Pakistan on brink of Collapsing?

Yesterday's Editorial from ET
Crunch time in Pakistan
India must be generous to Pakistan in its moment of dire crisis, says Praful Bidwai
ASIF Ali Zardari has done what no other Pakistani ruler has ever mustered the courage to do. In an interview to the Wall Street Journal, the Pakistan President has declared that India is no longer his country’s arch-enemy: indeed “India has never been a threat to Pakistan”. This is a truly extraordinary statement — if not of strategic reality or political assessment, then at least of intent to terminate Pakistan’s six-decades-long all-encompassing strategic hostility with India, rooted in an adversarial self-definition of the Pakistani state by much of its ruling elite, and expressed in a continuous hot-cold war for most of this period. Not only are Zardari and his “democratic government” not “scared of Indian influence abroad”, he has called Kashmir’s militant separatists “terrorists” and has no objection to India’s nuclear deal with the United States: “Why should we begrudge the largest democracy in the world getting friendly with one of the oldest democracies in the world?” Apart from lavishing generous compliments upon India, which no other Pakistani leader has done, Zardari even makes Pakistan’s “economic survival” conditional upon better ties and trade with this country: there’s no other strategy “for nations like us”. Within Zardari’s scheme, Pakistan’s cement factories would cater to India’s huge infrastructure needs, its textile mills would produce textiles to feed India’s growing demand, and Pakistani ports would help India relieve congestion at its own ports. Even citizen-level initiatives like the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy have hesitated to outline such a vision of economic cooperation. And few Pakistani analysts have gone as far as Zardari in acknowledging India’s emergence as a major economic power, vis-à-vis which it would play a naturally asymmetrical yet cooperative role. We don’t know what motivated Zardari to make these iconoclastic statements. The motives couldn’t have been solely rooted in the signals generated by his maiden meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Zardari must have known that such pronouncements would draw flak from the domestic opposition, as well as the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) with which his Pakistan People’s Party has an uneasy alliance. Zardari may not be an experienced leader, but he is far too street-smart not to know what he’s risking. Yet, so far only his “terrorist” appellation has been frontally challenged; the other statements stand. Zardari isn’t known to be a man of his word: he has reneged on many of the core pledges he jointly made with Nawaz Sharif, including reinstatement of dismissed judges. Nor could he have been under the illusion that this vision of a nonadversarial relationship with India is shared by the military, with which he shares power. Yet, beyond a point, these questions are irrelevant. What matters is that Zardari chose to stick his neck out by making a landmark overture to India at a critical juncture in Pakistan’s evolution. It is incumbent upon India to reciprocate this gesture by giving a determined push to the peace process and showing a similar quality of generosity. India has a huge stake in ending its rivalry with Pakistan. Indeed, South Asia’s very future of hinges on such a breakthrough. MAKE no mistake. Pakistan today faces its most profound existential crisis since 1947. In some ways, the crisis is far graver than the cataclysmic events that led to the separation of Bangladesh. Today, every institution of governance in Pakistan is in advanced decay amidst endemic political instability, made the more acute by the shaky ruling coalition, which could soon fall apart. The spaces recently opened by Pakistan’s unstructured democratisation could soon shut down. The economy is in dire straits, with inflation running at 25%, the rupee plummeting to a historic low against the dollar, GDP growth in decline, crippling power shortages, and foreign exchange reserves barely enough to pay for two months of imports of oil and food. As militant religion-driven radicalism grows, Pakistan’s western border has become totally unstable. The west’s phenomenally inept prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, with periodic missile and drone strikes across the border killing scores of civilians, has bred unprecedented resentment to a point where “positive” or “mixed” feelings towards al-Qaeda (22%) outweigh “negative” feelings (19%), according to polls. The Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad, called Pakistan’s 9/11, was a turning point, bringing home the deadly reality of jehadi terrorism. It was the 11th suicide bombing this year, which raised the death toll in such attacks to over 300. Last year, 3,599 people perished in terrorism-related violence, two-and-a-half times the number in 2006. Meanwhile, insurgencies are flourishing in the North-West Frontier Province, the tribal areas along the Afghanistan border and in Baluchistan, and separatism is growing in Sindh. The horrible prospect of Pakistan becoming “a nuclearised Yugoslavia in the making” can no longer be dismissed as an alarmist fantasy. The US bears a huge responsibility for the crisis — not least because it has conducted the war in Afghanistan primarily as a hunt for al-Qaeda, not as an operation to stabilise and reconstruct that devastated country by building viable institutions, and also because it imposed bad compromises upon Pakistan by backing Pervez Musharraf till the very end, thus undermining the possibility of Pakistan’s organic democratisation. One of the few rays of hope in the situation is the peace process with India, and the recent agreement to resume overland trade across the Punjab and Sindh borders. As I found during a recent visit to Pakistan, there is strong across-the-board support for the peace process and intensified economic relations, which have seen a doubling of trade over just two years. India can contribute to this handsomely by thinning out its troops in the Kashmir Valley, offering Pakistan security cooperation and joint projects in Afghanistan — thus decisively defusing the cold war-style India-Pakistan rivalry in that country — by supplying petroleum products and other scarce materials, and above all, by unilaterally allowing duty-free imports of all goods from Pakistan. Our economy can bear this. The extent of goodwill that this will create cannot be exaggerated, nor the political gains from a stable, secure Pakistan.