We are now witnessing tumultuous times of major change in the world around us. A fresh epoch of world history is in the making – and it may prove to be the most profound: Russia under Vladimir Putin, has attacked Ukraine -- and in Pakistan, a state system that has been rotten to the core for a long time is finally showing signs of crisis and breakup. Ostensibly both these events seem separate and disjointed to a casual observer, but they are very closely related. In order to understand that implication, one has to be a seasoned student of history, but a brief explanation is in order.
Author: Arif Hasan Akhundzoda
The battle is between two branches of European civilization: the Western civilization, which has exploited the rest of the world for its own benefit and supremacy over the past 500 years – and Russia, which has followed an alternate path of modern development and is opposed to Western philosophies, strategies and intentions. Five hundred years ago a few countries of renascent Western Europe seized most of the rest of the world and its wealth in order to develop their power and societies. The small European island of Britain became the most dominant of them all. It also seeded its successor, the USA. The Western Europeans established the “modern world” where European civilization – with its science, technology, and culture – is now in the vanguard. An exception is Russia – which although dominated by the Eastern European Slavic ethnicity – is actually Eurasian in character, straddling as it does the territories of both these divisions of the supercontinent. Russia also follows European civilization but owes its development and current position to an alternate path of European modern development known as Marxism, although it is not Marxist now. This divide between “East and West” can perhaps be further explained in the schism between the Orthodox and Roman (and later Lutheran) Christian doctrines.
Pakistan is a weak and dependent state, artificially created by Britain to embody and advance its geopolitical aims in this region after it physically left the area in 1947: these aims related mainly to the containment of Russia in the south Asian and Middle Eastern oil bearing region, so that the West could control and access the supply of petroleum which was so crucial to the technology on which its lifestyle is based. Pakistan – which was later on passed over to the US after Britain’s primacy declined – was also intended to contain Communist China and also keep a check on India lest it become too independent. By an unexpected twist the India-Pakistan rivalry got out of hand, and the resultant effect was an alliance of convenience between two very unlikely “friends” Pakistan and China. Modern nation-states are usually held together by pretences of common ethnicity, language and culture. Pakistan has no such cohesion – and the justification offered for its creation centred on the religion of Islam in India – although present day India and Bangladesh (former East Pakistan) still have far more Muslims than Pakistan’s total population. Pakistan is a state controlled by a nexus of parasitic rural, tribal and bourgeois elites who owe their power and privilege to the former British rulers. These elites in turn maintain an Army which takes care of everything in this country. As such, the Anglo- Western patrons and their other allies provide financial aid to this country which is used by the ruling elites to service the infrastructure, while the rest is pocketed.
Lately this corrupt dysfunction and embezzlement has increased exponentially, especially from the 1980s onward when the American CIA created an Islamic Jihad and flooded Pakistan and its Army with billions of free Dollars in its effort to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and destroy that country’s modernist revolution. This has resulted not only in the rise of guns, drug culture and religious violence and other forms of crime in the society, but also massive financial theft. For the past 40 years, the country has been run mainly by two massive corrupt rival political groupings – the PPP and PML-N – which have turn by turn sucked the treasury dry of funds and degraded the infrastructure via massive pilferage and nepotism. Only the Army remains relatively free of these effects as it has to preserve the country and hold it together. However its officers enjoy many high privileges, and by the time an officer reaches the general ranks, he lives like a prince. This is regarded a perfectly in order. This overall state of affairs has by now resulted in a critical situation in the functioning of this country and its system and has attained the magnitude of a spiritual malaise among the people. The situation now seems hopeless and out of control, and on this account Pakistan’s Western patrons and financiers lately seem to regard it as a dangerous and unpredictable liability, rather than the useful geopolitical tool it once was for them.
A related key factor influencing the Pakistani state’s decline is its involvement in Afghanistan. Once it had been an adventure for the Pakistanis, to wage a “proxy imperialism” of their own in Afghanistan in the shadow of their American masters. Millions of refugees were let in who received free aid from the West. They never really left Pakistan after that. With the Soviet withdrawal and collapse of the USSR, American involvement reduced, and was limited to a possible role for the Taliban in facilitating access to pipeline to transport Caspian oil. But that did not work out in the same manner that the previous Mujahideen had also turned foul. Pakistan’s Punjabi dominated military and security establishment had continued using the aftereffects of the original Afghan Jihad as its own instrument to dominate that primitive tribal country in the light of an ancient rivalry existing between Afghans and Punjabi Indians – and long after these Islamic elements fell foul of their original Western creators. By the time “9/11” took place the Jihadis were like a flesh embedded nail in the Pakistani military security establishment. America demanded that Pakistan act ruthlessly against these malignant cells, but that was not possible because they had become part of the Pakistani state organism. So Pakistan was faced with a nightmarish situation, in which it had to lie to its American patrons about acting against the Taliban – while at the same time harbouring and defending the same Taliban from the American-NATO combine. That explains why Osama Bin Laden was found living in a safe house just a few hundred meters from the Pakistan Military Academy in a special military district. The action that the Americans took against the Taliban from 2002 caused them to flee over the border into the autonomous Pashtun tribal belt where no writ of law runs except ancient Pashtun customary tribal law. This led to a radicalisation of the Pakistani Pashtun tribesmen, and by 2004 the country was witnessing the emergence of the “Pakistani Taliban”. By the end of 2007 they had organised themselves into the Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan (TTP) and a full-fledged insurgency had begun in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. This lasted for a further seven years, and never really died down.
By 2015 it was clear to all observers that the Pakistani state was failing due to its own rot and illness – and was being abandoned by its confounded Western masters, who had not expected such an outcome. This situation would in turn spell great danger not only for Pakistan’s patrons and enemies – but also its neighbouring countries. China is a regional and world power that was well aware of what this situation could spell to its own regional security interests. Therefore in 2013, it formulated a grand scheme that would enable direct and massive Chinese involvement and presence on Pakistani territory. Ostensibly, this scheme would be an economic infrastructural project and a transportation corridor linking Chinese Xinjiang with the Baloch port of Gwadar. However it had clear strategic implications. The takeover of Pakistan by the Chinese “big brother” would not only save it from its own internal rot and insurgency….but would protect it from its enemy India, which was also China’s regional rival; it would insure Pakistan against economic collapse and provide millions of jobs besides low cost yet good quality goods and services. On 21 April 2015 this scheme (named CPEC) was formally announced upon the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Pakistan.
However there were factors which has eluded Chinese calculations. One is that the Pakistani temperament and work ethic is not what the Chinese expected. They were soon facing snags posed by the local corruption. There was also a sizeable and influential section of the local ruling elites who hate and feared the Chinese – thinking that they would deprive them of all they had enjoyed during their almost 200-year relations with the British and Americans. The British and Americans had pampered the local elites because they were mercantile imperialists who wanted to loot their colony. They were not interested in any serious social reform or development. They just wanted loyal and servile proxies who would foil Russian designs in the area. But that was an old and outdated concept…
The American efforts were failing in Afghanistan, and they knew it. Afghanistan could not be dominated. It was a pointless waste to remain there. Besides it was not posing the threat it once did when Bin Laden was alive, and the US knew it would soon need to redeploy its forces to other more relevant theatres especially in Europe and the Pacific. Russia under President Putin had begun to reassert itself on the world stage since 2012, when it confronted and foiled American designs to destroy Syria. In 2014 Russian forces retook the Crimean Peninsula from the Ukraine, with its strategic naval base.
The Americans were therefore devising strategies for extricating themselves from the primitive Afghan mess – while trying to save face to preserve their international respect. Either way, a US withdrawal would not favour Pakistan, so the Pakistani planners resented the idea: the US military presence next door helped lessen the threat of a Taliban takeover in Pakistan; it also ensured that Pakistan kept receiving massive Western aid to keep it viable. Such aid was not just limited to that which Pakistan had traditionally received since its creation in 1947, but was provided under different pretexts such as the Afghan war related “Coalition Support Fund” (CSF), etc. However in the end the compulsions were such that the US literally fled when its final flights left Kabul Airport on 15 August 2021.
The Pakistani establishment knew that the politicians who had been running the country for the last several decades were the cause of the malaise that this country was afflicted with – and that if it were to survive, they would have to be replaced. None save two of the so-called “elected” governments that had been ruling since February 1985 had left office or completed its term naturally; all were removed or sacked due to accusations of massive corruption and incompetence, which was destabilising the setup. But the fact is that only two parties monopolized the politics of this country. If one was removed, the other would replace it. New political entrants would follow the old traditions, and politicians here frequently jump from one party to the one they know to be winning….and jump back again when their new party suffers some misfortune.
By 2018, the Establishment was desperate in finding some fresh figure whom they could back as the new Prime Minister over the tried and tested; the country was bankrupt and failing. One such person was the cricket celebrity, Imran Khan. He had been trying his hand at politics since 1996 when he formed his own party – but his luck began to get better in 2013 when his party formed the government in KP Province. The Establishment decided that they would “help” Imran Khan win the elections of 2018. That is what happened. Although not as corrupt as his predecessors (perhaps they had not left him that much to rob!), his associates and subordinates were all corrupt and Imran himself was an inspiring figure but very inexperienced. He did not know politics and just wanted to become Prime Minister. Over the course of his nearly four year rule, the malfunctioning and corruption of his government grew further. The IMF and WB which lent the money that Pakistan survived on, tightened the conditions for their loans as the risk of mismanagement and default grew – and this resulted in unprecedented inflation. The Western leaders began to ignore Pakistan and its Prime Minister and the newly elected US President Biden would avoid his phone calls.
The international situation was changing dramatically. In January 2020 COVID-19 made its appearance, and no elaboration is needed on that. On that score, it seems the Imran Khan government did rather well. On 1 April 2021 America suddenly announced its Afghan withdrawal, the Afghan Taliban re-emerged, and key Afghan cities and provinces “suddenly” began falling to them. By 15 August 2021 when the Americans had completed their pull-out, the Taliban were effortlessly ruling Afghanistan again from Kabul: twenty years of American effort (the largest war fought by this “hyperpower”) vanished into thin air. Additionally, in the six or so months since the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Pakistani Taliban or TTP’s terrorist activities and operations have increased manifold, especially in the districts on the Afghan border. It is no secret that the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban are basically one and the same.
In November 2021, Russia began deploying its forces on the border with the Ukraine in preparation for an invasion; that invasion took place on 24 February 2022. On that day, Imran Khan was in Moscow, meeting President Putin. Imran Khan during his premiership never seemed to comment or bother doing so, regarding the changing power balance on the global scene. However the Russian troop deployment followed by the invasion of the Ukraine enhanced Russian prestige in this society, and Imran Khan was more vocal in his praise of Russia. He also supported the Russian action. That is where things seemed to go wrong for him, as he said the concerned official in the American State Department sent a threatening cable to the Pakistani Ambassador in Washington, for onward transmission to the Pakistani Government – regarding Imran Khan and his public pro-Russian pronouncements. According to Imran, on 8 March 2022 the corrupt opposition parties which had previously been sidelined, suddenly joined hands in Parliament to table a no-confidence motion against his Prime Ministership – and that this had been carried out via payments of massive amounts of money to these politicians by Western powers. Imran Khan began a campaign of support for himself by making speeches around the country, in which he became more vocally anti-Western. The no-confidence vote was scheduled for 28 March 2022, but the Prime Minister took some steps and dissolved the Parliament, thereby preventing the vote from taking place. It was at this point that the Establishment joined the picture: it seems that the hostile American letter, plus Imran Khan’s increased anti-American response had unnerved them….it had also revealed the divisions within the Establishment which had hitherto remained hidden. The Army Chief himself joined in, publicly declaring that he would never think of disobeying America, and that relations with America and the West were the primary factor of Pakistan’s national security doctrine. He also criticized the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Although these facts were long known, his sudden admission made him unpopular overnight, and common Pakistanis who at one time adored and feared their Army – began reviling and abusing it. Imran Khan just increased his anti-Western rhetoric. People forgot about the inflation, and his popularity zoomed. He became someone who protected the Pakistani and Islamic national honour against Western slavery.
Another factor, several days later, was a television interview by the opposition leader (and now new Prime Minister) Shahbaz Sharif – in which he said that Pakistanis may hate America and its domination, but they had no other option because they were beggars, who depended upon Western aid for survival. This brought a huge outpouring of rage from the average Pakistani citizens….who said that corrupt politicians like Shahbaz Sharif had made them beggars in the first place, by stealing all the national money from the treasury.
Imran Khan had decided that after dissolving the National Assembly, he would call a fresh general election within 90 days as stipulated in the National Constitution. One of the reasons he took this step was that several of his own parliamentarians had changed their loyalties after receiving funds from “hidden quarters” and that his position as Prime Minister within the present assembly was insecure. However on 7 April 2022 the Pakistani Supreme Court suddenly restored the National Assembly, ordering it to meet at 10:30 AM on Sunday, 10 April 2022 – and hold the vote of no-confidence proceedings, because it felt that Imran Khan had violated the Constitution by dissolving the assembly. Imran Khan made a national speech on television on 8 April 2022, during which he stated his resolve, and reiterated his position.
On 10 April the session of the assembly was convened and lasted many hours into the evening, despite it being Ramazan. Imran Khan returned to his official residence, where his aides urged him to sign a document, removing the Army Chief. However, before this could happen, the Army Chief and the Head of the ISI (Pakistan’s infamous intelligence organization) quickly arrived in a helicopter at the residence and entered it forcibly. They threatened Imran Khan and ordered him to resign immediately. Some say that the Intelligence Chief even slapped the Prime minister. After that, the game was over. The assembly was still in session. Its members “elected” Shahbaz Sharif as the new Prime minister – and the assembly was ordered to complete its current term, up to 20 August 2023, for the duration of which Shahbaz will remain Prime minister. So no fresh elections will be held, until that date.
However, it remains to be seen what happens next – in this unstable and troubled country…
SUMMATION
It is plainly evident that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine is actually the first step in challenging the hegemony of Western European imperialism in the world – a hegemony which began 500 years ago with the expansion of Spanish colonialism in the “New World” – followed by the establishment of the British East India Company in 1599. (Doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism may be dead – but many of the concepts and definitions it recognised and engendered are still very much valid. It has given way and given birth to yet newer concepts).
It is also evident that Pakistan was a weak state artificially created from the old British Indian Empire by the Anglo-Western powers when a battered Britain found it hard to maintain its direct colonial hold over India in the aftermath of World War 2. This new neo-colonial client state was intended primarily as a geopolitical instrument of malevolence and mischief from the very outset, which was then passed on to the new world power and British protégé, the USA, which used it in its Cold War operations against the USSR – the last of which was the Afghan Jihad of the 1980s. After the US won full mastery of the world in 1991, Pakistan remained – but became a symbol of increasing corruption and decrepitude, signifying the depths to which people can fall…it has now arrived at a doubtful and pitiable stage, if not the final one – in its existence.
The emerging alternate world power axis of Russia and China intended to take over Pakistan, at the end of its existence – with the intention of salvaging it and putting it to better use; however it seems that fulfilling this noble intention will not be possible, owing to a host of factors.
