WikiLeaks — nothing unexpected

What WikiLeaks revealed about Pakistan is old hat. We knew as long ago as 1988 that Saudi King Abdullah had little regard for President Asif Ali Zardari. He apparently took a dislike to him when they first met in Riyadh when Zardari was the consort. However, if Abdullah judges people by allegations of corruption, he must hate half the world, including his own family, for their corrupt and dissolute ways. Who has not heard stories about the Saudi royal family that are circling the globe? They range from homosexual killings, for which one Saudi prince is now in jail in London, to spending millions a night gambling in Monte Carlo and earning billions in illegal kickbacks on arms deals. Of course, Abdullah is entitled to his opinions and it is not his fault that his views were leaked but for him to take umbrage over Zardari’s alleged money dealings is a glaring example of the pot calling the kettle black.

Similarly, what the leaks revealed about America trying to ferret out enriched uranium from one of our nuclear reactors is, again, not surprising given how obsessive the US is about the possibility that such a substance may go amiss. What is intolerable, however, was the manner the US sought to allay its concerns — by stealing. The thought that its ally might be as concerned and just as opposed to such material falling into the wrong hands does not occur to them. It says a lot about what America thinks of us and the nonsense they utter when they speak of Pakistan being ‘a trusted ally’. Frankly, neither trusts the other further than they can throw each other.

Former US vice-president Dick Cheney may have gone but his “one per cent” doctrine remains. Under this doctrine, if there is a one per cent chance of anything happening, America must assume that it will happen and act accordingly. By such logic, Americans should kill all smokers lest non-smokers die of passive inhalation of which there is more than a one per cent chance. For that matter, America should not have come to Afghanistan considering there is less than a one per cent chance of the venture succeeding.

It is curious how much American actions mirror those of Israel. In Israel too, the one per cent doctrine is the vogue. A rocket fired out of frustration from Palestine leads to the physical elimination of a whole community of Palestinians. We once likened Israeli influence on America as the tail wagging dog, no longer; it is the tail acting as if it is the head.

Clearly, paranoia has overtaken America. Transacting with America, as the leaks confirm, is like dealing with someone with a bipolar disorder. When America is on its medicine, like when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or her ilk visit Pakistan, it acts rationally but when the sedative is off, the other personality soon kicks in. No wonder dealing with America has driven Afghan President Hamid Karzai half mad.

The leaks have also removed the illusion that the Arabs and the Iranians were coming to a rapprochement. They are as distant as they were when their respective armies were lining up against each other centuries ago. And now, no further confirmation is needed that the Sunni-Shia divide remains unbridgeable. And yet, there is something breathtakingly hypocritical, even to jaded former diplomats, about inviting and embracing an Iranian president while urging another to cut off his head.

Where the leaks have caused untold damage is to the conduct of American diplomacy. Everyone interacting with the Americans has been put on notice that what they say could surface in the world’s newspapers and the internet. Every American diplomat must tread carefully in reporting what he thinks and senses lest, his views, when inevitably leaked, earn him the abiding ire of his interlocutor including the head of state of the country in question. American diplomacy, never very effective, has been rendered even more unproductive.

About the only good thing to emerge out of the wreckage that WiliLeaks has caused to the practice of diplomacy is that people know how yellow-livered some of their leaders are. But, on second thought, the public had probably guessed that already.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 1^st, 2010.