“SANGAR”: Pakistan is experiencing all earthly and heavenly disasters. On the one hand, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan stepped up its attacks on the country's territory with the help of the Afghan Taliban, the brainchild of Pakistan's regional policy. Its economy is in a coma. No one gives loans, inflation has risen to an unprecedented level. The opposition (led by Imran Khan) continues its multi-million dollar demonstrations. Even floods do not let go of the country, which in almost half a year claimed the lives of hundreds of people, turned part of the country into ruins, and caused great damage to the state treasury. Almost all the signs of the fall of Pakistan are evident. What is happening?
Author: Arif Hasan Akhundzada, an expert on regional issues, member of the Sangar Advisory Council
As long as America was in Afghanistan -- and as long as the old American-dominated global security order was intact, Pakistan's relations with the Taliban elements (which it had created for use in the post-Cold War Order) would be stable. That was because Pakistan itself was a component created to serve long-standing anti-Russian Anglo-American global security needs in this region.
But what with the global capitalist economic downturn resulting from COVID-19 and now that America has fled Afghanistan in defeat last year.....followed suddenly and quickly by the acute and direct Russian military challenge to NATO in the European theater of Ukraine -- America no longer needs Pakistan to serve those redundant regional security needs, nor will it tolerate any of the previous corrupt arrangements and proxy privileges that had been in force for the past 75 years since the creation of Pakistan in 1947. So it has effectively abandoned Pakistan and the aid it was giving to this country for this purpose...and that aid was Pakistan's lifeblood.
Meanwhile, Pakistan has failed to respond satisfactorily to comprehensive Chinese and Russian cooperative initiatives offered to it in the past decade -- in the form of CPEC -- instead openly preferring the slavish tutelage imposed on its and its ruling elites by the West, which is actually a direct continuation of the master-slave relations that the British had with their Indian subjects when the East India Company first arrived in the Indian Subcontinent in the 1600s and began taking it over.
So the situation is hopeless. We are now witnessing the end of a 400-year-old corrupt geopolitical order of paramount Western global ascendancy.....and there is nothing to replace it, except the prospects of total disintegration and atomic war.
On a local level, the Taliban are very effective because Pakistan and its abandoned and corrupt system are rapidly giving way to chaos and breakdown of writ and system....and there is no effective alternative or revolutionary force to replace them except the Taliban. That is how bad things now are over here. And the Pakistani ruling elite has set itself up to face the kind of crash that has few precedents, but which it fully deserves on account of its unrepentant greed and short-sightedness.