WHY is Pakistan’s foreign policy adrift and the country seemingly once again on a path towards regional and international isolation?

On Wednesday, senator after senator spoke from the floor of the Upper House about the country’s troubled relations with the outside world.

From Afghanistan to Iran and India to the US, foreign policy tensions are defining our engagement with strategically important countries and it is perhaps time for parliament to debate issues that the political government and the country’s national security architects seem unwilling to debate.

While the Senate debate was inevitably dominated by members of the opposition, the government should note that even some political allies felt compelled to speak.

In the absence of a full-time foreign minister and a prime minister who only yesterday returned to the capital after two months away, the link between parliament and the foreign policy establishment has nearly been severed.

It is right that some parliamentarians have taken it upon themselves to rebuild a vital connection between elected representatives and foreign policy decision-makers.

Part of the problem is obvious: the civilian government is ostensibly responsible for crafting foreign policy, but the reality is that the process is dominated by the military establishment. The PML-N government has also suffered several self-inflicted wounds.

The early decision by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to keep the defence and foreign ministry portfolios for himself suggested an intention to try and recalibrate crucial foreign and national security policies. But neither any plans nor any actions materialised.

On India, there seemed to be interest in pushing a trade agenda, but then the PML-N hesitated to engage a final-year Congress government in India.

Ever since, it has been one setback after another — for the political government and for foreign policy. Indeed, the more the military leadership asserted control, the worse the overall foreign policy situation appeared to become. Was it a cause or effect?

The military leadership would claim that its interventions were necessitated by a deteriorating international climate; critics would contend that those interventions helped worsen the international climate the country today faces.

Who is to blame perhaps matters less at present than how to recover the situation. As the Senate debate has indicated, the PML-N government has allies in parliament who both want the government to reassert itself in the foreign policy domain and are willing to help it with advice and debate.

With the backing of parliament and in consultation with the military leadership, Prime Minister Sharif and his cabinet can try and chart a new course. There are clearly no easy answers nor quick fixes.

Afghanistan and India, for example, are hardly foreign-policy challenges that can be resolved unilaterally by Pakistan.

But the drift towards unaccountable and undemocratic institutions making opaque decisions about this country’s national security and its relationship with the outside world needs to be reversed.

Published in Dawn, July 22nd, 2016