Watershed Year for Pakistan

The WikiLeaks scandal of late 2010, which has revealed to the Pakistan electorate the well-known mutual disregard and cynicism of the Pakistani and US political leaderships, coupled with the death on 14 December of the abrasive US Special Envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, will dramatically limit the efficiency of US-Pakistani cooperation - even more than was the case before - and compound the speed at which strategic change will occur in Pakistan in 2011.

At the same time, the visit to Pakistan by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on 16 December highlighted the reality that Beijing now feels that the US 'primacy' in Pakistan's strategic posture has effectively begun to erode, and that it is now time for the PRC to be seen for what it is: Pakistan's most stable and significant strategic ally.

The pace of change in Pakistan will also be dominated by several factors, some of which are structural:

1. The apparent decline in US political will or capability to engage in the region, either because of declining US power and a tight budget, or because of declining willingness of regional states and members of the NATO coalition to trust US strategic durability and constancy, or indeed because the logistics of sustaining the Afghan military operations are becoming too difficult. (The US-led Coalition's operations in Afghanistan critically depend on logistics through Pakistan. These have clearly been jeopardized, or affected, by the 2010 Pakistan flooding disaster, and by disaster relief efforts and the impact on Pakistani infrastructure. As well, some Coalition military assets have been diverted to assist Pakistani forces in dealing with the disaster across a broad swathe of the country. Coalition logistical efforts to support the Afghanistan military operations have also been dependent on tenuous, secondary logistical access through Central Asia, but these air routes - through Baku, Azerbaijan, and Manas, Kyrgyzstan - are equally under threat of suspension, but even now are only ancillary support routes. Should the Pakistani government decide that the Coalition operations are hindering rescue and revival operations for Pakistanis affected by the floods, Islamabad could decide to request substantially more support from the Coalition or request a restriction of Coalition access to Pakistani assets.)
2. The growing move toward a critical mass in the overall Eurasian landmass of a trading (and therefore geostrategic) patterns dominated by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) states linking the Great Black Sea Basin (GBSB) region and Russia to Western European and Mediterranean markets. In this framework, India will be substantially marginalized and Pakistan will be the 'bridge' used by the PRC to sustain this dynamic, ultimately adding to India's historical focus against Pakistan up to and possibly including moves toward consideration of military options;
3. The rapid transition from an oil-dominated global marketplace in energy to a gas-dominated framework, which will heavily favor the continental Eurasian pipeline and trading networks which, because of ongoing instability in Afghanistan, will probably exclude Pakistan and India. The signing on 15 December of the TAPI (Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India) pipeline agreement by the governments of Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India was an attempt to begin to redress the difficulty which India, in particular, has had in accessing Central Asian energy resources. Significantly, the gas for the TAPI pipeline is projected to come from south-eastern fields under concessions to Chinese companies, and TAPI is proposed to include a major pipeline from Quetta to Gwadar, in Pakistani Baluchistan- thus feeding the PRC market. Whether the Mutlan-New Delhi portion of the pipeline is ever built is very much an open question, but the PRC's interests will be addressed as a priority. From India's standpoint, the 1,700km pipeline would take gas from Turkmenistan's Daulatabad Field, through Afghanistan, to Multan in Pakistan, and then on to the Indian township of Fazilka.
4. The substantial decline, in the latter part of 2011, of US and general Western interest in the Afghanistan conflict, translating into a reduced perceived need to support Pakistani stability;
5. The impact of the 2010 flooding in Pakistan which will see dramatically reduced food and agricultural output in Pakistan in 2011, leading to an exacerbation of economic and political problems, internal schisms along communal lines, and greater pressures on the Pakistan Armed Forces to sustain the infrastructural skeleton of the nation in the absence of other institutions. Attempts by the US to replace physical commitments (of troops, in particular) to Afghanistan and Pakistan with economic aid may do little to stabilize the situation, given that the present governmental institutions are dominated by a corrupt and otherwise paralyzed political structure. This reality, in concert with other factors, is likely to drive pressures on the Pakistan Armed Forces to somehow stabilize national governance, perhaps in concert with the Pakistan Supreme Court, to provide a legitimizing framework of emergency rule. (By August 2010, mid-way through the flooding season, 160,000 square kilometers of land, a fifth of Pakistan territory, was underwater. The number of individuals affected by the flooding exceeded the combined total of people affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.);
6. The emergence by late 2011 of the PRC as Pakistan's dominant strategic partner, even if Pakistan would rather, for cultural reasons,- have wanted the US to be its principal ally. The reality is that while the US has been Pakistan's most visible strategic partner in an unstable cycle of peaks and troughs since the mid-20^th Century, the PRC has been the power which has consistently provided Pakistan with backing. This, both with regard to the growing necessity of the PRC to constrain India into a corner of Eurasia and with regard to the growing ability of the PRC to provide economic and military aid of very real substance to Pakistan, has reached a transformative stage. In other words, the PRC not only has the absolute need to regard Pakistan as its vital bridge to the Indian Ocean and the Middle East and its Great Wall Against India, it finally has the ability to drive this reality through economic and political power;
7. The growing economic and political stagnation within Pakistan, coupled with rapidly expanding urbanization (compounded by the 2010 flood displacement of rural societies) should be expected to drive radical political agendas in the major cities. This will compound security concerns within the country, pushing the urgency with which coalition partners, engaged in Afghanistan, will see the need to minimize their exposure in Pakistan. Moreover, the transformed security situation in Afghanistan, compounded by the speed with which the coalition is moving to "declare victory and go home", will exacerbate cross-border security concerns between Pakistan and Afghanistan and further encourage Afghan refugee flows into Pakistan, exacerbating Pakistan's economic, social and security concerns;
8. Declining central governmental authority in Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan is likely to drive Baluch security issues. This will represent a major concern for Iran - which has attempted to cope with the problem - and Pakistan, but also to China, which absolutely requires the overland connection from the PRC via the Karakoram Highway (now expanding in size) through Pakistani-controlled Azad (Free) Kashmir and down through Pakistani Baluchistan to the Arabian Sea port of Gwadar, which is the cornerstone of China's decisive strategic pre-positioning at the mouth of the Persian Gulf;
9. The military promotions and appointments pattern will, in 2011, govern how, or whether, the Pakistan Armed Forces - particularly the Army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) - are able, or enabled, to help deal with the strategic crisis at hand. There will be a profound political temptation on the part of the existing political leadership - which will face its own crisis in the early months of 2011 at the latest - to suppress any cohesive military capability which would curb the 'democratic' civilian elected leadership, and yet without a decisive military and intelligence capability the security situation would rapidly worsen; and
10. The PRC can be expected to move strongly in 2011 to help boost Pakistan's economic and industrial situation, bearing in mind that until the 2010 floods and the 2010 tribal unrest Pakistan's economic growth was impressive, albeit offset by its high population and urbanization growth rates. It is conceivable that, even as the Coalition's relative importance in Pakistan (and, indeed, the Northern Tier) declines through 2011, it may be possible for Pakistan's private sector to begin to once again focus on economic growth. The PRC would be critical to this, but of primary importance would be whether Pakistan remains hostage to the 'old-style' democratic structures, or whether the Supreme Court and military in Pakistan can help transition Pakistani governance to greater stability and less corruption.

China, unbeatable

All of these factors - and many more - warrant detailed expansion and show that 2011 will be a watershed year for Pakistan. It may also be a watershed year for India, given that the Indian government itself must come to grips with the reality that failure to break into the new Great Silk Route network of the Eurasian landmass will render China's strategic leadership unbeatable within a short span of years.

Moreover, if Pakistan collapses, or becomes vulnerable, it must be questioned whether the US or India can ever win back a place in the Central Asian economic framework, which is, once again, increasingly dominated by Russia and China.

Pakistan has, in recent years, been the country which has had the world's highest level of overall population growth, coupled with the highest level of urban population growth. At the same time, it had, in fact, enjoyed one of the most impressive growths in agricultural output in the world, albeit a level of growth which had not been able to match the growth in population numbers. Thus, the short-term outlook as a result of the 2010 devastating floods is for a major decline in domestic agricultural output, coupled with a further acceleration in the growth in non-productive urban population numbers. This will have major ramifications for political trends, and for the possible rise in urban unrest at a time when much of Karachi, for example, is - for security reasons - a no-go area even for Pakistani security forces.

As noted, it is significant that the PRC relationship with Pakistan remains critical, and it is this - not the US-Pakistan relationship - which effectively ensures Pakistan's security against India. As if to confirm this, US President Barack Obama indicated on 16 December that the US-Pakistani relationship would deteriorate in 2011 because Washington blames the US failure in Afghanistan on Pakistan's reluctance to invade the Pushtun and Baluchi lands in order to close down Taliban sanctuaries.

Paralysis or stability?

Meanwhile, Pakistan is the great impediment to India in gaining overland access to Central Asia and to be a major participant in the revived 'Great Silk Route' wealth of energy and other trade within and across the entire Eurasian landmass. As this writer has noted, India, if it fails to gain land access to Central Asia, will be forced to rely on being an Indian Ocean (and perhaps Pacific) sea power: "Given the rise of the Eurasian landmass and its internal lines of communications, the Indian Ocean itself will become the dynamic ocean of the 21st Century, an inland sea linking Eurasia with the resources and markets of Africa and Australia. How India plays in this game - as a Mahanist sea power or Mackinderish heartland [power] - will be significant." (See Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis, November 16, 2009, "As Superpowers Fade, the Satraps Stir, and the Indian Ocean Becomes the Vital Inland Sea". Writing in Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis, January 5, 2010 )

In terms of comparison by gross domestic product (GDP) in real terms - ie: not by so-called 'purchasing power parity' - India in 2009 was ranked by the World Bank as the 11th largest economy, with a GDP of $1.31 trillion, while the PRC was ranked as the third largest economy with $4.98 trillion. In 1979, India's gross national product (GNP) was $96 billion, while the PRC's was $517 billion (GDP figures from the World Bank; 1979 GNP figures from the 1981 Defense & Foreign Affairs Handbook.). Arguably, then, although the proportional difference between the Indian and PRC economies has remained fairly constant - as have the population numbers of the two states - the real differences in economic capability are now dramatic, giving the PRC greater strategic capability in comparison to India, just as, in recent years, India's real economic status has completely eclipsed that of Pakistan. These real economic differentials translate into the emergence (in both scenarios) of strategic differentials. However, in geostrategic terms, it is absolutely clear that the PRC regards Pakistan as an integral ally vis-à-vis India.

In the meantime, while it is possible that Pakistan could go through the worst political paralysis and instability in the first half of 2011, it could - with the help of the impending western withdrawal of forces from the region and the increase in Chinese support - begin to stabilize by the end of 2011. However, the failure of the present Pakistani government to adequately respond to the 2010 flood damage means that the country's agriculture may not recover for several years. This would be of profound concern, and it may be - along with improved electric power generation - the most critical national priority.

The immediate outlook for Pakistan, then, is a period of great challenges, and possible turmoil, with the end of yet another round of close US-Pakistan strategic relations, and the real emergence of support and investment from China. This will be a watershed year for Pakistan.