For Pakistan, the IMF is an Inter-Continental Financial Missile

While the IMF might claim to be apolitical and neutral in this critical phase in Pakistan’s history, its actions are saying louder than words that it is neither.

The International Monetary Fund is dragging Pakistan over broken glass to get the now infamous Nineth Review done. Every time the goal looks at hand, the Fund changes the goalpost to make the country crawl and bleed more at the knees.

When I spoke to finance ministry officials about minister Ishaq Dar’s statement of having done enough to please the Fund, they admitted that Pakistan is exhausted chasing the holy grail of IMF support. They see absolute and clear indications of global agendas at work in the Fund’s conduct towards Pakistan. They see the new demand of arranging an additional 3 billion-plus support as “strategic blackmail” that is connected with the aims to bring Pakistan to the brink of economic “implosion.” To force it to change its partnership with China. To rethink defence spending and nuclear programme development as a final bargain to avert civil strife caused by an economic meltdown. Ishaq Dar March this year did drop hints to this effect when he vowed, out of the blue and without any real context, to never compromise on the country’s missile programme.

This sounds too dramatic and akin to paranoia, but the point is that the IMF knowing full well what the country’s immediate economic needs are has used its clout to hammer Pakistan. Parallel to this are global rating agencies that are relentless in either forecasting apocalyptic scenarios about the country’s immediate future (another Sri Lanka) or have promoted fears of default by a nuclear country in weary international markets.

While IMF officials have not openly endorsed these scare scenarios, they have not disputed them emphatically enough either. Tossing the country between slim hope and grim apprehensions, they have for months used the Ninth Review as a weapon of mass speculation about Pakistan. No wonder the Indian foreign secretary in his post-SCO diatribe against Pakistan mentioned with contempt and delight the country’s “depleting foreign reserves” as proof of Pakistan’s vulnerability.

More to the point, economic stress and strain the IMF has generated through its now-you-have-it-no-you-don’t approach has played directly into national political turmoil where Imran Khan has used the same language as the international rating agencies and IMF officials to make dark forecasts about Pakistan’s future. He has used economic uncertainty to his advantage to plunge, ironically, the country into further uncertainty. Finance ministry officials also note with concern how IMF increasingly talks about the country’s “internal situation” in their official and informal interactions---a level of interest which in their view goes beyond the call of general duty to monitor ground realities in a client’s backyard.

All of this is happening when the country’s armed forces are coming under direct and physical attacks from terrorists across Balochistan and the KP and are in the eye of the domestic storm that Imran’s promotion of mutiny has stirred. A group of US and UK-based Pakistanis continue to add fuel to the fire by using social media to promote total chaos by encouraging youth to burn and plunder their own land. Half-baked theories of revolution fed to the gullible, most of whom are direct victims of economic challenges, have turned the country into a social tinderbox that goes off at a touch.

Economic relief can considerably douse these different fires and restore sanity to national discourse but that won’t happen as the IMF has been putting that prospect on hold for months on end.

Pakistan’s planners, including of course the General Headquarters, won’t be oblivious to this network of pressure points that connects IMF with a debilitating economic situation, internal turmoil and the rising tide of terror and destructive trolling the country is faced with. Some alternatives are also being worked out in light of this terrible experience with the Fund. Let us see how these pan out.

The bottom line: while the Fund might claim to be apolitical and neutral in this critical phase in Pakistan’s history, its actions are saying louder than words that it is neither. The IMF looks more like an Inter-continental Financial Missile carrying the warhead of Ninth Review targeting and testing Pakistan’s defence than a multilateral lending institution.