Why it's hard to help Pakistan even when India wants to

Pakistan finance minister Miftah Ismail’s suggestion that the country could consider importing vegetables from India to ease a burgeoning food crisis due to floods did not age well. On Tuesday, PM Shehbaz Sharif told a media briefing that he would only consider importing anything from India after “irritants” (Pak-speak for Kashmir) had been “resolved”. Nothing to see here, folks. Pakistan is suffering a monsoon on steroids: One-third of Pakistan is under water, as the monsoons have unleashed unprecedented fury bringing inevitable death and suffering to millions. An initial estimate pegs the reconstruction bill at $10 billion, and that may be a very conservative estimate. The UN and the Sharif government put out a “flash” appeal for emergency help. “Pakistan is awash in suffering. The Pakistani people are facing a monsoon on steroids – the relentless impact of epochal levels of rain and flooding,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. China, the US, EU, Japan, the Middle East etc are chipping in with flood assistance. India has stayed quiet, apart from the PM expressing sadness at the devastation. Assistance from India has always been a fraught affair in Pakistan. During the 2005 earthquake (ties were at honeymoon levels then) Indian assistance was never used by Pakistan. Relations are virtually non-existent at present but anything could trigger a downward spiral. So the process of sending aid to Pakistan will require some thought. Why does this get less coverage in India than Sri Lanka and Bangladesh woes? What is significant is how little Pakistan’s woes are playing out in India. Sri Lanka, which went belly up just a few months ago, was headlining. As was Bangladesh going to the IMF. The Pakistan fatigue that started some years ago is now real. Some of this is due to the shrinking space for Pakistan sympathisers in India. Partly it’s a weariness with things Pakistan. And partly there’s wariness that things could go south quite rapidly between India and Pakistan and one could be caught on the wrong foot. In addition, it’s hard to find anything that has changed in Pakistan that was not caused by the forces of nature. For instance, the continuing tragedy coincides with a much-awaited visit by the FATF team this week. Pakistan is hoping to get out of the grey list. Terror modules are regrouping around the launch pads across the LoC. Drones with weapons are being dropped regularly into J&K and August saw a serious attack at an army installation in Rajouri. Terror is active and well from Pakistan. The Shehbaz/Imran dampers: One change is that Imran Khan has morphed from the “clean guy” the Pakistan army brought in four years ago into a truly bizarre “Trump on steroids”. Western media are devoting entire pages to Imran’s shady dealings for party funding, while a case is pending against him for swiping official gifts while in office. But he won provincial elections in Punjab and his growing supporters have threatened civil unrest if he’s arrested. He also thinks nothing of setting up a parallel flood relief system with money he will be raising or trying to sabotage the IMF deal – as the leaked audio of a conspiracy by his loyalist and a former finance minister Shaukat Tarin suggests. IMF did not fall for this and completed its seventh and eighth rounds of reviews at once to disburse $1.1 billion to Pakistan this week. But it tells you where Pakistani political theatre has descended. Imran came in through one flawed procedure and was thrown out through another. Shehbaz Sharif and his motley crew may survive the next few months before elections are called in 2023, but how much real legitimacy they enjoy will be gauged by two things – whether the army wants them to stay and whether large-scale fraud would need to be employed when elections come around. The terror threat: Pakistan’s economic troubles did not begin with Covid and are unlikely to end with an IMF bailout. Like Sri Lanka, it has stubborn structural flaws that require strong political will backed by the army to be addressed. Historically that has been missing. Notwithstanding the dire statistics, Pakistan is not about to fail, yet. Meanwhile, Taliban is yapping at Pakistan’s heels. The Haqqanis are convinced Pak army gave up Ayman al-Zawahiri to the US, so Pakistan can expect more attacks by the Taliban-supported TTP. Floods are not Pakistan’s only problem. Even if PM Sharif meets PM Modi in Samarkand in the coming weeks, the India relationship is unlikely to improve. He doesn’t have the mandate to change Pakistan’s course. Pakistan is no longer India’s strategic challenge. But it retains the power to hurt through terror. India’s response, therefore, has become less emotional, and more clinical. It’s not pleasant but we can’t choose our neighbours. The writer is CEO of Ananta Aspen Centre. Views are personal