Our challenges and internal rot

In the Byzantium behind-the-scenes politics. any outrage against probity, law and norms seems possible

There’s nary a discussion in this country without reference to the multiple challenges facing Pakistan. Those challenges are both endogenous and exogenous.

One external challenge is that the world is moving away — in some ways already has — from the neoliberal globalisation to protectionism (some call it securitisation) and geoeconomics. I use the term geoeconomics as originally coined by Edward Luttwak in a 1990 article for The National Interest. Titled, “From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics: Logic of Conflict, Grammar of Commerce”, Luttwak argued that the grammar of commerce has not upstaged the logic of conflict but that, as he wrote, “This neologism [geoeconomics] is the best term I can think of to describe the admixture of the logic of conflict with the methods of commerce.”

What does this mean? Essentially, that neoliberal globalisation is facing a crisis in a world that has all but reverted to conflict, big power rivalry and economic coercion. Trade in that sense is being employed not just as a cooperative tool, the original premise of globalisation, but in many cases as a coercive tool through cooperative strategies among allies to punish adversaries either through sanctions or by denying them critical technologies. In other words, when the occasion demands, economic heft is being used by states in support of foreign and security policies.

Peer competition between the United States and China is a primary example, as is the sanctions regime against Russia since the Kremlin aggressed against Kyiv. Iran and North Korea have long been under sanctions. China has also used the same tool against the United States, and states within the EU and Taiwan.

Add to this the impact of Covid-19 pandemic that has disrupted supply chains and have forced a rethink on how to manage them in ways that could offset the shocks of conflict, pandemics and climate disasters. These are all real-world, big problems and inform the most important conversations currently raging in the world. All these factors are disruptive and present major challenges to Pakistan whose economy is already teetering on the brink.

These challenges are also in addition to hard-security challenges the country faces. India continues to be a threat; Afghanistan remains unstable and that instability is leading, again, to an ominous rise in terrorist attacks inside Pakistan.

Hard security concerns also include the changing conduct of war, as evidenced by the Russo-Ukraine conflict. Emerging technologies are transforming the face of battle and require constant reevaluation of war doctrines, procurements and decisions about what platforms and systems must be acquired or developed.

The list is long and this is a mere bird’s-eye view. But this should be enough to give us a basic idea of what’s happening.

Let’s now take stock of our internal challenges. Foremost is the economy. Last Wednesday, I invited former Finance Minister, Dr Miftah Ismail to my YouTube programme. Now, I am not an economist. At best, perhaps, an informed generalist. That meant doing a lot of legwork or research, if you will, to find out what the experts say about the boom and bust cycles of Pakistan’s economy.

I was also struck by a statement a couple of months ago by Ishaq Dar, Pakistan’s current finance minister, when he told the media that no one should worry since he had been dealing with the IMF for 25 years. I guess the statement was meant to burnish his credentials as the best choice to deal with the economy but the irony of his own statement was clearly lost on him — i.e., what kind of economic mismanagement over 25 years or more would keep sending a country back to the IMF?

Anyway, every expert seems to know how to streamline the economy, including those who have had a shot at actually doing it but failed rather miserably. So the question to myself was: if experts know what to do, why can’t they fix it? Could it be that there’s a difference between economics as taught and conceptualised and how the real economy works? If so, it’s like counterinsurgency, a subject I am familiar with: one can put forward lots of theories but the ground proves very frustrating. This is what the literature calls the whack-a-mole problem. Whack-a-Mole is an arcade game where moles pop up in the five holes and you whack them with the mallet to score. But as the game progresses, the moles pop up faster than you can whack them. So, my question to Ismail was: Is fixing the economy, given multiple vested interests, now becoming our whack-a-mole problem?

The programme can be watched so I’ll just give the gist: in theory one can say, Oh, we can and should do this and that but in reality no government has a plan to improve on non-debt raising revenue sources, there are vested interests that continue to stymie economic progress and we don’t have the capacity to plan and execute for the long-term. Corollary: we try to get a billion dollars here and a couple of billion dollars there and even that is now drying up.

Then there’s the country’s divisive politics. Political wrangling has reached a point where every actor thinks that the expected utility of continuing the conflict is greater than cooperation and agreeing on some basic rules of the game. Result: parochial, partisan strategies. That means continued political instability while the economy tanks.

In the middle of this brouhaha is the issue of choosing the next army chief. A debate has been raging about Party A wanting C and Party X wanting Y. It’s not just a bad joke, it is a sordid spectacle. Going by reports, the government now wants to bring yet another amendment to the Army Act.

“The amendment was originally proposed by General Headquarters, as per the Defence Ministry’s Summary for the Cabinet Committee for the disposal of Legislation Cases (CCLC).”

While the initial debate was about the current government wanting to retain a lieutenant general who was retiring a few days before the current army chief, one particular item in the proposed amendments, prima facie, now “seems to be meant to achieve the goal of getting Gen [Qamar] Bajwa to continue”.

Be that as it may and given the Byzantium behind-the-scenes politics of this benighted republic any outrage against probity, law and norms seems possible, I’d like the reader to juxtapose the ongoing circus with the challenges the country faces and then draw her own conclusion about where we are headed.

What is even more appalling are claims that playing ducks and drakes with every law and norm is in the larger national interest. If this is not insulting one’s intelligence, I don’t know what is.

The writer is a journalist with interest in foreign and security policies