Daily Times

The storm has been whipped up in the smithy of our smouldering dreams that once promised an elusive dawn. It was the dawn Faiz lamented in his inimitable style, “This smeared and stained light, this night-bitten dawn; This isn’t surely the dawn we waited for so eagerly; This isn’t surely the dawn whose desire cradled in our hearts.”

Faiz’s allusion to the dystopian existence that befell a majority of our countrymen is a scathing indictment of a system that has failed us. With a Gini Coefficient of 0.49, the inequality in Pakistan is rising sharply. Polarisation, both vertical and horizontal, measured province and district wise, shows an alarming rise as per Estaban and Ray Polarization Index. With polarisation and inequality on the rise, the socio-economic milieu of Pakistan displays a dangerous vulnerability to conflict and disorder.

This weakness is a virtual invitation to external actors to stoke fires of ethno-linguistic particularism. A perfect storm of geopolitical, geo-economic, and socio-political threats looms on the horizon. On the geopolitical front, India presents a perennial threat.

The IS-Khorasan, the TTP remnants and the Baloch insurgents represent Pakistan’s internal security problem.

On the geo-economic front, we have the standard IMF recipe of low growth stabilization.

The three strands of the perfect storm need to be tackled through modification of our national behaviour by strengthening our institutions and improving our governance

The runaway inflation and the flight of dollar are symptoms of a deeper malaise than the familiar trade and fiscal imbalance. Unfair taxation, profligate spending, high input industrial costs and elite capture of national resources do not get redressed through placebos and temporary solutions.

On the socio-political front, Pakistan faces a fractured polity and a dysfunctional Westminster system that can only serve the elite. The perennial political instability due to the tenuous government majority in the parliament allows destabilizing agents the room they need to keep the pot of political unrest boiling.

Reforms that focus on specialized cadres and modern induction methodology cannot be implemented without dismantling the colonial civil services structure. The structure resists reforms seeing those as an attack on the special privileges and perks of the civil servants. The civil services and police cannot be changed in the absence of a behavioural change in the ruling elite. The thana-kutchery culture of political patronage needs to change before restructuring the civil services and law enforcement. The first feeble attempt by the PTI government to reform Punjab Police came to a cropper due to the specious logic that Punjab was a special province with peculiar realities and, hence, not amenable to change.

On the external front, Pakistan is facing the proverbial Scylla and Charybdis situation. Between China and the US, the country’s foreign policy options are getting squeezed. A foreign policy recalibration on the part of Pakistan should aim at distancing it from the confrontational politics between the two global powers. Alternative diplomatic options are needed to replace an adversarial foreign policy.

Russia, Iran, and Afghanistan are important for Pakistan to loosen the hold of the US-China confrontation on its foreign policy. Care should be taken to ensure civilian ascendancy in framing foreign policy. While fully co-opting the security-centred viewpoint of the armed forces, militarization of foreign policy needs to be avoided.

The three strands of the perfect storm need to be tackled through modification of our behaviour by strengthening our institutions and improving our governance. The geopolitical challenges can be tackled through a sea change in our foreign policy to favour development at home and cooperation abroad. A metamorphosis from a national security state to a development state can only be achieved if we change the way we view the world. To reduce external threats, our diplomacy must chase positive peace i.e the absence of reasons leading to conflict. That can only happen if both India and Pakistan decide to resolve the intractable disputes like Kashmir. A departure from the stated positions to break new ground for lasting peace may be necessary.

On the internal front, there is no escape from containment of the economic slide and strengthening of governance through fundamental reforms. Pakistan needs better economic incentives, distributive justice and rule of law.

For rule of the law, the country needs strong discipline in every sphere, starting from fiscal discipline. The country also needs solid institutions to strengthen democracy and governance. Without these, no meaningful reforms can ever be realised. Who would discipline the masses and the rulers is the million-dollar question. Meanwhile, the gathering storm has announced its arrival in the form of an economic meltdown, social deprivation, and border forays by predatory powers.

The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST