Reading Obama right

Lacking objectivity, we ignore the difference of approach between Obama and the British prime minister while in India.

By and large, headlines in Pakistan regarding US President Barack Obama’s visit to India have been positive. The president was primed with advice on what to say in India. Hence, the good headlines: “Be a good neighbour, Obama tells India”; “Stronger Pakistan in India’s interest”; “Obama pushes India to talk to Pakistan”; “Stable Pakistan best for India”, etc. There was only one exception: “Carrots for India, sticks for Pakistan”.

Given the generally morose Pakistani reaction to Pakistan’s own strategic dialogue with the US earlier, one expected that the mere idea of Obama’s visit to India would be off-putting. But the newspapers in Pakistan have interpreted the presidential words in a moderate manner. Given the high level of anti-American feeling among the public in general and media men in particular, this is a good augury and presages a period of objective analysis of what is happening in Pakistan and the region.

The news anchor of one TV channel that specialises in the economy had to calm down one of its reporters, who insisted that the US was never a sincere friend of anyone in history and that India was not a good neighbour of anyone in South Asia. He compared America’s refusal to let Pakistan ply concessional trade with it while giving India trade worth $10 billion. It was sad to note that an economic reporter did not know the difference between what Pakistan wanted and what President Obama has promised India. The other thing that could have rubbed us the wrong way was the spectacle of the top couple of America dancing with children to popular Indian tunes. The ease the world feels with India is owed to India’s ‘soft image’ which our ideology and our weak state situation do not allow us. The truth is that our hard ideological environment repels global capital as investors feel jittery visiting Pakistan. These days, even expat Pakistanis don’t visit readily for fear of being kidnapped for ransom.

What should help us overcome our paranoia are some of the things President Obama said. He said it is in India’s interest to have a stable Pakistan next door. If you don’t decide to wave that aside as a picayune gesture, it should address our not always honest plaint that India is destabilising Pakistan in collusion with all sorts of unlikely partners. President Obama also recommended normalisation of relations and an India-Pakistan dialogue that would resolve the outstanding issues between the two. It is unfair to pretend to feel angry that he did not say the word Kashmir. Not many heads of state visiting India say that.

When it comes to India, we think black and white. The world appears to us in all sorts of political distortions through the prism called India. We are already hurting from the nuclear deal that the Republican administration – traditionally closer to Pakistan than India – gave to New Delhi. We are hurting even more that America is not only not giving us the nuclear power stations we desperately need but is opposing China’s decision to give us a few. Aren’t we the front line state in America’s war against terrorism? Instead, President Obama hinted in New Delhi that Pakistan needs to show more enthusiasm in fighting terrorism. Here comes the problem of an inward-looking state that no longer cares how isolated it is in the world. The news going out of Pakistan says the country hates America and the West in general because it is pushing Pakistan into a war that is not its own. There is a stream of news about how the terrorists – home-grown and imported – are killing innocent Pakistanis and that these terrorists are, at times, described by Pakistan’s own media as Islamabad’s ‘strategic assets’. Lacking objectivity and relativism grown out of realism, we ignore the difference of approach between the American president and the British prime minister while in India.

If the Americans hold on to pledged funds, much of it must be linked to our own fair assessment of the abysmal level of governance in Pakistan, and the confession by Musharraf about what he did with the aid he received. The Obama visit has been carefully orchestrated not to offend an excessively sensitive Pakistan.

For the coming days, Pakistan must learn to develop a more differentiated and supple approach to the world outside. Habituated to a confrontational foreign policy – because of the subordination of our Foreign Office to the military point of view – Pakistan has been adopting postures that gratify the domestic urge for ‘ghairat’ (honour) rather than its economic interests. In a recent speech made by a retired foreign secretary, the US was described as a state unfriendly to Pakistan’s interests with a history of going against Pakistan at crucial junctures. This attitude will be of no benefit to Pakistan, given its inherent domestic weaknesses.

In today’s world, defeat can be described in one way only: international isolation. Yet the concept of honour can only be realised through standing alone and fighting for a cause. Be it Kashmir or any other issue, principles don’t help if they cause isolation, pointing to martyrdom as justification for national honour. We must learn from China’s non-confrontational approach to its rival, the US. Beijing knows that the US is looking at South Asia as an arena where China could be challenged but its relations with Washington remain mostly intact. In our black and white Manichaean mind, we can prove our loyalty to China by vociferously opposing the US. The ambiguity of benefiting from maintaining friendly relations with both China and the US at the same time does not appeal to us. We prefer keeping things clearly defined; for instance, the US and India on one side and China and Pakistan on the other. That is not how China looks at India, nor India at China. Pakistan must learn to be more objective about the crisis it is facing internally because of its past operation of foreign policy in the region. Ironically, today Pakistan can sort out this crisis through self-correction.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 9^th, 2010.