A French parliamentarian said in Islamabad the other day that Pakistan and India should not be allowed to become “isolated” if the issue of nuclear proliferation was to be addressed effectively by the West. The national press gratefully blazoned the statement in a headline saying: “France against isolating Pakistan”. That is a great leap of the imagination.
Unfortunately, the issue of isolation has become a kind of tit-for-tat debate in Pakistan. Some say that Pakistan is internationally isolated, others maintain it is not. Certainly, General Pervez Musharraf himself thinks that his international contacts are sufficiently firm to dispel any such “isolation”. But consider.
International isolation is a political term. It denotes the measure of a state’s ability to walk with the rest of the international community. There is no legal basis for this. In fact, if a nation is legally in the right but has not been able to lobby its cause successfully it is liable to fall victim to ‘moral inflexibility’, which nudges it to go its own way and thus become isolated. Nor is there anything ‘moral’ about the international system — the threat of international isolation is faced by all states, including the sole superpower, the United States, as for example in the matter of its National Missile Defence (NMD). Avoidance of isolation is thus the constant preoccupation of all states in relation to their national economies, which require unfettered access to markets, and bilateral disputes which require steady international support.
The fact is that defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) isolated both India and Pakistan in the past decade. The United States, which made the NPT its main foreign policy plank, was also threatened with isolation because of the defective enforcement of the Treaty, especially with regard to Israel’s defiance. But it succeeded in countering it by getting the member states to endorse it in perpetuity, thus isolating India and Pakistan further. After 1998, our nuclear tests took this isolation up another notch, and a UN Security Council resolution affirmed the sanctions placed on both countries. The CTBT was then offered as a way out of this isolation, but India and Pakistan failed to sign it, even as Israel was quick to take the opportunity of relieving some of the isolationist pressure on it by signing it.
Pakistan’s malfunctioning economy and its dependence on external factors made this isolation more punishing. But in the months following the nuclear tests, Pakistan adopted other policies that deepened its isolation. The fall of the civilian Nawaz Sharif government added intensity to this isolation. Meanwhile, despite its anti-West rhetoric on the nuclear issue, India has been able to take initiatives to lessen its isolation. It is perceived to have shown “restraint and maturity” on the Kargil provocation, it has drawn closer to the US and NATO, it has made reassuring noises about signing the CTBT and it has moved closer to Israel — a move that also checkmates Pakistan in the military sense. But Pakistan’s isolation today springs from its inability to negotiate international demands relating to its internal situation: human rights, terrorism, lack of democracy and the uncertainty that this state of affairs evokes about its nuclear ability and failure to “normalise” relations with India.
Breaking out of isolation is a challenge for both India and Pakistan; in fact, it is a kind of competition between the rival powers. But since Pakistan tends to ‘follow’ India instead of taking initiatives that would isolate India, its ability to develop international linkages has become severely curtailed. Indeed, the tendency to use its nuclear capability as an antidote to isolationism is a dangerous game. While the bomb helps in averting total international boycott, it must be accompanied with civilian initiatives to prevent it from being seen as a crude blackmailing device.
Political initiatives in a world that bristles with conditionalities often compel ‘isolated states’ to reach out to other such states. We must avoid this at all cost. If such relations have to be established, they must remain discreet and low-profile. Therefore the recent high-profile visit by a delegation from Burma led by a general of the junta that has cruelly suppressed democracy in that country was not good diplomacy. In this too Pakistan followed India, forgetting that India’s contacts with Burma have been low-profile and secret.
The lesson to be learnt is clear — in a world that is guided by politics rather than morality, it is important for states to remain flexible in their conduct of foreign policy. China’s conduct over the past decade in this regard is exemplary. State ‘sovereignty’ is an easy principle to resort to in order to ward off pressures from the international community, but without international support it means very little. The choice is ours. We can reduce our increasing isolation through a reasonable and flexible approach. Or we can exacerbate it by pinning our defiance on self-righteous anger.