Pakistan must wake up and smell the geo-economic brew
Summary
Economic dynamism increasingly drives today’s world. It dictates military heft and power equations. Any country that doesn’t understand what’s brewing on this front will be vulnerable. Post Pahalgam, it’s about time Islamabad got this memo.
That Pakistan could not afford an arms race with much-larger India was clear all along. The infirmity of its quest for parity via nuclear weapons, for which a former Pakistani leader once said people would go hungry if need be, was exposed by its own role in a covert game of inflicting a ‘thousand cuts’ on India with terror attacks.
In 2019, its nukes did not deter Indian surgical strikes on its territory in retaliation to mass violence perpetrated in Pulwama, Kashmir. Today, after 26 tourists were gunned down in Pahalgam, the logic of proportionality has given India a catapult to hit back again.
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Meanwhile, our gap in the capacity for conventional warfare continues to widen. New estimates from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) show that our military spending dwarfs that of Pakistan. In 2024, the latter spent $10.2 billion, while our figure stood at $86.1 billion. As a slice of GDP, Pakistan’s outlay was about 2.7%, a bit higher than our 2.3%, but since the former’s economy is stagnant while ours expands robustly, Islamabad can expect its disadvantage to steadily worsen. At some point, the hoary rhetoric of Pakistani obsessions must confront the material reality of Indian advances.
Will cross-border misadventures backed by Pakistan’s ‘deep state’ continue? In deploying an untested new coercive device, by holding the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance, New Delhi hopes not. Signed in 1960, this World Bank-brokered treaty covers how waters of the Indus river and its tributaries are shared. Its vitality to our downstream neighbour is clear from Islamabad’s statement that in case upstream India held back its share of Indus flows, it would treat it as an “act of war". Enablers of a water choke might be in the works.
Also Read: Mint Quick Edit | India can gain Indus leverage over Pakistan
As reported by Mint, the Indian government plans to fast-track work on hydroelectric dams and may even consider new projects on the rivers whose flows Pakistan relies on. Should significant storage capacity come up, the sluice gates of dams could act as Damoclean shutters, granting New Delhi a novel form of leverage over Islamabad.
It is possible that Pakistan expects the backing of China, whose 2024 military spend SIPRI has put at $314 billion, in case an armed face-off with India escalates into all-out war. Although China’s rise as an economy and its AI leaps have made it a major force that even the US seems nervous about, there’s a memo that Islamabad must not miss. Global history is relentlessly being driven by economic game-plans, on which the outcome of today’s great power rivalry will likely pivot.
Also Read: Mint Quick Edit | Pakistan is caught in a time warp
This is most visible in America’s trade war, which it accords higher priority than its old security alliances. And if the US covets Canada and Greenland, it might plausibly be for control of Arctic ports as the polar ice-cap shrinks to open up new shipping routes. The Panama Canal matters to Washington for similar reasons. Across the Arctic, Russia’s interest in Ukraine was partly about access to minerals and the Black Sea.
Surely, the same goes for Beijing’s calculus.
China’s interest in Pakistan’s Gwadar port is focused on its own seaboard reach, as with many other links in its Belt and Road Initiative. The People’s Republic has been making overtures to India in the context of its stand-off with the US. If Asia’s big two were to strike a mutually beneficial bargain, it would spotlight the power of geo-economics.
Money talks. Prosperity is Pakistan’s only way out of an ideological time warp. Not just waters, we could share peace dividends if it succeeds.
