MY last few writings have focused on exploring options for Pakistan to reorient its approach towards India. I have argued that Pakistani decision-makers need to see regional economic integration, with India at its centre, as a means of increasing their leverage over Delhi and normalising their global image.

Mine is not the classic liberal argument that presents trade as a solution in and of itself. But I do suggest a paradigm shift on how we have approached economics in the region —from seeing it as a concession to India to internalising it as a move driven by self-interest.

The most common critique I have received is that, while seemingly logical, my argument ignores some obvious ‘facts’ about what India is up to: India’s pace of military modernisation and continued focus on Pakistan-specific platforms; the world’s facilitation of India’s conventional and nuclear expansion; Indian actions aimed at destabilising some of Pakistan’s already troubled areas, etc.

The Pakistani view is not all made up. Neither is all of it objective reality. But we’ll leave the authenticity debate for another day. The real problem is that I find an overwhelming majority of those who matter in this country fixated on perceived realities about India and convinced that they have no option but to take notice. The Modi government’s approach to Pakistan has further cemented this tendency. The result is that India is back at the fore of our national discourse, and in a simplistic way that emphasises these ‘facts’ to justify the need to stand our ground, lest we convey any sense of weakness in response.

We are paying too much attention to ‘facts’ about Delhi’s policies.

The current mindset worries me.

‘Facts’ can be a dangerous commodity if policymakers imagine these to be the whole truth. It causes one to miss the larger context; to prize the tactical over the strategic; to overlook the necessity of matching responses to available capacities; and to feel compelled to respond to the adversary’s provocations when inaction may be a more mature option. Organisation theory tells us that this mindset generates a momentum of its own. Before one knows it, institutions start to act and behave in ways consistent with it. Conformist official and public narratives follow and squeeze the space for those who are perceptive enough to recognise that bounded rationality has taken over.

When I make this argument to Pakistani policymakers, they rightly remind me they are not irrational. But that’s the point. Organisation theory is not about irrationality. It is about perfectly rational individuals making sub-optimal choices while being genuinely convinced they are optimising outputs in the best interest of their country.

Let’s recall two examples where a country’s obsession with facts about its adversary proved catastrophic. The attack on Pearl Harbour is one. The Japanese military that authorised this suicidal move argued they were forced into it by a hard “fact”, ie the Allies had imposed an economic/oil blockade.

Indeed, the blockade wasn’t fictional, nor the fact that it was hurting Japan badly. Yet, the specific response Japan chose brought nuclear annihilation upon two of its cities and resulted in its defeat in the Second War War.

The outcome of the Cold War is also instructive. Some of the literature on Soviet thinking during the last decade of this rivalry is strikingly similar to what we sometimes hear in Pakistan. Policymakers in Moscow seemed acutely aware of their country’s weak economic underbelly; there were any number of candid discussions at the top acknowledging this and the fact they could not afford to continue a perpetually competitive policy vis-à-vis the US; but they were also livid about, and fixated on, US policies in Afghanistan and their larger neighborhood, seeing these as deliberate attempts to undermine the Soviet Union.

The Soviet comprehension of the free world’s policies wasn’t all paranoia. But their fixation on ‘facts’ forced them into the very action-reaction syndrome they knew they could not afford.

The point is not to compare Pakistan’s trajectory with that of Second World War Japan or the Soviet Union. But these examples do convey the costs of losing sight of the larger picture and obsessing with facts to the point that your desire to respond overshadows considerations about your capacity to do so – in a manner consistent with achieving long term success.

Pakistani policymakers are aware of these dangers. They aren’t looking for any debilitating race with India. And yet, we have once again begun to pay way too much attention to tactical ‘facts’ about Delhi’s policies. This is after almost a decade of having removed India from the country’s everyday conversations. It’s a slippery slope that, at the very least, will prevent Pakistani policy makers from testing innovative approaches that may provide a way out of the country’s regional predicament.

The writer is a foreign policy expert based in Washington, DC.

Published in Dawn, October 13th, 2015

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