All great wars are existential. They are reshaping how people live, think, compete and consume. The 20th century understood this after the two world wars and their attendant horrors. The guardrails built collectively to prevent conflict and its tragic spillover have since splintered in a postmodern strategic cauldron of the new wars we witness with horror. Their strategic, political and human costs are both calculated and contested in real time.
Machine learning, automation, precision mass capabilities, cyber, space and information systems have all entered the mix of postmodern arsenals to create a new arc of potentially irreversible chaos, compounded by legacy hardware on the map of a world on fire. Aircraft carriers and elite stealth bombers attack alongside cheap unmanned craft in air and water. Supply chains, energy lifelines, water, food and public truths now compete with blood and treasure in any measure of limited and potential losses.
The 21st century is proving almost as violent as the horror that preceded it. Apart from the 61 active conflicts that define human experience worldwide, the West Asian War has shifted global action to the most strategic geopolitical theaters. Hormuz’s chokepoint economy is asserting its pivot at the heart of the global oil disruption, while investment futures built around stability in the GCC are under challenge between a hard-line Iran and its growing war with Israel and patrons, primarily the United States. GCC states need the blocked strait to import food and export oil, while oil-importing economies around the world continue to brace for impact on war prices, shipping surcharges, even rationing of petroleum products.
So far, Tehran has locked in its management of the strait and, from its stated position, will not relinquish options even as the war escalates in ways that entail formidable costs. At the same time, a fast-moving spiral of strategic volatility is setting new benchmarks for regional and global dangers in more ways than one. Although it will eventually be rebuilt, the bombing of US bases in neighboring Gulf countries has opened the door to a new fragility in geopolitical trust based on hydrocarbons, Western protection and limited predictability. For the main combatants, notions of sovereignty and endurance capacity are likely to determine outcomes rather than outright victories. Unthinkable tactical maneuvers also fill the new landscape as war possibilities in the realm of a dangerous new normal.
Yet headlines and emergency responses take up most of the public oxygen in this war. Peace has lost its luster in times of epochal rupture. Rules that protected the weak have gone on sabbatical. It is not only the traditionally vulnerable cohorts of the poor, the displaced woman and the lost child who are collateral damage in this conflict. This time it is air, land and water that we so regularly expect to recharge or be available as global commons that are at serious risk from both pollution, radiation and scarcity.
In Tehran, the black rain is a dark marker of the looming crisis to follow this largest single disruption of oil supply lines in history. Experts say this means that cancer-causing compounds, ultrafine particles and PAHs have already found their way into acid rain, which is the tip of the dark iceberg. It will not only affect Iran. The environmental crisis could trigger catastrophic impacts on ocean shores, marine life and even drinking water in a region that relies on seawater via desalination plants. Toxins will seep into the soil and cause incalculable damage to the quality of the groundwater and the food grown on it.
The warnings are everywhere. The Conflict and Environment Observatory warns that a high incidence of missile and air activity, as well as attacks on energy infrastructure, creates transboundary public health impacts that will continue long after the war ends. The scope and scale of modern warfare is so staggering that it defies calculation of its long-term damage. Nor do the risks calculate the dangers of a dizzying burn rate on carbon emissions. Since emissions from war are not included in the Paris Agreement, the calculation of global warming is already far out for a world that is driving past its climate tipping points. Just for context, greenhouse gas emissions from the Ukraine war in the first two years reached the entire annual emissions of France.
All such calculations matter for Pakistan, which experiences front drop in baking temperatures as high as 53 Celsius in summer. Although ‘scorched earth’ has been a tactical ploy used as early as iron arrowheads in human conflict, in today’s accelerated warfare non-combatants will suffer in ways they did not in conventional wars. Today, despite quantum technological leaps, the new weapons and AI, instead of sparing water, land and air, almost ensure that their lethality is scaled up to the slim agnosticism of freedom from consequence. In this amoral multiverse, the environment becomes a vast theater of accidental collateral damage. In development shorthand, that means more hunger, more scarcity, more inequality, more sick people without a safety net. Certainly not the prosperous future rolled out at conferences with large LED screens and tasteful white flowers.
For Pakistan, with a shared coastline with Iran and proximity to the Gulf states, the dangers are real but will continue to be seen as third-level threats until the coastline turns oily or Karachi’s air turns a dark shade of gray. In either case, there is little that Islamabad can do immediately, except to treat resilience as a multidimensional challenge with climate performance benchmarks for all strategic ministries. In the short term, in the hierarchy of disruptions brought about by this war, Pakistan’s threshold of anxiety will be common to many countries facing future reckonings at gas pumps and gas stoves. It won’t just be a transport crisis. Or LNG deficit. Diesel shortages in food-growing countries like Pakistan could significantly affect the upcoming sowing season.
As the government struggles to protect the public from more pain, a prolonged war of attrition in the Gulf – even at reduced levels of violence – will be difficult. All management bandwidth will be devoted to maintaining a currency stability regime, hedging essential imports and managing oil stocks. So far, Pakistan has mitigated extreme impacts, but exposure to exogenous shocks will be difficult to limit if the war goes beyond 60 days.
In this vortex of strategic global crises, Pakistan’s challenges are complex. Even without war, the safeguard between America’s choice and an unbreakable relationship with China has not been easy. Today, its diplomacy is tested daily between neighborhood coercion with Iran, defense pacts and vital economic ties with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, transfer exposure in the GCC, large domestic Shia cohorts, kinetic pressure from an intransigent Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a predator meddling in Balochistan and KP, and lingering notions of legitimacy.
On the Pakistani street, no foreign policy can expect to be whitewashed of moral choices, no matter how pragmatic the government becomes in embracing difficult choices for the greater public good. The reported use of white phosphorus on Lebanon and the genocidal land grabbing and trauma of Palestinians is not palatable to anyone. Nor is it an attack on the sovereignty of any country or the bombing of desalination plants.
Therefore, Pakistan was the first Muslim country to condemn such acts, including the tragic assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei. Despite vulnerability in multilateral forums controlled by the Bretton Woods financial institution, Islamabad did not join the ISF as a combatant, but also rightly condemned the recent attacks on the GCC countries.
In a world where the fragile unity of the Muslim world has melted away faster than a missile pod after an interception, Pakistan has been at the forefront of holding the flag. A deep national commitment to Muslim suffering in both Occupied Kashmir and Palestine has driven Islamabad to take consistent and clear positions against forced colonization in both illegal gulags. Still, the limits of Pakistan’s diplomacy must continue to adhere to the first overriding goal of any foreign policy, which is to protect its people and not feed justifiable anger or harm troops. Our capabilities have been decisively demonstrated in wars that have landed in our airspace. Let’s keep the sky blue as long as possible.
The author is a former ambassador to the United States and chairman of the Standing Committee on Climate Change in the Senate of Pakistan.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Pakinomist.tv’s editorial policy.
