This Could Be Imran’s Finest Hour
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

Remember an old adage: ‘when the going gets tough, the tough gets going.’
This could well be true for Pakistan’s intrepid and courageous leader, Imran Khan.
Ironically, it’s the scheming mind of India’s pugnacious PM Modi and his desperate tactics to hang on to a power rapidly slipping from his slimy fingers that has presented Imran with a challenge that his fighting spirit just can’t turn down.
Imran has made a spectacular success with his foray into what his detractors had once thought would be beyond him to make a mark: foreign policy. Jaded pundits, used to their sinecure pastime of reading tea leaves and making predictions on its basis, had dismissed Imran’s chances of success in what they thought was terra incognita for him.
Perhaps Imran himself thought foreign policy wasn’t quite his cup of tea when he landed at the epicenter of power six months ago. He’d good reason to underestimate himself because the power-barons preceding him had left him with a mountain of woes on the home front. On top of the putrid pile sat the hulk of a badly hemorrhaging economy which, rightly, deserved top priority and attention from a novice leader.
The spectacular success of Imran’s hospitality to the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad Bin Salman, aka MBS—and the rich early dividends harvested from it—may well be beyond anyone’s expectations, including Imran Khan’s own. A neat, hefty package of $ 21 billion in economic assistance from Saudi Arabia—spread over the next few years—is an achievement too impressive for any Pakistani’s comprehension. We, Pakistanis, had otherwise grown accustomed to seeing our pusillanimous and salivating puny little leaders, like Nawaz, Zardari et al. going out with a begging bowl and coming home with only a handful of crumbs.
It was the daunting task of fixing a bleeding economy—and doing so without too much obvious pain—that embarked Imran on his tough learning curve in relations with the outside world. But it was a godsend for him, a serendipity in the truest sense of the term.
Jaded pundits and foreign policy gurus were prepared to bet their life on it that Imran had no alternative to follow in the footsteps of those, like Nawaz and Zardari, he had decried and castigated for going to IMF for a bailout on that notorious agency’s tough terms and conditions. Imran just simply abhorred IMF and its standard jumble of conditionalities that had ruined umpteen economies in the developing world. He cast his eyes around for other options.
Soothsayers will tell you that good fortune smiled on Imran at that precise juncture when he was fishing for a partner to stand by him in the daunting task of fixing Pakistan’s moribund economy rightly and aptly said, at that stage, to be on life-support.
It could only be a match-made-in-heaven that he found that partner in Saudi Arabia’s ambitious Crown Prince, MBS. The young Saudi prince had been making his own waves in what had until his ascent to power been a highly secretive and cloistered political culture. But MBS seemed determined to recalibrate and retune it in his own image. Like Imran, he too was on a crusade against corruption and wouldn’t stop shy of holding his royal peers accountable for their ill-begotten wealth. His bravado got him rave reviews from admirers in the Western leaderships who saw in him someone with a modern touch in the desert kingdom’s arcane world.
But he soon fell out of favor under the sordid saga of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s heinous murder in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. The West decried him and shunned him like a pariah on suspicion of being the smoking gun in Khashoggi’s murder.
It was precisely at that critical moment in MBS’ roller-coaster career that he found a leader from the Islamic world not shy of staying by his side and not letting vicious Western propaganda poison his independent thinking. He courted MBS without apology. The successful visit of the Prince to Islamabad, February 17-18, is evidence of Imran making a pragmatically-sound decision to cultivate the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia in order to get Pakistan out of its wrenching economic predicament.
Those puffed-up and pompous mandarins of Pakistan’s hybrid intellectual community who’d disdained Imran’s lack of exposure and expertise in foreign affairs must have courage to admit that he has proved them woefully inadequate and wrong. Much against their sniggering predictions about his chances of success in what was admittedly an alien world to him, Imran has emerged as the first Pakistani leader to cash in his country’s enviable strategic location to Pakistan’s advantage.
God has gifted Pakistan with a geography which, if wisely used, can garner it rich and handsome dividends.
What other country’s landmass stretches from the ice-capped heights of Karakoram mountains, bordering with China, to the warm waters of the Arabian Sea?
And, then, is there another deep-water port like Gwadar, ideally located at the mouth of the Gulf—and within hailing distance of the strategic Straits of Hormuz through which 30 per cent of oil for global consumption passes through?
The Chinese aptly assessed the potential of Gwadar as their short-cut to the Gulf and, beyond it, to the heart of Middle East and Africa. They were already in with a multi-billion dollars’ package to develop Gwadar and harness the hinterland of Baluchistan under CPEC.
Imran rightly concluded that Gwadar could be the bridge to link China with the Gulf and beyond. All that he needed was a partner on the Arabian Peninsula to be dovetailed. It was then that he found that partner in MBS fuming at his humiliation at the hands of those the Saudis had counted as their perennial allies.
MBS had ample reason to take affront to the insults hurled on the Saudis and realized that it was no longer safe, or feasible, to keep all the Saudi eggs in the western baskets. He needed to look eastward. Imran landed at his door at just that opportune moment with his own vision of bailing out Pakistan’s bleeding economy without being chained by IMF.
The optics of the regal visit in Islamabad—with bonhomie, camaraderie and goodwill in abundance all around—must reassure the naysayers in Pakistan’s intellectual world that Imran’s gamble on Saudi Arabia wasn’t a fool’s venture. MBS calmly releasing two thousand-plus Pakistanis from Saudi jails on Imran’s request to him and then reassuring the Pakistanis to count on him as their ambassador to Saudi Arabia is a sterling testament to the success of Imran’s fruitful foray into the world of international diplomacy. And he has pulled off this miracle in just six months in power.
But Modi, notwithstanding his bombast and the hysteria of India’s licentious news media, wouldn’t succeed in his gamble to intimidate Pakistan on Imran’s watch.
Modi has been reeling under a series of humiliating electoral defeats in recent months. He has his back to the wall against a concerted backlash and comeback from Congress. Defeat at the upcoming general elections in May is staring him squarely in the face. But the Indian Establishment—made up of Indian intelligence, army and predatory corporate tycoons—desperately want their poster man, Modi with his loud mouth and hectoring proclivity to succeed in order to perpetuate their unabashed plundering.
The suicide attack at Pulwama, in the Indian Occupied Kashmir, smacks of an inside job by Indian intelligence to throw a lifeline to a drowning Modi. And Modi has done what was scripted for him: he lost no time in pointing the finger at Pakistan for the murder of 44 Indian soldiers.
But Modi would do well to himself and his hysterical followers in India to pay heed to the message Imran Khan has calmly but resolutely delivered to him and his world audience. If Modi and his generals made the error of indulging in any kind of military venture against Pakistan, they and they alone will be responsible for the price—a horrendous one for India—that Pakistan will exact from the craven invaders and adventurers.
Imran couldn’t have conveyed his resolve and that of every Pakistani, with greater clarity and correctness. He didn’t lose his composure, nor fumed at the corners of his mouth, in letting Modi and the world know that Pakistan wasn’t a push-over. A nuclear power of 200 million people, with a highly trained army whose skills are admired by friends and foes, can’t be a push-over.
So, Modi and his hectoring hawks have been served a clear and categorical warning by a calm and composed Pakistani leader sure of himself and the capabilities of the finest army in the world at his command. Only a fool would underestimate the thrust of Imran’s cold message. Only a mad Indian leader would still gamble on his chances of success against Pakistan. Modi isn’t a well-read man, at all. But someone in his cabal of yes-men must remind him of the old Greek saying: those whom gods wish to destroy they turn them mad first. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com (The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)