Diplomatist Magazine DIplomatist September 2018 | Page 26

SPOTLIGHT
Persian Paymasters
India’s partnership with Iran will remain a bit contentious
until New Delhi opens its constructed port in Chabahar, Iran.
With the new port, India can assist in operationalising US
regional policy aims of stabilising Kabul while fortifying
a positive wedge, effectively shaping Afghan dependency
away from Islamabad’s Pashtun majority along the Durand.
Turning & Opening Pakistan
The impact of America’s longest war in Afghanistan
has exposed a fraught US public to assume the mantle of
leadership in regions dispossessed of statehood, with fragile
borders, and militant confessional identities; with dominant
ethnic-based foreign supplied factions exhausting the host
nations. The American security establishment isn’t exhausted,
but America’s media-led political class is.
Our theatre combatant commanders were wise enough
to limit engagements to openly solicit the building of
Afghanistan. It’s a dire challenge having to resource nation-
building upon an archaic social base; especially one tethered
to opium. If the Americans believed that Kabul was fi xed
on Islamabad, they needed a partner in New Delhi to accept
Nawaz Sharif’s re-opening of Pakistan relations. Sharif’s
gamble failed, for it openly threatened to destroy the rentier
political economy that is Pakistan. But that offer remains
the only viable option for Pakistan’s political governing
class. Why? Because by normalising relations with India,
Pakistani military doctrine is forced to change; the opening
of commerce between Islamabad and New Delhi would
acknowledge the primacy of civil society over plundering
oligarchies.
What the 2+2 summit has wrought is simple: only
India possesses the social and political resources to turn
and transform Pakistan. Prime Minister Vajpayee did it
in Kashmir. India’s statesmanship can perform where the
American’s can’t.
To succeed, Imran Khan will need to quickly exhaust
his alternatives and move to openly counter the ruling junta
by promoting political liberalisation. It is the only way
to defeat the archaic tribalism that animates Islamabad’s
proxies; by usurping the Citadel, Pakistan’s medieval feudal
ethos will no longer supplant Jinnah’s vision of an Islamic
Republic. If you think this is untenable, just examine how
we arrived here.
The key to securing regional objectives throughout the
subcontinent, including Pakistan and Afghanistan is to actively
manage a dysfunctional Pakistan. The Americans arrived at
this junction after examining applied counter-insurgency
objectives. They discovered that the sheer intransigence
of Pashtun culture, the ideological militancy of Pakistan’s
security establishment tethered to a weak political economy
blunted the socio-political goals of counter-insurgency.
What they faced was startling. They learned that American
regional objectives aren’t war aims; they are the result of
insuffi cient culture in Pakistani civil-military relations. The
key to winning lay in Pakistani political liberalisation and
reform, with civil supremacy in Islamabad.
Even in Jinnah’s own writings, we fi nd a determinist
view of value regarding Pakistan, having openly identifi ed
“the land of the pure” as a fulcrum of geopolitical value;
Pakistan was to become an embodied Islamic Republic based
on the inevitability of its positioning. Being the link between
South-Central Asia and the Middle East, Jinnah’s vision
was a centre of trade, investment, infrastructure, and energy.
Yet both its dominant political class and its military junta
remain unable to benefi t from these advantages as a result of
frequent and irreversible political decisions that invariably
led to unresolved crises. The result is an entrenched security
establishment in constant confl ict with elected offi cials, the
lowest indices in the world regarding health, literacy and
nutrition, rampant corruption — all tied to a nuclear regime
employing jihadi proxies in confl icts whose aim is to unite
disparate ethnic groups domestically.
What the 2+2 summit ratifi ed is that Paris’ Financial
Action Task Force (FATF) openly identifi ed Pakistan as a
nuclear proliferator alongside North Korea and Iran. Team
Trump has withheld $2 billion in aid for an identical purpose
of applying direct pressure to Islamabad. Both FATF and
American pressure place extraordinary international sanctions
in a time when Islamabad lacks resources to sustain isolation.
What Trump’s cabinet believes is that Pakistan’s junta will
26 • Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Diplomatist • Vol 6 • Issue 9 • September 2018, Noida