Exclusive: Pakistan PM Preparing Response to 'Enemy' India 'Being Strengthened' by US

Pakistan is preparing to respond to the United States' policy of empowering the South Asian nation's longtime rival India, caretaker Prime Minister Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar told Newsweek Senior Foreign Policy Writer and Deputy Editor of National Security and Foreign Policy Tom O'Connor in an exclusive interview on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

Kakar assumed office last month to oversee elections overshadowed by former Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif's bitter rivalry with his ousted predecessor Imran Khan, who has been charged with an array of offenses and is likely to be banned from entering the race. While Kakar was confident that the highly anticipated vote would go on, he acknowledged that stability remained a key issue as Pakistan faced economic turmoil and an uptick in militant attacks.

Adding fuel to the fire is the lingering insecurity in neighboring Afghanistan, which Kakar saw as the primary source of the rise in violence plaguing his country. But more potentially destabilizing still is the decades-long dispute along another border with India, which has fortified its relationship with the U.S. at a time when both nations sought to counter China, a crucial partner of Pakistan and, according to Kakar, the true target of India's designs.

And while Islamabad has long sought to boost relations with Washington, he questioned whether the U.S. was truly invested in a region with vast potential, both in terms of economic and human capital as well as the capacity to ignite a devastating conflict.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Newsweek: What does it mean to be the caretaker of Pakistan, a nuclear power and one of the largest populations on Earth, at this very complex time in its history, and what are the stakes of your success right now?

Kakar: Currently, to be honest with you, we are focusing that we attempt to and try to bring our economic revival plan in force, and this is the first and foremost challenge for the caretaker government back in Pakistan. And other than that, of course, assisting the process of elections is one of the prime duties of any entity in government, so it's ours. We will be assisting and supporting the process, and while doing so really try to focus on the economic revival plan. That is the biggest challenge.

On the matter of those elections, it has been somewhat of a chaotic period for Pakistan's political scene. Are you concerned about stability right now?

As far as stability is concerned, I think it should be on the top of agenda of any government, because a relative degree of stability and order is a prerequisite for any sort of governance structure or system, whether it's a democracy, an oligarchy, or a dictatorial arrangement.
But you do require a certain degree of order to implement whatever governance system you have in place in different areas across the globe. Pakistan is no exception. We do care and we're very deeply concerned about the situation of stability. At the moment, it's pretty much under control. It's something which we fully and lawfully monitor, and we are in charge to pull all the strings when it comes to stability.

Stability, of course, has multiple facets to it, one of them being political and another being security, especially when it comes to the uptick in militant attacks that we've seen, some of them in your home province of Balochistan. Are you concerned that certain groups or other enemies of Pakistan could take advantage of this moment to try to target more civilians and soldiers?

I mean, this is always on the agenda of these non-state actors, be it religious-inspired or ethnic-inspired aspects in Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, both. Is the recent surge a point of concern for us? Of course, yes. Are we worried about it? Of course not. Are we callous about it? Certainly not.

We are observing it and approaching it in a plethora of angles, and trying to appreciate and understand from where it is emanating. Our threat matrix is being calibrated and recalibrated all the time at the institutional level. Military is, of course, in the lead role in that context. And we have get very committed and capable professional soldiers who are willing to die and kill for the cause of country, but not irrationally. These young boys and girls are not that valueless that we will just push them to the warfront. They're valuable to us, and they are fully supported in our attempt to respond to this madness.

What has changed for us in this new era of security threats? Post-August withdrawal of U.S. and related allies, what we saw was, all of a sudden, the disappearance of the Afghan National Army, which even in the beginning was, in my opinion, a ghost existence. They were reportedly or in all the books, probably an army of 300,000 people. But in reality, the actual figure probably was somewhere between 50,000 to 60,000. But in all its inventory and its armory, the small arms and the related gadgetry within was probably provided for 300,000 people.

And—we are not referring over here to any sort of conspiracy theory, it's the objective outcome of what actually happened in that month of August—once this force disappeared, then in the following months, all small arms were in the hands of these non-state actors, be it, again, religiously inspired TTP [Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan], or BLA [Balochistan Liberation Army], or others.

So, we do observe a renewed capability to fight. There is no additional or reignited energy to fight back with the society and state of Pakistan, but these added gadgetries have encouraged and emboldened them to come up with their so-called spectacular attacks. And then we are witnessing that, we are observing that, and we are planning to respond to that.

There are areas where, of course, we will be looking forward to having a cooperative environment within the region, by all the neighborhood of Afghanistan, and Afghanistan and its de facto government itself. It'll take a bit of time, but we are quite confident that we will be able to manage that.

On the subject of Afghanistan, what is the nature of the relationship now between Pakistan and the Islamic Emirate ruled by the Taliban, with which Pakistan has had a historic relationship? What does that look like now as it attempts to live up to those commitments of counterterrorism?

When it comes to Afghanistan, we have a complex relationship. As you would appreciate, we do not have a Westphalian state next door where there's a strong central authority. The United States, along with its allies, tried to create one, but we feel that it was a squandered opportunity of two decades and spending of two trillion American dollars, of course, of America's taxpayers. That could not get the desired results of having a functional state—forget about utopia, it did not even achieve the basic indicators of any normal functioning state.

So, would we expect on a pragmatic account that a militia, which was fighting the same regime for almost two decades, and then, all of a sudden, they swap that role of fighting and assuming the role of governance and trying to provide health services and education services and then doing policing and managing terrorism and so on and so forth, that we would be able to achieve the results which we could not achieve even being a non-major NATO ally with the U.S.? And we did have the same kind of challenges and incidents during that presence of all these big forces.

So, what are the realistic options with us? We are exploring that. I wouldn't say that we have an adversarial sort of relationship with the de facto government. But there are times when there is a warmth, but there are times when there's not that much warmth. So, it oscillates between one point to another according to the day-to-day developments, which are quite parochial in nature. And that has actually determined all of our strategic thinking process towards Afghanistan.

We do have a larger perspective and outlook on the whole of the region. But these day-to-day events do mire and complicate our relationship at times. But we're trying to manage it and we're trying to manage it in a manner which is mutually beneficial to both sides.

When it comes to the U.S. and its policies toward the region, be it Afghanistan, the Kashmir issue or bilateral relations with Pakistan itself, a number of Pakistani officials have told me they feel the U.S. is not paying enough attention to the region, that it's not doing enough. Do you share this assessment of the U.S. commitment to the region and what it is doing?

It's more about the U.S. role and its belief in multilateralism and engagement, and does the United States believe in an isolationist America or an America which is engaged with the rest of the world. It's more a question of U.S. leadership, moral, political, economic, at all levels, other than just us being the attention-seeker all the time and looking for U.S. attention, either in one or another region.

It's more of a broader question of the U.S.' own positioning. And we're more interested in that, that how does the United States translate itself? How does United States identify itself? How is it perceived by its friends and foes and adversaries alike? And there are times where people are questioning the willingness of the United States to lead at a global scale. And there are times when people still have faith in U.S. leadership. It is for them to determine their degree of attention, their degree of interest.

As a Pakistani and someone coming from that region, I would be very much baffled if that region is being ignored or if it deserves less attention by the United States, because this is where actually lot of things are happening. A population of around 3 to 4 billion resides in that region. How do you ignore 4 billion people? How do you pay less attention to 4 billion people out of 8? Almost half of humanity resides there.

There are potential conflicts in those areas. It would be very stingy on my part not to mention Kashmir, because it's a flashpoint between two nuclear states. God forbid, if there is any sort of military confrontation between the two nuclear powers, how would that translate to the region? How would that translate outside the region? What sort of implications would it have for the European continent? What implications will it have across the planet into North America and the rest?

So, it's not that simple that they would, in a way, easily shy away from the region and just say, "Oh, we don't want to pay that much attention, because it's not in the direct area of interest of the United States." It is more for the U.S. and American public to decide. That region has its own problems, it has its own potential, whether it's in terms of identity, in terms of economy, in terms of flashpoints of conflict areas.

There are disputes between India and China. There are disputes between India and Pakistan. There are disputes between India and Bangladesh. The region is full of conflicts with a huge potential in terms of the human demographic that resides there, in terms of a huge potential of natural resources, which offers and encourages a lot of new business initiatives. So, can the U.S. remain aloof from all those happenings? My answer would be 'no.'

That added interest would determine our position, that how and what sort of relation we will be having in the future with the U.S. Would it be a prism which goes through a regional power over there, or would it be an independent lens, where the U.S. would see us through its own context? That is the question in which we are very much interested.

On the matter of the China-India dispute you mentioned, it appears to be becoming part of a broader dispute playing out right now in the form of an intensifying competition between the United States and China, with India part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. Pakistan, of course, enjoys a robust economic relationship with China. What is the role of Pakistan, what are the stakes for Pakistan, and what are the risks and opportunities for Pakistan in this broader geopolitical dispute?

This entire so-called "Indo-Pacific" policy of either the U.S. or generally of the Western Hemisphere via the encirclement of a regional power around the South China Sea is concerning. We do view it and we are closely monitoring all the developments.

Of course, there are serious challenges and risks, which are involved directly with Pakistan. For us, we see that our adversary and our enemy is being patronized, is being strengthened on the pretext of limiting the role of China. When we have a reality check, we see [India] is still obsessed, and all the world's resources which are being attracted on this pretext by the Western Hemisphere, still is Pakistan-centric and on Indian military preparedness. Probably it is within this paradigm of countering Pakistan.

All the economic competition, which [India] is trying to take advantage of, is not to leave behind the Chinese economy, but it is to boost [the notion] that Pakistan is a leftover of the Indian Union, and they should be penalized, and they should have a sense of regret, [asking] 'Why did they come out of Mother India in 1947?' So, when see observe these sorts of obsessions, we do not see that on merit.

The so-called Indo Pacific strategy is done for the objectives which suit Western powers. Our adversary, India, is just having a flirtation and that flirtation—whatever it wanted, economic and strategic, from which it is taking benefit—is all Pakistan-focused. So, there is an element of concern and there is a legitimate sense of caution on the Pakistani side, and we are closely monitoring that—What does all of it offer us? And we are trying to do our own preparedness to respond to such a challenge.

Thank you very much, Mr. Prime Minister. Is there anything else you would like to add on the election or anything else on your mind?

We're going to have one, and quite soon. So, just wait for the date.