The Pakistani Ambassador To Russia Sent Some Positive Signals About Bilateral Relations
Reviewing everything that Ambassador Khan revealed in his latest interview with TASS, it’s clear that the political will still exists to expand economic linkages with Russia, but the sanctions imposed upon his country’s new partner by its other ones in the US-led West’s Golden Billion are obviously a major impediment.
Pakistani Ambassador to Russia Shafqat Ali Khan gave an interview to TASS earlier in the week where he sent some very positive signals about bilateral relations. It’s in Russian and can be read here, but those who don’t speak the language can easily use Google Translate to understand what he said. The present piece will summarize the substance of his interview, after which some concluding thoughts will be shared about the future of Pakistani-Russian relations.
Ambassador Khan opened up by reaffirming his country’s commitment to the Pakistan Stream Gas Pipeline (PSGP), which he described as a strategic project. According to him, however, there are still some procedural, legal, and financial issues to overcome, though he clarified that they aren’t crucial. His Excellency also reminded his interlocutor that the latest meeting between both countries’ leaders at the SCO Summit in Samarkand saw them reaffirm their political will to the PSGP.
Western sanctions are of course an issue, he said, but he also added that Pakistan is trying to find ways to continue mutually beneficial interaction with Russia in this new environment. The next intergovernmental commission will be held in Islamabad on 18 January, during which time Ambassador Khan expects there to be further clarity about the PSGP. It’s possible that it could even begin construction sometime in 2023, but that’s only in the best-case scenario.
On a related subject, TASS asked him about how exactly he expects trade to be conducted in the new environment of Western sanctions. His Excellency revealed that Pakistan asked for clarification from Russia about how it deals with other countries since his own admittedly doesn’t have any experience in making payments in national currencies. It engages in significant barter with neighboring Iran, but everything else is mostly settled in dollars or euros, he said.
The interviewer alluded to his disclosure in early June during the Valdai Club’s first-ever conference on Russian-Pakistani relations where he revealed that some businessmen were already using a currency swap with China to facilitate bilateral trade to follow up on that development. The reader should be made aware though that this was recently contradicted by President of the Trade House of Pakistan Association Zahid Ali Khan last month when he said that trade in rubles and yuan had yet to be finalized.
It's unclear whether Ambassador Khan was aware of this minor scandal, but he in any case seemed to walk back what he’d earlier disclosed when he was asked about the possibility of trading in yuan. According to him, it’s now only something that he wants to discuss, and he made no reference to his prior disclosure of that currency supposedly already being used by some businessmen. In his view, “experience and time are needed” to complement political will on this possibility.
Moving along a related tangent, His Excellency also said that Pakistan is open to the use of Russia’s Mir payment system, but mentioned that this can only be discussed “after we resolve issues related to currency conversion and trade.” On a positive note, however, he said that he was announcing for the first time that “a significant volume of trade is now carried out through the territory of Afghanistan.” The North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC) via Iran is also a route that Pakistan is exploring too.
Furthermore, Ambassador Khan said that Pakistan is in discussions to buy more wheat from Russia, which his country views as a “long-term, stable food supply partner.” This represents a reversal from early August when the Finance Ministry issued a statement that the Economic Coordination Committee rejected the rate at which Russia offered to supply wheat after Moscow declined to drop the price a second time upon Islamabad’s request.
This volte face is likely attributable to the disastrous flood that followed and thus immensely impacted Pakistan’s food security. That South Asian state rightly realized that clinching commodity deals with Russia is the wisest policy choice since Moscow is a reliable supplier of everything that it agrees to provide. Ambassador Khan seemed to imply exactly this pragmatic mindset when telling his interlocutor that Pakistan is also exploring LNG imports from Russia, though no deal has yet been reached.
On that topic, His Excellency added that his country is open to exploring the possibility of Iran supplying Pakistan with energy via a swap deal that it might soon reach with Russia. Reviewing everything that Ambassador Khan revealed in his interview, it’s clear that the political will still exists to expand economic linkages with Russia, but the sanctions imposed upon his country’s new partner by its other ones in the US-led West’s Golden Billion are obviously a major impediment.
This could explain the lackluster progress that’s been made on these previously agreed plans, all of which is exacerbated by Pakistan’s post-modern coup regime being largely beholden to its US patrons. To its credit, however, it retains its pragmatic policy of principled neutrality towards the Ukrainian Conflict and still continues to trade with Russia like Ambassador Khan discussed. Nevertheless, everything has essentially removed frozen at its February level since that same regime is reluctant to provoke the US.
In the event that it ever becomes brave enough to stop unilaterally conceding on its objective national interests, such as if former Prime Minister Imran Khan returns to office in the scenario of free and fair elections being held as soon as possible like his millions of supporters have peacefully demanded, then Afghanistan and Iran will play crucial roles in the Russian direction of Pakistan’s new geo-economic grand strategy.
Looking forward, it’s premature to predict when that’ll happen. On the one hand, Pakistan is pragmatically declining to openly take the US’ side against Russia despite immense American pressure to do so, while on the other, it’s also tacitly complying with its foreign patron’s demands by essentially freezing its level of cooperation with Russia at its February level. Islamabad will thus need to either receive Washington’s permission or defy its sanctions in order to continue building ties with Moscow.
Given the intensity of the pressure being put on India for its continued bilateral relations with Russia, it will be difficult for the much smaller state of Pakistan to defy the unipolar hegemon. But hopefully ways will be found.
The claim that Eskimo words for snow (specifically Yupik and Inuit words) are unusually numerous, particularly in contrast to English, is often used to support the controversial linguistic-relativity hypothesis or "Whorfianism". That strongest interpretation of this hypothesis, which posits that a language's vocabulary (among other features) shapes or defines its speakers' view of the world, has been largely discredited, though a 2010 study supports the core notion that these languages have many more words for "snow" than the English language. The original claim is based in the work of anthropologist Franz Boas and was particularly promoted by his contemporary, Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose name is connected with the hypothesis.
Franz Boas did not make quantitative claims but rather pointed out that the Eskimo–Aleut languages have about the same number of distinct word roots referring to snow as English does, but the structure of these languages tends to allow more variety as to how those roots can be modified in forming a single word. A good deal of the ongoing debate thus depends on how one defines "word", and perhaps even "word root".
The first re-evaluation of the claim was by linguist Laura Martin in 1986, who traced the history of the claim and argued that its prevalence had diverted attention from serious research into linguistic relativity. A subsequent influential and humorous, and polemical, essay by Geoff Pullum repeated Martin's critique, calling the process by which the so-called "myth" was created the "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax". Pullum argued that the fact that the number of word roots for snow is about equally large in Eskimoan languages and English indicates that there exists no difference in the size of their respective vocabularies to define snow. Other specialists in the matter of Eskimoan languages and Eskimoan knowledge of snow and especially sea ice argue against this notion and defend Boas's original fieldwork amongst the Inuit of Baffin Island.
Languages in the Inuit and Yupik language groups add suffixes to words to express the same concepts expressed in English and many other languages by means of compound words, phrases, and even entire sentences. One can create a practically unlimited number of new words in the Eskimoan languages on any topic, not just snow, and these same concepts can be expressed in other languages using combinations of words. In general and especially in this case, it is not necessarily meaningful to compare the number of words between languages that create words in different ways due to different grammatical structures.