Blocking NATO supplies

Doesn’t hurt the US as much as it hurts the Afghan poor and KP’s economy

A fanatic, Winston Churchill said, is someone who won’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. A check on both those counts as far as the PTI goes on the subject of drones. Despite being elected, it needs to change either its own mind or that of the central government, whose prerogative it is to decide how to deal with the issue. Not showing any flexibility on that front, the PTI, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to tap into the only actionable variable that it has at its disposal: the NATO supply line.

And by the PTI, this paper means the party itself, not the government that it runs. Yes, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has decided to take a backseat, more or less, while party activists and those from ally parties perform the task of physically blocking the roads. These are the exact same manoeuvres of fascist parties, not virgin territory for the Jamaat-e-Islami but certainly new ground for the PTI. The legality of the issue is confounding, to say the least. The burdens of governance, advocates of democracy point out, are enough to sober up the most radical of political forces. It was this that they pointed out when the MMA were ruling the province; it was a shambles of a government but nowhere near the shift back fourteen-hundred years that the agents of doom and gloom were predicting it would be. In one fell swoop, the PTI has confirmed what many analysts have been saying: the JUI-F, which was running the MMA’s government, was, for all its flaws, a far more mature and responsible political player than the PTI.

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‘These are the exact same manoeuvres of fascist parties, not virgin territory for the Jamaat-e-Islami but certainly new ground for the PTI.’

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The PML-N shares, by and large, the viewpoint that the PTI has on the issue of terror. It also agrees with it on the issue of drones. That it couldn’t work out a mutually acceptable plan of action with as likeminded a party as the League is disappointing; what is politics, after all, if not the art of the possible?

Till recently, only the plight of the many individuals whose livelihoods depended on the Afghan transit trade was being highlighted. But it is more than those who will bear the brunt. Afghanistan is not just a war ravaged country but also a land-locked one. It gets its food supplies from different routes, the principal amongst them being Pakistan. To put things in perspective, the import-export associations, who are staging a protest of their own against the PTI’s strikes, say that the number of containers of fruits and vegetables that cross the border ranges from 450 in the off-season to 2,000 in the peak season. That figure has now dribbled down to 50 to 100. This is a course of action that is not really going to stop the drone strikes; it is only going to make NATO’s logistical costs only marginally greater if they were to start employing any other routes. But it would certainly lead to food insecurity in Afghanistan.

Not only is Pakistan’s target of export to Afghanistan ($2 billion) not going to be met, but even the tax revenue stream that the transit trade was going to provide the provincial government, one that the latter has itself accounted for in its budget, is not going to be met.