PAKISTAN’S contributions to the Qatar World Cup reveal a juxtaposition. On the one hand, the country’s institutions have failed to adequately develop its talent pool — footballing and otherwise. The Pakistan Football Federation remains the only Asian Football Confederation member yet to win a FIFA World Cup qualifier. On the other hand, the country’s institutions have excelled at extracting economic and geostrategic rents (defined as effortlessly accrued income streams).

Pakistan reportedly sent 150,000 migrant labourers to build Qatar’s stadiums, and provided 4,500 soldiers to secure them. These contributions to Qatar 2022 emanate from poor domestic policies and structural economic fault lines, which carry harmful downstream implications for Pakistan’s strategic autonomy and foreign policy.

Pakistan’s half-beating economic pulse continues to rely on the generosity of Gulf monarchs and their economies.

Gulf monarchs provide cyclical bailouts, loans, and deferred energy payments to help plug Pakistan’s structural current account deficit year to year. The Gulf economy provides Pakistan with millions of individual monthly remittances that keep many Pakistani households afloat day to day.

Not too long ago, figures showed Pakistan — nuclear-armed home to 220m people — to have earned more foreign exchange from its remittances than from the cumulative value of its exported goods and services.

Pakistan’s reliance on the Gulf inhibits its ability to protect its overseas citizens, reduces strategic autonomy in its foreign policy decision-making, and creates sentiments of faux pride and misplaced relevance — most visibly seen this year at the Qatar World Cup.

The country’s half-beating economic pulse relies on the generosity of Gulf monarchs and their economies.

Despite being one of the largest suppliers of migrant labourers in Qatar, Pakistan did not join the chorus of international criticism over the commodification and exploitation of labourers in Qatar.

Over 150,000 Pakistani migrant workers sent back approximately $1 billion in annual remittances in the 2021-22 financial year. Under the now defunct Qatari kafala labour system, Pakistani migrant labour had been subjected to poor and unsafe working and living conditions, including irregular wage payments, debt bondage, passport confiscations, among other forms of exploitation through asymmetric employee-employer power relations.

Pakistan’s reliance on remittances and the resulting commodification of its overseas citizenry in the Gulf should have engendered an outcry at home. However, for Pakistani decision-makers, the migrant labourer’s importance to Pakistan’s rent-seeking economy takes precedence over their well-being and lived experience.

Gulf monarchs can use — and have used — expedient leverage against Pakistan. The country’s reliance on billions in annual Gulf remittances (over $17bn last fiscal year) undermines Pakistan’s strategic autonomy and foreign policy goals.

In late 2019, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is reported to have privately threatened former prime minister Imran Khan that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would deport over 4m Pakistanis if Pakistan did not pull out of its commitment to participate in an OIC-alternative summit in Kuala Lumpur.

Pakistan pulled out of the summit despite Malaysia’s principled stance following India’s revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy.

More recently, in August 2022, there were reports that Qatar was likely to provide $2 billion in bilateral assistance amidst a balance-of-payments crisis. Pakistan then became the only country in the world to send soldiers to help provide security at the Qatar World Cup. Assistance is never free, especially from the Gulf.

Pakistani policymakers have voiced feelings of pride in providing migrant labour and soldiers to Qatar. This is an attempt to seek faux relevance through issues that poorly reflect the state’s priorities. The collective failure of the state to build domestic capacity, incentivise export production, and live within its means makes overseas Pakistanis the country’s most significant ‘export’.

Perhaps pride ought to be shelved for a time when Pakistan’s government possesses the strategic autonomy to advocate for overseas citizens by decoupling them from its reliance on remittances — often earned in the Gulf through sweat, tears, and occasionally, blood. Or better yet, perhaps pride ought to be shelved for a time when Pakistanis don’t feel it necessary to toil away as second-class citizens in the Gulf to make their families’ ends meet at home.

Pakistan’s most promising contribution to the Qatar World Cup was not from its migrant workers or soldiers. It came from a sporting factory on the outskirts of Sialkot. Forward Sports retained their FIFA contract and exported millions of official FIFA Al Rihla matchday footballs used in Qatar and beyond. More than 43m footballs, valued at close to $200m, were made in Sialkot in financial year 2021-22.

Over many preceding decades, Sialkot’s industrial hub has competed internationally by manufacturing and exporting high-quality products. For many World Cup iterations, Sialkot has beaten out significant competition from South and East Asia to retain its FIFA contracts. These export success stories may offer a little glimmer of hope.

Incentivising policies encouraging greater, more scalable exports can help dilute Pakistan’s reliance on remittances. They represent the most promising avenues to bolster strategic autonomy and improve Pakistan’s ability to pursue its foreign policy. The current government’s economic policies of pegging the dollar have the opposite effect.

In future iterations, Pakistan’s aspirational contributions to the World Cup should be to field a team that competes against other world teams, kicking footballs crafted in Sialkot, and supported by fans travelling to stadiums as supporters — not construction workers. However, like in Pakistan’s political economy, structural reforms across the board — especially within the Pakistan Football Federation — are needed before that conversation can even kick off.

Until our decision-makers continue to celebrate successful rent extractions through the Gulf and beyond, this aspiration will remain a figment of our imagination.

It is in Pakistan’s interest to shelve temporal feelings of pride through their contributions to Qatar 2022 until Pakistan’s footballs and football players — not soldiers and labourers — have structures that enable their participation in World Cups.

The writer is a South Asia research assistant at the Stimson Centre, Washington, D.C.
usattar@stimson.org

Published in Dawn, December 15th, 2022