Three opportunities

A culture of constant lamentations about how bad things are for Pakistan has negative consequences on a number of fronts. One possible area of damage is our collective national ability to identify and take advantage of opportunities. If you spend all your time looking at the rear view mirror, it is hard to see what is in front of you.
In Pakistan’s case, a wonderful set of coincidences, visionary leaders, and geostrategic openings is coming together in the neighbourhood. For years, we’ve been the victims of a perfect storm of the worst possible kinds of domestic and international alignments. Today, Pakistan’s neighbourhood is resplendent with the sheen of three epochal opportunities for Pakistan: the visionary leadership of President Ashraf Ghani in Afghanistan, the blank cheque of support that China has written and will keep writing for the foreseeable future, and the transformational aspirations of India’s Prime Minister Modi. How this country deals with these three opportunities will define this country’s fortunes for a generation or more.
It is only part coincidence that these three once-in-a-generation opportunities have emerged simultaneously. Not only are the postures of Afghanistan, China and India potentially beneficial to Pakistan, but even the interlinkages between Xi’s China, Modi’s India and Ghani & Abdullah’s Afghanistan are aligned in a manner that is a cause for optimism in Pakistan.
Since independence, Pakistan has had to deal with either overtly ornery leaders in Afghanistan, or with the fallout of Pakistan’s own terrible decisions aka the Taliban. After almost seventy years of trying and failing to dictate what happens in Kabul, and increasingly finding the space from Karachi to Khyber to be equally immune to its desires, the Pakistani establishment seems to have warmed to notion of influencing Afghanistan the regular, plain vanilla way: by establishing strong bilateral relations with the country’s leaders. This moment in Pakistani lesson-learning has been almost a decade in the making, but back in 2005, no one could have imagined that the starring role would belong to Ashraf Ghani. His consistent and calm messaging to Pakistan is only part of what constitutes an epochal opportunity for Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Aabpara.
The most important quality of President Ghani’s leadership is that it is accompanied by Abdullah Abdullah. The national government in Afghanistan is far from perfect, but is far more representative than anything Afghans have known in at least a generation. This means that decisions that may well be Ghani’s ideas, have the political backing and ownership (reluctant or otherwise) of a wide swath of Afghan society. Three decisions that Ghani has made reflect the big change in Afghanistan’s attitude and posture toward Pakistan. First, his decision to eschew taking rhetorical swipes at Pakistan, and instead constructively engaging with it. Second, his decision to visit Beijing, instead of New Delhi, as his first bilateral visit. Third, his decision to ask New Delhi to hold off on a weapons deal between India and Afghanistan.
No Afghan leader has expended this much political capital on deepening relations with Pakistan so soon after coming into power. A range of Pakistani leaders and officials deserve credit for helping shift Pakistan’s own attitude toward Afghanistan. However, without Ashraf Ghani, Pakistan’s outreach would have kept amounting to one step forward, two steps back. The current opportunity afforded to the region is not inexhaustible. Unless President Ghani can go back to Kabul and show off the benefits of his outreach, this opportunity will be lost. Pakistanis have only learnt to demand Fazlullah’s head after the atrocity at APS in Peshawar. Afghans have been demanding with equal passion, members of the Quetta Shura and the Haqqani Network for a decade.
Pakistan may not be fully capable of what Americans and Afghans often accuse us of being capable of doing, but we’ve successfully reduced the supply of oxygen to violent actors in Afghanistan before. The absolute minimum benchmark for Ghani to show success in his efforts is a less violent Afghan spring than the last, and a more conciliatory Kandahari Taliban. Without these two results, Afghans will deem President Ghani’s efforts with Pakistan to have failed. And this epochal opportunity will begin to slip from Pakistan’s tired hands.
The second epochal opportunity available to Pakistan is China’s almost unconditional support for Pakistani infrastructure and connectivity. China acts in its national interest in offering this support, and we would be wise to be less effervescent in our pronouncements of dedication to China. But the quantum and nature of Chinese support for Pakistan is unique and unprecedented. Unlike previous administrations in Beijing, President Xi Jinping’s government is keen for China take a more overt regional role. This gels well with both the US plans for drawdown in Afghanistan, and President Ghani’s brilliant diplomacy.
For Pakistan however, this offers a golden opportunity to transform its internal economic infrastructure. The early signs do not suggest that Pakistan will be able to take full advantage because instead of being run like a country, Pakistan is being run like a mid-sized toothpaste factory. If civil servants at BPS 20 or 21 were really capable of being CEOs, they would be running big companies. And if family accountants were really capable of being prime ministers, they would be winning elections.
Pakistan needs its elected leadership to act decisively, and swiftly to transform how things work. Nothing less than big-bang, fire-on-the-platform reforms to government will enable the country to take advantage of China’s blank cheque. This cannot and will not happen under the dictatorship of bureaucrats and accountants that currently governs Pakistan. All four important Sharifs know this (Nawaz, Raheel, Shahbaz and an unnamed fourth). If they can’t wrest control of governance and enact dramatic reforms, the China opportunity will continue to be frittered away. You can’t build a bright new future on the back of aide memoires and MoUs. And bureaucrats and accountants can’t give you anything but.
Finally, there is the epochal opportunity offered by a changing India. Pakistan has already seen enough of PM Modi’s machinations to understand that a sincere, wide-eyed approach to normalisation between India and Pakistan is an optimists’ nightmare and a hawks’ dream come true. India cannot be trusted to act with the warm sincerity with which Pakistani leaders, from Zardari to Sharif to Khan to Fazlur Rehman have all acted in recent years. However, India can be trusted to act in its national interest. For all its faults, Modi’s India is two things that Pakistan currently is not.
First, Modi’s India is, at the top of Indian government, a meritocracy. Second, Modi’s India is, at its core, a reformist entity. If a commitment to merit and a passion for reform are what define the Modi instinct, then two things are likely happening in New Delhi. First, Ajit Doval’s control over Modi’s Pakistan policy has to be slipping, because Foreign Secretary Jaishankar is a dramatically more intelligent, pragmatic and effective actor. On merit alone, his will be a bigger voice in Modi’s ear than Doval’s. Second, the first wave of Modi’s ‘let’s show those Pakistanis’ instinct should be giving way to a reformist attitude toward Pakistan.
Of the three epochal opportunities available to Pakistan, Modi’s India is the riskiest and most toxic. But it is also the most transformational. Foreign Secretary Jaishankar’s Saarc yatra, which brings him to Islamabad on March 3, is a huge opportunity for PM Sharif to explore his vision for the region more robustly. He must not allow this opportunity to be lost in the way that the Ananad Sharma-KD Khan trade deal was lost in 2014. The military trusts India less than it did before Modi took office. It will need major convincing to go along with any initiative, but Raheel Sharif and Rizwan Akhtar are neither stuck in the 1990s nor stuck in mud. Jaishankar’s visit to Islamabad is an opportunity to for PM Sharif, once again, to lead. He has the vision, but does he have the will, alertness and competence?
A bright new future for Pakistan rests on the answer to these questions. These three opportunities won’t last forever. And neither will this PM’s term of office. Tick-tock.
The writer is an analyst and commentator.