Must Pakistan Strive to be Really Isolated?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

 

The carnage in Quetta,on August 8, was barbaric, even by the well-recognized bestiality of the TTP. These monsters, who put even beasts to shame, are adding a ghoulish new chapter with every new act of their utter depravity and insatiable lust for the blood of the innocent.

The toll of 70 innocent lives in the latest Taliban-perpetrated bloodbath is horrendous. This is a human tragedy of epic proportions and must be denounced by everyone with a soul. The monsters have, no doubt, exacted a price much too high even for a country lulled into a stupor by the excessive, and routine, flow of blood on its streets. But a bloodbath at a hospital—and that too of mainly lawyers and media men—has touched a new low.

A wanton crime as the massacre is its intensity has been inadvertently watered down by a wringing pontification by the Chief Minister of Baluchistan that the crime was inspired and master-minded by India’s notorious RAW. As is the wont of most of our politicos, especially those anxious to see their name boldly mentioned in the media headlines, the CM didn’t bother to present any evidence linking RAW to this heinous crime.

Of course, RAW would be on top of the table of prime anti-Pakistan foreign suspects with a high probability of complicity in the dastardly crime. RAW’s dirty fingers have been traced back to this openly hostile spy agencyin many a similar incidents of a bloody nature. RAW’s interest in stirring the pot, on behalf of its client ‘freedom-fighters’ of the Baluchistan Liberation Army, is a subject of common knowledge in Pakistan. Remember Kulbashan Yadav, the RAW agent captured in Baluchistan some months ago? He confessed to running a well-oiled network of Indian and local sleuths with the sole agenda of harming Pakistan.

But it’s the timing of the Baluchistan CM’s ‘sensational’ claim that puts a huge question mark over the issue of RAW and India. It has come quickly on the heels of the brief visit to Islamabad, last week, by the Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh, which spawned its own considerable baggage of controversy to further mar the already bad and deteriorating-by-the-day relations between the two South Asian arch-rivals.

Singh came to Islamabad in connection with a SAARC Ministerial Conference on the burning issue of terrorism. It was a welcome sign of sanity prevailing, after all, in the inner echelons of the Modi government that it overcame the temptation to sock it to Pakistan by sending, instead of Singh, some junior minister to fill the blanks. The nefarious government of Hasina Wajid, in BD, couldn’t rise above petty thinking and did exactly that: it sent some faceless bureaucrat to the meeting to take a dig at Pakistan.

However, once in Islamabad, Singh sank to precisely the petty shenanigans for which Modi’s inner circle—made up of knaves and rogues—has earned such a notoriety both at home in India and abroad. He took leave of all political decorum associated with multi-lateral diplomacy and fora and indulged, to his heart’s content, in thinly-veiled Pakistan-bashing for its alleged sponsoring of terrorism.

Singh’s boorish behavior at a regional conference assembled to work out a common South Asian strategy to combat the common menace of terrorism compelled the conference host, Pakistan’s Chaudhry Nisar, to take off his own gloves. His repartee to Singh’s provocation was fitting and well-articulated. I bet even Chaudhry Nisar may have been surprised by the temerity of his Indian guest but, then, had the composure to return the compliment in full measure.

But having paid back his egregious guest in his own coins, Nisar did something totally, totally, outrageous and, in terms of diplomacy, unpardonable.

Nisar was the host of the meeting, in which capacity he, as per routine protocol, had invited his counterparts to lunch. But instead of attending the lunch as its host, he shunned it, completely, and went off his own way—to PM’s House, to be precise—on the flimsiest of excuses; he said he’d been summoned by his boss to rush to his palace, forthwith.

It was the dumbest of excuses. What was the emergency that PM couldn’t just wait long enough for his minion to play out his scripted role of the luncheon’s host before showing himself up at the PM’s door? Had all hell broken loose? Had there been a terrorist attack, somewhere in the country that required Nisar to brief his boss about it without losing a minute?

There was nothing of the sort. It was just that typically boorish behavior for which Nawaz and his minions—and, for that matter, most of our political ‘stars’—are so notoriously known for. These narcissists are so madly infatuated with themselves that they just can’t look beyond their noses. They think the world owes them a debt of gratitude—all these pompous Chaudhries, Mians and what not—for gracing this earth with their ‘blessed’ presence. Protocol is dear to them for only as long as it serves their petty whims.

Nisar, in fact, was guilty of not being able to resist his temptation to cut Singh down to size by humbling him publicly and being so conspicuous by his absence at the luncheon. But Singh was no better than Nisar in being equally consumed by his Himalayan ego. He left the conference in a huff and boycotted the luncheon with his trite comment that he wasn’t in Islamabad for the lunch.

No doubt that the duo, Nisar and Singh, put up an infantile show of petty politicians with incontinent proclivities to settle scores, publicly. It was unfortunate. But the good news is that their antics couldn’t derail the primary purpose of the Islamabad conclave, i.e. it was a dry run—a trailer, if you will—for the real show to come, three months hence.

The Islamabad ministerial meeting was intended to be a curtain-raiser to the SAARC Summit at which Pakistan will be playing the host after several years. Singh’s petulant conduct notwithstanding, early indications and signals from Delhi suggest positivity as far as PM Narendra Modi’s attendance at the Islamabad summit is concerned. Early vibes from the Indian capital suggest that Modi is still on course to travel to Islamabad, come November. This would be no mean achievement for the spirit of regional cooperation as embodied by SAARC. Saner elements in India would want to see it through too.

However, the kind of forays into regional politics, like this one from, of all the people, the CM of Baluchistan in the wake of the Quetta massacre could easily push the prospects of Modi resisting his own legions of hawks and attending the summit in Islamabad over the edge, and into an abyss of uncertainty.

There’s no denying the gravity of bad relations between India and Pakistan. The ongoing episode of utter barbarity from the Indian occupation army in the Valley of Kashmir is adding daily doses of bad blood in the already tense relationship. The Indian army in Kashmir is as ruthless and inhumane in its treatment of its Kashmiri Muslim quarries as the Israeli Zionists have been, for a half century, in Occupied Palestine. India-Israel camaraderie, especially in defense, is no secret. So no wonder the Indians are so keen to deploy the same tactics of cruelty and insensitivity in Kashmir as their Israeli comrades have practiced in Palestine for so long.

But there’s no injunction, fore-ordained by a Higher Being that must be followed through to make a bad relationship with India even worse by jumping to early conclusions of India’s guilt, or complicity, in crimes perpetrated in any part of Pakistan.

Worse still is that such an accusation of guilt should be coming from the CM of a province of Pakistan which has been the locus of conflict and internal strife for so long. Who has given the mandate to a puny politician—worse, still, to a nondescript hereditary Baluchi Sardar—to indulge into a subject so foreign to his roster of duties and obligations?

As it is, our foreign policy is in a limbo and our relations with our immediate neighbors, mostly in tatters. If Pakistan isn’t isolated, already, it’s close to, quite close to.

With the exception of China, our relations are strained—to use a very mild terminology from the lexicon of diplomacy—with every one of our immediate neighbors. India has been an albatross round our neck for as long as one can remember. But now even Afghanistan, a country we have sacrificed so much for and earned, in return, a train full of domestic fallout, is straining at the leash to have a go at us, now that its American mentors have decided to stay put there for as long as possible.

All this disarray in our foreign policy is the result of years of neglect of the Foreign Office as the fulcrum of foreign policy. Nawaz Sharif and his bunch of nincompoop cronies have reduced the FO to the abysmal status of a post office receiving orders from more than one master. A sick PM, literally sick of late, has made a hash of FO by parceling it out between two perennially feuding minions of his while retaining the title of foreign minister to his own incompetent self.

We badly need friends in the world around us instead of specializing in how to make enemies. With virtually no hope of a breakthrough with an India consumed by orgies of greatness under Modi, we desperately need smaller countries of the region to bond with us. SAARC fits the mold perfectly to give our hobbled regional relations a modicum of normalcy.

With the exception of BD in thrall to a vicious and vindictive leader, none of the other SAARC member states really like or fancy India because of its grandiose designs and proclivity to throw its weight around, in the region, with impunity like a besotted overlord. These India-allergic countries, within SAARC, can be an antidote for us to ward off some of India’s obnoxious machoism. There’s no compulsion on us to waste this one little asset available to us. A little glimmer of light at the end of a dark tunnel must always be welcome. (The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)

K_K_ghori@hotmail.com