“Your civilian politicians are a waste of time,” former Singapore diplomat Bilahari Kausikan said, recalling how former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto allegedly refused to take a call during the 1991 passenger plane hijacking after her household informed him that she was asleep.Kausikan also delivered a scathing assessment of Pakistan‘s political leadership and state institutions, warning that the country has long remained “on the brink of failure”.Speaking during a wide-ranging interaction with journalists at the National Press Foundation’s International Reporting Fellowship, when a Pakistani reporter’s questioned whether Islamabad’s geography was the root of its problems.Kausikan rejected the argument and said, “That’s just an excuse. The fact is that Pakistan, from the very beginning, has been mismanaged terribly. ““The military is both part of the problem and what holds the country together. Your civilian politicians are a waste of time, all of them, regardless of party,” said Kausikan, who served as Singapore’s permanent secretary for foreign affairs from 2010 to 2013 and currently chairs the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore.To illustrate his point, Kausikan recalled the hijacking of a Singapore Airlines aircraft by Pakistani militants in March 1991. He said the hijackers had demanded to speak to Benazir Bhutto, who was out of office at the time and residing in Sindh province.According to Kausikan, he contacted Bhutto’s residence around 3 am or 4 am with the assistance of Pakistan’s high commissioner, but initially struggled to find anyone who could speak English.“I don’t know who it was. It was some servant or some member of the household, right? So, I explained to him carefully what’s the situation: there are four or five hijackers, we’re not sure what they want, but they want to speak to Madam Benazir Bhutto, and they have told us if they can speak to her, they will surrender. If they cannot speak to her, they will start killing the passengers. So, I explained this to the person three times,” Kausikan said.“And he said, ‘Madam is sleeping, cannot be disturbed.’ And put down the phone,” the former diplomat added.Kausikan said Singapore security forces eventually stormed the aircraft, killing all four hijackers and rescuing the passengers and crew. “We still do not know and we’ll never know, what they really wanted because they’re all dead,” he said.“None of our passengers were injured. I tell you this story to show that this is a very feudalistic society you have in Pakistan,” he added.Kausikan further offered a blunt assessment of Pakistan’s current condition after another journalist described the country’s domestic challenges, including soaring inflation, rising fuel prices and worsening law-and-order conditions.“I’ll be very blunt. Pakistan was very agile and very successful in taking advantage of a diplomatic opportunity, and that has gone some way to rehabilitate Pakistan diplomatically in the eyes of the US anyway. But, you know, that doesn’t feed the Pakistani people,” he said.“Pakistan is a state that is teetering on the brink of failure, and has been for some time. It hasn’t quite fallen over, for which we should all be grateful, but that diplomatic success doesn’t change that fundamental reality. And I don’t think the US is going to lift whatever restrictions in totality it has on Pakistan, because the fact is Pakistan is a hotbed of all kinds of strange groups that are not necessarily working for US interests,” he added.The former diplomat also criticised Pakistan’s powerful military establishment, arguing that diplomatic manoeuvring could not address the country’s internal weaknesses.“Pakistani military was very agile and very successful, that you have to give them credit, but diplomatic success doesn’t feed people, that’s the hard reality. Pakistan’s problems are not diplomatic; Pakistan’s problems are much more fundamental within Pakistan. Mismanagement of the economy, letting various jihadist movements get out of hand, if you don’t fix those problems, you’re always going to be teetering on the brink of state failure,” he warned.Kausikan concluded with a stark observation about why the international community remains concerned about Pakistan’s stability. “And everybody is worried about it because you happen to have nuclear weapons. If you had no nuclear weapons, nobody would care,” he remarked.The Singapore Airlines aircraft referred to by Kausikan was hijacked on March 26, 1991, shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur. Commandos from the Singapore Armed Forces launched a rescue operation early the following morning, killing all four hijackers and rescuing all passengers and crew members unharmed.
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