THE ill-planned American withdrawal from Afghanistan and its pivot to the Indo-Pacific region is indicative of a seismic shift in the evolving world order.
When a declining and wounded superpower wraps up its unfinished agenda and shifts its centre of strategic attention to another region, other states situated in the backyard should stand alert, closely monitor its policies and steer a well-thought-out path to safeguard their national interests.
In hindsight, Pakistan bore the brunt of such a perilous situation in the 1990s when America had bid adieu to the region after the crushing fall of bulky Soviet Union; its consequences still reverberate in political and security circles of the country.
Since the 1990s, the world order has been exclusively dominated and moulded by Uncle Sam; Washington attained this prerogative after its defeat of the Soviet Union in the Afghan war.
At that time, communist China didn’t present a formidable threat to the US as Beijing was deeply engaged in silently entrenching its economic power at home and spreading its soft power across the border .
So, the US didn’t sense the need to be preoccupied with the thought of the Thucydides Trap against China. However, the rapid pre-eminence of China on the world stage has made the US apprehensive of losing its venerated status as ‘ the sole super power’.
Presumably, when an arrogant superpower thinks of losing its invincible power, it likely make desperate attempts to disturb the security of key regions of the world. Therefore, Pakistan should brace itself because the American ongoing tug of war against China will badly hurt Pakistan’s febrile economy and fragile security.
The economy has always remained a major flank of any world order. In the contemporary world, neo-liberal world order is somehow prevalent with free trade, globalization, de-regulation, and privatization as its major principles.
It is an open secret that the US single-handedly controls the crumbling levers of the economic aspect of the existing world order. Moreover, the US exerts increasing influence over the lending organizations such as the IMF and the WB.
To put it economically for Pakistan, American withdrawal from Afghanistan has turned out to be obstructive for Islamabad; the IMF has hardened its bargain chip with Pakistan by tightening conditionalties around the nose of it, hence putting Pakistan’s anaemic economy on the ventilator and exacting a heavy price on the masses in the shape of unbearable inflation.
Secondly, though American pivot to Asia and its Indo-Pacific strategy are geared to contain Chinese economic growth and military rise, Pakistan cannot escape the telling aftershocks of such policies.
Washington has systematically afforded a leading role to India – Pakistan’s arch rival – in placing formidable hurdles in the way of Chinese expansion of hard power in East and South Asia. Giving India a significant role in the Quad alliance substantiates this point.
New Delhi has cashed in on its alignment with America and the West by receiving, inter alia, geo-spatial technology, Rafale aircraft, nuclear technology, and the latest surveillance drones from Israel. Inevitably, this has made supremacists-dominated India dangerously overconfident of its hard power.
The Modi government felt emboldened to conduct ill-conceived surgical strikes on Pakistani territory in 2019, blatantly violating international law. Luckily, sanity prevailed on the part of Pakistan and it , therefore, didn’t let the situation veer into a nasty conflict.
Interestingly, to cover up its role as a spoiler in Afghanistan and stage a comeback, India is striving to make a diplomatic stint by inviting NSA level meeting in New Delhi on Nov 10.The US stands behind India in this initiative.
Ominously, when a rising power led by a populist government gains military power and all-out diplomatic support from the leading states of the world, it dares to conduct more and more such military misadventures against its foe; abortive attempts of Indian submarines to seep into Pakistan waters is largely illustrative of hawkish policies of the Modi government against Pakistan.
Thirdly, there is no doubt that the twenty-first century is also the century of multibillion economic corridors. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is one of the major connectivity projects in the South Asian region.
The corridor has been in the throes of a spate of militant and insurgent attacks in recent months. These attacks increased in number and intensity after America had signed the deal with the Taliban in early 2019.
The ghastly attacks on Chinese engineers this year working on the Daso Hydro Power Project ended up putting a brack on some key projects of CPEC. An anti-China militant outfit was found to be involved in the attacks When American operations were in full swing in Afghanistan, Washington didn’t take stringent actions to dismantle the sanctuaries of this group in Afghanistan.
Moreover, the US is likely to ensure that Pakistan does not service Chinese loans through the bail-out packages received from the IMF.US policymakers have always made sure that Pakistan does not pay its Chinese loans from money provided by the IMF. More worrisome is the likely upsurge in insurgent attacks on the CPEC projects in Baluchistan; one cannot deny the destabilizing role of India in sponsoring insurgency in Balochistan.
Pakistan ill-affords to adopt an ostrich-centric approach by half-heartedly treating these emerging threats out of the brewing world order.
The government should not put the entire state machinery behind fixing the issues of rising inflation and internal political instability caused by recent protests by a religio-pilitical party; the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Finance should be tasked with dealing these pressing issues. After all, these are constitutional duties of both ministries.
One cannot flatly deny the fact that the country direly lacks a team so that it can make vibrant and proactive foreign policies in a timely fashion and effectively deal with rapid shifts in regional and global politics. Therefore, it is time to grasp the contours of the changing global order and hammer out well-thought-out policies to deal with these dynamics.
The country’s foreign minister and his team are supposed to learn and hone the art of soft power and diplomacy to win hearts across the border, especially across the Atlantic Ocean.
—The writer is former senior researcher at the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs (PIIA) and now an editor and commentator based in Karachi.​
Source: Published in Pak Observer