Tale of two threats

In Pakistan’s modern history two dates–May 7, 2025 and June 27, 2025–will go down as days when two critical threats to the country’s national integrity and security got crystallized. On May 7, 2025 Indian launched missile strikes on six different sites targeting civilian buildings dubbing them as terrorist base camps. On June 27, 2025 country’s worst floods started in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa before they reached the plains and cities of densely populated Punjab provinces where it displaced more than 2 million people. Which one of these events presents a bigger threat to national security? The question apparently will look irrelevant or maybe outrightly silly. But its answer or may be answers will determine our priorities for the future. Whether we need more tanks, guns, aircraft and missiles or whether we need a well trained and well equipped relief force which will deal with these calamities and provide assistance to the hapless people of Pakistan whose cities and colonies lie at the course of six Pakistani rivers–the source of all flooding in urban areas of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The Pakistani state is built and constructed on the principle of providing strong military support against threats from our much bigger enemy to our east. The military machine that we built over the years also provided us with a security guarantee against internal threats. We employ the military manpower that we have built since independence as a force to provide our citizens with relief whenever a national calamity hits any part of Pakistan. But employing a conventional military force in the rescue and relief operation is different from building a dedicated rescue and relief force that can act as a first relief provider in our country in the time of need. Many countries of the world have picked battalions from their regular army and put them under the command of rescue and relief authorities that they have established in their countries. In this way these dedicated formations act as a first relief provider in the situation of natural calamity. We have been witnessing regular monsoon floods in all our provinces since 2010 and experts cite climate change as the reason behind these high floods. It is not likely that these floods will stop in the future. The latest floods are the worst in the history of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab,  “This is the biggest flood in the history of Punjab. The flood has affected two million people. It’s the first time that the three rivers — Sutlej, Chenab, and Ravi — have carried such high levels of water,” the senior minister for the province, Marriyum Aurangzeb, told a press conference.

The events of May and June clearly present us with two extremely dangerous threats to our security–the military threat from India and climate change threat from natural calamities like Floods. In both the cases we will be needing strong finance and political stability to deal with these two threats. In both the cases Pakistani military will be playing a central role in meeting the challenges arising from these two threats.

Anatol Lieven is a British journalist who has spent some good ten years reporting for a British newspaper from this part of the world. Recently, he authored a book titled, “Climate Change and Nation State” published in 2020. Predicting quite straightforwardly that Pakistan could go off the rails before any state in the West could derail us because of climate change, he puts forward, very strongly, the suggestion that militaries and security establishments around the world should be mobilised in the cause of preventing global warming and climate change. He specifically mentions the Pakistan military in this regard while suggesting that mobilising the military establishment in Pakistan and other countries, including the Western world, would be the only viable way of enlisting the support of forces of nationalism in the cause of climate change prevention.

The Pakistani military is a conventional fighting force, and its training to this day does not include anything related to educating its officers and Jawans about climate change or global warming. Since 9/11, training in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency has entered the military’s training manual. But nothing is organised about climate change. What role can it play in this connection? American and British militaries are training their cadets in subjects related to climate change. At present, the climate change ministry in Islamabad is a sideshow, but those who think that ten years from now, it will continue to be a sideshow are living in a fool’s paradise. For the Pakistani military, the time to come out of its Cold War slumber is now. I have not seen any substantial support among Western intellectuals for Mr Lieven’s proposal to enlist the military establishment for the cause of climate change. But this proposal suits us well, especially in a situation when the voices criticising the military for getting the lion’s share of the national budget are getting stronger and stronger. Time is, in fact, running out. We should quickly resolve our terrorism and militancy problems and start getting down to the real work related to the biggest challenge awaiting us in the shape of climate change.

I have researched for weeks, and I have not found a single study which has been conducted by any government department that could tell us what would be the fate of Pakistan—a country, which for the past ten years has been included in the list of top ten countries that would be worst affected by climate change. I have, however, come across a research report by two scholars–Faraz Haider and Adil Sultan from Air University Islamabad—who predicted in their report the possible impact of climate change on Pakistan’s military security, “Sea level rise and cyclone risks impact naval assets and infrastructure while warming patterns and glacial melting affect troop movement, deployments, and logistics. Resultantly, military training, force capacity, and operational readiness are affected. Threats are more potent in strategically significant locations (Siachen, Sindh, and Punjab) which house important forward military bases. The paper provides actionable recommendations that create foundations for future steps as well,” reads the gist of their report, which was published in the Journal of Contemporary Studies, in 2022.

In, let’s say 200 years from now, when Pakistan’s historians look at the story of the Pakistani state and its military, they would describe the Cold War as a process that shaped the Pakistani state apparatus and Pakistani military structures. However, he/she would certainly not ignore the impact of climate change on the structure, perceptions, and organisational integrity of the Pakistani military. That is only if we succeed in putting our acts together and meet the challenge of climate change. In that event, and several international experts are very pessimistic about the possibility of humanity surviving the calamity of global warming as a species, we only have 11 years left.