Imran Khan’s Visit to Russia, That’s!
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

 

 

By the time one gets to read these lines, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan (IK) will have been done with his two-day—February 23-24—official visit to Russia at the invitation of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

IK’s visit to Moscow at the height of the ongoing tension between Russia and the bloc of Western powers, led by US, over Ukraine dispute raised eyebrows, not only in the outside world but also within Pakistan.

Opposition to IK’s Moscow yatra inside Pakistan is mainly within the bitching circle of his political foes who have made opposition to his every move—be that on domestic issues or on matters of Pakistan’s foreign relations—a reflex reaction on their part. This banal proclivity to oppose for the sake of opposition has lowered the status of IK’s nemeses in popular esteem. It’s another matter, though, that stalwarts of the so-called ‘Opposition’ are, viscerally, incapacitated from plumbing the depths to which they have sunk in the eyes of the common man.

In other, more serious and informed, circles of people’s opinion, however, the critique of IK’s Moscow visit is focused, almost entirely, on its timing.

Come to think of it, IK visiting Moscow at such a critical time when his host, Putin, is embroiled in a battle of nerves with his Western adversaries over his provocative moves on Ukraine, does beg a question. Why should IK have chosen—with his eyes wide open—to be hosted and feted, in Moscow, by the man who’s an arch villain to Biden and his European acolytes and minions?

Many a diplomatic pundit, within Pakistan—especially those who have been steeped in the art of punditry by looking at all foreign policy moves through a Western prism—also feared—and pulled no punches in castigating IK on his naivete—that by being closeted with Putin at such a juncture IK may end up annoying Biden and US.

However, foreign policy gurus and instinctive Cassandras couldn’t be more wrong in accusing IK of being naïve, especially in the context of the timing of his visit.

For the sake of record, IK’s Moscow visit had been in the cards since quite some time. The invitation from Putin to IK was the result of a lot of diplomatic spadework. Even if he wanted to—which he clearly didn’t--postponing his visit to Moscow would have led to another huge embarrassment for IK.

It would have revived that unsavory episode, of two years ago, when he’d buckled under obvious Saudi pressure and didn’t show up in KL for a planned summit with Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammad and Turkey’s Erdogan.

Now in his fourth year in power, IK has enough foreign policy savvy under his belt to appreciate that the limelight of his visit to Moscow, is in honoring Putin’s invitation as planned, months ago, and not giving in to any kind of pressure or persuasion to not visit Putin at this stage.

Any student of international relations would tell you that nothing could add more to IK’s standing in the eyes of his host than the Pakistani leader keeping his rendezvous in Moscow, as planned.

In a way, IK, by standing tall in the jaws of a crisis on hands of his Russian host, is correcting an inadvertent historical wrong—of more than seventy years.

There’s a history of misunderstanding and misperception between Pakistan and Russia.

It dates back to the early years of an independent Pakistan when PM Liaqat Ali Khan was invited by both then global powers, the then Soviet Union (SU) and by US.

History records are conflicting on this point whether SU, or Russia, ever formally invited Liaqat to pay them a visit. Most records say the invitation was only verbal—from the Soviet Ambassador in Pakistan. No formal invitation from Moscow materialized. Meanwhile, the Americans were quick to invite Liaqat, formally and Liaqat responded positively to Washington’s invite.

Liaqat’s decision to honor the American invite was pragmatic, given the yawning needs of an infant Pakistan, on both economic and defense fronts. US, in the aftermath of WWII, was the only country with resources to answer Pakistan’s needs. Russia, in comparison, was struggling, itself, to cope with the enormous toll the war had exacted from it. There was no way the Russians would have been able to cater to Pakistan’s alarming needs for assistance.

But the perception lingered on, somehow, that Liaqat had committed a diplomatic faux pas in refusing to visit Moscow. Liaqat’s political foes—whose intrigues against him resulted in his assassination in Rawalpindi in October 1951—used it as an alibi to accuse him of harming Pakistan. The visit to Moscow-that-never-was has been a stigma on the legacy of Liaqat.

What followed is history. But now, under IK’s upright rule, Pakistan has a chance to correct that so-called ‘historic wrong.’

IK has assiduously worked—especially since the retreat of US from Afghanistan - to distance Pakistan’s foreign policy mode from the West. US itself seems well embarked on extricating itself from the region, whose dynamics have grossly changed over the years. Narendra Modi’s India is now the fulcrum of American policy in the region. On the other hand, Pakistan has chosen to rely more and more on its neighbor, China, for the fulfilment of its ambitious agenda of economic self-reliance. Any child would tell you to cultivate a neighbor—placed within your hailing distance—over a distant one.

And who said that if Pakistan were to get closer to Moscow or Beijing, than Washington, it would be choosing one over the other?

Another leitmotif of IK’s foreign policy initiative is to steer clear of big power rivalry. Not getting hooked to the apron strings of this or that power is the lodestar of Pakistan’s foreign policy under IK’s watch. He made this categorically clear in his television interview with the Russian Television network, on the eve of his Moscow safari.

IK, with his bold foot forward into a terrain that no Pakistani leader before him, ventured to tread, is out to prove the efficacy of the old dictum: there are no permanent friends, or foes; what’s permanent is national interest. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)