By Aflatoon
Two documents crossed my desk this week and they should be read together, though nobody will read them together, because one is a policy and the other is a strike notice.
The first is a 168-page proposal to let foreign oil suppliers store petroleum in Pakistan under customs bond. They bring the cargo in. They pay no duty, no tax, no levy, no cess, so long as it stays in the bond. They move it by pipeline to Mahmood Kot or Machike, still untaxed. Then, at a moment of their choosing, they decide whether to sell it to us or ship it somewhere else entirely.
The second is the All Pakistan Goods Transport Alliance parking its trucks, because it cannot make the arithmetic of diesel work.
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I want to be fair to the policy, which is not stupid. It is the opposite of stupid; it is rather clever.
We import ninety per cent of our energy. We produce about 70,000 barrels a day against demand of roughly half a million. That gap — 430,000 barrels, every day, forever — is the central fact of the Pakistani economy, and everything else people argue about is downstream of it. The rupee, the levy, the tariff, the IMF programme, the transporters’ strike: all of it is that number wearing different clothes.
Having physical stock inside the country, even somebody else’s stock, is genuinely better than not having it. In a year when Hormuz is contested and Adnoc says fifteen of its ships have been attacked, a full tank at Port Qasim is worth something regardless of whose name is on it.
So: not stupid. I record that clearly, because I am about to be unkind.
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Here is what the policy actually says, stripped of the word “hub”.
A Kuwaiti or Saudi supplier may keep oil on Pakistani soil, in Pakistani facilities, moved through Pakistani pipelines, guarded presumably by Pakistanis, and pay this country nothing for the privilege — until and unless it decides to sell to us. And if a better price appears in Singapore, the right to re-export is, in the policy’s own words, expressly protected.
We are not being made a hub. We are being made a warehouse with unusually generous terms, and a warehouse does not set the price of what it stores.
The pitch to investors is summarised in the reporting with admirable frankness: bring product into Pakistan, keep it under customs bond, wait for a commercially attractive domestic sale or redirect it overseas.
Read that sentence as a citizen rather than an investor. Wait for a commercially attractive domestic sale. The oil is here. It is sitting in Hub or Gwadar. Whether it reaches you depends on whether you are the best available bidder that week.
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Now put the strike notice next to it.
The transporters are not asking for much. They want the withholding tax cut from seven per cent to two — the rate tanker operators already pay. They want tolls reduced; one trailer, they say, pays Rs2.4 million. And more than anything they want the daily price revision stopped, because a man quoting a rate for a four-day haul cannot know what the diesel will cost on day three.
That last demand is the one I find genuinely poignant, because it is not a demand for money. It is a demand for predictability — the thing a state is supposed to supply and this one has stopped supplying. They are not asking to be made rich. They are asking to be able to do sums.
Meanwhile APTMA writes to the Communications Ministry to say that cotton is stranded at the ports and in the mandis, mills are low on stock at the end of the season, and export containers are not moving.
So the picture, all in one week: we are designing an elegant regime to hold foreign oil we may not get to buy, while the trucks that move our own cotton have stopped because their drivers cannot price a journey.
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I am told Pakistan is now a net security provider in the region. The petroleum minister said so this week, and after Makkah I suppose it is even true.
We provide security. We provide storage. We provide, at some point, the men.
What we do not seem able to provide is a litre of diesel at a price a haulier in Sargodha can plan around, or a functioning way of getting cotton from a mandi to a mill.
There is no contradiction in this, and that is the part I want you to sit with. It is entirely coherent. A country can be strategically indispensable and domestically threadbare at the same time, and ours has been arranging itself into exactly that shape for fifty years with great consistency.
The oil will come. It will sit in the bond. And we will find out, at a commercially attractive moment, whether it was ever really for us.
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Aflatoon is a satirist and observer of the Pakistani condition. His column, Intellectual Voices, appears in The Pakistan Daily.
