Muzamil reads Pakistan's 2024 election as 70% a global story

Leave the emotions at the door

This is the first of two episodes Muzamil recorded two days before Pakistan’s 2024 general election. He opens with a disclaimer. Some of what follows is fact, from history or from other countries. The rest is his own analysis and opinion. “Do not accept what I say as it is,” he tells viewers. “Go and Google everything, so your own knowledge grows.”

He asks for one more thing. Pakistani politics has turned into a fight between good and evil, where one side is a thief and the other is a traitor. Muzamil wants the audience to put that frame away for an hour. In his reading there are two sets of people with two sets of ideologies, and both want Pakistan’s future to be good. “Only their style is different, their policies are different, their system is different,” he says. A policy may be outdated or wrong for the times. That is a fair criticism. Calling the other side evil is not.

His reason for starting so far back is simple. Pakistan’s politics is the micro picture. It sits inside a global order, and you cannot read the micro until you understand the macro.

A century of superpowers

Muzamil starts with the Second World War. Britain was the superpower, the pound was the world’s reserve currency, and much of the world, including the land that became Pakistan and India, was a British colony. Britain came out of the war deep in debt. Two powers rose in its place: the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union.

The rivalry that followed was a contest of economic systems, and it was fought everywhere. Proxy wars ran from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan. Regime changes were common. Muzamil reads this as ordinary power politics. Any state with power tries to project it, he argues, and Pakistan did the same in Afghanistan with its policy of strategic depth.

The US used the Afghan war to exhaust the Soviet Union, which was already economically drained. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and America stood alone. In his view, the next three decades brought American growth and also American overreach, with wars in the Middle East that bred deep resentment and destabilised Pakistan’s region.

Meanwhile China rose quietly. It offered to make what America designed, cheaply, and used free-market capitalism to grow until it became a likely rival as the world’s largest economy. Russia rebuilt its military and, this time, also played economics through gas pipelines into Europe.

The dollar is the real source of power

The centre of Muzamil’s argument is currency. A superpower turns its currency into the world’s reserve currency, as Britain did with the pound and America did with the dollar. If the whole world trades in dollars, America can print dollars and buy what it needs. “That gives them virtually unlimited resources and unlimited power,” he says. Pakistan can print rupees. It cannot print dollars.

He argues the US is now structurally weaker than it looks. He cites a national debt of about 33 trillion dollars, a large current account deficit and years of money printing that he calls quack economics. Trillions spent on wars have added to the strain. China is challenging America economically, with export surpluses and a lead in chips, cars and other productive sectors. Russia, in his reading, is using the long war in Ukraine to drain American money. He compares the risk to Britain’s Suez Canal crisis, the moment Britain stopped being the global superpower.

Two Americas

Inside the US, Muzamil sees two camps. The status quo believes American military might can keep the world using the dollar. Donald Trump, whom the media sold as a clown, represented a different idea: end the wars, stop funding the world’s conflicts, pull back and rebuild at home. Muzamil calls that a strategic retreat.

He describes the 2020 change in Washington as a change of government that the establishment worked hard to bring about, and he notes that, at the time of recording, Trump was leading the polls by about five points. His prediction was that Trump would most likely return as president in November 2024. Around this split he sees a multipolar world forming, with China and Russia working alongside the global south against a western order of the US, Europe and their allies.

Pakistan’s rollercoaster with Washington

Muzamil reads from a public summary of US-Pakistan relations. The two countries established relations on 15 August 1947, a day after independence. Pakistan joined the western bloc in the Cold War. Ayub Khan built a strong military alliance after 1958. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto moved closer to the Soviets after 1971. Zia-ul-Haq’s government worked with the US on the Afghan war. Sanctions came and went: waived in 1994 when Pakistan joined US-backed missions in Somalia and Bosnia, imposed after the 1998 nuclear tests, lifted again after 2001.

His conclusion is that the relationship is transactional. When America has a geopolitical need, the door opens. When the need passes, it closes. He notes that the PML-N government turned towards China through CPEC, and that, against expectations, Prime Minister Imran Khan built a good working relationship with President Trump between 2018 and 2020. When the Biden administration came in, he says, that engagement went quiet.

Three parties, three postures

Muzamil then places Pakistan’s three main parties on the same map. In his reading, the PPP never got over the removal and execution of its founder. Its later leadership came to see American power as something you could not compete with, and its 2024 manifesto, which he covered in an earlier episode, did not mention China or Russia. He puts the PPP firmly in the western camp.

The PML-N, in his view, is largely neutral. It is centre-right, it carries some memory of the 1998 sanctions, and its manifesto treats both China and America as acceptable partners.

The PTI, he says, has been anti-imperialist since 1996, campaigning against drone strikes and Pakistan’s role in America’s wars. He compares this to Bhutto’s push for an alternative pole built with the Islamic world. Muzamil insists both positions are legitimate. “Bilawal Bhutto is not wrong when he believes in his framework,” he says, “and Imran Khan is also not wrong” to believe self-sufficiency is the answer. “You can disagree with the ideologies, but they are ideologies nonetheless.”

2022 and what changed after it

Muzamil does not take a position on the cipher controversy. What he says is certain, in his reading, is that the US was not happy with Imran Khan, much as it had not been happy with Bhutto. He lists the reasons he sees: the refusal to give bases for drones, Khan’s outspoken statements at the UN, and his visit to Russia in early 2022, followed by pressure on Pakistan to condemn Russia. The vote of no confidence came in April 2022. Muzamil points viewers to reporting by The Intercept. He frames what followed as normal power politics, and notes that Khan himself came to power in 2018 with the establishment’s support. “In real politics, when there is power, power is also exerted,” he says.

What interests him more is what happened next. In his account, Pakistan’s stance on Russia and Ukraine shifted. The US ambassador was photographed at Gwadar port. At China’s Belt and Road summit, Pakistan’s prime minister stood in the fourth row and CPEC, the flagship project, was not mentioned. Pakistan began expelling Afghans, ending what he calls a 40-year policy, and relations with Iran grew tense. Muzamil reads all of this as a slow move away from the China camp and towards the US, led by an old ruling elite that believes Pakistan is better off with the West.

A weakening superpower and a 70-30 split

Muzamil closes the first part with his reading of the last ten years. The US tried and failed to change the regime in Venezuela and Syria, did not prevail in Yemen, and left Afghanistan in a way he calls humiliating. In Ukraine, the early narrative that Russia was finished has flipped. On Israel and Palestine, he believes America has lost the narrative war on a scale he calls unprecedented.

The lesson he draws is that a new cold war has begun, and its two camps are reproduced inside every country, Pakistan included. “Wherever Pakistan’s politics stands today,” he says, “I would say 70% of it is external impact and 30% is internal.” Part two takes up that 30%: the rise and fall of the PTI, and the challenges he expects for a PML-N-led government, which is his own guess for who will form the next government. He expects the next 12 to 24 months to be hard for Pakistan either way.