‘Chinese Citizens Among 4 Dead in Pakistan Terror Attack’ had become the second most read story on Bloomberg.com on Tuesday by the time Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was able to rush to the Chinese embassy in Islamabad to assure them that whoever did it would be sorted out very sternly.
You can be sure that he threw his hands up in despair when he heard of it because it’s very likely that it would already have set a cycle of events in motion that will divert yet more resources away from controlling the economy.
His government is neck-deep in negotiations with the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and he must already be working on politically correct explanations for the inevitable rise in petrol and electricity prices. He also has to deal with the pressure from PTI’s (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf’s) imminent march on the capital; not the least because it’s sure to spook the economy.
The power crisis, especially in Ramazan, is also driving people crazy and pushing down his ratings at a very critical time, and he must now move pieces around fast enough to meet his own May1 deadline for completely ending electricity load-shedding throughout the country.
But he had to leave all that aside and put out this fire first.
Ask any journalist who’s covered the Chinese, essentially CPEC (China Pakistan Economic Corridor), over the last three years and he/she will tell you that Beijing was furious after earlier terrorist attacks on its workers in Pakistan; to the point that it stopped work on a few projects and even pulled back from some that were ready to take off.
And it didn’t help at all that the government of the time tried to cover up one of the attacks as an accident, and had to be schooled by Chinese intelligence on what really went down. Then it took many months of begging and pleading, not to mention hefty compensation packages, to get them to come back.
If Beijing gets upset again it could really hurt our economic interests. If it hadn’t agreed to roll over a $4.2 billion loan just last month, with the IMF programme suspended and reserves signaling an SOS, we could well have started tumbling towards default.
In fact, the government’s already prepared plans to ask the all-weather-friend for more money to meet its immediate needs. It’s precisely this kind of situation that cries out for the attention of an insurgency that is itching to restart. The Karachi attack also shows that fears of the enemy mutating into a more efficient, much fiercer, fighting force were true.
It’s also got much smarter. First it surprised by using complicated strategy and technology, no doubt picked up from the Americans in the long war, and now it’s surprised by realising that targeting the Chinese hits nerves in both Islamabad and Beijing. It’s also a reminder that this terrorism business is getting out of hand once again. The headlines didn’t miss that the same day as the Karachi attack TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) terrorists were active in Waziristan as well.
PM Sharif really has his work cut out to solve all the problems at the same time. The economy is in crisis. There’s no way around another round of cost push inflation that will drop a bomb on the politics just when public discourse is about at its ugliest ever.
It’s anybody’s guess what more sacrifices will have to be made for the IMF programme; or if it will be revived at all. Once again, hardly a week goes by without news of more terrorist attacks and more needless deaths. Even if the Chinese put up a straight face, which remains to be seen, everybody knows that they will be upset.
All of this makes the economic situation much worse. And people screaming on the streets about backbreaking inflation is the last thing the government needs when PTI is agitating so aggressively against it. This must be the farthest thing from the welcome Shehbaz Sharif expected when he took oath. Since then, he seems to run into a new problem that ultimately also threatens the economy every few days. Now, he’ll have to wriggle very well to avoid the axe, and the going is getting tougher all the time.
Truly, when it rains, it pours.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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