A Pakistani Dilemma: American Dream Or Chinese Money?
Opportunistic elites have led Pakistan to become a proxy for America and China, with no real benefits to its people.
Lt Gen Devendra Pratap Pandey (Retd)
Former Corps Commander, Chinar Corps | DG Territorial Army | Director of Military Intelligence | Commandant, Army War College
In Brief
In this piece, Lt Gen D.P. Pandey (Retd.) traces Pakistan’s decades-long balancing act between two competing patrons the United States and China arguing that the country’s elite has repeatedly sold national alignment for personal gain, leaving ordinary Pakistanis worse off each time.
He opens with a blunt critique of Pakistan’s global image problem, pointing to its outsized dependence on remittances from beggary and its long-documented links to major terror networks and attacks, arguing that state and military leadership have often been complicit rather than merely tolerant of these ties.
The piece then moves into a historical arc: how Pakistan became Washington’s regional proxy soon after Partition, pivoted toward Beijing after India’s 1962 setback, brokered the historic US-China opening in the 1960s, and later served US interests again during the Afghan jihad and the post-9/11 War on Terror each time absorbing the social and security fallout domestically. He describes China’s entry through CPEC as bringing infrastructure and investment, but at the cost of deep debt dependency, resentment over Chinese labour and assets, and growing insurgent attacks on Chinese nationals and projects.
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The piece’s central argument sharpens around Operation Sindoor, where Lt Gen Pandey observes that Pakistan’s leadership instinctively turned back toward Washington rather than Beijing despite far deeper economic and military dependence on China — revealing where its elite’s real loyalties and safe havens lie. He closes by arguing that this pattern of opportunistic pivoting between two external powers has cost Pakistan its resource base (citing Gilgit-Baltistan and Baluchistan) without delivering meaningful benefit to its population.
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Copyright/Disclaimer:
This article, “A Pakistani Dilemma: American Dream or Chinese Money?” is authored by Lt Gen Devendra Pratap Pandey, PVSM, UYSM, AVSM, VSM (Retd.), and was originally published on News18. All rights to the original article rest with News18 / Network18. This blog post presents only a brief summary for informational purposes and does not reproduce the article in full. Views expressed are the author’s own, in his personal capacity, and do not necessarily reflect News18’s views. For the complete article, readers are directed to the original publication on News18.
