Mending ties with neighbours key to Pak woes

Shahzad Raza

Last month, a senior police official, Superintendent of Police (SP) Tahir Dawar, was kidnapped from a residential area in Islamabad. This week, pictures of his body went viral on the social media. The kidnappers claimed to have taken him to Afghanistan and killed him there.

This incident deteriorates already strained relations between Kabul and Islamabad and indicates that both countries must keep their houses in order. It remindes that the non-state actors still have the capacity to carry out dangerous missions. It also unearthes yet another intelligence failure.

The kidnapping and killing of SP Dawar call for stringent action against the sleeper cells of terrorist outfits. The incident demands indiscriminate action against all non-state actors. It raises the importance of larger cooperation among the intelligence agencies of the neighbouring countries. For that, it is utmost important to improve its bilateral relations.

At the moment, Pakistan does not enjoy best of the ties with three of its four neighbours. Pakistan is like a boxer who enters the ring with one hand tied to its back. This must be changed to survive the strategic realignment in South Asia and beyond.

The government has to invest in deradicalising the Pakistani society. There has been unprecedented growth of seminaries since 9/11. All campaigns to regulate them have failed to yield results. Extremism has also crept into modern educational institutions. For example: the Mashal Khan case. A student of Bacha Khan University, Khan was lynched last year by a mob comprising his university fellows after he was accused of blasphemy.

After assuming power, Prime Minister Imran Khan dashed to Saudi Arabia and China to get necessary financial assistance to maintain the balance of payment. The economic condition of Pakistan is in the state of peril. A so-called accountability drive has already been labelled as a “political vendetta”.

Herculean task

In his opening dialogues in Mission Impossible-II, Rade Serbedzija says that every search for the hero must begin with something what every hero requires — a villain. So in search for its hero, the nation has created too many villains. And when they finally found what they were actually looking for, the people of Pakistan feel bamboozled. They now seem to be suspending their disbelief. The hero himself has realised that Herculean task of diverting the “river’s flow” would not be possible within the deadline he has set for himself.

Pakistan needs structural reforms which should have been done decades ago. However, such reforms do not look or sound fancy and flashy like new airports, motorways or metro-buses. These do not offer kickbacks, bribes, etc. So, why the fuss?

When the PML-Nawaz government took over in 2013, the country was under Rs 16,000 billion of internal and external debt. When it left, the debt had climbed to Rs 30,000 billion. The Pakistan government owns 193 state-owned enterprises. In 2013, their annual accumulated losses were less than Rs 500 billion. In 2018, these losses soared to Rs 1,100 billion.

It has been three months since the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf took power, but given the intensity of criticism it seems the party is ruling for the past three years. Nothing can be done in three months, except setting the targets or priorities. However, the government, because of its own ineptness or, perhaps over-ambition, has incurred unnecessary criticism from every segment of society.

Without stabilising relations with the neighbouring countries, the economic woes of Pakistan will never go away. How can a shopkeeper ever survive if he refuses to sell goods to the people living in his neighbourhood?

Since Mumbai attacks, Pakistan and India could never resume a full-scale dialogue on strategic issues. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. The decision makers in Pakistan think India will not enter into any sort of dialogue before the 2019 elections. Time will tell whether there will be a change in New Delhi or they will have to deal with Modi Sarkar once again. Whatever the case may be, the Pakistan government has to be pro-active to resolve all issues pending since long. 

— The writer is an Islamabad-based journalist