Nawaz Sharif parrots same old li(n)es in US — seeks parity with India

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Any hopes that Pakistan may embark on a new course in its ties with the United States — and India — have been laid to rest even before Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif meets President Obama at the White House on Wednesday afternoon. In a speech at the US Institute of Peace (USIP) some 24 hours before he is to meet Obama, MNS delivered the stock Pakistani wish list, despite the Obama administration having shot down each of them in the hours and days before the meeting viz., US should mediate between India and Pakistan particularly on the Kashmir issue (Washington has said no several times); US should offer Pakistan a civilian-nuclear deal like the one it did to India (fat chance, the US has said); and US should stop drone strikes inside Pakistan (We will when we’ve taken out the last terrorist, the Obama administration has indicated). On the last point, Sharif was evidently emboldened by a Amnesty International/Human Rights report that pilloried the US for civilian deaths associated with drone strikes, but some of the key accounts in the report are already being questioned in the online media. Besides, the White House has already pushing back against the report. But on the other two issues relating to India — it’s the same old, same old. Besides, allowing wicked Indian diplomats to chuckle about “who’s being the dehati aurat now?” it also suggests that far from allowing Miansahib to get on with a new foreign policy paradigm, the Pakistani military is still calling the shots. You can almost hear the Obama folks, who’ve been trying to walk Pakistan away from its India-fixation, banging their heads against the wall, although my sense is they knew/know what was coming (same old, same old). Which is why the protocol for MNS is anything but dazzling, as Ejaz Haider has snarkily pointed out here. Not only was Obama out playing golf with his White House staff on Sunday, leaving MNS to call on secretary of state Kerry (although as Ejaz points out charitably, MNS is also Pakistan’s foreign minister), MNS had to wait two days in Washington for a White House meeting while Obama had been in town all along doing other things. If the WH had sensed (doubtless from good, clear NSA intercepts) that Pakistan was ready to change its stars or stripes, they would have laid out the band-baaja with lunch or dinner thrown in. Instead, Obama isn’t even feeding him lunch on Wednesday. The White House schedule shows Obama having lunch with Vice President Joe Biden before he meets Sharif, AFTER LUNCH. Really, how bad is it really if Obama prefers to have lunch with his bloviator vice president??? Hell, even MMS got a “working lunch” despite the fact that he may be serving out his last few months! The good news Pakistanis can carry home though is first lady Michelle Obama (joined by Dr Jill Biden) will not only host tea for Kulsoom Nawaz, but thereafter entertain her with a poetry recital, ostensibly because she holds a Master’s degree in Urdu literature, although whether she will appreciate former US poet laureate Billy Collins (who I met and heard at TED last year and absolutely loved) is another matter. Still, bully for Pak. They’ll probably think this is so much more than what Mrs Gursharan Kaur got (only tea), although the truth is Mrs K hoofed off to be present at the investiture ceremony of DC Appeals Court judge Sri Srinivasan not waiting for any White House song and dance. But such is the burning Pakistani desire for one-upmanship vis-à-vis India that they must have gone looking for a judge whose swearing in they could have Mrs MNS attend. You can see and hear this desperate yearning for being tagged with India in every one of MNS’ speeches, but the sad fact is Pakistan is in a different league altogether. For all the positive noises and optics aimed at creating a congenial atmosphere around the visit, Pakistan is now known as a terrorist state, or to put it more politely, a state that nourishes, entertains, and uses terrorists. You don’t have to hear this from American or Indian commentators. There are many Pakistanis who are saying this openly, and one of them, Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, has been embarrassing the travelling circus with brilliant testimonials about the garrison state’s ties to terrorism. Of course, in the eyes of ultranationalist Pakistanis, he’s a traitor, in the same vein as Dr Shakil Afridi, who helped US nail Osama bin Laden. In fact, I’m surprised that US lawmakers who MNS met today did not make a STRONGER case for springing him, since the scales have fallen from their eyes (in most cases) about the true nature of the Pakistani state. Here is an example of Congressional reaction to meeting MNS, an event that involved close questioning on the Lashkar-e-Taiba. It has also not escaped the American media that Washington is doling out US tax payer dollars to a Pakistan that is extracting American blood in Afghanistan at a time when the US itself is in debt. “US resuming aid to Pakistan as national debt passes $17 trillion” read the headline on Fox News, always ready to take a swipe at the Obama administration, although it was the Bush administration which accelerated the “let’s buy Pakistan’s loyalty” program, a strategy that is questioned even by Husain Haqqani (who didn’t mind the lolly coming in as long as he was ambassador). But Denialistan, living in some cuckoo land (a new Pakistani poll shows 59 per cent of Pakistanis believe US was responsible for 9/11) just doesn’t get all this. After the masterpiece in his UN speech about Pakistan being a “responsible nuclear power,” poor MNS had to ply another military-vetted speech at the USIP in which he said, with a straight face that, “Pakistan is neither source of nor epicentre of terrorism.” Towards the end of the speech, he was comparing the founding fathers of Pakistan of his moth-eaten state with those of the US and even brought the Sermon on the Mount into play. You can hear all of it here, including the 182 times he clears his throat, which suggests that he has a throat infection and which begs the question – what happens when world leaders have a bug (the real one); do they avoid shaking hands? The military of course has remained in the shadows during Sharif’s visit. He is being projected as a civilian prime minister, an elected leader of a Pakistan that has effected a smooth transition of power for the first time in history yada yada yada. But long-time Pakistan watchers know the khakis are never too far in the shadows and everything that Sharif has said so far on his U.S visit suggests they still in control on the foreign policy front. He’s just fronting for a military that has been starved of $$$ and new toys for a few years now. The $ 1.6 billion American largess, including an immediate transfer of $ 322 million under the CSF — is the biggest takeaway from this visit. More to follow, as we say in journalese.