Pakistan and the IMF trap.

With Iran and Saudi Arabia ready to embrace each other, Turkey looking forward to mending its broken ties with Syria and Egypt, and Afghanistan being able to form a club with Central Asian States and Russia, it seems that Pakistan is the only one in the immediate region that has failed to breathe the changing air of the international order - one that is not ready to defy the old, rotten ways of unilateral, unidirectional capitalist liberalism of the West that uses the IMF as an instrument of bleeding living nations to their last running drop of blood.

What the IMF has been up to with nations around the world is no secret, but it is amazing how the intelligentsia of a nation can act in complete defiance of both history and contemporary world events. There are numerous examples, but we as a people tend to follow constructed popular narratives and show little interest in global realities. Still, let's go through some eye-opening cases.

Mali, one of the world's poorest countries, had a major cotton sector upon which its economy relied. In the 1990s, the World Bank and IMF started pressing for privatisation of the Malian cotton sector and liberalisation of its pricing system, tying cotton prices to world market values. These reforms coincided with a period when the cotton prices were heavily distorted by subsidised production of cotton in developed countries. As a result, Malians had to sell their crops at less than production costs, eventually pushing farmers to grow other crops.

When the 2008 financial crisis struck, Greece was having a $299.7 billion external debt. With Greece unable to pay back its loans, the troika of European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF charted a set of reforms including 12 rounds of tax increases, austerity targets, institutional elimination of social benefits, privatisation targets, administrative and judicial changes and so on. Despite these efforts, and despite getting a pound 100 billion debt relief, the country required bailout loans in 2010, 2012 and 2015 from the IMF. Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis resigned, and claimed that the troika, including IMF, had exclusive control over the country's tax system and the secretariat general of public revenues. 'It was not under control of my ministry,' Varoufakis said. 'It was controlled by Brussels. The general secretariat is appointed, effectively, through a process that is troika-controlled and the whole mechanism within.' Today after several IMF...