Pakistan’s embrace of Russia

Pakistan’s position as a country permanently stuck between rocks and hard places was further cemented last week when long-time strategic ally Saudi Arabia took the lead in isolating gas-rich Qatar. As has been argued ad nauseam by every shade of thoughtful Pakistani, maintaining a robust impartiality in the quarrel between the GCC states is absolutely essential. However, if we feel flustered by the challenge of simultaneously maintaining a measure of equilibrium between traditional ally Saudi Arabia, ‘it’s complicated’ status friend UAE, and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) supplier, Qatar, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

At Astana, India and Pakistan were welcomed to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). On one hand, this represents a brilliant coup for Pakistan – confirming its indispensable strategic importance to various world capitals, despite the agony that reverberates through South Block – where Indians, both Nehruvian and Hindutvavadi, convulse at the sight of Pakistan being taken seriously, anywhere, ever.

On the other hand, the SCO is just another multilateral forum. Pakistan has consistently managed to turn the advantages of multilateralism (such as UNSC resolutions favouring Pakistan’s position on Occupied Kashmir) into disadvantages (such as UNSC resolutions’ listing of various Pakistan-based groups like the LeT and JuD as UN-sanctioned terrorist groups). What indications exist that Pakistan will manage to get its membership in SCO just right, and not end up being singled out eventually for the various things it does in pursuit of its strategic and tactical objectives? The record Pakistan has built up is not enviable. It routinely ends up paying the price for the sins of others and, often, for its own virtues – a principled position on Occupied Kashmir, hosting five million Afghan refugees over three decades, fighting Al-Qaeda and Daesh. Even when Pakistan does the right thing, it gets tagged with the burden of failure.

The SCO window has not opened up because Pakistanis are a nation of jolly, good looking and generous people. It has opened up because Chinese and Russian interests have converged enough to make Pakistan useful to both of them, for different reasons. As it has done repeatedly for the US – which now openly flirts with the same language for Pakistan that is used by cancerous Hindutvavadi internet trolls, and Saudi Arabia (which thanks Pakistan for helping build the kingdom by repeatedly pressing it to engage its neighbour Iran in sectarian conflict) – Pakistan has a never shied away from being a partner for countries seeking to expand their strategic influence, and tactical capacity far beyond their borders. In signing up to the Sino-Russian camp, Pakistan is doing what comes naturally to us: pursuing short-term gains without serious deliberation or public debate about longer term implications.

China’s endorsement of Pakistan as its principal partner in the One Belt, One Road initiative, through the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is without doubt a unique and unprecedented opportunity for Pakistan to transform the core infrastructure of the country. It is, however, important to note facets of CPEC that should comprise a legitimate debate within Pakistan and between Pakistan and China – but don’t.

First, the obligations on Pakistan that stem from CPEC should be clear, and have parliamentary sanction. Concerns about future streams of loan repayments and the quality of analysis, forecasting and planning that has gone into Pakistan’s negotiations with China for CPEC do exist. Second, the rhetoric of the Pakistan-China friendship far outstrips the reality of it. People-to-people contact is limited and Pakistan enjoys negligible, if any, public diplomacy advantages in China. This represents a threat to CPEC and to the strategic relationship between the two countries.

Third, Chinese strategic thinking is very different from the binaries and zero-sum gamesmanship Pakistan is used to with other strategic partners like the United States, or Saudi Arabia. Case in point: China has been a most robust advocate of better Pakistan-India relations, despite having tensions with India. China can cling to a dispute whilst simultaneously increasing trade with a foe. The Muslim Zion (to borrow Faisal Devji’s brilliant framing) often acts in stark contrast to this go-along, get-along Chinese ethos. Despite all this, China is, now and for the foreseeable future, a partner unlike any other for Pakistan. It is not China’s job to think of Pakistan’s long-term needs, and constraints. This is something Pakistan must do for itself.

If thinking and planning for Pakistan’s interests with respect to China is important, it is absolutely imperative with respect to Russia. Over the last decade, Russian and Pakistani contacts have been increasing with reasonable consistency. Russia has traditionally been, at best, a distant foe. Today, however, Russia is cited as a guarantor of Pakistan’s resistance to global isolation. How did Pakistan go from a relative also-ran in Moscow to a country that is actively been courted by President Putin? To understand Putin’s appetite for Pakistan, we need to zoom out. Russia’s broader ambitions in Europe and the Middle East notwithstanding, two clues about Russia rest in places well known to Pakistan.

In Turkey, Russia has swallowed a number of bitter pills against every historical and cultural prejudice, to build a fast-growing strategic alliance that is on the one hand, a formidable regional partnership, and on the other an irritant for Nato, and the European Union. Putin ignores many of Turkey’s actions in Syria that run against Russian interests, and has forgiven the downing of a Russian Su-24 by Turkey last year, to secure this alliance.

In Afghanistan, Russia has seemingly forgotten the humiliation of its withdrawal from Kabul at the hands of the predecessors of the Taliban to forge a growing relationship with anti-American forces in Afghanistan to ostensibly help broker a credible and lasting peace in the country. It has already hosted three major multilateral meetings on solving Afghanistan, and was reportedly behind the surge in Taliban firepower that helped the insurgents overrun Kunduz in 2015.

To the Russians, Syria is for the Middle East what Afghanistan is for Central Asia. A collapse of Syria opens the door and excites the imagination of all manner of wild-eyed terrorist groups, many of Central Asian extraction, and many of whom speak Russian fluently. Russia’s gamble in Syria therefore is one that privileges order and coherence in Syria. To achieve this, Russia has cooperated with any and every actor it has needed to – notwithstanding the scepticism of Americans still obsessed with Nikita Khrushchev’s abrasiveness. US-Russia cooperation on Syria is the most obvious example, but it is the courting of Turkey that reflects the longer-term stability that Putin seeks in that region – with the obvious benefit of Russia coming up aces in the bargain.

In Afghanistan, Russia has seen the Americans struggle to even define a clear objective, what to say of achieving any kind of victory. The vacuum created by the US ceding of coherent leadership in Afghanistan was long thought to be one that the Chinese could fill – but the Chinese seem to have soured on the prospect after having been stung by the sputtering nature of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG). More importantly, Afghanistan is still a kinetic battlefield, and the Chinese interest in Afghanistan is not in war but in peace.

Russia, on the other hand, is run today by many of the men and women that were involved in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The threat posed by Daesh to Afghanistan could realistically metastasize and consume stability not just in Afghanistan, but northward, through Uzbekistan and beyond. Only one country in the region has the kinetic battlefield experience of victory against Daesh types. That country is Pakistan. Not only does Pakistan have a robust and battle-tested military, it also has been traditionally the most sympathetic to Afghanistan’s parties to conflict: from the Taliban, including the Haqqani Network, to an alphabet soup of other Afghan groups over the years.

As Afghanistan grows more hopeless, the Russians correctly see Pakistan as being critical to any long-term solution in Afghanistan. They also probably see India as a spoiler, and provocateur of Pakistani insecurities in Afghanistan. Optimists will see Pakistan’s joining of the SCO as the crescendo of a long process of Russian intimacy with Pakistan.

This would be a mistake. Other countries – including the US – have, very recently, placed their bets on Pakistan as the game-changer in Afghanistan. Officials from those countries now routinely spew venom about Pakistan’s duplicity. History has shown that attempting to play guarantor has not gone well for Pakistan.

Pakistan should carefully consider both the short-term gains to be won from its embrace of President Putin, and the medium and long-term costs. Having jumped into bed with world powers before, and still suffering the illnesses contracted from them, this country should tread with caution and care. Our embrace of Russia is a good thing, but it is not unqualified and unconditional love.

The writer is an analyst and commentator.