South African comedian Trevor Noah was once going about his stand-up comedy. He was comparing the level of threat people feel from Russians versus the Indians. He depicts a movie scene where the Russian terrorist named Vlad threatens the UN in a video call that he was about to bomb several cities around the world, if not given a $100 million. The entire UN body is horrified and everyone runs around to meet Vlad’s demands in order to prevent destruction because they take his threat very seriously. Then Trevor asks his audience to imagine the same scenario except this time with an Indian named Rajesh instead of the Russian Vlad. Rajesh’s threats scares nobody and the UN even tries to enter into some bargaining deal with him, to which Rajesh seems to be open.
I was reminded of this joke when I heard about the news of Iran attacking Pakistan. If I have to answer the question asked in the title of this article, I’d say, because Pakistan allows it. And I don’t mean to say that Pakistan has some secret deal with Iran where Iran would attack Pakistan using drones and Pakistan would publicly condemn those attacks as was the case with the CIA’s drone strikes in FATA. What I rather mean to say is that Pakistan nurtures this sort of behaviour in others.
When the CIA attacked and killed Pakistani soldiers in the Salala incident, Pakistan did not put up much fight. When the Americans in the dead of the night attacked Bin Laden, there was not much resistance put up by Pakistan. When Raymond Davis killed innocent people in broad daylight in the Pakistani mainland, not only did Pakistan not put up any resistance but rather facilitated his court acquittal and safe departure from the country. When Abhinandan came attacking, we not only gave them a nice cup of tea but also released him in a heartbeat. Kulbhushan came to Pakistan perhaps through Iran for the sole purpose of destabilising Balochistan. Rest assured, he is not languishing in a Pakistani jail.
All the nations around the world know full well that Pakistan does not belong to the category of states that would attack back when provoked. They are fully cognizant of the fact that while the basic responsibility of a state is to protect the life and property of its citizens from external attacks, the state of Pakistan wouldn’t frown much if some foreign state violated exactly the life and property of Pakistani citizens. This is about signals. In studying International Relations, there is one little scenario all students must study. It is called Beer and Quiche.
A man enters a bar where another man is already sitting at one of the tables. He wants to intimidate the man at the table so he sits at a nearby table and orders beer, sending an aggressive signal. The man at the table doesn’t want to put up any fight so he orders quiche, which is a signal for being timid and weak. And so the story goes. The idea is how nation states send signals to other nation states determines how they’d be treated. Pakistan has been ordering quiche every single time for as long as I can remember. Every nation comes to this town and orders beer.
It saddens me to think that Iran attacked two countries at the same time. Pakistan and Iraq. That is the status of Pakistan, equated with a war-torn, almost destroyed country. India sends astronauts to the moon and is equated with the strongest nations on earth today. Pakistan stands in line with the weakest, destroyed and attackable countries. I am sure many would be quick to criticise Iran and along with it even the United States, Israel and India for establishing this horrible precedent of preemptively striking targets on foreign soil. But usually those attacks are made on the soil of defenceless countries. Since when has Pakistan become a nuclear armed defenceless country?
Published in The Express Tribune, January 18th, 2024.
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