EDITORIAL – JUNE & JULY 2025 – Pakistan’s poisonous pact

In the wake of the latest India-Pakistan conflict, one thing has become clear: Pakistan’s strategic orientation is no longer ambiguous. 

Its actions, both recent and historical, align more closely with that increasingly cohesive alliance of states, led by China and Russia, that are fundamentally hostile to Western values. 

South Asian alliances are far from straightforward in that Pakistan has long been treated as both a Chinese and American ally, while India has a solid security relationship with Russia. 

But, with the winds of change sweeping geopolitics, it is time that Western powers openly acknowledged the destabilising threat posed by Pakistan to the global order. 

For decades, the West has tried to walk a tightrope with Pakistan, offering aid, diplomatic engagement, and strategic partnership. But the military and intelligence establishment, the real power behind government, has consistently failed to deliver. 

Under a suffocating military umbrella, Pakistan has been incapable of using this military influence to raise living standards, as is the case in Thailand, whose military is smarter. The army has failed to evolve Pakistan into a trade and wealth-creating entity, as other Islamic nations such as Bangladesh and Malaysia have done. 

The country’s appalling indicatorssum up the destructive path it has trodden since its creation in 1947. GDP per capita in India and Bangladesh is around $2,700; Pakistanis are more than $1,000 worse off at just $1,600. 

The International Monetary Fund is constantly bailing out the flawed economy. 

Moreover, there has been a flow of allegations against Pakistan state-sponsored terror since the first 1947 Kashmir war. There have been four military coups, numerous attempted coups and the fingerprints of generals and the Inter-Services Intelligence agency are everywhere.

Since the 1980s, Pakistan has stood accused of supporting the Sikh Khalistan independence movement in India’s Punjab. After that, violence and unrest moved up to Kashmir. The all too familiar pattern of terror strikes in India includes attacks in 2001 on the parliament in Delhi, and in 2008 on Mumbai. 

In the early 2000s, Western intelligence agencies exposed Pakistan’s role in nuclear proliferation with evidence of scientist A.Q. Khan selling nuclear technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea with the full knowledge of senior generals. 

While claiming to side with the West over Afghanistan, Pakistan undermined NATO forces by also working with the Taliban. In 2011, it was found to be harbouring the architect of the 2001 terror strikes on America, Osama Bin Laden, who lived in a compound in the military garrison town of Abbottabad.

Pakistan’s democratic institutions remain a charade. Elections are stage-managed by the military. Civil society operates under constant threat. Imran Khan, the former Prime Ministerwho challenged military influence, is in jail. Dissent is not tolerated, thus making accountability near impossible. 

Without an opposition to stress-test ideas and policy, leadership becomes weak and corrupt. Those generals running the country today are inevitably less bright and disciplined as those who wrested control in the 1950s. 

The question is: what do Western powers do about Pakistan’s slide into dangerous decline, not least because this is a nuclear power that has threatened to use its weapons. 

An answer comes from the crowing applause Pakistan has given itself for holding the line in its latest conflict with India. 

Firstly, its security agencies could have shut down the terror camps from which the attacks on Indian civilians were launched. They did not. Nor did they move in afterwards. 

Secondly, Pakistan’s military pushback against India lay not in its own ingenuity but in Chinese-made aircraft, missiles and associated technology. More than 80 per cent of Pakistan’s weapons come from China, which is also by far its biggest source of foreign direct investment. 

Thirdly, army chief Syed Asim Munir, who failed to avert this latest crisis,was subsequently promoted to field marshal, having made a provocative anti-India speech just days before the Kashmir attack. 

None of this carries nation-building ingredients. It is a culture more in line with Myanmar and North Korea, junior members of that Sino-Russian-led grouppitting itself against the West, where fear and nationalism justify repression at home and confrontation abroad. 

Opposition leaders are jailed, criticism silenced, militias supported. 

Against Pakistan’s catastrophe, India has thrived. The currency that keeps Pakistan’s elite afloat is a fabricated atmosphere of war and threat. India’s currency is the potpourri of modern life, trade, technology, infrastructure, the arts, science and democracy, however flawed. 

Its neighbour’s hostility is merely an irritation. 

Pakistan has been given ample opportunity to prove itself as a responsible international stake-holder and has failed on too many occasions to ignore. 

Democratic governments need to recalibrate their policies accordingly with measures that could include calling Islamabad out, sanctioning leaders and giving greater support to the jailed Imran Khan and opposition voices. 

In aligning itself with the enemies of democracy, Pakistan has chosen a side. The West must acknowledge this and respond with clarity and conviction.