Dr Muhammad Ali Ehsan
The one big constant of Pakistan, India foreign policy has been the Kashmir dispute. Both countries have fought wars over the issue; and as the current circumstances indicate, both countries find little reason not to do this again. What has happened so far should be viewed as implementation stage in the two countries’ foreign policy.
Implementing foreign policy is all about finally choosing an instrument of power to reach out into an environment where the clash of wills between the actors takes place. India finally chose to use the military as an instrument of power, but will it be able to control the environment, and manipulate the context? India is not using power just as a means to an end; it is using power as a context.
Contextual power is the power that frames an actor, whether an individual or a state. The circumstances that frame Pakistan in the current event are all built around the Indian accusations that Pakistan is not just involved in the terrorist attack in Pahalgam but also in previous such attacks at many other places in India.
What makes the context real or unreal is how it is perceived. The Indian context is based on an Indian perspective; the Pakistani perspective is that Pakistan is also a victim of terrorism. This is a different interpretation of the same position, and the big challenge that Pakistani policymakers face is to convince the international audience to take an unbiased position on the interplay between the two actors in the conflict, and in this context.
The Indian preference for framing Pakistan is worthless if it is not supported by evidence of Pakistani involvement. Not the domestic Indian audience, but it is the international audience and its interpretation of the context that matters most in this conflict.
International means different things to different people, and to compete against this Indian contextual power, which is being utilised to frame Pakistan as some kind of rogue state, Pakistan will have to increase its diplomatic efforts on both dimensions of international, horizontal as well as vertical. The horizontal starts with the immediate, and the immediate is the home.
We must set our house in order, as Indian manipulation of the context is possible and more acceptable because the world views India, unlike us as an established democracy. India’s domestic policy enters the implementation phase of its foreign policy in the form of a consensus. In conflictual situations, consensus is more felt than built. The contextual power of the actors can be as good or bad as the world around which it is built and from where it is intended.
So, horizontally, we must start at home, then with our other neighbours and the other medium and great powers in the region. If we can achieve the regional acceptance of not the Indian-framed but the real context, we will have little effort to make to reach out far and away for its global acceptance. If the regional audience sees merit in our context, the global audience will find little reason not to do so.
Our political, economic, military, normative and cultural layers are the vertical extension of the international. We should clearly distinguish and define the importance of hierarchy of these layers. Political stability, economic interdependence and sustenance, and military preparedness go hand in hand, but to win the war of context, we need to invest in the normative and cultural dimension of the vertical extension of the international.
