President Obama’s recent visit to India spooked the government of Pakistan. Possibly to nip in the bud the blossoming diplomatic relations between the U.S. and India, Pakistan’s foreign office issued a statement expressing concern about a strengthened relationship between Washington and New Delhi.
This concern focused on closer U.S.–India nuclear cooperation and the possibility that it could contribute to regional imbalance, particularly regarding the decades-old conflict over Kashmir. Islamabad’s raising of Kashmir in response to the Obama–Modi meetings is a red herring. Raising the Kashmir issue may be aimed, in part, at distracting Pakistanis from the poor state of the economy and domestic terrorism problems.
Pakistan’s High Commissioner to India also recently indicated that Pakistan is backing away from granting India most-favored-nation (MFN) trading status, claiming that whenever Indo–Pakistani trade goes up, India hardens its stance on Kashmir. When the Nawaz administration took office in 2013, it promised to grant MFN (or what it now calls Non-Discriminatory Market Access—NDMA) to India, but it keeps finding reasons not to do so. According to Pakistan’s Commerce Minister Khurrum Dastagir Khan, however, it remains a “policy priority” for Nawaz.
MFN or not, India is really the least of Pakistan’s worries right now. In only the past few months, Pakistan has suffered many terrorist attacks, one of which targeted schoolchildren in Peshawar and claimed 100 lives. During his visit to the U.S. in November, the Pakistani Army’s Chief of Staff assured Washington that Pakistan was taking an aggressive and nondiscriminatory approach in targeting militants. Nonetheless, terrorists remain at large. In only the past month, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and militant groups with links to TTP have attacked religious mosques in Sindh, Peshawar, and Rawalpindi, leaving countless dead.
Pakistan’s economy, too, remains fragile in the wake of terrorism, political instability, and bad governance. The 2015 edition of the Index for Economic Freedom ranks Pakistan as “mostly unfree” with scores well below world and regional averages. Heavy regulation, poor security that creates an unfavorable environment for foreign investment, lack of accountability and transparency, and restrictive markets contribute to the deep-seated economic problems Pakistan faces today.
Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) has more bad news: Pakistan is a very corrupt country. Pakistan’s CPI score is one of the lowest in the Asia–Pacific region, while India’s scores have improved since 2012. Pakistan’s ranking has also fallen in the Doing Business report published by the World Bank, ranking 128th out of the 189 economies surveyed.
Pakistan has maintained its status as a “partly free” country since 2008 according to the 2014 Freedom in the World report published by Freedom House. Pakistan needs to continue in that direction under the Nawaz government by improving the rule of law at home and seeking more trade and investment abroad to tap Pakistan’s economic growth potential.
The civilian government and the military should worry about Pakistan’s economy and how the country’s homegrown terrorism is affecting it and the rest of the world. It should prioritize what it considers to be the biggest threats to the country and the Pakistani people. Those threats do not include India.
—Huma Sattar is the LINKS Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
