The State of the Union: United States and Pakistan
By Dr Ghulam M. Haniff
St Cloud, Minnesota
The State of the Union was a commendable talk given on the third Tuesday of January by President Barack Obama. It kept the nation mesmerized for over an hour. The speech was delivered before the joint session of the Congress with a multitude of guests and visitors. The President laid out his agenda for the future and beyond.
The leaders in Islamabad would have benefitted a lot by listening to the message for the wealth of information it contained. As usual Obama’s style of delivery was superb, spiting each word out at the right time, with correct enunciation and emphasis.
One of the main items in the talk was the training of the American people to be more productive with skills for the future. It focused on the education of the next generation and how their skills have to be developed from the beginning. America is the most advanced nation in the world but each year it worries about educating the coming generations.
Not so in Pakistan. No one is concerned about the future generations. What people like Asif Zardari and others want is to educate only own their children, at Oxford no less, and put them in the slot currently held by daddy. Others, be damned.
At the moment there are millions, at least 50 million under the age of 18, with less than five years of schooling. No one wants to improve their skills. In fact, they don’t have enough training to hold even a factory assembly line job. A person with five years of schooling is considered to be literate.
As expected of a Third World country Pakistan does not have a tradition of a State of the Union or anything like it. Nobody bothers with plans for the future, or of the next generation, or the trajectory of the country. If something is to be done in the national interest it is leaked out to the friends so they can make money out of the information provided.
Pakistani leaders are only interested in traveling abroad. London is their favorite destination where they can check up on their investments and prop up their children for their future roles as leaders of the country. They might also swing by some of the other countries, Switzerland for example, to count the money squirreled away in foreign banks.
They are not about to listen to a speech, regardless of how good and delivered by the leader of the greatest power in the world. Pakistani leaders only want to brag about their own greatness. Never mind that Osama is found, and plucked away, out of the country on their watch. They don’t feel responsible. No one offered to resign, regardless of the failure.
As has been mentioned by many writers, Peter Bergen for example, they can’t even fight a ragtag collection of civilians classified under the label of terrorists. Pakistan is a country where anyone one can steal anything and fly away on planes and helicopters in the middle of the night without being caught.
Such guts are to be admired and the knowledge upon which such actions are taken. Those are to be widely emulated and applied. Even in Pakistan.
Neither Asif Ali Zardi, nor Yusuf Raza Gilani nor Parvez Kayani has any idea of what is going on. If they had educated some of the many millions out in the bushes perhaps someone would have been able to catch the violators of sovereignty, or at least suspected that something was up.
But in Pakistan leaders think only about themselves. They want to keep the common people away from the flames of knowledge. Ignorance, they claim, is bliss.
Meanwhile at his State of the Union message Obama repeatedly brought the audience to their feet. The halls of the Congress thundered with applause, delivered more than sixty times in just an hour. There were also hints of move to be made on the global chessboard of power politics. Hinting at future policies are fun for a great power.
The speech is mandated by the constitution to be delivered each year by the sitting President. The message lays out the President’s vision for the coming year focusing on some of the legislation the President is likely to engage the Congress.
If such a requirement were to be instituted in Islamabad the leaders would simply ignore the mandate or call for a change to amend the constitution. The idea of laying out plans for the future of the country is not a popular one. Not doing anything is to everybody’s liking.
Not too many years ago the Prime Minister of the country at that time, Benazir Bhutto, widely ignored conducting census in the nation. The results of the census would have affected her political future. Did anybody care? Not really? Did she pay the price for the deliberate neglect?
As for Obama upon entering the great hall he took fifteen minutes shaking hands and thanking guests for coming, a gesture which he repeated at the conclusion with even more time spent in politicking.
Keeping in check the personal ambitions for the sake of the future of the nation has rewards beyond imagination.
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