President Dr Arif Alvi has said that ensuring the provision of health & education facilities and food for all should be the goal of a new world order, which should be based on morality, compassion and equality among people and nation-states.
He added that instead of pursuing global policies and laws based on vested interests, the world needed to adopt more humane and environment-friendly policies, recognise the changing power dynamics and eliminate the harmful usage and effects of technology to ensure a better and safer tomorrow for all mankind.
The President expressed these views while addressing the inaugural session of the Global Strategic Threat & Response (GSTAR)’s international conference on “Evolving Global Order: Challenges and Opportunities”, at the Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies (CASS), Islamabad, today.
Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Baber Sidhu, President of CASS, Air Marshal Farhat Hussain Khan, members of the diplomatic & defence community, academia, think tanks and media attended the event.
Addressing the conference, the President emphasised that humanity needed to shun security doctrines like Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as they had proven dangerous for the human race. He underlined that different security policies were needed to ensure the safety of humanity, adding that billions of dollars had been spent on the development of weapons and nuclear arsenals, which could have been better utilized to address hunger, starvation and poverty.
He said that the new world order must take into account human emotions like love, hate and phobias, which had previously led to wars among nations. He said that human phobias needed to be handled with rationality and just and fair application of global laws, rooted in compassion and morality.
The President said that he was a proponent of the complete elimination of war from human societies as in human history, the efforts to humanize and civilize war had not yielded any results and wars had been allowed to continue bringing pain and misery to humanity.
The President said that due to emerging challenges in different fields, we needed to adopt better and more humane policies to create a better and safer world by making collective efforts to encourage innovation, nurture global cooperation and by motivating the leadership to address the pressing issues confronted by humankind.
The President said that nation-states were being challenged by multinational and global actors, stating that in the past democracies and states had been undermined by the vested interests of different power lobbies.
The President said that human history was replete with examples of war and cruelty among nations, adding that many a time in recent history, humanity had come close to extinction due to nuclear weapons and was only saved due to human judgement and interference.
While referring to the incident of an Indian missile landing in Pakistani territory, he said that advancements in technology, like Artificial Intelligence, warbots, hypersonic missiles, Cyber Security and militarization of space, should be controlled to ensure global peace and security as the reaction time of nations to effectively and intelligently respond to threats had significantly been reduced, which was alarming.
The President called for the implementation of UN resolutions and fair application of international law to ensure regional and global peace and security and added that the issue of the Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) had been on the agenda of the United Nations for 75 years, however, despite several UN resolutions the issue had been allowed to fester.
He further said that refugees should also be treated equally without discrimination of colour and ethnicity, adding that Pakistan hosted 4 million Afghan refugees for 40 years on humanitarian grounds.
Terming global warming and climate change “the most pressing human issue”, the President called for bringing a paradigm shift in human consumption patterns, adding that a global solution was needed to address this global challenge. He said that humanity should be cognizant of its responsibilities towards the planet and adopt sustainable and environment-friendly behaviours and policies.
He said that Pakistan was faced with unprecedented global warming-induced super floods having catastrophic impacts on the life and livelihoods of millions of people and had inflicted economic losses of an estimated US$ 40 billion.
Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Baber Sidhu, also addressed the conference. He said that the challenges of cyber security, promoting national resolve and institutional reforms were significant, adding that PAF was actively pursuing security objectives as the world witnessed contemporary challenges of military and psychological warfare. He said that PAF would leave no stone unturned to ensure Pakistan’s security, highlighting that structural and organizational reforms had been initiated in PAF to bring it in line with modern requirements and to overcome emerging security threats.
Emphasizing the importance of the aerospace industry, he announced the opening of the National Aerospace Science and Technology Park in Islamabad in the next few months.
The two-day conference will deliberate on topics including Pakistan’s geo-economics, regional connectivity and aerospace security, emerging technologies and future warfare, strategic stability in South Asia and military applications of artificial intelligence and cyber warfare
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