(Part 10)
Pakistan does not have any history. It killed the history. It has a gravitational field. Like a black hole, everything it pulls, vanishes inside it.
A jinx is not a ghost. A curse is not magic. In geopolitics, a “jinx” forms when a system is so unstable that anyone who interacts with it gets damaged even without harm being intended. Pakistan’s geopolitical allies suffer in proportion to their intimacy with it.
International Jinx of Pakistan
The International leaders who sought to mediate Pakistan’s crises became victims of violence that traced back to the instability Pakistan exported.
Pakistan does not reward defenders. It outlives them. It outgrows them. It turns them into footnotes or casualties, depending on convenience. No one who attempts to frame Pakistan in a positive light escapes unscathed.
Pakistan at international forums often face blowback. Leaders who stake their political capital on Pakistan’s stability end up confronting the instability themselves. The jinx becomes transnational. Violence spills, alliances fracture, trust evaporates. The cost of association rises over time, not because Pakistan is uniquely malevolent, but because it is uniquely unable to sustain equilibrium. Every partner eventually becomes collateral.
Afghanistan
Pakistan called Afghanistan its backyard. Faiz Hameed as its Intelligence Chief was instrumental in Taliban 2.0 in Kabul. Today they are at war. Afghanistan attacks and kills Pakistani soldiers who abandon their posts and have run away. A large number of soldiers have resigned or deserted.
Afghanistan used Pakistan for decades and then discarded it like used tissue paper.
Arab
Pakistan has a history of deep association with Arabs. Saudi Arabia often mediates in power struggles in Pakistan. It has extended a line of credit to Pakistan. The oil they sell to Pakistan is on deferred payment.
Pakistan has named its cities and public institutions on Arab names. The relations used to be very close. After 9/11, the Arab states realised the cost of association. They barred the Tablighi Zamat in 2020. Arab deported hundreds of beggars from Pakistan. They have restricted the visa too.
Saudi Arabia had reduced cash grants to Pakistan. UAE has tightened remittances rules. Qatar and Bahrain became cautious. Nobody wants to bankroll Pakistan’s bankrupt economy anymore. An entire civilisation steps back in unison, for self-preservation.
Bangladesh
Mohammad Yunus was installed as dictator without title to rule Bangladesh who is warming up to Pakistan. Within months it is facing revival of political unrest. Economic turbulence has hit it. Street protests are back. Inflation is spiking. Government is undergoing a deep crises of legitimacy.
Bangladesh had been the South Asian success story. It touched Pakistan and stumbled almost instantly. The jinx repeats.
Britain
British produced Pakistan to keep a foothold in India, as desired by Churchill. Britain wanted to obstruct the march of Soviet Union into south Asia. The power center of the empire shifted across the Atlantic after the failed takeover of Suez Canal. The British retreat from empire to become a poor nation happened in 1976, when the UK itself had to seek an IMF bailout. A former imperial superpower, was reduced to borrowing from the world. That is not a symbolic collapse but the jinx.
British ignored the jinx as superstition and the jinx continues into the modern era. In 2019, Prince William and Kate visited Pakistan. A warm, elegant visit. A rare show of royal diplomacy. It was aimed to bring Pakistan out of isolation. Within a few years of visit Princess Kate disappears from public life after undergoing major abdominal surgery. A prolonged health crisis ensued. Cause of illness is shrouded in rumours, silence, and secrecy. A lovely smile vanishes into hospital walls.
Jinx strikes at the British monarchy and weakens it by illness and internal fracture.
China
Unlike the West or the Gulf monarchies, China did not approach Pakistan with illusions. It did not come for religion, romance, history, culture, or sentiment. It came with hard power, hard cash, and hard strategy. Beijing believed that a weak state could be stabilized by overwhelming investment and military discipline. If anyone could fix Pakistan, it was China. And so China committed 30–40 billion dollars, sent thousands of its citizens as engineers, technicians, teachers, and supervisors, and built infrastructure on a scale Pakistan had never seen since independence. Yet this was precisely the moment when the jinx began to tighten.
Chinese engineers were attacked repeatedly, year after year. They were murdered on roads, blown up in buses, attacked at hotels, ambushed near project sites, and even targeted inside educational institutions. Dasu, Gwadar, Karachi, Balochistan. The geography of CPEC became a geography of funerals. China, a state that prides itself on internal security and zero tolerance for chaos, suddenly found itself burying citizens because it trusted a country that could not secure its own streets. No foreign investment model ever accounted for suicide bombers targeting teachers of the Confucius Institute simply because they were Chinese.
The tragedy for China is that the damage was not limited to Pakistan. CPEC was marketed in Beijing as the crown jewel of the Belt and Road Initiative, the model partnership that would showcase China’s rise. Instead, it became the example Chinese media learned to avoid discussing. Simultaneously, China’s housing market collapsed, its local governments became insolvent, youth unemployment exploded, GDP growth fell to levels embarrassing for a planned economy, and the world began quietly acknowledging that China had entered a long period of stagnation. The deeper China’s footprint in Pakistan grew, the more its own internal crises sharpened. This may be coincidence, but the timing follows the same uncanny pattern that proximity to Pakistan correlates with decline.
China eventually understood something that Britain and America had learned earlier: Pakistan cannot be secured by money, guns, diplomacy, or ideology, because its instability is structural, not situational. It cannot be stabilised because it was never designed as a stable nation-state; it was designed as an ideological reaction. No amount of investment can repair a society whose foundations are organised around negation. So China quietly paused projects, withdrew workers, tightened security demands, froze loans, and dramatically reduced political warmth. The “iron brotherhood” became ceremonial, not real. China did not leave because it lost money; China left because Pakistan made it lose face. And in the Chinese worldview, face is more valuable than gold.
Pakistan does not harm others intentionally. It harms itself so deeply that anyone connected to it absorbs a portion of its chaos. China, with all its discipline and power, could not escape the contagion. Because the contagion is not terrorism or corruption or mismanagement.
USA
British Empire was succeeded by USA. The mercenary garrison called Pakistan was also transferred to USA which became Pakistan’s godfather. It gave Pakistan billions of dollars during the Cold War and the War on Terror.
Today USA has $38 trillion national debt with no plan to repay. It has highly polarised society. Its most successful and widely exported product the Dollar is losing share in global trade. Its military is overstretched. Brics countries have started trading in local currencies. De-dollarisation has become a reality and is slowly accelerating.
Empires end gradually. The decline began after Iraq and Afghanistan. It halted for eight long years when Pakistan was moved to a distance. Now President Trump is hosting its Army Chief into White House and jinx has reached along with Pakistan. USA has stopped publishing the data pertaining to holding of treasury bonds. Nobody knows who holds it and who sold it.
The timing is not coincidence. Jinx is.
References:
- _The Murder of History: A Critique of History Textbooks Used in Pakistan_by Khalid Kureishi Aziz or K.K. Aziz (1993).