Daily Times

Like its neighbours, the geographical location of a country is also fixed and permanent. Attached to the location are advantages and disadvantages with which the country has to live. Attached to the location is a country’s strategic importance, which in turn hinges on the strategy of survival formulated by it. One such successful strategy makes geographical location a heaven to inhabit while a botched strategy renders location a hell on earth.

Pakistan may be geographically well placed, but the point is which country of the world is geographically ill placed? What is wrong with the geographical locations of Afghanistan, Iran, China or India? If Afghanistan had not been geographically well placed, the former Soviet Union would not have sent its army to get entrenched there. If Iran had not been geographically well placed, it would not have to bear sanctions on the export of its oil and gas. If China had not been geographically well placed, it would not have become the centre of the economic attention of the world. If India had not been geographically well placed, the US would not have entered into a civil nuclear energy deal with it. Alaska and Siberia are also geographically well placed and enjoy perpetual peace while they conserve natural resources beneath the surface for utilisation in the future.

Pakistan may be a gateway to Central Asia but Pakistan is not the sole gateway to Central Asia. In this age of competition, all gateways have to contest their cases to gain competitive monetary benefits. From the Indian Ocean, Pakistan may offer the shortest route to Central Asia but the point is this: does the world prefer approaching Central Asia through Pakistan? After the end of the Cold War, if the world has not been entreating Pakistan to offer it a land route to Central Asia for trade, Pakistan must comprehend that the world has been utilising other options to reach Central Asia. In the past, the nascent independent states of Central Asia might be culturally and religiously more attached to the area constituting Pakistan today but in recent times, economically, they are found more attached to Europe. Second, their independence from Russia does not mean that they have severed all links with Russia. Instead, they are still linked economically (and ethnically) to Russia. Generally speaking, the rhetoric that Pakistan holds the key to the Central Asian gateway has brought more miseries than benefits to Pakistan.

Attempts to have a civilisational link with the Arab world by assuming the Arabs as the ancestors of the Muslims of the subcontinent started decades before the inception of Pakistan. The desire was expressed in the theory of pan-Islamism expressed through the famous Khilafat Movement of the 1920s. Poets, writers and orators tried to retrace the Arab pedigree of Indian Muslims. After the formation of Pakistan, attempts to get unified with the Muslim world started. The holding of the summit of the Organisation of Islamic Conference in Lahore in 1974 was one such attempt. Later on, the conflict in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 was approved by pan-Islamist theorists and proponents. It was called an ideological conflict, which later on engulfed other countries of the world. Hitherto, neither have Pakistanis been owned genetically by the Arabs nor has Pakistan been enjoying any unification with the Arab world. However, the yearning for having a civilisational link has brought sectarian conflict to the land of Pakistan, as both Saudi Arabia and Iran have got involved in promoting their own sectarian ideology in Pakistan.

Boasting about the benefits of Pakistan’s geographical location by successive governments over the years has made the provinces conscious of their natural resources. All provinces of Pakistan share borders with the neighbouring countries. Pakistan has two peaceful borders, one that is shared with China and the second where the Arabian Sea lies. Consequently, provinces think that they can better survive in disunity by tapping their natural resources and exploiting their individual geographic locations strategically. This thinking has enervated the concept of the federation in Pakistan.

The overemphasis on Pakistan’s geographical location and, consequently, how Pakistan should behave with the world strategically has also been a cause of civil-military conflicts in Pakistan. Since the early 1960s, the military has been dictating the strategy of survival for Pakistan. The civilian governments have been following suit. The Cold War was a golden era to exploit the world by adopting one strategy or another but the cost Pakistan has paid after the end of the Cold War has outweighed the benefits Pakistan obtained. Pakistan has now become a country that loves to buy guns and tanks (including their spare parts) and not pens and books. It has still failed to realise that if the military keeps on calling the shots, the Taliban will keep on breeding and elements such as al Qaeda will keep on taking refuge under the auspices of the Taliban. Especially in the post-2008 phase, the military of Pakistan has finally realised that it has been caught in the quagmire of the war on terror and needs civilian help to extricate itself.

Pakistanis needs to come out of three delusions: first, Pakistan is the only country in the world or in this region that is geographically well placed; second, the whole world has no other job to do but to exploit Pakistan’s geographic location to its benefit; and third, Pakistan can blackmail the world strategically to force it to come to its terms.

Pakistan has yet to realise that the first beneficiary of its geographic location should be Pakistan itself. It needs Central Asia (more than Central Asia needs it) to establish regional trade to make its economy prosper. Secondly, Pakistan needs peace with its neighbours to find time to look inward and maintain law and order. Thirdly, Pakistan needs civilian supremacy to look at the world through the strategic lenses and see economic opportunities by introducing peace (and not by promoting conflicts) around.

The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at qaisarrashid@yahoo.com