LAHORE: Senior Vice President of the Lahore Chamber of Commerce & Industry Mian Rehman Aziz Chan while speaking at the seminar on “Economic Warfare & its Impacts on National Security”, jointly organized by the Chamber and Golden Ring Economic Forum (GREF) has said that we are living in an era which is tagged by the name of 5th generation warfare.
It is conducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, misinformation, cyber-attacks, along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems. It is also described as a “war of information and perception”.
Vice President LCCI Haris Ateeq, President Golden Ring Economic Forum (GREF) Hasnain Reza Mirza, Dean, National University of Science & Technology Dr Ashfaq Hassan, Leading Taxation Expert, Dr Ikram ul Haq, expert Pak-China Center of Excellence Dr Shakeel Ahmad Ramay, former LCCI president Shahid Hasan Sheikh, former LCCI senior vice president Kashif Younas Meher, former vice president Mian Zahid Javed and executive committee members of LCCI also spoke on the occasion.
The LCCI office-bearers said that the economic warfare is one of its offshoots and it is utilized as an economic strategy with the goal of weakening the economy of other states so that they may remain at the mercy of strong nations and could never take decision independently.
They said that applying trade embargoes, economic sanctions, tariff discrimination, freezing of capital assets, suspension of aid, prohibition of investment and other capital flows etc. are some of the common tools of economic warfare.
They further said that if we talk about Pakistan, we are currently facing even tougher and newer challenges. Is Pakistan subjected to an economic warfare? This question comes to mind when we see that many restrictions have been applied on us in terms of transferring funds through banking and other channels through Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
Should we take it normal or get suspicious about it? They questioned, adding that Pakistan has adopted IMF program and for every single tranche of dollars, the government has to take some unpopular decisions like increasing energy tariffs, removing subsidies, devaluing national currency, making State Bank of Pakistan autonomous and withdrawing tax exemptions etc. Once again, these factors question about the secret objectives behind all these developments.
The speakers said that we need to realize that Pakistan is the only Muslim country in the world that is a nuclear state and our nuclear assets are the lifeline of our country.
We need to remain very vigilant about our national security. President Golden Ring Economic Forum (GREF) Hasnain Reza Mirza said that in the light of changing regional geostrategic conditions and their ramifications and growing pressure on Pakistan, the situation demands that Pakistan needs a serious revisit to its economic, foreign and security policies to face the future challenges of national economic and territorial security.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022