Keeping strategic assets secure.

Byline: Ikram Sehgal

Strategic assets' is a relatively new concept that arose in connection with the fast-forward development of economic globalization in the 20th c. and a new wave of economic cold war that has been leashed by the change in economic power centres more recently and the reorganization of economic, political and strategic alliances connected with it. By strategic assents we mean generally any tangible or intangible asset or concern of significant value in a given economy, state, or nation. Strategic assets are central to the development and security of a country, holding them provides an advantage to the owner both because of the raw force and power of their usage and the implicit persuasive power that they hold. Pakistan is today embroiled in armed conflict with stateless and state-related enemies who will resort to unprecedented tactics, both kinetic and/or non-kinetic, in sum hybrid warfare, to achieve their extreme goals.

The economic weapon is among the most powerful assets that the federal government possesses in protecting national security and freedom of development. All the more reason for Pakistan to define and maintain control over our strategic assets. Considering globalization to be a risk to national security and thinking that globalization opens economy to malicious foreign investment the US government has taken to greater scrutiny to economic transactions involving strategic assets: the US federal government has enacted laws to protect American farmland, airlines, telecommunications, and defence-related corporations from adverse foreign investment. Potential strategic assets include oil and energy. Experts contend that in the absence of any crisis also those considered nonstrategic assets, because of their abundance and ready availability in global markets, could be subject.

Shortages -or even market fluctuations, this could convert them into strategic assets. In deciding what strategic assets one can reasonably afford us to sacrifice, a nation, one must not only consider the asset's value to it. Any asset holding strategic value is important to the country holding that asset. Strategic assets have national security implications because of their tactical value, in weighing the sale of a strategic asset a country must consider the extent and severity of the sale's national security implications.

The EU is only reluctantly and partly following this road. Given the internal problems the EU has (for instance...