Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a South Asian columnist for the Wall Street Journal, talks with James M. Lindsay about the political, economic, and climate crises in Pakistan.
Sadanand Dhume is with me to talk about the political, economic and climate crisis in Pakistan. Sadanand is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and focuses on the political economy, foreign policy, business, and society of South Asia. For a decade, he has been a South Asian columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His most recent column is titled “Imran Khan’s Arrest, the Army, and the Perpetual Crisis in Pakistan. “Sadanand, thank you for joining me.
Since then, this has only intensified the relationship between him and the military. The recent U-turn is because he has stepped up his rhetoric. He spoke directly about the challenge of army chief Gen. Asim Munir. He directly named a serving elementary school general, a high-ranking army officer named Faisal Naseer, and accused him of plotting an assassination attempt against him. All this rhetoric is unprecedented in Pakistan. This is a country where a year ago even the most experienced and seasoned journalists chose their words very conscientiously when they talked about the army. Sometimes they adapted to the code, so they would say things that described them. They were called “the boys” or, sometimes, jokingly, “the Department of Agriculture. “Here’s this very high-profile figure, the country’s most prominent user, we can come back to this a little bit later, a recent former prime minister directly attacking the army leader and other senior army officers.
So they ended up arresting him. There was a whole series of accusations. About 150 charges were filed against him. Some or most of them are probably false, but in any case he was arrested. Then you had this explosion of violence. Once again, the violence was unprecedented in Pakistan’s history as it directly attacked military installations. Protesters attacked the house of a senior general in Lahore, the top commander. They ransacked his house. Someone ran away with the peacocks from his garden. Someone else left with the lamb korma in their refrigerator, so it was pretty dramatic. Then it looked like Khan was going to get his way when the Supreme Court freed him. But for the moment a very tense confrontation continues. It’s one of those things that’s a bit like a cricket match where one team gets up one day and the other gets up the next. But suffice it to say that Khan finds himself facing a high-stakes confrontation with the military, something we haven’t seen in Pakistan for a long, long time.
Some analysts also maintain that there were deeper political disagreements and that Bajwa was seeking some kind of rapprochement with India. Bajwa was willing to take a step back from defending Pakistan over the Kashmir issue. He claimed that Pakistan was in a dire economic scenario and sought after achieving some kind of modus vivendi with India, which Imran Khan resisted. So, there is a political detail, but I think the most important and vital detail is that Imran clashed with the army chief. The idea that he could get away with it. he. It turned out that the army leader had other plans.
The figure I used in one of my columns was a comparison with Bangladesh, which, as you know, has long been much poorer than Pakistan. In 1999, Bangladesh’s constant source of capita income was slightly less than that of Pakistan. It cost about $400 in Bangladesh and about $420 in Pakistan. If we look at today, the constant source of capita income in Bangladesh is 2,500 dollars. Obviously it is still a very poor country, but in Pakistan it only costs $1,500. Thus, the country went from being slightly ahead of Bangladesh to being 60% behind, which is quite dramatic. Again, I don’t think it’s fair to blame any single Pakistani leader for this. This is just a systemic problem. They failed to attract investors. They have failed to implement legislation that allows companies to operate consistently. This is a very military-dominated situation, which has also distorted Pakistan’s political economy. The old joke told about Prussia also applies to Pakistan: that it is less a country with an army than an army with a country. So those are all deep-rooted structural disorders that predate the advent of Imran Khan, but he too has not been able to fix them.
So this is a serious and persistent challenge that is faced not only by the terrorist component, which is real, specifically in the north-west and Balochistan, but also by the broader ideological issue. This is a challenge that Pakistan has faced from day one. Is it intended to be a country for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, or at least for some of them, a third of the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent?Or is it intended to be a country founded on the legislation of Islam?They struggled with this from the beginning. You can ask other people to highlight the founder of the Nation, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and you can use their comments to provide arguments from both sides. But in some ways, the rise of the Taliban makes this issue even thornier.
The one thing that no Pakistani politician or general ever sees talk about, for example, is the bad remedy of Muslims in Xinjiang. These are the same people who spend a lot of time complaining about the bad remedy of Muslims in India, France, the United States. But when it comes to China, not a word, and it shows how vital China is and how widely its importance is identified through the Pakistani ruling elite.
I feel like the Biden administration hasn’t invested much in Pakistan. Pakistan is feeling a certain weariness after the end of the war in Afghanistan. There is a sense that while this war was going on, Pakistan did not. . . it was more pronounced under Trump’s administration, however, I think all administrations shared that Pakistan was not exactly an actor of intelligent religion in this period.
So I think Pakistan has a lot less vitality now, and I see that as a columnist. I’ve written several columns about Pakistan over the past few months, but when I read the Washington Post, the New York Times, etc. , there’s just not a lot of media politics. Whereas ten years ago, when bin Laden was discovered in Abbottabad, and there was a lot of interest in Pakistan or a lot of media politics about Pakistan, you were seeing stories about Pakistan and the Atlantic all the time. time, and they just disappeared. I think it reflects the fact that we’re not in Afghanistan anymore, it just doesn’t seem that vital, and there’s a certain weariness of Pakistan that’s settling in. It also reflects the fact that there is rarely much sympathy for Imran. Khan, of course, whose rhetoric has been very un-American.
We recognize that the third A has faded relative to the other two A’s over time, but we do our best to push Pakistan towards what I call a more general country. By this I mean adapting a little more to Bangladesh. Indeed, it will have its flaws, but it is primarily focused on improving the lives of its citizens, getting its economy in order, and selling some form of democracy. It won’t succeed in Denmark very easily, to use Francis Fukuyama’s expression, but I think it is a giant enough country that we should get involved in bringing it a little closer to Denmark and further away from Kabul.
Today’s episode produced through Ester Fang, with podcasting director Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Michelle Kurilla for her help in the studies. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.
Mentioned in the podcast
Sadanand Dhume, “Imran Khan’s arrest, the army and Pakistan’s perpetual crisis”, Wall Street Journal