We "live in interesting times" but this is the time I have waited my whole life for!
Author: Arif Hasan Akhundzade, Pakistani-Tajik analyst, member of the Sangar Advisory Board
RECAP AND ASSESSMENT OF THE PREVAILING SITUATION AT HOME AND IN THE WORLD AT LARGE
I believe that till last month things in the old system of Pakistan were stable and corrupt as always, just as its masses were always inert. Imran Khan was known as "the Umpire's Selected Prime Minister".....nobody in the system was bothered by him. They were actually bothered by his dismal political performance as Prime Minister. In fact, he had become very unpopular and was doing badly. The people were blaming his character flaws and accusing him of incompetence and mismanagement... This was the case till barely two months ago. It was the events in Ukraine that unnerved the Pakistani state's establishment and its old Western patrons -- and changed everything. It was like giving a rotten tooth a punch.
To elaborate:
Larger global geopolitical upheavals and forces are at work....and they have shaken the entire traditional "Old Order" global ruling power structures. Pakistan has ever only been an appendage of those structures and is now manifesting these external dramatic international changes in its own body.
When the price rise began to bite at about the time of COVID, the people's mood turned sour. That is what the common people mostly bother about... and there were no issues of "qaumi ghairat" or national outrage till March. People were calling Imran Khan a scandalous sexual debauchee, a naive cricket captain unfit for politics, and a cocaine snorter. They were talking of bringing the old thief politicians like Zardari and Nawaz back. However, it was his trip to Moscow during the Ukraine invasion on 24 February 2022 -- which was a pure coincidence -- that set the ball of change rolling in a very different direction. America then threatened the Army GHQ, which in return complied as it always has... otherwise till now the Chinese strategic Pakistani project of CPEC was conceived under Bajwa's tenure and Nawaz Sharif's political premiership in since 2015 and nobody bothered. America only felt threatened by events when Russia made determined moves to challenge it on the world stage, as I have always predicted it would.
Even now that is the case. As for Pakistan, nothing will ever be the same again after 10 April 2022. But if one asks me about any classical type of revolutionary successes here -- I wouldn't be at all sure. It is more likely that a civil war will erupt, which will shatter this already ramshackle and dysfunctional country and its debased structures permanently. For that is its reality.
Pakistan is a third-rate client state as it always has been. First of British and American imperialism; and now of Russian and Chinese geopolitics, even though these are benign. So nobody should entertain any fancy illusions in Pakistan's regard. Even now, its traditional leadership still looks very much towards the West for inspiration and protection -- even though the West is now potentially finished forever although it may not yet appear that way to the ordinary eye.
The fresh moves announced by Vladimir Putin in his determination to face the Atlanticist global and historical stranglehold are about to manifest in a few days, and will undoubtedly accelerate events everywhere....and confront the West and its toady apparatuses like Pakistan.
We "live in interesting times" but this is the time I have waited my whole life for!
