Pakistan's Foreign policy
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Overview of Foreign policy since 1950
Debate on foreign policy By Anwar Syed
SENATORS from both sides of the aisle argued the other day that the current pro-American policy, a product of the military establishment, should give way to an independent stance. Mr Raza Rabbani, a PPP spokesman and leader of the House, endorsed this call and added that his party had never had any connection with the ‘establishment’ and its fashioning of a pro-American policy.
These assertions are not correct. Pakistan adopted a distinctly pro-American policy beginning about 1954 when a civilian government was in place. It joined US-sponsored anti-communist alliances in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and began receiving American military and economic assistance. This policy direction continued during Ayub Khan’s rule and, in varying measure, during subsequent military regimes. But it is wrong to say that the military establishment had initiated it.
It should be noted here that the so-called alliance with the United States did not keep Pakistan from developing close relations with China, the communist giant in Asia whose influence the United States also wished to contain. American officials did not approve of Pakistan’s advances towards China but made no serious moves to stop them.
Relations between Pakistan and the United States during Gen Ziaul Haq’s rule and then again during Gen Musharraf’s regime became more specifically transactional than those of a generalised rapport. America needed Pakistan’s assistance for the attainment of its objectives in Afghanistan (expulsion of Soviet forces from that country during the 1980s and more recently the eradication of Islamic militants). Pakistan provided the needed assistance and received compensation for services rendered. The transaction did not make Pakistan a ‘friend’ or ally of America (except in the wishful thinking of some Pakistani commentators). Their relationship has remained essentially like that between a buyer and seller, even though it has included some peripheral American interest in Pakistan’s well-being. It was a bargain that governments in Pakistan made quite willingly.
Each side has had some minor dissatisfactions. Pakistan wants to be treated on par with India, which the United States has declined to do on the ground that Pakistan is not potentially the world power that India is. American officials approve of Musharraf because he has done a good job as an instrument of their policy, but they have not been happy with his being a military dictator. They have urged adoption of genuine democracy, honest elections, and respect for human rights.
The United States is not keeping Pakistan from pursuing an ‘independent’ foreign policy. It does not seek to influence Pakistan’s relations with the rest of the world, and Pakistan is able to reject its advice in those few cases in which it is offered. Pakistan has declined to support the American campaign to isolate Iran, and it has gone ahead with negotiating a gas pipeline deal with the Iranian government, and no American penalties have ensued. The United States has been advocating peace between Pakistan and India and this is a policy that successive governments in Pakistan have accepted for their own reasons regardless of American urgings.
The Bush administration is more than satisfied with Pakistan’s role in combating extremism and the accompanying terrorism. It is this area of policy that invites criticism from certain political forces in Pakistan. It is a complicated issue. Both Pakistan and America disapprove of extremism as such because it disrupts the good order of society. There is thus a mutuality of interest and identity of views on a vital issue.
But each side also has its own reasons for wanting to eradicate extremism and terrorism. Islamic extremists are anti-American. They want to expel American presence and dominance from the Muslim world. It is Pakistan’s assistance in the suppression of this anti-American drive to which critics in the Senate and elsewhere object. Pakistan, they say, is fighting America’s war and its army is killing its own people in its tribal region bordering Afghanistan.
But ‘our own people’ here are killing others of ‘our own people’. The critics believe that negotiations, and not force, should be employed to persuade them to stop their operations within Pakistan. American officials, who used to be sceptical, are now willing to give negotiations a chance and see what they will accomplish. If negotiations do not get anywhere, Prime Minister Gilani’s government will have to decide whether to use force against the militants or yield our territory and people to their control.
Let us now take up the matter of the PPP’s connection with the ‘establishment’. Raza Rabbani asserts that there never has been, and there isn’t now, any. He is a good old socialist, true to his party’s professed ideological commitments, and a man of honour. He declined a post in Mr Gilani’s cabinet because he did not wish to be sworn in by a president whom he regarded as illegitimate. I believe he has no desire to be an ally of the military establishment, and that he has had no part in the fashioning of its pro-American policy. But he does not control the thinking of his party’s top leaders.
It is a well-known fact that following the 1988 elections, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan invited Benazir Bhutto to form a government only after she had conceded the military establishment’s primacy in certain areas of policymaking. In her second term as prime minister, her inability to get along with successive army chiefs was a major reason, among others, for her dismissal. It is also a well known fact that she had been negotiating a deal with Gen Musharraf for almost a year, and finally made one before her return to Pakistan in October 2007. After her assassination last December, Mr Zardari has continued to honour it.
It is equally well-known that her return to Pakistan had been facilitated by the Bush administration’s intercessions with Musharraf. She came lavishly praising the American anti-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering that country. She declared her own resolve to eradicate the likes of Al Qaeda and the Taliban living in Pakistan. She went out of her way to present herself as America’s vice regent in Pakistan — a stance that may have cost her life.
This is where the PPP has stood with regard to the military establishment in this country and its interaction with the United States, Mr Rabbani’s preferences in these matters notwithstanding.
The writer, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, was until recently a visiting professor at the Lahore School of Economics.
anwarsyed@cox.net
The Gulf
2017: some setbacks
Is Pakistan losing friends in Gulf due to terror taint?, Aug 24, 2017: The Times of India
HIGHLIGHTS
Qatar's visa-free entry program included US & European countries, India, China, Russia, but curiously left out Pak, one of its close allies.
Kuwait has placed visa restrictions on Pakistanis since 2011.
While they don’t call it a visa ban, Pakistanis have to go through much stricter scrutiny than other countries’ citizens.
NEW DELHI: In August 2017, Qatar introduced a visa-free entry program for 80 countries+ to attract more tourists and business people to the tiny emirate following the Saudi-led embargo+ that has isolated it within the Gulf Cooperation Council. The list included US and European countries, India, China, Russia, but curiously left out Pakistan, one of its close allies. Qatar's action has drawn protests from Islamabad, but Doha has remained unmoved.
Kuwait, another GCC favourite, has placed visa restrictions on Pakistanis since 2011.
While they don't call it a visa ban, Pakistanis have to go through much stricter scrutiny than other countries' citizens. Former Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif personally intervened in March 2017 with the Kuwaiti leadership, but despite promises of review, Pakistanis continue to stay on the restricted list. Is the Pakistan-Gulf relationship fraying at the edges? In 2015, Pakistan refused to join+ the Saudi alliance against Yemen prompting swift angry reprisals from the UAE authorities. Saudi Arabia, one of Pakistan's biggest benefactors, virtually asked Pakistan to choose between Riyadh and Doha earlier this year, when the Gulf states hit out at Qatar for its alleged support to terrorists.
Pakistan, for a while, considered pulling out Gen Raheel Shareef as commander of the Saudi-led anti-terrorism alliance after Nawaz Sharif felt ignored and shunned in Riyadh during a visit by Donald Trump. Sharif was not allowed to deliver his prepared speech, nor could he meet Trump. To add insult to injury, Trump named only India as a victim of terror, when Pakistan insists it has paid the largest cost in human terms. The Qatar decision this month was not a one-off. In November '16, it introduced visas on arrival for tourists from India, Russia, China among others. In September, it liberalised its visa regime for Indian citizens with US Green Cards or UK permanent residents. Pakistan was not on either list. However, Qatar has just launched a new shipping route to Karachi which might mitigate Pakistan's difficulties, after a 15-year LNG deal concluded in 2016.
The agreements are forcing Pakistan to choose between Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
The Kuwait visa ban on Pakistan has had other consequences — it has become difficult for its businessmen and executives to go to Gulf countries or work there, because of travel restrictions between GCC countries. It's also making it difficult for them to be recruited in corporate sector. UAE foreign minister Anwar Gargash was in Delhi sometime ago to assure India the ongoing crisis between GCC and Qatar would have no effect on India's ties with either side.
2020: More setbacks
DOHA: Amid an increasingly polarised Muslim world, Pakistan's strategy to maintain diplomatic ties with countries in the Middle East is no longer working.
In a break from the past where the Gulf countries balanced their relations with Pakistan and India, they are now seen moving towards New Delhi and distancing from Islamabad, according to a report in the Al Jazeera.
Pakistan, on the other hand, is seen moving closer to Turkey and Malaysia - two countries that Saudi Arabia sees as challengers to its stronghold within the Muslim world, according to foreign policy analysts Abdul Basit and Dr Zahid Shahab Ahmed writing in the Al Jazeera.
The relationship between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, went haywire last month when Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi openly rebuked the kingdom for its lack of support for Islamabad's interests on the Kashmir issue.
During a television talk-show, the Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmud Qureshi made a statement that irked the Saudi "big brother", where he said that Pakistan would be "compelled" to "call a meeting of the Islamic countries that are ready to stand with us on the issue of Kashmir."
In Basit and Shahab Ahmed's article, the remark by Pakistani Foreign Minister was not taken well by Riyadh and was seen as a veiled threat to concoct a new side against the Saudi-dominated Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
In retaliation, the kingdom was quick to request the sudden repayment of a billion-dollar loan extended to Pakistan in November 2018, which was renegotiated just six months ago. Besides this, it also refused to renew a deferred oil payments scheme that was part of the same loan which was given to Islamabad when the country was trying to avoid a possible sovereign default.
After Riyadh raised the bar, Pakistan was forced on a back foot. Thereafter, Qureshi, trying to save face, refuted reports that ties have strained between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in the past few weeks. "The kingdom has neither asked Islamabad to return its loan nor has it suspended oil supply to Pakistan," Qureshi was quoted as saying by The News International.
As a result of Qureshi's backtracking, Pakistani journalists slammed the Foreign Minister saying it contradicted the comments he made earlier.
Soon after, Pakistan went into damage-control mode and had to send Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa to Riyadh. However, the visit turned out be futile as the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) did not meet Bajwa, and they were left to meet with Saudi Deputy Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman bin Abdulaziz.
According to the Al Jazeera report, "the latest diplomatic spat between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan should be seen in the broader context of recent strategic realignments in the Middle East and the Muslim world."
"For some time, Pakistan has been struggling to keep to its traditional policy of maintaining neutral relations with rival Muslim powers. While Islamabad is concerned about the deepening strategic and economic cooperation between its arch-rival India and a group of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia, Riyadh is equally frustrated by Pakistan's overtures towards Muslim-majority states it views as hostile, such as Turkey, Malaysia and Qatar," it said.
The Gulf countries are now visibly seen moving towards India and distancing from Pakistan. The tides are turning in India's favour. One such example is MBS's February 2019 visit of South Asia.
During his tour, the Saudi Crown Prince made the unprecedented move of visiting India directly after Pakistan. After signing agreements worth $20 billion with Pakistan, MBS said he expects Riyadh's investments in India "to exceed $100 billion in the coming two years".
Saudi Arabia is not the only one. After India's August 2019 move to revoke article 370, Pakistan called Arab states to raise their voices. However, its Gulf partners including Saudi Arabia failed to put a front against India. Riyadh even told India that it understands "India's approach and actions in Jammu and Kashmir".
Amid the strategic readjustment in the Middle East, political analysts say that relations between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is bound to get bumpy as it appears that the former will continue to move closer to New Delhi. Islamabad, on the other hand, will have to retain its partnerships with several countries in the Middle East and return to Saudi Arabia's sphere.
