Pakistan and Chinese investments

S P SETH

The recent visit to Pakistan of the Chinese President Xi Jinping created great excitement in the country’s political establishment for understandable reasons. A promised Chinese investment of $46 billion for projects across the board sounds like an answer to Pakistan’s prayers to lift it out of its economic morass. As it is, Pakistan is a mess, and has been for a long time, much more so after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the Unites States. Which made Pakistan the frontline state and in that role it has been simultaneously part of the global war against terrorism and a sanctuary for the Taliban leaders and other extremist/terrorist outfits. Even thinking about this inherent contradiction is sufficient to give one a headache. And to be living with this headache nationally and in terms of policy planning and execution, it is not surprising that Pakistan is such a mess. In the process, it has spawned a serious extremist/terrorist internal threat to the state from the country’s own version of the Taliban, and a medley of extremist/militant groups and movements, some of them enjoying the patronage of the country’s military establishment. It must get pretty hectic and confusing with crossed wires about who is doing what to whom in a country, which at the best of times, if there were ever such times, had a difficult task of governance.

Pakistan has been under direct or indirect military rule ever since the country’s first military coup in 1958, not long after its creation in 1947. In an article titled: “Why Pakistan is Sinking”, in the New York Review of Books, Ahmed Rashid, highlights the problem this way, “The country has for years been under partial military rule, outright martial law, or military authority disguised as presidential rule.” Things seem to be getting worse as: “The arrangement that has evolved over the last six months is the strangest so far: the elected government remains in place but has few powers, and no longer rules the country…”

Externally, Pakistan has always regarded India as the country’s biggest security threat. And this has shaped both its internal and external policies. Internally, among other things, this has meant massive diversion of the country’s resources to build up and maintain a military machine to deal with the Indian threat. Apart from skewing the country’s economic priorities with limited resources, it has also meant that this obsession with India has created a paucity of alternative thinking about Pakistan’s future. It is tantamount to creating a national psyche of perpetual emergency.

It is not suggested that Pakistan simply stopped functioning. The suggestion is that the perceived Indian threat became an over-riding factor determining Pakistan’s present and future. At another level, after the collapse of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, Pakistan decided to divert some of the Mujahidin fighters, now redundant from Afghanistan, against India in the Kashmir region. And its seeming effectiveness led Pakistan, essentially the country’s military establishment, to foster and encourage additional militant groups for all sorts of anti-Indian operations from across the border. Which had the effect of further magnifying the perceived Indian threat and militarizing the country’s politics and policies, resulting from some strong Indian reaction. It has been a vicious circle. In other words, the country never managed to develop a vision for its future. It has become a prisoner of its besieged mentality. In a sense, the old Hindu-Muslim divide of the pre-partitioned India, fostered by the British, was simply transformed into a conflict between two sovereign states of India and Pakistan, and hence all the more dangerous.  Pakistan has continued to regard a much larger Hindu-majority India as a threat to its existence.

As Ahmed Rashid writes, “Because of its fear of India, Pakistan has been turned into a garrison state with a persisting paranoia about being surrounded by hostile countries and dominated by a demanding belligerent United States. Yet the Pakistani army is the seventh-largest in the world with some 642,000 soldiers, 500,000 reserves, and an arsenal of 120 nuclear weapons.” And this still hasn’t been enough to create a sense of security in Pakistan’s military and security establishment. Indeed, Pakistani state is increasingly fighting threats from within rather than any external danger, and not doing a good job of even that. To quote Rashid again, “Still, since September 11, 2001, the army has often been ineffectual. Pakistani extremists have killed up to 30,000 Pakistani civilians and 15,000 members of the Pakistani military.” And the army is engaged in bloody operations against the militants in North Waziristan and the adjoining region. It is a severe indictment of a bloated military machine that is not able to ensure even the country’s internal security and stability.

Coming back now to the promised Chinese investments in a number of development projects in Pakistan, it is fabulous for the country’s future. At the same time one has to ask how such wide ranging economic engagement and cooperation will be carried out against the backdrop of Pakistan’s internal insecurity, where the extremists/militants/terrorists are able to strike at will to expose the failure of the state to enforce its writ. Or else it is hoped that the militants too will see national good in Chinese commitment to lift up Pakistan’s economy in a meaningful way and line up behind the government and army. In that case, will they pack up their alternative project of creating an Islamic state and society as they visualize it?

This doesn’t seem likely and the country’s political/military establishment is aware of it. That is why Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and President Xi Jinping have reportedly agreed to set up a joint security force to protect the new investments. Which is rather baffling when Pakistan has an army of over 1 million soldiers (including the reserves) and they are not considered enough to handle the new responsibility of Chinese-funded projects. One would think that another security force in Pakistan is something the country might do without, because this will only further militarize its already dangerously over-loaded military machine. Even more dangerous might be the induction of a Chinese military component to fight off extremists that might target Chinese projects.

One never knows how such collaboration might develop because ensuring security will be a huge task considering, for instance, continuing insurgency in the crucial province of Balochistan for the proposed economic corridor, not to speak of terrorism in other parts of the country. Pakistan certainly needs economic development on a grand scale and China has the resources to help. But that can only proceed meaningfully when Pakistan has some level of national consensus and a shared vision of where it is going. And that vital component is sorely missing. 

Note: This article was published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au