South Asia and Beyond

‘Pakistan’s National Security Policy Document Cannot Be Taken Seriously’

NEW DELHI: “I don’t take these documents seriously because there is nothing to back them up with. It’s part of an elaborate image building exercise. You know Pakistan is seen as the epicentre of terror or as the MEA once described it, as the mothership of terrorism.”

Now geoeconomics has become some kind of a buzzword but what geoeconomics are we talking about. What do they mean by geoeconomics for a country that is not even $300 billion of GDP?

This is at best a statement of desire. This is an ideal they might be aspiring to. What are the building blocks of a policy? Their own minister has said that we’ve announced the policy but we don’t have a framework for it right now.

Nitin A Gokhale WhatsApp Channel

The driving force behind it is Moeed Yusuf. If you look at some of his past writings, you can find elements being repeated in this particular document. This is a spin they are trying to give that we are not part of any camp, we are an open society open to everyone. But the moment someone wants to come in and start something they say ‘no no, this is something the Chinese will not allow’.

It doesn’t add up to anything, it doesn’t mean anything at all. The army is part and parcel of this tactic to present a nice reasonable to the rest of the world but that is where it all ends.

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