Is Donald Trump Getting Foreign Policy Advice from Husain Haqqani?
By Riaz Haq
CA
"Number one, the people negotiating don’t have a clue. Our president doesn’t have a clue. He’s a bad negotiator...We get Bergdahl. We get a traitor. We get a no-good traitor, and they get the five people that they wanted for years, and those people are now back on the battlefield trying to kill us. That’s the negotiator we have...I know the smartest negotiators in the world. I know the good ones. I know the bad ones. I know the overrated ones...But I know the negotiators in the world, and I put them one for each country. Believe me, folks. We will do very, very well, very, very well." - Donald Trump, Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2015
US real estate billionaire and Republication candidate Donald Trump's rhetoric on US negotiators' skills reminds me of similar writings and analyses of the US-Pakistan ties offered by Mr Husain Haqqani, ex-Pakistani Ambassador in Washington.
“Since 1947,” Haqqani argues in his book 'Magnificent Delusion' , “dependence, deception, and defiance have characterized US-Pakistan relations. We sought US aid in return for promises we did not keep ... Pakistan and the United States have few shared interests and very different political needs… If $40 billion in US aid has not won Pakistani hearts and minds, billions more will not do the trick… The US-Pakistan alliance is only a mirage.”
If one really analyzes Haqqani's narrative, one has to conclude that Pakistanis are extraordinarily clever in deceiving the United States and its highly sophisticated policymakers who have been taken for a ride by Pakistanis for over six decades.
A similar narrative can be found in recent books by other authors. Notable among them are Carlotta Gall (The Wrong Enemy) and TV Paul (Pakistan: The Warrior State) . Are they giving advice to Donald Trump? They all seem to think that they could do better than the highly sophisticated US policymakers and seasoned diplomats, like ex-US CIA Director and ex-
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who have real experience in such matters. Here's a quote from Secretary Gates's testimony to a US Senate Committee: "Well, first of all, I would say, based on 27 years in CIA and four and a half years in this job, most governments lie to each other. That's the way business gets done."
Here is the text of the exchange between Gates and Leahy during the US Senate hearing on Pakistan that began with Leahy asking Gates how long the US will be willing to "support governments that lie to us?"
GATES: Well, first of all, I would say, based on 27 years in CIA and four and a half years in this job, most governments lie to each other. That's the way business gets done.
LEAHY: Do they also arrest the people that help us when they say they're allies?
GATES: Sometimes.
LEAHY: Not often.
GATES: And -- and sometimes they send people to spy on us, and they're our close allies. So...
LEAHY: And we give aid to them.
GATES: ... that's the real world that we deal with.
Will Donald Trump win the Republican Primary and then be elected the next President of the United States? Will Trump prove Gall, Haqqani, Paul and others right by being tough on Pakistan, Iran, Mexico, China and other nations? The chances that the Gall-Haqqani-Paul narrative will be put to test by Trump appear remote. It may be the best thing to happen to preserve world peace and allow the US and the rest of the world to prosper.
