Pakistan’s leaders have worked out how to manage two rival superpowers in a way that seems to have escaped much more stable nations. They are promising the US a foothold in the economy that does not step on China’s — and vice versa. Their response to a multipolar world is to give every pole a stake.
In the past months, the nation’s vulnerability has been starkly visible. Monsoon floods damaged half the crops, killed 1,000 people and displaced millions. The government is still trying to persuade the IMF to release US$1.2 billion it needs to stay solvent.
Yet its leaders are managing to win friends and influence people. Last month, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif visited Beijing and announced US$8.5 billion of new investment. Later that month, Pakistan signed a mutual defense agreement with Saudi Arabia that might extend Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella.
Illustration: Mountain People
Islamabad is managing all this even while locking in gains with the US. Its dependence on China and renewed intimacy with Saudi Arabia has not put off Washington — quite the opposite. US President Donald Trump hosted Pakistani Chief of the Army Staff Field Marshal Asim Munir twice in the past few months.
How has the Pakistani establishment — run essentially by Munir and his soldiers, without whom Sharif could not stay in office — managed this? Partly though skillfully reassessing what a multipolar world actually looks like, and by putting together bespoke offers for possible partners that look too good to refuse.
For example, the US has reportedly been presented with a port to develop in the southwestern province of Balochistan — possibly as a route to the mineral resources in the interior that Islamabad has already promised the White House.
The offer is a physical manifestation of Pakistan’s developing “please-everybody” strategy. The fishing village in question, Pasni, is 110km from the Chinese-run Port of Gwadar, the southern terminus of Beijing’s ambitious corridor from the Arabian Sea to Xinjiang.
If, as official sources have confirmed, Pasni is to play “a vital role in transporting Pakistani minerals to partner countries,” then it appears that Munir and Sharif imagine two parallel tracks bisecting their country, one built for China and one serving the West.
There is real money in play, as well. Missouri-based US Strategic Metals has signed a US$500 million contract with an army-run company, the Frontier Works Organization. The Asian Development Bank has created a US$410 million financing package for Barrick Mining Corp’s Reko Diq mine, which is close to the Iranian border and 400km north of Pasni. International Finance Corp, a multilateral agency, is to add another US$400 million to try and develop one of the world’s largest remaining reserves of copper and gold.
Even if there is gold in Balochistan, getting it out of the ground is not the only challenge. Transporting it to the coast is harder. It is an inhospitable part of the world, as every outsider since Alexander has discovered — the conqueror’s most difficult days were near Pasni, where the Greeks suffered from “intolerable heat and the lack of food, water and firewood,” and lost most of his army’s families and transport animals to a flash flood.
The Baloch have always been restive under Islamabad’s yoke, and have killed almost 100 Chinese expatriates in the past few years. If the US truly intends to put down roots, it would have to deal with local opposition.
Officials might already be preparing for this: In August, the US Department of State added the Balochistan Liberation Army to its list of foreign terrorist organizations, something of a reversal from how Washington viewed the area a decade ago.
Islamabad might have failed for decades to create the sort of productive, dynamic economy that builds anything the world might want to buy, but that does not mean there is nothing left to sell. It can still slice off its sovereignty: Outsource fiscal policy to the IMF, share its nuclear umbrella with Saudi Arabia, mortgage its energy infrastructure to China and promise the US minerals that are still in the ground.
The strategy might have bought the Pakistani establishment another few years. Munir and Sharif must not waste it. They need to ensure the promised money gets spent, and the hoped-for rewards materialize. They must use the treasure and time they have deftly unearthed to stabilize the country’s creaking economy.
Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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