‘Pakistan is a basket case economy, nothing to lose’: Fareed Zakaria says India needs to take the strategic high ground

Geo-strategist Fareed Zakaria, also host of ‘Fareed Zakaria GPS’ on CNN, columnist for The Washington Post, and a bestselling author, said Pakistan has nothing to lose in this war but India, a high-growth economy, would definitely want peace and prosperity. He said India might have taken the moral high ground – of only attacking terrorist factories inside Pakistan – but it needs to take the strategic high ground too. 

Speaking to India Today TV, Zakaria said, “The fact is India may have the moral high ground but it does not absolve it, however, of maintaining a strategic high ground. At the end of the day, India has the moral high ground but it also has the most to lose. Pakistan is already a basket case economy. India is on a high growth trajectory right now. Peace and prosperity are very important to it.”

Zakaria said that there is a crisis of legitimacy in Pakistan and the increasing hostility could be the unpopular military’s way of rallying national support for it as well as the government. It has now come to India to manage Islamabad's political problem. 

“What’s going on is there is a crisis of legitimacy in Pakistan. Let's be clear. Pakistan’s most popular politician is in jail. The people responsible for putting him there – the Pakistan military – are deeply unpopular. For the first time in a long time, the Pakistani military does not have the easy legitimacy they have always had. So one has to wonder if this hostility is part of the effort to rally the Pakistani nation behind the nation and particularly the military. The Chief of Army Staff’s (Asim Munir’s) comments five days before the attacks would lend credence to this view. So, you have a fundamental problem politically in Pakistan that might have erupted and now India has to manage it.” 

He said it is always dangerous when two nuclear neighbours are involved in this kind of tension. “It is particularly worrying because this one does not seem to follow the pattern that you have seen in the last 25 years. Ever since India and Pakistan developed nuclear capacities, there have been a tendency to have managed escalations and manage de-escalation. When both sides realised there are dangers here of escalating and that it could get out of hand so there has always been somewhat a choreographed process by which these hostilities are managed. That does not seem to be happening here.”

Zakaria said it is rather worrying that there could be an easy miscalculation or a stray drone or a stray missile that could target what was not originally intended to be targeted. “There seems to be no mechanism to bring this down, to land this plane that seems to cause minimal harm,” he remarked. He said no one is going to care who started this all if this escalation blows up. 

Commenting on how India could possibly de-escalate when Pakistan is provoking and is eager to escalate the conflict. “We have lost the United States as a kind of useful intermediary as a country that could talk to both sides and try to manage this de-escalation down. You saw Marco Rubio lean into that kind of a role initially but then JD Vance washes his hands off the whole situation and says ‘the US does not want to get involved’. Because of that you don’t have a party that’s trusted, and frankly the US is now less trusted by Pakistan than it did 10-15 years ago. They believe the US has become entirely pro-Indian.” 

“This may be the new world we're in — a world without a superpower, and a country that tries to manage these conflicts, and these local conflicts can therefore spiral,” he said, adding that the US is just not interested in the world anymore and is pursuing a ‘fortress America’ stance.

“It’s very easy to start a war. It is very hard to stop it,” he warned.