Part 1
By Akbar Jamal
When a foreign power attacks a country’s national independence, it does not necessarily have to send tanks across its borders or fill its skies with warplanes. In the geopolitics of the twenty-first century, the most dangerous wars are often fought without a single bullet. They are waged through agreements, loan documents, and the psychological wounds of neglected and marginalized communities.
When a country grows weak from within, outside powers move in like ants and gradually tighten their grip on its vital arteries. To understand this hidden form of infiltration, its economic, political, and social dimensions must be understood together.
Let us begin with control over the main arteries of the economy and what is known as debt trap diplomacy. Whenever you look for the clearest sign of foreign influence inside a country, it usually shows up through economics. In the language of international finance this is called debt trap diplomacy. The approach works like this: a powerful country provides billions of dollars in loans to a weaker or developing country to finance major infrastructure projects.
At first these projects raise hopes of development and prosperity. But when the borrowing country, because of economic crisis or weak governance, can no longer repay the loans and their heavy interest, the true nature of the arrangement becomes clear. Instead of cash repayment, the formula of debt-for-equity swap is put into practice.
The best-known example is Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port. When Sri Lanka could not repay the loans taken to build the port, it was forced to lease the port and thousands of acres of surrounding land to China for ninety-nine years. This kind of influence does not stop at ports. It extends to energy networks and gas infrastructure as well. If Pakistan, for example, were forced by its circular debt crisis to hand over shares or management control of strategic companies like Sui Northern Gas Pipelines to foreign firms, it would in practical terms be surrendering a major part of its economic independence.
Once information about a country’s gas and electricity distribution networks, along with decision-making authority over them, falls into foreign hands, key decisions such as pricing, energy distribution priorities, and public support measures are no longer fully under that country’s own government. If a country becomes completely incapable of meeting its financial obligations, even this limited control can turn into full ownership. During ninety-nine or hundred-year lease periods, foreign powers extract the greatest possible economic benefit from these assets, and with the protection of international courts, domestic governments and courts are often left with little ability to intervene effectively.
By the time such leases expire, either the assets have lost much of their economic value or the imbalance of power has become so great that the host country is compelled to renew the agreement.
Another important way of undermining a country’s national independence is the battle over narratives and intellectual dominance. Alongside economic infiltration, a quieter assault plays out in the arena of ideas and public opinion. Anyone who wants to change a system from within will first try to reshape the thinking of the public and the decision-making circles.
When media outlets, educational curricula, and research institutions suddenly begin promoting one-sided narratives that favor a particular foreign power, that is a sign of intellectual infiltration. Local culture and traditions get labeled as backward, and a foreign way of life gets pushed under the name of modernization until society gradually loses its intellectual roots.
Organized propaganda campaigns on social media, efforts to weaken national unity, and attempts to present foreign objectives as national needs are all part of the same process. Pakistan’s current Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif, for instance, has on the official parliamentary record stated that jihad-related content was introduced into Pakistan’s educational institutions at the CIA’s request, in order to recruit Pakistani youth for the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Another important channel of foreign intelligence infiltration is the strategic link between domestic grievances and foreign-backed proxy groups. The most complicated part of this whole process is when foreign influence merges with a country’s own internal injustices, deprivations, and long-standing problems. No armed movement anywhere in the world springs up overnight purely through foreign funding. It always requires a social environment already shaped by state discrimination, denial of rights, and sustained pressure.
The narratives put forward by the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) in Balochistan and some protest movements in Kashmir draw heavily from exactly this kind of social and political reality. When people in a region see that the natural resources taken from their land, like Sui gas and mineral wealth, benefit the whole country while their own communities remain without basic services, and when the political and legal avenues for seeking their rights are closed, they gradually come to believe that their deprivation under the existing system will be permanent.
This mindset gives armed groups the opening to target major projects like CPEC and foreign engineers, believing that damaging those projects will weaken the government they see as responsible for their exploitation. At this stage local grievances and foreign exploitation come together in what the literature of international relations calls a marriage of convenience.
On one side, armed groups need money, advanced weapons, satellite communications, and safe havens across the border for their operations. On the other side, international or regional powers that want to limit the influence of their rivals use exactly these kinds of groups to advance their own strategic interests. These foreign players are not interested in defending the rights of local people. Their objective is to weaken their rivals, and they use people’s genuine grievances as a convenient tool to do it.
The real answer to foreign intelligence infiltration is not limited to strengthening intelligence agencies. More important than that is effective statecraft. When a government faces this kind of broad and layered foreign pressure, its response is usually security and military in nature. Arresting spies, conducting military operations, and suppressing armed groups are the standard responses. But the basic principle of security and statecraft is that such measures are like painkillers. They reduce the symptoms but do not cure the disease itself.
A spy may be arrested or a network dismantled, but if the people’s grievances remain unchanged, foreign powers can simply build another network. The lasting and effective solution is for the state to give priority to political resolution, justice, and the protection of people’s rights rather than relying on force alone. When people receive their legal, economic, and social rights, and come to believe that they themselves have the first claim over their own resources, the appeal of armed groups begins to fade naturally.
When trust between the people and the state is restored, the public no longer feels the need to shelter foreign spies and those who plot against the country, and in this way the social space for foreign influence gradually disappears.
For this reason, protecting a country’s national independence does not depend solely on having a large army and advanced intelligence services. More than anything else, it depends on strengthening trust between the state and its people. Economic dependence and domestic injustice are the two greatest weaknesses that give foreign powers the right opening to interfere. As long as governments continue to push their own citizens to the margins instead of making them genuine partners in the country’s affairs, the shadow of foreign influence will hang over their national independence, and under the name of economic agreements, the country’s strategic assets and national wealth will gradually pass into foreign hands.
