(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
In part 8 of this article, it was argued that Two-Nation Theory is the real “jinx.” On deeper analysis it appears that the jinx is international. It operates on every country having ties with Pakistan.
The skull and crossbones on a poison bottle does not tell the molecular mechanism of toxicity. It does not explain how the compound binds to receptors or disrupts cellular respiration. It simply says: those who touched this did not fare well. Pakistan as jinx works the same way.
Jinx need not be emotionally charged issue. Incompetence is a jinx. Bankruptcy is a jinx. Intolerable society is a jinx. In previous 8 parts of articles all those issues were discussed. When a dysfunctional system exports its dysfunction to those who engage with it, that is a jinx in the most precise sense. No magic required.
The countries that treated Pakistan as a strategic asset worth subsidizing made specific bad investments. 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.
France
France sold Mirage jets. Those jets flew against India, extended Pakistani military ambition beyond what its economy could sustain, and pulled France deeper into a relationship that produced no strategic return. Germany supplied submarines to a navy that exists primarily to threaten a neighbor while the state itself cannot pay salaries. Both countries took real resources, real engineering, real industrial capacity and fed it into a system designed to consume without producing.
They get back disorder, refugee flows, terrorism exported through its diaspora, and the reputational cost of having armed a state that sponsors the very threats you are now defending against.
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.
Sweden
Sweden closed its embassy in Islamabad in April 2023, citing security concerns. Sweden had maintained diplomatic presence in Pakistan since 1951, seven decades of engagement, and walked away. The immediate trigger was the Quran burning controversy in Stockholm, which created direct threats to Swedish diplomatic staff in Pakistan. A court in Sweden overturned a police ban on Quran-burning demonstrations, and the embassy closed the very next day.
Sweden absorbed a large Pakistani diaspora, struggled with integration, experienced gang violence concentrated in specific communities, and watched its famously peaceful social model visibly strain under pressures it was politically forbidden to name directly for years.
Demographic association is sufficient for the jinx of Pakistan to operate.
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.
The Two-Nation Theory as active cognitive poison intensified specifically after 1971. Before Bangladesh, Pakistan could still pretend the theory was vindicated. After Bangladesh, the theory became an open wound that could not be acknowledged. A Muslim-majority nation had voted with its feet against the Islamic state. The theory said that should have been impossible. Societies function on cognitive ability to perceive reality. When that ability is destroyed institutionally, decline follows in every dimension. Post-1971, Pakistan did exactly that. It rewrote textbooks, intensified anti-India rhetoric which led to complete cognitive decline. Therefore the jinx had an activation date. That date was December 1971. Think of developments in USA thereafter starting with abandonment of Brettonwood Treaty.
By the 1980s the Afghanistan jihad scaled the relationship dramatically. USA did not just use Pakistan, it handed Pakistan the keys to an entire covert war, money, weapons, ideology, the full ISI infrastructure. That is when the dose became genuinely toxic. But even then America’s Cold War victory masked the damage. Winning against USSR felt like vindication.
The bill arrived in 2001. The infrastructure USA built through Pakistan in the 1980s walked into the Twin Towers. Then America spent twenty years and three trillion dollars fighting the exact network it had funded, through the exact country that was simultaneously sheltering its enemies.
Close association with Pakistan requires its partners to systematically lie to themselves. The USA had to pretend the ISI was an ally while evidence of double-dealing accumulated for decades. Britain had to pretend parallel communities were integrating. China has to pretend CPEC is progressing. Germany and France had to pretend arms sales were neutral commerce with a stable state.
Sustained self-deception at the institutional level is genuinely paralyzing. You cannot think clearly about your own economy, your own society, your own strategic interests when a significant portion of your political and intelligence establishment is professionally committed to maintaining a false picture of a key partner.
Today USA has $38 trillion national debt with no plan to repay. It has highly polarised society. Its most successful and widely exported product, 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).
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