INTERIOR Minister Mohsin Naqvi last week told the Senate that the coordinated attacks across Balochistan were aimed at subverting the upcoming Shanghai Coope­ration Organisation (SCO) Council of Heads of Government meeting, which Pakistan will host this October. Linking the militant attacks to the SCO highlights how high stakes the upcoming meet is for Islamabad. But how significant is the SCO in Pakistan’s broader foreign policy landscape?

The focus on the Balochistan attacks’ implications for the SCO is largely driven by bilateral India-Pakistan dynamics, as Islamabad waits to hear back from Delhi regarding India’s attendance. India has not attended any Saarc meetings in Pakistan since 2016, and any high-level participation in the SCO meet would be a major departure from Delhi’s current approach to non-engagement.

Whether or not India shows up, regional terrorism is likely to be top of the agenda. The SCO, after all, has its roots in security cooperation, fighting what the organisation terms are the ‘three evil forces’: terrorism, separatism and religious extremism.

In recent years, security and counterterrorism discussions have focused on Afghanistan’s role in fuelling regional terrorism. Afghanistan is an observer at the SCO, but the Afghan Taliban-led government has not been invited to meetings, as members disagree about how to engage the country. They agree, however, that stability and effective counterterrorism in Afghanistan is a top priority for the wider region. Given that our Foreign Office just declined an Afghan Taliban offer to mediate with the TTP, one can expect robust discussions on how to tackle Afghanistan-based militant groups at the summit.

The SCO has sought to expand its scope beyond security.

The Balochistan attacks will feature too. India has often made veiled statements about Pakistan’s role in regional terrorism at SCO forums. Given longstanding concerns about India’s backing of Baloch militant groups, Islamabad will take the opportunity to land a reverse blow.

But this is also why the SCO is unlikely to be more than a talking shop. While it is growing in size and significance, frequently framed as a Eurasian counterpoint to Nato, it is too plagued by tensions among its members to take meaningful strides as a bloc. Beyond the India-Pakistan rivalry, there’s the India-China dynamic, with New Delhi still wary of throwing its support behind a Beijing-led enterprise.

The simmering tensions don’t end there. There are sectarian tensions (say, between Iran and Afghanistan), and the underlying resentment among Central Asian states who feel increasingly sidelined as the SCO evolves from a small, security-focused regional grouping to a geopolitical platform with Eurasian and anti-Western ambitions (Belarus became a member in July; dialogue partner Turkiye is considering membership despite its Nato links; and the SCO itself is eyeing simpatico countries like Hungary as potential members to further extend the organisation’s reach into Europe).

As it grows, the SCO has sought to expand its scope beyond regional security by floating plans for increased connectivity, joint energy infrastructure, banking platforms to enable local currency transaction (and so reduce members’ dependence on the dollar) and boosting regional trade. But the economic competitive dynamics between China and India, and China’s reluctance to share its tech know-how with Russia, keeping it in the position of a captive consumer rather than a rival producer, continue to curtail these economic aspirations.

In his book, The New Cold War, Robin Niblett argues that China and Russia are making overtures ac­­ross the Global South because they are se­­eking to build international appetite for their autocratic political systems. In this context, part of the driver for growing and empowering a multilateral grouping such as the SCO could be to create forums where autocratic approaches — such as the suppression of free speech and dissent or limits to judicial independence in the name of national security — are normalised. There is a danger that the SCO becomes a grouping of countries seeking to walk away, hand in hand, from democratic principles.

This is a scenario that Pakistan — an ostensible, multiethnic, multi-linguistic, religiously diverse and youth-oriented democracy — should seek to avoid, particularly in its current chairmanship of the SOC HoG council.

It could do that by opting to veer the discussion away from security considerations alone, to include human rights considerations in discussions about Afghanistan. What, for instance, are the SCO members going to do about the latest Afghan Taliban edicts that seek to erase women from the public sphere entirely? Without tackling fundamental topics such as human dignity and prosperity, the SCO will only ever get so far.

The writer is a political and integrity risk analyst.

X: @humayusuf

Published in Dawn, September 2nd, 2024