Pakistan, Teetering on Insecurity Stilts

"Pakistan is facing a triple crisis. It's facing a threat from the Pakistani Taliban. A collapsing economy; And, polarization and political chaos on the street."

"Pakistani leaders seem woefully unprepared for tackling the challenge and continue to fight each other rather than finding solutions for the country"

Farahnaz Ispahani, former Pakistan parliamentarian

"Looking at the seven years from FY16 to FU22. Pakistan's cumulative current account deficit was $74.5 billion, while the State Bank's forex reserves fell by $3.6 billion during this period."

"This means Pakistan needed financing of $70.9 billion, and borrowed $65 billion."

"Foreign investment barely financed the external deficit, so the government just kept borrowing."

"Since foreign creditors are reluctant to continue lending, Pakistan's external sector has become unsustainable."

Dawn, Pakistan's leading English language newspaper

The banned militant group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has ended a cease-fire agreement with the government, and vowed to launch attacks across Pakistan. What will this mean for the country's economy?  DW.com

 

Pakistan, one does best to recall, is a seething cauldron of backward Islamists. Violence and uninhibited threats percolate on the streets of Pakistan's cities when fiery-throated Islamists go about preaching jihad while deploring the presence of western-style shops selling music, and where male and female friends congregate together in restaurants. A country where the minority Christian population is threatened and persecuted when haters can accuse Christians of denigrating the Prophet Mohammad and face a death penalty.

The successive governments of Pakistan plotted against Afghanistan, anxious their neighbour not form an alliance with India. Pakistan invested itself in forming, training and arming the Afghan Taliban, giving its leaders haven at a time that US. forces led an international, UN-NATO force to dislodge the Taliban and al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden who took credit for planning the aerial attacks against the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington.

Osama bin Laden himself had sanctuary in Pakistan where his family compound was discovered in Abbottabad, not far from an elite military academy. A Pakistani doctor whose own home was next to the bin Laden compound, a secret location for an 'unknown' occupant, helped the CIA identify that unknown occupant whom Navy Seals subsequently dispatched. The Pakistani doctor was arrested, held responsible as a traitor, and incarcerated.

Pakistan's military with its embedded Intelligence Agency, was well infiltrated by their own Taliban, as radical a group of hardcore Islamists as the Afghan Taliban. As a nuclear nation the very prospect of these terrorists potentially having access to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is mind-boggling. The Taliban threat that Pakistan now faces is one that emerged many years ago, its growth to the point where it challenges the government of Pakistan, just as Afghanistan experienced with the viperous group Pakistan bequeathed to its neighbour.

Now, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan with its immense population of close to 233 million. occupying a land mass of 881,913 square kilometres faces an existential crisis brought about by its own incapacity to govern itself wisely and well. Its focus on its hostility with India from which it broke away in 1947 following British rule leading to a cataclysmic separation and the retaliatory deaths of countless Muslims and Hindus has kept the threat of resurgent conflict alive, over the mutually contested Kashmir.

Pakistan's army has been the traditional fount of emerging leaders. Since its independence there have been three military coups and four military rulers. One of its non-military rulers, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated by raging fanatical Islamists. Pakistan is currently in a state of political and financial collapse. Former prime minister Imran Khan whose tenure came to a forced halt in April 2022 through a non-confidence parliamentary vote imprisoned other politicians including one of his predecessors, Nawaz Sharif, along with Maryan Nawaz Sharif, the daughter.

Now presiding as Prime Minister of Pakistan is younger brother Shehbaz Sharif. A turf war between Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf political party and a coalition of opposition parties, the Pakistan Democratic Movement, has Pakistan at a political standstill. The Pakistani army sides with the U.S. State Department, and Khan was leading the country into a Russia-Chinese camp. Unseated from power he encourages supporters to violent encounters with the law.

Inadequately governed, Pakistan's institutions are collapsing; educational institutions in particular. High unemployment, poverty and an increase in the Consumer Price Index of 31.5 percent has sent more families into poverty. What the country desperately needs is guidance from a secular-minded, seriously capable leader who can lead it toward normalization with India and the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel. 

And what the world needs from Pakistan, is the accepted presence of an internationally designated body of specialists to manage Pakistan's nuclear arms in the assurance that should its condition further destabilize those nuclear arms will not be seized by the fanatics crawling about in huge disruptively threatening numbers in Pakistan.

In the midst of yet another economic crisis, Pakistan is currently facing significant upheaval in the political, economic, and security domains. Amplified by near-historic polarization among ruling elites, the rapidly deteriorating situation has significant implications on near- and long-term Chinese influence in the country.  Atlantic Council