In at least three years, a country called Pakistan may disappear from the world map.
Author: Arif Hasan Akhundzada, Regional Affairs Expert (Pakistan), especially for Sangar
After the incident on 9 May the “Establishment” (read Army) which owns this country has now begun rectifying their latest failed experiment named the PTI. This experiment began 12 years ago with a meeting held by Imran Khan at Minar-e-Pakistan on 30 October 2011.
From the moment it occurred a few weeks ago, it was clearly apparent to me that the incident of 9 May had been engineered deliberately by those in charge to take the steps that they are now taking. After allowing and encouraging charged rioters and Imran Khan supporters to damage a few selected buildings and symbolic military installations, the authorities moved quickly to shut down the internet and declare 9 May a “day of infamy”. However internet services were resumed after 3 days. They also declared 24 May to be commemorated as a “day of martyrs” in order to hype up propaganda for this country and the symbols associated with its armed forces. This has been a standard military tactic in the 75 year existence of Pakistan. Since 9 May 2023 the authorities are believed to have shot dead scores of demonstrators and have thus far, by their own admission, arrested 10,000 “miscreants” who they say will be tried by military courts under special military laws. Many people are said to be fleeing the country. Young professionals are traveling in droves to their destinations of choice in the West, while hundreds if not thousands of PTI cadres and members are said to have fled across the Durand line and are now with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The rulers have also prevented the leadership of PTI from traveling abroad and the intelligence agency is forcing the top leaders of this party to resign from politics and denounce the party and its leader publicly – under the threat kidnapping their families and forcing their wives and daughters to pose naked in videos. Yesterday a senior official announced that the PTI would soon be declared illegal.
It should be kept in mind that this time around the situation for Pakistan and its future prospects is very different from what it was on all previous occasions. Pakistan was initially created as an artificial nation state, solely in order to rent itself out and fulfil certain geostrategic roles by global powers: it was created as an Anglo-American geopolitical bastion, to prevent Soviet Russia from obtaining a direct foothold the Persian Gulf area. As such this country was run by a parasitic bourgeois ruling elite – topped by the army – which is Anglophone and which did not care or see any need to develop the rest of the society or a national infrastructure because it was being provided freely with all the aid it needed by its Anglo-American backers – 75% of this aid was being pocketed personally by this elite, while spending the bare minimum on keeping this country running. All Pakistan and its elites had to do was to was to form an impediment to Soviet/Russian moves in the region. In giving Pakistan this aid, the West tolerated (and even encouraged) extreme corruption and dysfunction – as long as its geostrategic needs were being met. America even tolerated Pakistan’s token toy “nuclear programme”. Self-respect is not an issue for Pakistanis, either in acting as a slave or toady, or in robbing the assets belonging to one’s own family. History knows the denizens of the Indus Valley populations to be the descendants of slaves as well as plunderers. That is why they repress proper history. Neither do Pakistanis seem to possess strategic vision.
But such an arrangement of direct slavery and endless aid was not sustainable. Since 2012 when Russia and China began reasserting themselves against Anglo-American “Globalist Unipolar” supremacy in the world, the West has been facing increasing adversity on the global level. After confronting America in Syria in 2012 for the first time, Vladimir Putin quickly regained the strategic Crimean Peninsula for Russia in 2014 in a surprise move. In 2022 a few months after America fled from Afghanistan, he was ready to invade the Ukraine, which was being used as a hotbed of mischief against Russia at its very borders, and as a springboard to expand NATO further. Pakistan’s old role as a South Asian strategic bulwark against Russia was suddenly no longer viable because Russia was now acutely and directly threatening the existence of a weakened West in the primary European Continental theatre. The West now has to fight for its continued primacy on its own European home turf, rather than throw unaudited billions at corrupt toadies in a faraway region which it has effectively abandoned. As can be expected, the international lending institutions such as the IMF and World Bank through which the West propped up Pakistan and its dysfunctional regime – are now using every excuse at hand to decline giving their former Pakistani protégés further financial aid in the form of loans and grants.
In the past ten years both Russia and China have offered Pakistan financial and infrastructural lifelines – but these have been declined and rejected by the Pakistani ruling elites because Russia and China demand genuine social development and audited development expenditure and ask for results….whereas for the last 200 years Pakistan’s slavish and greedy elites have been used to lavish and freely dispensed Anglo-American largesse and bounties.
In Pakistan the state treasuries are now empty and the salaries of officials serving in most government departments are in doubt for this month. Maintenance and repair, not to mention new projects – are at an indefinite standstill. The money is simply not there. It is this singular factor, not any riots or disorder, which will nullify any remedial measures by the military in trying to tackle the emerging situation. The incident of 9 May was meant to be the excuse to deliver a crippling blow to the PTI and it seems to me that this has been achieved. I also suspect that this was staged to furnish the excuse for other radical measures that come with emergency situations of breakdown. But it has to be remembered that the Pakistani structure was potentially unworkable to begin with, even in the best of times. Even the most brutal corrective measures by the state will not work in an environment which is bankrupt and has nothing in the way of money to sustain it viably. It is evident that those now in power have realised this; there is nothing further possible in this decayed artificial framework and I will give its continued existence another three years at the very most.
Imran Khan was originally intended by the military as their latest puppet. But neither Imran nor any other replacement can succeed in reforming a structure that was artificial and abnormal from its outset. Unlike most other modern era nation-states, Pakistan served a single geostrategic purpose and was sustained criminally for that. Now that purpose no longer exists, so Pakistan’s raison d’etre is over with.
The discarded Western instrument called Pakistan will not disintegrate per se. The stoppage of the country’s Western financial lifeblood will lead to a socio-economic collapse scenario – and a severe downgrading of its infrastructure and regression of its development and government. In KP Province, the TTP is ideally poised to take over as ruler, being low-maintenance and having grassroots support in this backward tribal society. Ex-government officials will flock to the TTP, looking to it for employment and protection. While in Balochistan, the TTP is likely to strike deals with separatist elements and local Sardars. Punjab and Sindh being ethnic Indian territories and sophisticated peoples have an eternal affinity with Mother India and that is where they will return in all likelihood. That is not at all difficult as they have the same races, cultures, and languages – eat the same foods, and sing the same songs.
It will be up to sensible and well-intentioned world powers like Russia and China to deal with the future reshaping and reinvigoration of this region once this terrible mess falls apart. At the moment I do not see any capacity for revolution or respectable self-determination in the common person of Pakistan – whatever ethnicity he or she may belong to – who are too backward, servile and low-grade for such accomplishments. I would not make the mistake of previous naïve political scientists in attributing to them qualities that they simply don’t possess.
