Certainly, on the foreign fronts, Imran Khan government can take credit for a multitude of mischiefs – from publicly suggesting the establishment of an interim government in Afghanistan to facilitate peace talks, creating confusions and doubts on the implementation of the CPEC, failing to comprehend the Modi’s government’s course of action after winning reelection and, therefore, openly embarking on to bet on the Modi’ victory, to emboldening the distasteful notion of U-turn in policymaking. But the foreign policy blunder that Imran Khan made during the course of Malaysia’s preparation to host the summit far outpaces his other idiocies.
Let’s be clear that Imran Khan took a categorical approach when it came to matters of unity and strength of the Muslim world. His speech at the General Assembly forum may be a high point of his career’s struggle against the injustices on the Muslims. Further, in his meeting with Mahathir and Erdogan, it is also clear that Imran Khan was focused on trying to translate his categorical righteous approach into reality. To a certain extent, he tried to rally those leaders to the greater independence and freedom of the Muslim world. So, with Mahathir and Erdogan on the stage, Imran Khan saw an opportunity to rekindle hope and progress in the Muslim world.
Fast forward. Malaysia announced on 23rd November that it was going to hold the summit. Organizing the KL Summit was important for this major reason: it would signal the much-needed start of a greater and enduring struggle.
And then came the summit. What happened down the road is a sad story now. A majority of the country’s newspapers simply put that Pakistan refrained from joining the summit. However, the underlying facts are far more complicated and bitter than that simple assumption of ‘refraining’.
Summarily, it represented the hollowness behind all that decades-old uproar that Pakistan has been making on achieving greater goods for the Muslim Ummah. It also showed that the notion of morality that Pakistan preaches is very different from that it practices: that, when it comes to walk the talk, Pakistan weighs morality on the (narrowly-defined) basis of its utility alone.
So, would we be wrong if we assume that most of Imran Khan’s efforts to bring together the Muslim world were nothing except part of his, otherwise, routine habit of rambling and roaring? Considering Imran Khan’s ceaseless proclivity to talk of lofty goals at one hand and ignoring those very goals when the moment arrives for an action, therefore, one can be forgiven for looking the other way to Imran Khan.
So, the Imran Khan government took a sort of narrowly-constricted consequential approach when the summit arrived. It is also far beyond the logic of comprehensibility that why the government came to that decision to skip the summit at the final hours, not before. Take a look at the chronology of events: Imran, Mahathir, and Erdogan met in the US at the end of September to reach on a decision to set the seal on new initiatives to engender progress and positivity in the Muslim world; at 23rd of November, Mahathir announced to host the summit nearly a month later, at the end of December. So, if we start counting from the days of the UNGA meetings, there is the span of nearly three months for the summit to take place. In case the benchmark is 23 November, the day Mahathir announced the summit, then we have a one month time period to ready ourselves. That is pretty much time to successfully undertake the task.
Failing to accomplish the foreign policy goal e.g., participating in the summit, means that for the government it was business as usual and that the government didn’t have the exact understanding on how things work in the Muslim world.
So, the question arises that why did Imran Khan and his foreign ministry fail to analyze and interpret the ensuing events among major Muslim countries in a way to successfully walk the talk? When will our foreign ministry finally come to behave in a proactive and active way? It has been nearly one and a half years since Imran Khan is in power.
Once, soon after Shah Mehmood took charge of the foreign ministry, I argued in a paper that Pakistan’s foreign policy during the Imran Khan-led government will be more of the same. It does not please me to see that I couldn’t be truer all this time.
Also, we can raise serious questions on the way Imran Khan’s foreign policy blunder is being discussed among scholars and writers. Mostly, we see writers debating the powerful role and influence of Saudi Arabia on the country’s ability to freely decide (or not decide). Certainly, dependence has its own way of negatively influencing events, especially in terms of sovereignty and independence. “You don’t get to choose”, goes the traditional saying.
But in many ways, it does not appeal much to build the whole narrative of Pakistan’s external failure on the involvement of Saudi Arabia. If somehow we are adamant to nurture a Saudi-centric argument then we will have to go, needlessly, far back in history to start from the time when our dependence on the Saudis started growing. Also, in one way or another, we will have to establish a causal relationship between the Saudi’s funds and the influence they create. Therefore, in the meantime, there also runs the risk that we will end up altogether negating Pakistan’s agency as an important actor.
Painting Saudi Arabia’s influence in dark color and blaming her for the wrongs seems nothing more than an escape. We can’t burden Saudi Arabia for the mistakes that we have been committing. If not participating in the KL Summit was a blunder – then it was a blunder of our own making, not anyone else’s.
So, while doing all that blaming stuff, the real story dies screaming. The most important factor that led Pakistan to this day lies in the failure of Imran Khan’s government alone. There is a need to admit that Imran Khan government has no direction when it comes to foreign and defense policy. The core of the government’s policy-making is reactionary at best.
Certainly, Imran Khan made good appearances in New York. At the UNGA forum he made a few strong resolutions on uplifting of the Muslim world. The possibility is that in the course of the unfolding of future events, he would arrive to this square where he would have to shamble off he didn’t know. He has no one but himself to blame for this. Because we must remember that he isn’t an ordinary man: he is the prime minister of the country. He has, at his disposal, the vast machinery of the state consisting of ministers, advisors, ambassadors, and agencies.
Possibility is that it’s Imran Khan’s grandiose and all-knowing style that came in the way of his informed decision-making. Were the senior staff members at the foreign ministry to have his ears and had Imran Khan been from the listening-kind, he would have succeeded in knowing in details about how things work among the powerful blocs of the Muslim world.
Needless to say, there are fundamental reasons to seriously worry about the actual capabilities of our foreign ministry too. The chance is that the ministry of foreign affairs also didn’t exactly have the idea about what’s the current level of interaction or lack of interaction is in the Muslim world? So, what if the ministry too didn’t have the clue to the future unfolding of events? We are doomed, then. At least that much we should admit in the end.
Hence, the foreign ministry should better answer that what exactly it was doing the whole time.
As for the Imran Khan government, we are sure of the fact that since the day it came into power it is leaned on cashing immediate and short term benefits from the emerging situation. For better or worse, the government does not have a larger picture of the country’s external fronts.
There are reasons to worry. Simply look at who is holding the central government. It’s Imran Khan. Also, who is holding the reign of the foreign ministry? It’s Shah Mahmood Qureshi. Both are men of larger-than-life ambitions. Both have a strong tendency to place their personality first. Both believe in accumulating more power. So, aren’t their reasons to believe that foreign policy would be used to benefit their own person?
Moreover, is there any guarantee that it’s not their self but the country that comes first in their foreign policy considerations? So far, there is none. Had the country been a priority we would have seen a measured and proactive approach to the decision-making. Instead, time and again, what we come to see is that the government is merely using foreign policy as a tool to constantly ramble and adjust according to the rising challenges and that it is hard to locate focus in the decision making.
Also, the reasoning for not participating in the summit is horrible. The government told that it maintained neutrality. Strange! If it was a practice in exerting neutrality then the government should, at least, do the task of redefining neutrality as the traditional notion of neutrality is way far from being synonymous to impotence.
In Erdogan and Mahathir, Imran Khan has certainly found allies. However, Imran Khan’s abandoning of the summit has surely dented its government credibility. Abandoning the summit wasn’t just a snub; in fact, Pakistan put both leaders, the main organizers of the summit, in an awkward position. A little after the summit, Tayyip Erdogan made headlines with the shocking news of Pakistan being pressurized by Saudi Arabia to stay away from the summit or else face the consequence. Certainly, it wasn’t an empty talk: Erdogan was onto something.
Later, Mahathir himself could be heard talking politely on the importance of the summit and that the summit wasn’t a step in the direction to create a separate block in the Muslim world. To take a better view one must try to deeply look into Mahathir’s posture: it was all defensive and explanatory. That speaks volumes for itself. Instead of being a reason for strength and courage to its new-found ally, the PM Mahathir, Pakistan’s backpedaling was a reason that put Mahathir on the defensive.
Morally and pragmatically, we cannot exonerate the government. What Imran Khan government did on the foreign policy front is condemnable. It simply means Pakistan cannot take a courageous stance on matters based on morality. It means, therefore, the world shouldn’t give a second thought to what the country says. It means from now on we will have to spend more energy, capabilities and attention to prove that we matter in larger interests and affairs of the Muslim world. It also means that we should make ourselves ready to face additional challenges. Because we have established a reputation of talking tall, making hollow promises and broken commitments, there are ample reasons to believe that many countries would try to take Pakistan’s claims and decisions mostly at their face value.
There must be thorough investigation and accountability. At least, in the end, that much right the people have to demand from the government.