EDITORIAL: The government waxed eloquent about securing $9 billion or so in Chinese financial support - full of sovereign loans, refinancing of old loans and an uptick in the currency swap grant - when prime minister Shehbaz Sharif returned from Beijing. But it’s becoming apparent that the Chinese leadership, all the way to President Xi Jinping, also expressed very serious concern about the security of its citizens working in Pakistan.
It wouldn’t be surprising, as some analysts have started questioning, if they tied further financial help to improve on-ground security. PM Sharif gave him the firmest assurances, of course, but all this has been said and done before, yet attacks have continued despite the Chinese stopping work on a few projects in protest.
They clearly no longer take these promises at face value. And now, after the assassination attempt on former prime minister Imran Khan, our Chinese friends will trust our security arrangements even less for very understandable reasons. Yet it is crucial to regain their trust.
China is a very valuable friend for financial reasons more than anything else. The political alliance is also very important, of course, and in many ways mutually beneficial, but right now Pakistan’s needs and priorities are more economic than political. And what would happen if Beijing stopped some of the financing just because we couldn’t keep terrorists from killing their nationals? This question has a very simple answer: we would be singularly responsible for the security breakdown as well as another big black hole in the economy.
In some ways this problem is related more to political policy than security. A close look at attack patterns suggests that they tend to occur more frequently in areas where the police force is designed to revolve around protocol duties for the political upper class. So the prime minister will have to do more than just give police chiefs a good dressing down to honour his promise to President Xi.
He will have to go to the heart of policymaking and reset priorities there. No doubt he remembers that one of the first things he had to do as PM was call the Chinese president and express regret for a suicide attack in Karachi that left four Chinese nationals dead – and, of course, promise severe action.
The Chinese were no doubt furious, which slowed down CPEC (China Pakistan Economic Corridor) just when the economy was diving. And relations improved only after the government accepted Chinese help in taking out a BLA (Balochistan Liberation Army)-related outfit responsible for the attack.
Now Beijing wants up-front assurances. It doesn’t help, of course, that the attack on Imran Khan has sparked ugly protests, and uglier police crackdowns, which is not what investors want to see in countries where they park their money.
The government will also have to ensure law and order for the aid to flow uninterrupted. And that will require its own share of political wheeling and dealing, not to mention ensuring transparency in an extremely sensitive, and sure to be controversial, investigation into the attack on the PTI leadership.
It seems the Chinese will continue to throw enough money into Pakistan to keep it stable, at least for a while longer. But it’s also clear that just like our other donor of last resort, the IMF (International Monetary Fund), it will now attach conditions that will make these loans more qualitatively expensive for us. And, also like the Fund, it will set “prior conditions”. We are facing similar pushback from other regular donors as well, especially the two Arab countries: Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
That means even borrowing enough money to stay just afloat is now contingent upon cleaning up one mess after another at home. If the government still doesn’t wake up to the desperate need for these internal structural reforms, then the future will be much worse than the past.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022