This may yet be the trickiest one. With three of the five years under its belt, the PTI government steps into the next one with elevated confidence. It believes it has the economy in its grip, opposition in a firmer grip and the path to its next victory in its firmest one. It is not the first government in memory to believe so.

The challenges PTI faced in the first three years were fairly linear in nature. There was the plain old incompetence fuelled by a combination of inexperience, incapacity and rhetorical hubris. Then there was the bravado.

Oh, and what bravado it was. PTI could do no wrong, the PTI said, when PTI in actuality could do no right. As Year 1 stumbled onto Year 2, which limped across to Year 3, PTI continued to struggle with governance while fending off attacks from the opposition, and often from itself. Surely this experiment — with the debris of its intentions raining down upon a hapless citizenry — could not carry on for five long years. Surely.

In Year 4, it seems the experiment will, surely, go on. But will it succeed? Ah, now that is a tricky one. Existential issues having been dealt with, and linear ones — jalsas, dharnas, long marches — having been brushed off, the PTI now enters an arena that is less an obstacle course and more a minefield. You cannot just jump your way across the field; you need to watch every step even when the field looks clear.

It is this deceptively clear field in Year 4 that is giving many PTI movers and shakers a false sense of confidence. But a closer look inside the shape-shifting dynamics of the Red Zone shows how complicated the power landscape is becoming as the government races towards what it believes is another five-year term. Yes, the talk about the next five-year term has started doing the rounds inside the ruling party circles in Islamabad. There is a thinly disguised, though deliberately subdued, sense of triumphalism on display among the PTI leadership. Imran Khan is the only real leader in town and there is no alternative, they say, and then proceed to argue that the PML-N is in a mess both internally and externally, PPP is irrelevant in Punjab and vulnerable in Sindh, and the establishment remains comfortable with the PTI. So life is peachy.

Even some rivals agree. “Things will carry on like this till the next elections,” says a senior politician who has no love lost for the government. “Real politics will start after August 2022.”Which essentially means that liner threats from the usual places — opposition, establishment, party rebels — constitute non-threats, so to speak. This is evidenced by some recent developments. PDM’s attempt to look ferocious is not exactly working out. The jalsa in Karachi this Sunday may mark its re-entry onto the political battlefield but its quiver doesn’t have too many arrows and its longsword appears rusted.

The PML-N’s organisational fiasco hasn’t helped. The party’s Sindh secretary general Dr Miftah Ismail has tendered his resignation because the party leadership was unable to take action against a faction inside the party that not only attacked the party office in protest against the award of some tickets for the cantonment board elections but also launched a vicious defamatory campaign against their own secretary general. Dr Ismail, former finance minister who holds a doctorate in economics and is considered a veritable brain trust for the party, and who wrote policy papers, and defended the party vociferously on TV, had no choice but to step down. If the PML-N is willing to lose someone like Miftah, it has a bigger problem on its hands than it may want to admit, or even realise.

Read: The three year scorecard

With PDM going through the motions, and the PPP content with holding on to Fortress Sindh, the PTI leadership surveys the landscape with barely disguised glee. With the federal and three provincial governments in its control, a trillion-rupee Kamyab Pakistan Programme on the roll-out, a Rs260 billion Ehsaas programme injecting cash into families across the country, and the optics of a growth budget — including billions of rupees of development funds going into constituencies via ruling party politicians — the PTI is feeling mighty fine about life and the prospects it has on offer.

But wait.

As Year 4 dawns, there’s a rumble across the western border. It could spell trouble even if peace breaks out with a vengeance. The threat of terrorism from the rejuvenated TTP remains very real — as real as the threat of a US backlash in the shape of Pakistan’s scapegoating. “Don’t forget the US will be a factor in the next elections,” says a former cabinet minister who played a critical role in the 2018 elections. He believes the PTI leadership is playing to the galleries by taking a tough line against the US but this may have a downside. “The voters may love such talk but it is not helpful for the larger business of the state,” he says, and adds that this is the reason the establishment has adopted a more measured and nuanced tone.

There’s plenty at stake. The IMF and World Bank assistance, for instance, or the FATF listing, or even — in a worst scenario — threats of sanctions. None of these are easy options for the US and its allies, but much will depend on how Pakistan utilises deft diplomacy and strategic communication to reframe its positioning. The threat however remains. And it is a threat, above all, to our vulnerable economy.

Vulnerable? You would not think so if you heard the PTI ministers. The economy is getting stronger by the day, they say. Don’t you see how people are buying cars like crazy, how textile factories are struggling to cope with the volume of orders, how foreign exchange reserves are breaking previous records and business is booming like never before, they ask. And yet it sounds all so familiar, all so deja-vu-ish, all so…PML-N.

There’s something rather perilous about spending money you don’t actually have. Finance Minister Shaukat Tarin will however have none of it. He wants growth, and growth is what he shall have regardless of how much money he has, or how much money the IMF is willing to spare. Year 4 will be cash rich, even if the cash belongs to someone else.

But cash can’t buy reform. At least not the kind that the PTI promised to usher in. That reform agenda did not survive the first three years — perhaps not even the first one. Today the PTI is clear it wants victory more than it wants change. You want change? Then give us five more years, the party leadership is saying. Year 4 is about readying for the win. Change can wait.

But can it, really? Year 4 will see this question put to test. At the end of this year, and the start of Year 5, there will be a grand reckoning. Either the economy will touch the 4.8 per cent target growth and provide PTI its strategic depth, or it would have consumed its high-octane perceptional fuel, and be running on fumes. Then the PML-N may also find its feet, weaponise its narrative and fire up its Punjab base; then the PPP may also activate its realpolitik and start cultivating coalition candidates; and then the independents, and sundry electables, may also start sniffing the wind and smelling trouble from the PTI side. “We can break off five to seven PTI MNAs and MPAs in Sindh today if we want,” claims a PPP minister. The PTI wants Sindh? He asks mockingly. They don’t know how vulnerable they themselves are here.

Vulnerability is a state of mind. As Year 4 dawns, PTI believes it has none of it.

Published in Dawn, August 26th , 2021