Visit the two countries. There is hardly any difference. The same bustling bazaars. The same chockablock traffic, screeching until one’s ears go mad. The same apparent, abysmal poverty. The same top five percent lording over everyone else.
The same corruption. Over the same things, be it bribing traffic cops or receiving cuts on imported fighter jets. The same contempt for politicians, militaries held in the same high esteem. The same looks, the same stuff being watched and listened to, the same flanneled fool’s sport being obsessed over, in which none of the countries is the world champion, nor will ever be, at least in the foreseeable future (World champion means you gotta win in Australia and South Africa.)
The only differences between the two nations seem that one’s currency is plastered with one father of the nation, and the other’s with the other’s father of the nation. Both fathers of the nation and their teachings forgotten in only seventy years, and whose memory is invoked by the powers that be to burnish their own images. The fathers would go mad if they were to come and see how their names are being misused and by whom. And the other difference is that signs are in different languages, which sound the same though.
Yet, one nation is a rising power, ready to take its rightful place in the comity of nations, while the other is deemed a global pariah, a jelly state if not a failed state. Huh? How did this happen?
The reality is different. The world pays lip service to India for its large middle class and its ability to buy arms on a large scale. India seems to consider this courting as its emergence on the world stage.
Scratch the surface, and you will find something else. The US is denying Indians H1-B visas. The US has delinked the Haqqanis, who they want, from Hafiz Saeed, who they couldn’t care less about, so that they can give dollops of aid to the Pakistanis.
Today the Yanks hector the Pakistanis, but that is empty bluster. The Pakistanis have trumped them; the Yanks’ wails appear like crocodile tears. The Yanks forgot when they invaded Afghanistan and enlisted the Pakistanis’ help by threatening to bomb them into the stone age that the Pakistanis had been there once before.
That time they trumped the Russians, with significant money and arms from the Americans and the Saudis. But the Americans never took to battle in Afghanistan the first time round. Sure they had read that Afghanistan was a graveyard for empires, from the British to the Soviet, but they believed, foolishly, that they themselves would win out.
They struck a Faustian bargain with the Pakistanis, without ever realizing that they were dealing with the devil. In the nineties, the Pakistanis used Afghanistan to hijack Indian planes and launch jihad in Kashmir. Afghanistan had become both strategic depth as well as a launching pad for them. How were they expected to give up this twin treat?
Once the Yanks entered Kabul, the Taliban vanished. Into thin air? Oh no, many of them disappeared into Pakistan. The Yanks forgot about Afghanistan, until first the Iraqis, and then the Taliban, started knocking their teeth out. One by one their Nato brethren fled Afghanistan, until the Yanks realized that they had to flee as well.
Go to Kabul today, and you will find disdain for Pakistan everywhere. But the Pakistanis don’t care. The real people who matter in Afghanistan are the Taliban, and you don’t find many of them in Kabul. The writ of the government of Afghanistan extends over only Kabul, much as the later-day Mughals were derided as the mayors of Delhi.
The Taliban control over sixty percent of the country. The Talibs don’t like the Pakistanis, referring to them often as blacklegs. But the Talibs need Pakistan to capture Kabul, much as the Pakistanis need the Taliban to capture Afghanistan.
The Pakistanis are disdainful of the threats emanating from the Yanks. The Yanks need Pakistani territory to transport supplies to their legionaries in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis blocked their land routes once, and all hell broke loose then. It’s almost impossible to transport goods from the west of Afghanistan.
In courting China, Pakistan has been shrewd. India cannot win a two-front war, and the whole world knows that. As the Chinese and the Pakistanis together wear out India in any conventional conflict, India would have to resort to strategic weapons. But that is a big ask, for it would risk making India an international pariah. Just at that stage, Pakistan would unveil its Kashmir card.
Second, by making India have two enemies instead of one, Pakistan forces India to up its defence budget, while lowering its own earmarks to levels much lower than they would have been in case India did not have to consider China. Its sad how Indian policymakers have been taken in by Pakistan’s love affair with China. They have tried to ween China away from Pakistan, but to no avail.
Today Pakistan stands on the cusp of victory in Afghanistan. It spurns the Americans for the Chinese, and lo and behold, the Russians, the very people it had helped kick out of Afghanistan. Politics, or rather realpolitik, sure does make for strange bedfellows.
Pakistan is able to stymie India at every international forum, be it the UN or the nuclear suppliers group. There have even been strong rumours about the Obama administration offering the Pakistanis their own nuclear deal. Trump yells and curses at the Pakistanis, but is the first one to give it gobs of military aid.
Pakistan sure doesn’t seem like a loser. It appears to have come out of Afghanistan smelling of roses. It can blackmail America to its heart’s content, and what is more, happily get away with it. Does it seem like a failed state? A terrorist state? A terrorized state? At least not now. For now it seems that Pakistan’s star, that star in their beloved crescent, is rising. And rising. -Times of India
Written by: Sunil Sharan