Daily Times

Rhetoric and emotional rants aside, folks in our neck of the woods love to remain in a delusional and self-created cocoon. Take the recent visit of the premier, Mr Nawaz Sharif to Washington, for example. A lot was said about his visit in the print and electronic media. Don’t know who but someone was drumming up this fantasy of the pesky drones to be part of the negotiations. Hmm, clearing my throat here, I meant discussions. I often wonder how heads of states cover a wide variety of topics in a very limited amount of time. Like how do they jump from one issue to the other? Who gets to decide the agenda and who gets to cover the bullet points? As they say, it is all about your presentation. Anyway, so a wide range of topics was at hand, and reading the joint statement after the Sharif-Obama moot, it almost felt like what-a-waste-of-human-time. The language of the communiqué was so overly diplomatic that it almost felt like a rehash of news clips. All the details were as old as an oak tree in your backyard.

Come to think of it, there were no details. The usual feel good, oft-repeated, oft-printed mumbo-jumbo. Then there were people on our end criticising the relationship to the nth degree and drawing parallels to a ‘master-slave’ relationship. The sensitive hyper patriots ought to revisit our history to truly understand our dependency on Washington. Some of the scribes are of the opinion that our creation was due to the collusion of the British and Americans. It was primarily to facilitate a wall, a shield if you will, to safeguard the region from Soviet influence. I tend to agree with those scribes, as facts tend to support that view. Try the 1950s for example, and see how this relationship started and solidified after the very first martial law of Ayub Khan. Pakistan served as a ‘client state’, and when our Indian friends mock us for that relationship, I accept their criticism. However, I remind them of the ground realities, and how the third world countries typically get aligned with countries of influence to survive.

Much like at its birth, India was under the umbrella of the former Soviet Union. India was able to reinvent itself, in a different fashion, and unfortunately, we were not able to market ourselves other than as ‘contract footsies’. Often what our emotional hyper patriots in their self-created grandeur tend to ignore is that relationships between nations are dependent on some sort of transactions. It has to be mutually beneficial. No one gives you anything for free. It is a trade of give and take. A transactional relationship, which some call a master-slave relationship, in reality is definitely not so. How often do you see ‘slaves’ do what our establishment does? How often doyou have slaves, for that matter, criticising their ‘masters’ in their daily national narrative? How is it that the so-called slaves get away with keeping their masters’ worst enemy? So absurd is that notion that it is not worth wasting any breath on. We are — to say the least — best described as unequal partners. It is not unusual to have unequal partners in a business relationship, where one partner has a lion’s share of investment and the other brings minimal investment but priceless expertise or market know-how to the table. Like every business relationship, this transactional relationship has gone through its high and lows. It has stood the test of time.

What else was expected from the recent meeting of the heads of the two states? The US president would have assured Prime Minister Sharif that those pesky unmanned planes would no longer fly in your territory. Kindly take the only daughter of your nation, who is incidentally serving time here, on your way back. We will be quadrupling our trade with you, as the security conditions are so conducive that the business sector here in the US is killing each other to get a share of your market. You get the picture. The channels were drumming up the potential barter of “Afridi-Afia” and expecting major breaking news, right after all the photo ops were done. But perhaps those were just dreams as usual.

Like any business relationship, the partners constantly assess each other’s strengths and weaknesses. It is fair to say that we are banking on our strategic geographical position when it comes to the so-called endgame in Afghanistan. Knowing perhaps nothing about the military angle of this so-called ‘endgame’, I humbly feel that it is a very questionable approach. The partnership cannot solely depend on this particular aspect. It is high time that we reassess our own strengths and market those strengths to our partners here in Washington.

The writer is a Pakistani-American mortgage banker. He blogs at http://dasghar.blogspot.com and can be reached at dasghar@aol.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/dasghar