The United States government recently slapped sanctions on four Pakistani companies for contributing to their country’s long-range ballistic missile programme. These include Karachi-based private firms Akhtar & Sons, Affiliates International, and Rockside Enterprise, and public sector organisation National Development Complex in Islamabad. According to US Department of State spokesperson Matthew Miller, these measures are directed at entities involved in the distribution of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery.
The announcement seems to have come as a shock because it indicates a further downgrading of Pakistan’s bilateral ties with the US. Or it is that the outgoing Joe Biden administration’s counter-nuclear proliferation wanted to send a strong signal to any proliferator including Pakistan that the US would not tolerate capacity enhancement. This does not mean that the incoming Trump administration is likely to remove the sanctions but what is important is how efficiently it implements these sanctions.
The country has experienced US sanctions many times since 1977 due to its nuclear programme. But this is the first time after 1998, when Pakistan along with India went overt with its nuclear capabilities, that a government entity such as the NDC has faced American sanctions. More importantly, Pakistan is not the only country that has been sanctioned. Some Indian companies have also faced sanctions.
Islamabad’s reaction, however, was curt but careful – instead of various office bearers responding, it was just the Foreign Office that expressed its unhappiness with the decision, pointing out how this action was aimed at “accentuating military asymmetries” in the South Asian region. The Foreign Office did not officially name India, instead indirectly pointing out an American policy that conveniently ignored New Delhi’s ballistic missile and nuclear proliferation.
Pakistan’s Foreign Office has a point. The latest American sanctions are not based on the principle of stopping all proliferators but only countries of concern. It was not too long ago in October 2022, during a private Democratic Party fundraiser, that outgoing President Joe Biden, while talking about US foreign policy, mentioned Pakistan as “one of the most dangerous countries in the world” due to its nuclear programme.
Moreover, earlier this year, several Chinese companies and a research institute were sanctioned for providing material to Pakistan’s ballistic missile programme. Wonder why Pakistan’s Foreign Office was not watching, because these restrictions were surely coming its way.
Pakistan’s balancing act
There is a lot of hue and cry within Pakistan’s strategic circles regarding Washington’s tilt toward India because of the Indo-Pacific strategy. But perhaps there is a lack of deeper understanding about what it entails. The recent restrictions are not even about American concerns for Indian security. According to Lt. General (retd) Khalid Kidwai, the former head of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, the country’s recent ballistic missile developments are meant to acquire multiple targets in India, particularly the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. These include missiles such as Ababeel with a 2,200 km range (tested in October 2023, just months after General Asim Munir took over as the new army chief), and the Shaheen-III, which has a prospective range of 2,750 km.
From Islamabad’s perspective, this is about building a second-strike capability to match India’s defence capability – especially because it does not have sea-based deterrence, which requires a nuclear submarine. Pakistan is clearly trying to balance out what it lacks by developing other technologies. This includes Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicle(MIRV) capabilities that were tested with the Ababeel in 2023, the first ballistic missile in South Asia to reach the testing stage.
The US is not tolerant of a limited war or conflict escalation between the two South Asian neighbours, as was recently suggested – though cautiously and indirectly – by one of Pakistan’s participants in a recent track 1.5 dialogue in the Gulf. This is because it will pose a major distraction to the American Indo-Pacific strategy, where it is working toward strengthening regional partners and boosting their capacity vis-à-vis China. Furthermore, such long ranges raise concerns that such capability may one day be used against the US to help China.
In any case, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are part of a strategic buildup against China, which makes it critical for the US. Despite the Pakistani military leadership’s current efforts to convince Washington that it is keen to take the middle road with China and the US, the trust factor is not there.
Interestingly, the US has a long history of not trusting Pakistan, which it saw tying up with the Taliban and other terrorists while claiming to fight the War on Terror (WoT) in partnership with Washington. Those lessons are certainly not forgotten. In addition, Pakistan’s domestic fragility, coupled with a lack of clarity about its leadership and the true strength of its army chief, makes it appear less stable than even the highly belligerent North Korea, where there is greater transparency about who calls the shots.
Also read: Pakistan is suddenly resisting China’s security pressure. Is Trump the reason?
Will the sanctions work?
Pakistan’s former ambassador to the US, Hussain Haqqani, is of the view that the sanctions will probably not work as they only express annoyance and do not have bite.
Other analysts working closely with the National Security Division also consider the sanctions frustrating due to their inherent bias, stressing that they will not impact Pakistan’s “self-sustained missile development programme”. These arguments can be questioned because the sanctions are serious – it’s the first time, after all, that a Pakistan government agency has come under the US radar in this manner. It also means that the NDC will now be watched, with further sanctions in the future against any foreign or national company that is caught doing business with the four entities. This could affect the non-nuclear business of companies that may find themselves caught between their need to do business with the US and their dealings with the sanctioned organisations.
Any traffic of spares, components and even minor technologies could have greater problems reaching Pakistan, which depends on foreign imports for its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.
Cases of individuals and companies that were tried in the US for smuggling components for Pakistan’s nuclear programme may help understand that there is nothing like a totally indigenous programme. However, what is clear is that this will not necessarily stop Pakistan’s non-conventional defence planning, especially because the NDC imports more from China than the US or other Western countries.
What is even more interesting is that, unlike in the past, when American sanctions would generate a lot of anger in Pakistan, little sympathy and attention are being given to what just happened. Domestically, some circles are calling the development a possible reaction from the future Donald Trump government to Imran Khan’s continued incarceration. Of course, these reactions are not directly linked to Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell’s statement about freeing Khan. Pakistanis abroad and in the country are just so distracted by the domestic political environment that they aren’t paying any attention to the seriousness of the sanctions. This is a battle that the Pakistan Army may find it has to fight on its own, without the kind of strong public support it received in the past.
Ayesha Siddiqa is Senior Fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. She is the author of Military Inc. She tweets @iamthedrifter. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)