Pakistan in Crisis, With Sadanand Dhume

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is crises in Pakistan. 

 

With me to discuss the political, economic and climate crisis roiling Pakistan is Sadanand Dhume. Sadanand is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute with a focus on South Asian political economy, foreign policy, business, and society. For more than a decade, he has been a South Asia columnist for The Wall Street Journal. His most recent column is titled, "Imran Khan's Arrest, the Army and Pakistan's Perennial Crisis." Sadanand, thank you for joining me.

 

DHUME:
Great to join you.

 

LINDSAY:
I want to start by acknowledging that Pakistan is in the midst of multiple crises. I'd like to begin with the most visible and immediate one, which is the showdown between former Prime Minister Imran Khan and the Pakistani military. This is a fluid and possibly volatile situation. As we are sitting down to talk, Pakistani police are about to begin searching Imran Khan's home with his permission in the search for potential suspects wanted in recent anti-government violence. I was just wondering if just to start, you could help us understand why it is that the former prime minister is squaring off against the government he led until a little over a year ago.

 

DHUME:
Yeah. So I described this in another recent column as a clash between Pakistan's most popular leader and its most powerful institution. The army, as many of your listeners would know, has dominated Pakistani politics since the creation of Pakistan in 1947. It's ruled the country directly for about thirty-three years and indirectly for most of the rest. What's ironic about this confrontation is that when Imran Khan came to power in 2018, he was widely seen as the army's choice for prime minister. His views are aligned with the Pakistani Army's views ideologically. He was seen as the most cooperative of their major politicians, and the army was seen as having assisted him by greasing the path to power for him. But he fell out with the army and then he fell out of power last year, this was last April, he lost a vote of no confidence in Parliament.

 

Since then, this has been building up the confrontation between him and the army. The most recent turn is because he escalated his rhetoric. He has been speaking directly about the Army Chief General Asim Munir as a problem. He has directly named a serving major general, a very senior figure in the military called Faisal Naseer and accused him of plotting an assassination attempt against him. All this rhetoric is quite unprecedented in Pakistan. This is a country where a year ago, even the most seasoned and senior journalists would pick their words very carefully when they were speaking about the army. Sometimes they would resort to code, so they would say things that would describe them. They would refer to them as "the boys" or sometimes jokingly as "the agriculture department." Here you have this very high profile figure, the most famous person in the country, we can get into that more a little bit later, a recent former prime minister directly going after the army chief and other senior military officials.

 

So then they ended up arresting him. There were a bunch of charges. About 150 charges have been filed against him. Some of them, or most of them are probably bogus, but in any case, he was arrested. Then you had this outbreak of violence. The violence, again, was quite unprecedented in Pakistan's history because it directly targeted military installations. Protestors, they attacked the home of a senior general in Lahore, the core commander. They looted his house. Someone ran away with the peacocks in his yard. Someone else ran away with the mutton korma in his fridge, so it was really quite dramatic. Then it seemed as though Khan was going to get away with it when the Supreme Court let him out. But at this moment, there's a very tense standoff continues. This is one of those things rather like a cricket match where one side is up one day and then the other side is up the next day. But suffice to say that Khan is in a high-stakes confrontation with the military that we have not seen in Pakistan for a long, long time.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. So Sadanand, you put a lot on the table there. Let's unpack it. Again, I want to pick up on that point that Khan came to power seen as being the choice of the military, but that love affair, if there was one, broke up. Why did all of a sudden the military, the army, decide that he no longer was the right man?

 

DHUME:
So what happened was that about six months before he was voted out of office, the the then Army Chief General Bajwa decided to appoint a new chief of the Pakistan's Army Intelligence Agency, the ISI, which is a very powerful role in the military. Now, traditionally, the army chief has aggregated that right to himself. Imran Khan clashed with the army chief on this question because the serving ISI chief at the time was someone who was very close to Imran Khan, and he wanted him to continue. That he pushed back against the army chief on something that the army thought was its own prerogative, that's what precipitated this falling out between him and Bajwa.

 

Some analysts also say that there were deeper policy disagreements, that Bajwa wanted to pursue some kind of rapprochement with India. Bajwa was willing to step back on Pakistan's advocacy of the Kashmir issue. He recognized that Pakistan is in dire straits economically and wanted to come to some kind of modus vivendi with India, which Imran Khan resisted. So there was a policy element, but I think the main and more important part was that Imran clashed with the army chief. He thought he could get away with it. It turned out that the army chief had other plans.

 

LINDSAY:
So in April of 2022, the Pakistani parliament passes a no-confidence motion, which means under a parliamentary system, he's relieved of duties as prime minister. I'm not sure how popular Imran Khan was at that moment in whether he would have succeeded in winning in the elections that Pakistan is scheduled to have later this year. But whatever would've happened in an alternative universe, he's dismissed from the Prime Minister's office. He then begins to protest against the government calling on the government to hold new and early elections. He seems to be pretty popular, at least with some sections of the Pakistani public. Can you help us understand how popular he is and where he's popular?

 

DHUME:
Yeah, no, you're certainly right that a year ago he hadn't done a great job as Prime Minister, and a year ago he wasn't as popular as he is today. He started these protest movements, he blamed the United States for his ouster, and he claimed that the prime minister who replaced him, Shehbaz Sharif, he referred to that government as the imported government. The implication being that it was imported by the United States and because he had sought, in his words, "a relationship of dignity and self-respect with the United States, that was unacceptable to Washington," and that's why he was ousted.

 

LINDSAY:
Is there any truth to his charge?

 

DHUME:
No, I think that he was ousted because of, as I'd said earlier, he was ousted because of his problems with the army chief. Since then, Imran Khan himself has walked back that allegation. He now claims that the army chief manipulated what the U.S. was saying about him in order to oust him rather than the U.S. directly being responsible. So that's his current view of that. But he's very popular for a couple of reasons. The immediate reason, of course, is that the government that replaced him has not done a good job. Inflation has been very high, the economy has been tanking. But there are deeper reasons, which is that in many ways, as I mentioned earlier, he's an iconic figure for Pakistanis. I spoke with the leader from his party a few weeks ago for another column, and the way he put it was that imagine for an American if Michael Jordan was also America's most famous philanthropist and had founded his own political party and gone on to win the presidency, what kind of iconic figure Imran is in the Pakistani imagination?

 

LINDSAY:
Yeah. I should just point out for people who aren't familiar with his background that he was a world-class cricket star. He led Pakistan in 1992 to victory in the Cricket World Cup, the one and so far only time that Pakistan has won the Cricket World Cup. So he is an iconic figure simply as a sports personality.

 

DHUME:
He is also an iconic figure as a philanthropist. He set up a world-class cancer hospital in Pakistan in memory of his mother. He's widely seen as clean. For many middle-class Pakistanis, he's seen as somebody who can carry himself with a certain amount of confidence and dignity on the global stage, so he has genuine support. The support has obviously increased over the past year, but he does have deep reserves of support.

 

LINDSAY:
Is his support regional to any extent?

 

DHUME:
Well, it's strongest in Punjab and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, that's about 70 percent of the country. So in some senses, he's more of a national figure than any of his rivals. The Nawaz Sharif dynasty is centered mostly in Punjab. The Zardari and the Bhutto's are centered mostly in Sindh. Khan has more of a pan-Pakistani appeal than any of his rivals right now.

 

LINDSAY:
Are we at risk at seeing a military coup in Pakistan?

 

DHUME:
I don't think we're going to see a direct coup. They'll always have one power, but they're more comfortable having power without responsibility. So the preferred choice would be pliant prime minister, which they have right now. If things really get out of hand, if you see an escalation of violence, if you see more attacks on military facilities, more attacks on generals, then of course, anything is possible. But as of now, it does not look as though this current Army Chief Asim Munir is keen on imposing martial law like several of his predecessors have done.

 

LINDSAY:
So if General Asim Munir chooses not to do that, I assume that means that elections will go forth later on this year. Will Imran Khan be allowed to run, and if he does, will he be allowed to win?

 

DHUME:
It's not clear if elections will go forth later this year. So for example, in January, Imran Khan who had governments, his party had governments in two provinces, in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, he dissolved the assemblies. Under the Pakistani constitution they were supposed to hold new elections within ninety days. The Supreme Court ordered those elections to be held, but the government backed by the army has just said that they don't have the funds. They've made all kinds of excuses and they've not held them. So one, it's not clear whether the elections will indeed be held in October. That's what the government is saying, and it's also not clear whether they're going to allow contest. They could ban him from politics, they could ban his party, they could do all kinds of things. So that part is extremely unclear at this point.

 

LINDSAY:
So let's look at the crisis in Pakistan in a broader sense. You've already alluded to one of them, which is the economic crisis in Pakistan. Inflation is very high, I think it tops 35 percent. Pakistan has very deep international debt problems. Reserves have plummeted the value of the rupee, the currency, has plummeted as well. What's happening on the economic front?

 

DHUME:
So Pakistan has really struggled, and I think over here, again, if you take the longer view and compare it with some of the other countries in the region, if you compare it with Bangladesh and India, one of the things that Pakistan did not do at the end of the Cold War was reorient its economy more towards a market economy. For a long time, Pakistani elites have been dependent on aid and handouts from the West, specifically the U.S. During the war in Afghanistan, that became a kind of substitute for serious economic reform. Now they find that they are really falling behind even by regional standards. 

 

The figure that I used in one of my columns was a comparison with Bangladesh, which as you know, for a long, long time was much poorer than Pakistan. As recently as 1999 per capita income in Bangladesh was slightly behind Pakistan. It was about $400 in Bangladesh, about $420 in Pakistan. If you look today per capita income in Bangladesh is $2,500. Obviously it's still a very poor country, but in Pakistan it's only $1,500. So it's gone from being slightly ahead of Bangladesh to being 60 percent behind, which is quite dramatic. Again, I don't think that it's fair to blame any one Pakistani leader for this. It's just been a systemic problem. They have not been able to attract investors. They have not been able to put in place laws that would allow business to function smoothly. It's been a very military dominated quality and that has also skewed the political economy of Pakistan. The old joke that they used to say about Prussia is equally true of Pakistan that it's less a country with an army and more an army with a country. So these are all deep-rooted structural problems that predate the rise of Imran Khan, but he was not able to solve them either.

 

LINDSAY:
Did he attempt to solve them, or did he have no solutions to the problems that Pakistan faces?

 

DHUME:
He does not have solutions in my view. He came to power touting this idea that he would create an Islamic welfare state. He claimed somewhat fantastically in my view that the Swedish welfare state was really based on Islamic principles and Pakistan could somehow get to something like that. He's not very literate on economic issues, and he was not able to surround himself by people who were particularly literate on economic issues. There was a time briefly when he was going to hire the Princeton economist, Atif Mian, who was very highly regarded as an advisor, and that was shot down because of Atif Mian's faith. He was an Ahmadi Muslim. So that was seen as beyond the pale, "How could you possibly have an Ahmadi advising you?" Imran, who has always been very keen to pander to fundamentalist sentiment in his country, immediately stepped away and canceled Atif Mian's appointment. To me, that incident really summed up his lack of seriousness on economic questions.

 

LINDSAY:
My sense also is that Pakistan has immense problems with its infrastructure, that it's in dire straits, particularly the electrical grid, which I think at one point last year and more than one point last year essentially seized up.

 

DHUME:
Power infrastructure isn't great, ports aren't great, and you have China involved. Now with the CPEC, which is of course an important part of the BRI, but now I think many Pakistanis are looking at some of those contracts and deciding and coming to the conclusion that they didn't really get the best deal out of the Chinese. One place where Pakistani infrastructure is not bad is roads. They have pretty good roads, but a lot of the other infrastructure, like you said, power and ports and so on are problematic.

 

LINDSAY:
Well, the other thing is that Pakistan has been really hit by climate change. Last year, Pakistan experienced horrific monsoons. My understanding is something on the order up a third of the country was underwater at one point and that obviously is a big setback economically.

 

DHUME:
Yes, for sure. The floods, again, the timing could not have been worse because they were, in any case, struggling with economic issues. They were struggling with inflation. They were struggling with their debt problem. They have been to the IMF more than a dozen times, and they're in the middle of negotiations. Even now foreign reserves are down to just about $4 billion. So all this and the floods came on top of that. So I think this is a country, and it's a very large country. I think we sometimes lose track of that because it's next to India, which is much larger, but Pakistan has 230 million people.

 

LINDSAY:
It also has nuclear weapons.

 

DHUME:
And nuclear weapons, so it's a very large country and it's got this large population. It's being battered now by climate change as we saw with the floods, and it hasn't really been able to cope with all these multiple crises.

 

LINDSAY:
Yeah, I'll just note I've been reading that Pakistan has been experiencing a very warm spring, much warmer than usual, not just during the day, but having temperatures quite high at night so people don't get a chance to have things cool off, which complicates a lot. I want to talk about how neighbors are reacting to what's happening in Pakistan. You mentioned Pakistan in many ways stands in the shadow of India, a much more populous country. They have had great tensions in the relationship since the partition back in 1947. Do you have a sense, Sadanand, as to how New Delhi is viewing what's happening in Pakistan? Is it an opportunity, or they see it as a potential threat?

 

DHUME:
I think they view it mostly with glee and schadenfreude, to be frank. The relationship has been quite bad for a number of years now. It was quite bad under Imran Khan. India as it sees its own role in the world grow is almost as though as if they've decided that they don't need to deal with Pakistan. In my view, that's a mistake. It's an important neighbor and you do need to deal with your important neighbors, but my view is not the view of the ruling establishment in New Delhi. So they're watching all of this, and they have the popcorn out, but they haven't reacted beyond that. I don't think you're going to see anything like military adventurism or an attempt to take advantage of this in any way from the Indian side.

 

LINDSAY:
Do you worry about the resurgence of terrorism from the Pakistani side? Many people still have very strong memories of the attack in Mumbai back in 2008.

 

DHUME:
Yeah, I worry about the long-term stability and what that means for Pakistan's export of radical Islam's terrorism. It's a complicated question because in some ways, the major actor in that drama has been the Pakistani military. So on the one hand, you could argue that anything that weakens the Pakistani military or forces it to face up with more domestic challenges could dampen its enthusiasm for groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and others that it has unleashed on India in the past. On the other hand, a chaotic Pakistan with law and order deteriorating is also Pakistan where some of these groups would take advantage of the chaos to build up their strength. They would, of course, affect not only Pakistanis, but also Indians because they have, in the past, conducted many terrorist attacks on Indian soil.

 

LINDSAY:
My sense is that Pakistan has its own internal terrorism problem with groups in the Northwest Territories who are hostile to the central government in Islamabad.

 

DHUME:
Yes, and the rise and the fall of Kabul to the Taliban has enormous security implications for Pakistan. It's another example, I think, of Imran Khan making the wrong call because when the Taliban swept into Kabul, he said that the Afghans had thrown off the shackles of slavery. But it turns out that many of the arguments that are put forward by the Taliban in Afghanistan are also put forward by the TTP, the Pakistani Taliban in Pakistan. 

 

So it's a serious and persistent challenge that they face, not just the terrorist component, which is real, particularly in the northwest and in Balochistan, but also the broader ideological question. This is something that Pakistan has grappled with from day one, is this meant to be a nation for Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, or at least a section of them, a third of the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent? Or is this meant to be a nation based on the laws of Islam? They've struggled with this from the start. You can have people bring out the founder of the Nation, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and you can cherry-pick his comments to make arguments on either side of this. But in some ways the rise of the Taliban really makes this question much more stark.

 

LINDSAY:
What is the difference between those two different visions in specific terms?

 

DHUME:
The one vision is more secular that this is a country which happens to be populated by Muslims, but it can follow laws and political norms that are not too dissimilar from India next door. The other vision is that it is not just populated by Muslims, but it must be specially dedicated to Islam, which basically means that you want to implement aspects of Sharia. So the Taliban would argue that the Pakistani ruling elites are dissolute and westernized and are not following true Islam. So that's really the long-term dilemma.

 

LINDSAY:
Obviously the Pashtun ethnic group lives on both sides of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

 

DHUME:
Yes, and that's ironic because in many ways, the Islamist problem in Afghanistan was fueled by Pakistan starting in the early 1970s because they were very uncomfortable with the idea of the Pashtuns wanting an independent homeland. The fact that the Afghans had never accepted the Durand Line between Pakistan and Afghanistan as a legitimate border. What we've seen happen over the past five decades is that the Pakistanis got their wish to the extent that the Pashtuns became much more deeply Islamized. You saw the rise of the Taliban, but this hasn't ended Pashtun nationalism, it's just given Pashtun nationalism a more Islamic inflection. So this in fact, you could argue, has increased the security risk that Pakistan faces in that part of the country.

 

LINDSAY:
My sense is that Pakistan also faces sub-nationalism where secessionist tendencies elsewhere, particularly in Balochistan.

 

DHUME:
No, absolutely. So Pakistan is a country, it's dominated by Punjab. Punjab is the most important province. It's the most economically important province. It's where the bulk of the political leadership comes from. It's most importantly where the bulk of the army comes from. That's also what makes these current protests and the current turmoil quite dramatic and in many ways, unprecedented because you have the army that is rooted in Punjab going up against a leader, though he's of Pashtun origin himself is also widely seen as Punjabi. He grew up in Lahore, he was born in Lahore. So it's a lot of his support is also in Punjab. So you have the heartland of the country in a way involved in this conflict, which is quite different from when the army goes out and conducts operations in a place like Balochistan or even in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa they're seen as peripheral regions of Pakistan.

 

LINDSAY:
You mentioned China a while ago, Sadanand, in terms of the support it has given to Pakistan as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. That is a double-edged sword from the vantage point of Islamabad. It's easy to spend money, harder to pay it back, especially when your economy's not doing well. My sense is that Pakistan owes China more than $30 billion. What are the Chinese doing right now in terms of what's happening in Pakistan? Are they continuing to invest doubling down, or are they starting to walk back away from Pakistan?

 

DHUME:
I think there's been a certain amount of forbearance, but the Chinese are, I would argue, much tougher on these kind of questions than what Pakistan has been used to over the years when the U.S. was the country that was mostly-

 

LINDSAY:
China likes to get repaid.

 

DHUME:
China likes to get repaid, and they can be pretty tough about it with-

 

LINDSAY:
Don't like to take a haircut as they say.

 

DHUME:
Yeah. But I think broadly speaking, the Chinese, they're with the army, they recognize that the army is the most important institution. They're not going to stick their neck out for Imran Khan, and that relationship has been very close for many decades. Recently, in one of these leaks, you had one Pakistani junior foreign minister making a point about how the true strategic relationship for Pakistan is China. That has been true for more than fifty years at this point. 

 

The one thing that you will never see any Pakistani politician or generals talk about, for example, is the maltreatment of Muslims in Xinjiang. These are the same people who will spend an awful lot of time complaining about the treatment of Muslims in India or France or the UK or the Netherlands. But when it comes to China, not a peep, and that just tells you how important China is and how widely recognized its importance is for the Pakistani ruling elite.

 

LINDSAY:
So is the Chinese play in Pakistan primarily an economic one, or is it a strategic one, i.e., deep relations with Pakistan because you want to be able to have a way to put pressure on India?

 

DHUME:
The economic component is relatively recent and shallow, that's basically CPEC. The strategic component is longstanding and goes back many decades and it has been to keep India boxed in the subcontinent: the Chinese can help Pakistan with its missile technology, they've been very supportive, both sides refer to it as an all-weather friendship. They use all kinds of flowery language to describe it, so essentially, a strategic play. Part of the problem with the economic component of it is that it's not clear that Pakistan has been able to get its act together sufficiently to benefit from these Chinese investments. So that part, I'm not sure that has that much of a future, but the strategic relationship has been rock solid. I imagine that that is going remain rock solid regardless of who ends up winning this tussle for power.

 

LINDSAY:
What has the United States been doing in recent months in terms of its policy toward Pakistan? Joe Biden came to office talking about how he wanted to champion democracy over autocracy. Obviously in Pakistan right now, democracy is being tested, but you have, as you mentioned, Imran Khan blaming many of his woes on the United States. Has the Biden administration been saying or doing anything?

 

DHUME:
I'll get to the Biden administration, but I think in many ways, this question about democracy goes to a deeper dilemma that we face, which is that when we talk about democracy in the Islamic world, we mean liberal democracy. Imran Khan is a very popular man, but he does not stand for liberalism in any way. He's deeply illiberal in his instincts, and his party is deeply illiberal in its instincts. 

 

My sense is that the Biden administration has not been deeply invested in Pakistan. There's a certain amount of Pakistan fatigue after the end of the war in Afghanistan. There's a sense that while that war was going on, Pakistan did not ... this was more pronounced in the Trump administration, but I think it's shared across administrations that Pakistan was not exactly an actor in good faith during that period.

 

So I think that Pakistan has just become dramatically less important now, and I see this as a columnist. I've written several columns about Pakistan over the last few months, but when I look around at The Washington Post to The New York Times and so on, there's just not that much coverage. Whereas ten years ago when Bin Laden was found in Abbottabad, and there was just a lot of interest in Pakistan or a lot of coverage of Pakistan, you would see stories about Pakistan and The Atlantic all the time, and it's just faded. I think that reflects the fact that we're not in Afghanistan anymore, just doesn't seem that important, and there's a certain amount of Pakistan fatigue that's set in. It also reflects the fact that there isn't that much sympathy for Imran Khan, understandably, who a lot of his rhetoric has been very anti-American.

 

LINDSAY:
I take your point, Sadanand, that Pakistan fatigue has set in in official Washington. But I guess that leads me to ask, is that a good thing, or is the Biden Administration missing an opportunity or allowing a danger to gather by basically taking a hands-off approach to what's happening right now in Pakistan?

 

DHUME:
Well, there are two ways to answer that. On the one hand, I think that there is a recognition that American power in Pakistan has receded. There was an old saying in Pakistan that there only three As count in Pakistan, and they were, I'm not sure in which order, but they were Allah, the army and America. Of those three As, I think it's fair to say that Allah and the army seem to still be very central, the U.S. role has receded. I think Pakistan remains an important question. To your point, more directly the fact that it has a large number of nuclear weapons, the fact that it has these Islamist groups that are in proxy to it. But I do see some virtue in the U.S. administration not allowing themselves to be put into a corner with Pakistan, essentially negotiating with a gun to its own head, which it's done very successfully in the past. I think this coolness towards it has its virtues, though, I would hope that if things turn dramatically out of hand, we are able to do something about the obvious security threats that that would present.

 

LINDSAY:
What do you think those options might be?

 

DHUME:
I don't know if those are things that are discussed that openly. I think a lot of it would depend on what kind of visibility we have on their nuclear support, security. What kind of arrangements have we been able to, or are we able to come to with the people who are in charge? Do we believe that they are secure? Do we believe that they will remain secure? I think a lot of this is going to be outside of the public discussion, but I certainly hope that they're ... this is something that people are paying close attention to, and I imagine they are.

 

LINDSAY:
Oh, I certainly think so. I imagine there are a number of contingency plans that have been drawn up, and a lot of time has been spent trying to figure out just how secure those weapons, the materials, the facilities, the plans all are. But again, those can be very tough to be able to determine from being very far away, even with all of the various high-tech techniques the United States has as part of its surveillance. When you think about the future of Pakistan, and again, you do have the potential that there is a collapse or a failed state and the issues you just raised, Sadanand, by having its nuclear facilities be breached. But how should Americans be thinking about Pakistan longer term? Is this a country that the United States should find a way to invest and to encourage or it is a country in which you simply say it's issues, it's intersection with American interests are really distant, that we have much bigger priorities to worry about?

 

DHUME:
Much more the former. We can acknowledge and recognize that Pakistan has been a problematic partner for the U.S., but you can't wish away the fact that it's the fifth most populist country in the world. You can't wish away the fact that it has nuclear weapons. Can't wish away the fact that in many ways, in ideological terms also, it matters. So this is a country that was created on the basis of a religion. I would argue that along with Saudi Arabia and Iran, Pakistan stands out in that sense of having some kind of wider significance to the Islamic world for those reasons. So I think for all those reasons you have to stay engaged. Ideally, I think we should recognize our limitations.

 

We should recognize that the third A has faded compared to the other two As over time, but to do what we can to nudge Pakistan towards what I call becoming more of a normal country. By that I mean becoming a bit more like Bangladesh. It's going to have its flaws, but it should be focused basically on improving the lives of its citizens, getting its economy in order and promoting some kind of democracy. It's not going to get to Denmark, to use Francis Fukuyama's phrase, very easily, but I think that it's an important enough country for us to care about nudging it to some degree closer towards getting to Denmark and farther away from getting to Kabul.

 

LINDSAY:
On that note, I will close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Sadanand, if the Pakistanis do have an election, or maybe if they don't, I want to have you back on The President's Inbox to help unpack all of that. But for now, let me just say thank you for joining me.

 

DHUME:
Thank you. I really appreciate this. Enjoyed it.

 

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox and Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed in The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not as CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go out to Michelle Kurilla for her research assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.