Earlier this year, Pakistan secretly supplied arms to Ukraine at the behest of the US, in return for a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This explosive information has emerged in the recently leaked secret documents of the Pakistani government. According to some leaked documents, Pakistan sold arms from summer 2022 to spring 2023. Ukraine used that weapon.
According to two sources with access to internal Pakistani and US government documents, Ukraine was currently in a chronic shortage of munitions and military equipment. In the midst of Russia-Ukraine war, extreme financial crisis was created in Pakistan. On this occasion, Pakistan signed this arms purchase agreement through a company called Global Military Products, through the mediation of the US, to get loans to the IAF on easy terms. And last July, the IMF announced a $3 billion relief package for the country.
Pakistan’s secret documents also reveal the behind-the-scenes look of the country’s financial and political elite, which is rarely exposed to the public, even though the public has to pay a price. After the Ukraine war broke out, then Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan visited Moscow for a long-planned bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The visit angered US officials.
Afterwards, US Assistant Secretary of the Interior Donald Lew expressed his anger privately in a meeting with then Pakistani Ambassador Asad Majid Khan, saying that the US believed that Pakistan had only taken a neutral position at the behest of Imran. Other US diplomats have also warned of dire consequences if Imran remains in power and promised a pardon if he is removed.
Then, in April 2022, Pakistan’s military ousted Prime Minister Imran Khan in a US-instigated no-confidence vote. Since his ouster, Pakistan has firmly sided with the US and Ukraine in the war and received an IMF loan as a reward. Meanwhile, after Imran’s removal, the military began mass killings and mass arrests to eliminate his political party.
The IMF emergency loan allowed the new Pakistani government to launch a nationwide crackdown on civil society and postpone elections indefinitely, seen as a pretext to prevent the country’s popular leader, Imran Khan, from contesting future elections.
But, while the US is desperate to protect Ukraine’s civilian population, it has remained silent on the scale of Pakistan’s human rights abuses, which have left the future of the country’s democracy in limbo. Arif Rafiq, a professor at the Middle East Institute and an expert on Pakistan, said, “Ukraine’s counter-attack may ultimately damage Pakistani democracy.”
“The bottom line is, we have to save Ukraine, save this fighter for democracy on Europe’s eastern border,” Rafiq said. And this brown country of Asia will have to pay the price. So they can live in a dictatorship, their people can be denied their freedom, as every popular figure in this country says, our ability to choose our leaders, our ability to have civil liberties, the rule of law, all these things that distinguish many European countries and solidarity democracies from Russia. Can, we have to support Ukraine to get it.”
However, neither the US nor Pakistan has so far acknowledged the deal, but details of the arms deal were leaked to The Intercept by a Pakistani military source earlier this year. The US brigadier general’s signature on the contract matches his signature on publicly available US mortgage records, the documents said. And this has been confirmed by reviewing publicly available but previously undisclosed US documents on arms sales to the US posted by the State Bank of Pakistan.
According to an investigation by The Intercept, on May 23, 2023, Masood Khan, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, met with Donald Lu in Washington regarding arms sales and IMF loans. Lu admitted that the Pakistanis thought their weapons worth $900 million would help them meet the remaining amount under the IMF’s terms, which is about $2 billion. However, there was no specific discussion on how much the US would actually pay to the IMF on Pakistan’s behalf.
