Cries in the Wilderness

It makes no sense to be allowed to vote but never receive the services for which you vote.

Foreign policy is the external dimension of national policy. As Pakistan is a developing country, its transformation to a developed country is among its foremost national priorities. Moreover, national transformation is a comprehensive, longer-term process that includes systemic reform to facilitate it. This alone lends a longer-term dimension to the foreign policy of a developing country, apart from longer-term security and other diplomatic aspirations and imperatives.

Despite regular features of Pakistan’s external policies, including relations with Arab and Muslim countries, the USA, China, India, Afghanistan, Europe, etc., its foreign policy has not been implemented in a longer-term perspective. This is because foreign policy cannot escape the quality of domestic governance and the policy horizons of national decision-makers. Accordingly, Pakistan’s political history has been described as a journey “from crisis to crisis.” Over the decades, the international perception of Pakistan has changed from a country with a bright future to one today with much dimmer prospects. Most of the country’s economic, social, and political indices confirm this woeful transition.

Instead of national development, regime survival became the de facto priority of governments of the day, whether democratically elected, militarily imposed, or “hybrid” mixtures of constitutional and unconstitutional government. Religion and patriotism have been politically weaponized in this process at the expense of developing a confident and educated public opinion. Every aspect of government policy, including foreign policy, has increasingly been defined by short-term survival considerations rather than the longer-term whole of the nation transformation imperatives. Accordingly, everything has suffered, including education, science and technology, healthcare, human rights, especially women’s rights, greater equality of opportunity, institutional development, climate policy, and the integrity and fidelity of national decision-making.

Foreign and other national policies have been reduced to short-term damage limitation instead of achieving longer-term national objectives. Economic development and stability have become more propaganda than reality. Pakistan still has a crop of excellent and nationally motivated diplomats, bureaucrats, and experts with well-informed, longer-term perspectives. But their collective and institutional voice has been reduced to cries in the wilderness. Their counsels are, by and large, treated by their political bosses as water on a duck’s back. Accordingly, our rulers score duck after duck in the arena of international diplomacy.

The antiquated class structure of Pakistan’s society has ensured elite capture of Pakistan’s national policies, including its foreign policy, which in turn has caused the progressive deterioration of Pakistan’s image abroad. As a result, even when our diplomats deploy credible and telling arguments in support of Pakistan’s positions on bilateral and international issues, they tend to fall on deaf ears because of Pakistan’s image as a failing state in the perception of much of the international community. This irresponsibility of the ruling elites of Pakistan has denied it a longer-term national and foreign policy.