SAMAJ WEEKLY UK
Bal Ram Sampla
Geopolitics
Pakistan’s economy runs on a simple problem: it spends more foreign currency than it earns. Its factories don’t export enough. Its energy sector burns through imported fuel. And whenever the government tries to grow the economy, imports rise faster than exports, and dollars drain out of the country.
This is why, again and again, Pakistan turns abroad for rescue money , from the IMF, from Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and now from the United States.
The latest example is telling. After helping mediate talks during the Iran war, Pakistan raised its profile in Washington and almost immediately followed up with a request for a $10 billion facility from the US Treasury.
To critics, this looks like turning a diplomatic favour into an invoice: having earned goodwill, Islamabad is cashing it in rather than fixing the deeper problems at home.
That’s the core of the “begging” critique that instead of building exports, attracting real investment, or reforming a bloated energy sector, Pakistan’s governments have learned that crisis diplomacy and strategic usefulness (whether against terrorism, or as a mediator, or as a US ally) can always be converted into another loan, another rollover, another bailout.
Reserves rise and fall based on the next debt repayment rather than the strength of the economy itself, and each rescue simply buys time until the next request.
It’s worth noting the other side of this, though. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed country of over 240 million people in a genuinely difficult neighborhood, and its supporters would argue that outside financing is a normal tool nearly every developing economy uses , Argentina and Uruguay have gotten similar US facilities, and IMF programs exist precisely for countries navigating currency crises. Pakistan is “begging” and playing the diplomatic and financial hand it has, the way most states do when they have leverage to offer.
Source:
https://www.tbsnews.net/world/pakistan-seeks-10b-fund-us-after-mediating-iran-talks-source-says-1494831
