inhabiting the geographical boundary of a territory are actually the state. This way of governance, without the participation of the people, has to change. The people have to be at the centre of any political system. This would be the most important paradigm shift in political governance if we want to get out of our current political quagmire.
Zafar Mirza, in one of his recent columns, says that the starting point of this paradigm shift has to be how we understand the word ‘state’. The state is its people. This is why our Constitution begins by saying in its preamble that ‘we the people of Pakistan … give to ourselves, this Constitution’, and that ‘it is the will of the people of Pakistan to establish an order’, and ‘wherein the state shall exercise its powers and authority through the chosen representatives of the people’, and ‘wherein the principles of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance, and social justice, as enunciated by Islam, shall be fully observed’.
The state is not the establishment or a single power-wielding national institution. We may also recognise that while the political party or alliance forming the government was elected in a majority by the people, they also mandated another party or alliance to play the role of the opposition. So, the ruling party and the opposition represent the two important features of a democratic dispensation or people’s rule.
Without an opposition, the democratic dispensation can easily be turned into authoritarianism. The fairness of the electoral exercise is the sine qua non for political stability. The fraudulent elections, as happens in underdeveloped South Asia, create more political chaos than stability, as we witnessed as a result of the February 2024 elections. The nation has suffered from the consequences of these elections. We have to fix our fractured system of governance.
Having failed to achieve their objectives in the week-long war, the USA leadership is falling back on heinous parochialism and sectarianism. Their new strategy seems to trigger civil war in the country, as they did in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, by calling on different ethnic groups, including Kurds, to rise against the occupation of their land by Iran to achieve a grand country of their own. The Iranian people have understood their game plan. The Kurds were used in the civil war in Syria and were abandoned later.
Iran has not collapsed like a sandcastle; no Iranian is willing to assume the role of supreme leader at the behest of the USA. The late Ali Khamenei has, in his martyrdom, become a unifying symbol, successfully evoking the historical tragedy of Karbala. The people of Iran have already demonstrated overwhelming support for their political and military leadership, showing a readiness to defend the country at any cost.
The resolve and resilience of the Iranian people were vastly underestimated. They would rather face death than surrender, and their endurance is unmatched by any of their adversaries.