Several months ago, a couple of caricatures went viral on social
media. In one of those caricatures, Donald Trump was depicted as a child
sitting on a chair and Vladimir Putin was shown whispering something into
Trump’s ears from behind. In the other, Trump was portrayed as sitting in Steve
Bannon’s lap and the latter was shown mumbling into Trump’s ears, “Who is a big
boy now?” And Trump was shown replying, “I am a big boy.”
The meaning conveyed by those cunningly crafted caricatures
was to illustrate that Trump lacks the intelligence to think for himself and
that he is being manipulated and played around by Putin and Bannon. Those
caricatures must have affronted the vanity of Donald Trump to an extent that after
the publication of those caricatures, he became ill-disposed towards Putin and fired
Bannon from his job as the White House chief strategist in August last year.
Donald Trump is an impressionable man-child whose vocabulary
does not extend beyond a few words and whose frequent typographical errors on
his Twitter timeline, such as ‘unpresidented’ and ‘covfefe’ have made him a
laughing stock for journalists and social media users alike. These spelling
mistakes reveal that though fond of watching news and talk shows on the
American conservative television channels, like the Fox News, but Trump isn’t
much of a reader.
It is very easy for the neuroscientists on the payroll of
corporate media to manipulate the minds of such puerile politicians and to lead
them by the nose to toe the line of political establishments, particularly on
foreign policy matters. Nevertheless, it would be pertinent to mention here
that unlike dyed-in-the-wool politicians, like Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton, who cannot look past beyond the tunnel vision of political
establishments, it appears that Donald Trump is familiar with alternative news
perspectives, such as Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, no matter how racist and
xenophobic.
Though far from being its diehard ideologue but Donald Trump
has been affiliated with the infamous white supremacist ‘alt-right’ movement,
which regards Islamic terrorism as an existential threat to America’s security.
Trump’s recent tweet slamming Pakistan for playing a double game in Afghanistan
and providing safe havens to the Afghan Taliban on its soil reveals his
uncompromising and hawkish stance on terrorism.
Many political commentators on the Pakistani media are
misinterpreting the tweet as nothing more than a momentary tantrum of a fickle
US president, who wants to pin the blame of Washington’s failures in
Afghanistan on Pakistan. But along with the tweet, the Trump administration has
also withheld a tranche of $255 million US assistance to Pakistan, which shows
that it wasn’t ‘just a tweet’ but a carefully considered policy of the new US
administration to persuade Pakistan to toe Washington’s line in Afghanistan.
Moreover, it would be pertinent to mention here that In a
momentous decision in July last year, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif
was disqualified from holding public office by the country’s Supreme Court on
the flimsy pretext of holding an ‘Iqama’ (a work permit) for a Dubai-based
company. Although it is generally assumed the revelations in the Panama Papers,
that Nawaz Sharif and his family members own offshore companies, led to the
disqualification of the prime minister, but another important factor that
contributed to the downfall of Nawaz Sharif is often overlooked.
In October 2016, one of Pakistan’s leading English language
newspapers, Dawn News, published an exclusive
report dubbed as the ‘Dawn Leaks’ in Pakistan’s press. In the report
titled ‘Act against militants or face international isolation,’ citing an
advisor to the prime minister, Tariq Fatemi, who has since been fired from his
job for disclosing the internal deliberations of a high-level meeting to the
media, the author of the report Cyril Almeida contended that in a huddle of
Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership, the civilian government had told
the military’s top brass to withdraw its support from the militant outfits
operating in Pakistan, specifically from the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba
and Jaish-e-Mohammad.
After losing tens of thousands of lives to terror attacks
during the last decade, an across the board consensus has developed amongst
Pakistan’s mainstream political forces that the policy of nurturing militants
against regional adversaries has backfired on Pakistan and it risks facing international
isolation due to belligerent policies of Pakistan’s security establishment. Not
only Washington, but Pakistan’s ‘all-weather ally’ China, which plans to invest
$62 billion in Pakistan via its China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)
projects, has also made its reservations public regarding Pakistan’s continued
support to the aforementioned jihadist groups.
Thus, excluding a handful of far-right Islamist political
parties that are funded by the Gulf’s petro-dollars and historically garner
less than 10% votes of Pakistan’s electorate, all the civilian political forces
are in favor of turning a new leaf in Pakistan’s checkered political history by
endorsing the government’s decision of an indiscriminate crackdown on militant
outfits operating in Pakistan. But Pakistan’s security establishment jealously
guards its traditional domain, the security and foreign policy of Pakistan, and
still maintains a distinction between the so-called ‘good and bad’ Taliban.
Regarding Pakistan’s duplicitous stance on terrorism, it’s
worth noting that there are three distinct categories of militants operating in
Pakistan: the Afghanistan-focused Pashtun militants; the Kashmir-focused
Punjabi militants; and foreign transnational terrorists, including the Arab
militants of al-Qaeda, the Uzbek insurgents of Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan
(IMU) and the Chinese Uighur jihadists of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement
(ETIM). Compared to tens of thousands of native Pashtun and Punjabi militants,
the foreign transnational terrorists number only in a few hundred and are hence
inconsequential.
Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is mainly comprised
of Pashtun militants, carries out bombings against Pakistan’s state apparatus.
The ethnic factor is critical here. Although the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) like
to couch their rhetoric in religious terms, but it is the difference of
ethnicity and language that enables them to recruit Pashtun tribesmen who are
willing to carry out subversive activities against the Punjabi-dominated state
apparatus, while the Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants have by and large
remained loyal to their patrons in the security agencies of Pakistan.
Although Pakistan’s security establishment has been willing
to conduct military operations against the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), which are
regarded as a security threat to Pakistan’s state apparatus, but as far as the
Kashmir-focused Punjabi militants, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba and
Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the Afghanistan-focused Quetta Shura Taliban, including
the Haqqani network, are concerned, they are still enjoying impunity because
such militant groups are regarded as ‘strategic assets’ by Pakistan’s security
agencies.
Therefore, the Sharif administration’s decision that
Pakistan must act against the jihadist proxies of the security establishment or
risk facing international isolation infuriated the military’s top brass, and
consequently, the country’s judiciary was used to disqualify an elected prime
minister in order to browbeat the civilian leadership of Pakistan.
Finally, after Trump’s recent outburst against Pakistan,
many willfully blind security and defense analysts are suggesting that Pakistan
needs to intensify its diplomatic efforts to persuade the new US administration
that Pakistan is sincere in its fight against terrorism. But diplomacy is not a
pantomime in which one can persuade one’s interlocutors merely by hollow words
without substantiating the words with tangible actions.
The double game played by Pakistan’s security agencies in
Afghanistan and Kashmir to destabilize its regional adversaries is in plain
sight for everybody to discern and feel indignant about. Therefore, Pakistan
will have to withdraw its support from the Afghan Taliban and the Punjabi militant
groups, if it is eager to maintain good working relations with the Trump
administration and wants to avoid economic sanctions and international censure.
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