Author: Shahid Hayat
Introduction: The structure of Strategic Ambiguity
Nothing in the history of post Cold War geopolitics could be more continually challenged and yet more thoroughly misinterpreted than the efforts of the Pakistan’s foreign policy to pursue its national agenda towards the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America. Islamabad sits at a strange, risky cross roads in the present international system, deeply involved in China’s Economic Belt and Road Initiative, a history of strategic and military entanglements with the USA and squandered on the windswept interface of what is emerging as a rising Sino-American conflict. It is to assume a simplistic policy flip flopper or opportunist hedging strategy to describe Pakistan’s foreign policy actions is to miss the penetrating rationales behind the operations of a policy machinery which is under the permanent structural constraints. As the growing body of scholarship now suggests, however, what has developed is a complex and carefully calculated approach to hedging: a strategy that aims to induce ambiguity, purposefully fragment alliance possibilities and enhance national returns amid uncertain geopolitical circumstances. Balancing and hedging are not abstract concepts that are merely theoretical, but rather ones that are of critical strategic importance to the operation. In its classic realist sense, balancing means a state using its own resources and/or developing alternative counterweight coalitions to resist a threat it perceives. In contrast, hedging is an adaptive and ambivalent approach that contains aspects of engagement and “quasi balancing,” of cooperative and resistant elements, but at the same time does not fully accept either. Theories of hedging hold that it is the act of a state to mitigate risk through simultaneously pursuing policy options that they believe will achieve mutually offsetting outcomes in the face of a high threat and high uncertainty environment. In essence, it was a baksheesh of strategic non clarity and that is the very framework which reveals Pakistan’s present foreign policy thinking.
Historical Foundations: From Alignment to uncertainty
What drove Pakistan’s evolution of foreign policy from a true American ally to a nation that practices “double speak” in its relations with Washington is not something that happened overnight. Criticized by Pakistanis for being too tepid in its backing of Islamists, the country is a victim of forty years of bitter history as a great power client. In the immediate post independence period, Pakistan was completely oriented towards the western bloc, having joined SEATO and CENTO, mainly for reasons of security from India and need of economic and military support. Washington did not just offer her aid, but proved be an existential guarantor This alignment, nonetheless, contained the potential for its own breakdown.
The United States consistently deliberated that its obligations to Pakistan were consistently secondary to larger American strategic interests, interests that Pakistan did not always endorse and could not always control.
The relations with China, on the other hand, was based upon a different cupidity. Since the boundary agreement of 2 March 1963, Sino-Pakistan relations were fueled by shared common antagonism to India, a lack of colonial feelings and a recognition of mutual interests. From its very inception, Beijing viewed the Islamabad as having strategic value and this is eloquently expressed in Chairman Mao Zedong’s directive to his second envoy to Pakistan to view Islamabad as ‘China’s window to the west’. In response, Pakistan did its best to help China in its diplomatic rehabilitation, towards the position especially of Beijing on Taiwan, Tibet and the position in the United Nations Security Council. The opening of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Karakoram Highway (KKH) was merely a formalization of an enduring geopolitical arrangement. But, what is important is that the Sino-Pakistani relationship was not primarily ideological; it was strategic and transactional and such partnerships are more likely to withstand the test of time than ideological ones.
The Structural Drivers of Hedging: Disillusionment and Diversification
Studying the indicators of these drivers to opt hedging strategies: disillusionment and diversification proved to be constant factors to determine hedging policies of Pakistan. The post 9/11 era seemed to foster new, moderate terms to the Pakistan-US relationship at first glance. Perceived as the ally in the global war on terror, Pakistan received a lot of military and economic support from the coalition, in the form of Coalition Support Fund, Foreign Military Funding, and International Military Education and Training programmes. However, the inconsistencies that were ingrained in this structure were readily apparent from the start. Some specific events were significant structural accelerants of Pakistani disillusionment: American drone strikes on Pakistani territory without any significant notification; suspension of military assistance during Obama and Trump administrations as a result of the lack of action by Pakistan’s security intelligence agencies against militant groups, and the most harrowing – the May 2011 Special Operations in Abbottabad in order to kill Osama bin Laden. The Abbottabad incident was of prime significance. It was denounced by all tiers of the Pakistani political establishment as an infringement on national sovereignty and led to a parliamentary resolution calling on Parliament to review the ties with Washington in general. Closure of NATO supply routes by Pakistan symbolically and materially was a severance with a great intensity. In this context, the growing economic and strategic involvement of China brought not just an alternative option, but a counterweight, an option available to Islamabad which would allow Pakistan to balance off the pressure coming from the United States without completely severing ties with the West. The leaked State to State document, written by former Minister of State, Hina Rabbani Khar and titled ‘Pakistan’s Difficult Choices,’ merely shared an observation long attributed to the Pakistani policymakers: a sense of their inability to navigate between Beijing and Washington without taking sides; and their concern about what they view as an unavoidable strategic shift and how to manage it.
The Economic Dimension: CPEC and Dependence
No study of Pakistan’s hedging policies is worthwhile without a close examination of the economic aspect of Sino-Paki relationship, and specifically, China Pakistan Economic Corridor. As it has been since its inception, CPEC has been receiving an investment of around $62 billion, and is greatly aiding the transformation of Pakistan’s energy and infrastructure sectors in a manner that no other bilateral relationship is managing to replicate. The proposed development of the China Gwadar Railway, which will link China to Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea, further emphasizes the important architectural interdependencies which are already being experienced in economic cooperation. While American FDI investment in Pakistan has been declining by an average of 9.5 per cent annually, reaching its lowest point of $89.5 million in the latest reported period, Chinese FDI grew by around 14 per cent during the same period, reaching its highest level of investment of $1.31 billion in 2017-18. An economic imbalance has significant consequences for Pakistan’s policy space. Enthusiasts of CPEC in Pakistan focus on its transformative power, while others, who also include, crucially, parts of the Pakistani civil-military establishment, as analyst Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa has pointed out, have doubts regarding the speed of the project, its transparency and, most prominently, the longer term objectives of the Chinese investment. While India has essentially resisted any extensions of Chinese influence in Central Asia, Washington has seen CPEC as part of China’s ‘string of pearls’ strategy in the Indian Ocean and thus has reacted with suspicion to any such extensions with the potential of civilian and military applications. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s observations on Pakistan’s dealings with the IMF in 2018 are a testament to the American stance – a blend of healthy competition and punitive leverage. The formation of the CPEC Authority in 2019 and the broader concerns in the United States about the potential for military control significantly ramped up the US security worries over future governance.
The Military Dimension: Arms, Alliances, and Strategic Realignment
The military aspect to Pakistan’s strategic realignment is instructive. By the latest SIPRI statistics, China has overtaken the United States as the country’s biggest arms supplier to Pakistan with “no uncertainty”. In 2022, only China provided military assistance to Pakistan that measured $1.36 billion. On the other hand of the table, since 2018, Americans have supplied military equipment to Pakistan, valued at an insignificant amount. Developing the JF-17 Thunder fighter planes along with collaboration on T-85 tanks, F-22P frigates, Shaheen series ballistic missiles and much more marks a high degree of integration between Islamabad’s defence industries, which is far deeper than it has ever seen with Washington over the past couple of decades. The comprehensive nature of Sino-Pakistani strategic partnership is further strengthened by the nuclear cooperation, which had started since Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. But the Gwadar Port development, now under the guardianship of Chinese Overseas Port Holding, brings a sea element, with important strategic implications: firstly for China’s desire to become a two ocean power and secondly for India’s equanimity with its neighbors dominating the seas. Adopting this rational and analytical approach to Pakistan’s resurgent ties with China, however, would fail to do justice to make Pakistan a complete ally of China. To read this into Pakistan’s increasing military partnership with China would, however, be analytically reductive as far as the subjugated peoples are concerned, as they are the ones who continue to suffer the brunt of conflict. Islamabad also views American involvement as crucial in other critical areas, including IMF programme management and the implementation of various mechanisms of multilateral financial pressure like the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), and maintaining some leverage on the American side in international institutions. Pakistan’s former Foreign Secretary Riaz Muhammad Khan perfectly caught this subtle point when he spoke that Pakistan does not have a formal alliance in China’s relationship where Islamabad has no defence pledges on China to intervene militarily on behalf of Pakistan. This lack of a treaty obligation is in some respects a restriction on the China relationship, yet part of the reason for maintaining the American relationship going.
The Limits of Hedging: Structural Constraints
Pakistan hedging strategies, factually wholesome as it is, has a structural constraint, thereby realistically constraining the efficacy of this strategy. The first is at the level of the asymmetric relationships. By any valid measure Pakistan is a far weaker ally of both the Chinese and the Americans. The sovereignty of smaller states is always endangered in the relationship with great powers, for example by becoming dependent, on conditionalities, on being pressured for strategic subordination. The continued spread of Chinese FDI into Pakistan and the continuing dominance of such investment over American investment are likely to enhance structural asymmetries between the two countries, forcing Islamabad to take more actions that will reduce its space for strategic manoeuvre. Moreover, the existing literature lacks attention to a domestic political economy of hedging. The tensions seen within Pakistan between the civilian and the military establishment in terms of slowing down or controlling CPEC investments by the Chinese reflect a fuzziness within the policy of Pakistan and is more than likely a reflection of an ongoing and unending battle between different domestic forces.
Conclusion
Coming years, Pakistan will be an increasingly bipolar foreign policy environment in which Pakistan will have to continue hedging, if it has the capacity to do so. Sino-American competition is a structural threat that is ramping up much more quickly than the contenders can live up to the Pakistan’s ideal of strategic ambiguity. The Great Powers, Beijing and Washington, are increasingly insisting on clarity and commitment from other countries, bigger and smaller and as they try to assert their respective influence in South Asia, the benefits of remaining neutral may become more costly. Pakistan might soon run into the dilemma of having to implicitly choose the stance it would like to take in the future, a choice that Pakistan’s policy makers have hitherto carefully avoided. China needs Pakistan as a buffer between Pakistan and India, as an anchor of Belt and Road Initiative and to find it as a successful example of the viability of its model of developmental partnership. The United States needs Pakistan, at least to not turn into an irrevocably hostile actor, for two factors, regional counter terrorism and security in South Asia and ability to control the threat of nuclear proliferation risks . Such parallel dependencies also provide the structural strength on which the Indo-US hedging relies, and can only be stripped away if/when the general level of Sino-American competition reaches higher tides. These interconnected dependencies form the structural basis for Pakistan’s hedging strategy, and they are improbable to vanish completely, no matter how fiercely the overall Sino- American rivalry escalates The hedging strategy, as proposed by scholars from Evelyn Goh to Kuik Cheng Chwee, is not indicative of strategic uncertainty or institutional inconsistency; it is a logical response to real structural challenges. The ability of Pakistan to maintain this stance in the upcoming stage of great power rivalry, and whether its internal political economy will allow for the ongoing handling of the inherent contradictions, stands as a key strategic question for South Asian geopolitics in the coming decade. The response will shape not only Pakistan’s destiny but also significantly influence the developing framework of stability in one of the most critical and unpredictable areas globally
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Mr. Shahid Hayat
I am Shahid Hayat, Founder & CEO of ISI, and an MPhil scholar with focused academic interests in security studies, foreign policy, and international political economy. My academic journey at the University of the Punjab, where I pursued a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations, provided me with the opportunity to engage deeply with both distinguished scholars and the complexities of contemporary global affairs. This experience not only shaped my intellectual orientation but also strengthened my commitment to producing research that is both rigorous and purposeful.
