Recently I was stunned to see the following message by current German ambassador to Pakistan, Martin Kobler: “I have a special request, maybe one of you can help me: i need to print new business cards and want to add my name in braille script for the blind. can anyone message me institutions for the blind to help me in that? Thanks.”
This message underscores the ambassador’s relentless pursuit of reaching out to every Pakistani citizen. He has been all over – from Namak Mandi in Peshawar to Lahore and Chitral. And now he is looking out for ways to connect with the blind in Pakistan. I can’t resist but salute his passion and wonder how many of our ambassadors abroad indulge in this pro-active and incessant public diplomacy.
Lijian Zhao, the deputy head of the Chinese embassy, is a second outstanding case study. This diplomat is single-handedly taking on all the detractors of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. While a lot of Pakistanis, motivated by western aspersions and doubts on the nature and the perceived long-term consequences for Pakistan, keep grumbling and cribbing, Lijian is acting as a one-man demolition squad for this opposition, as a real spokesperson for Pakistan.
Sushma Swaraj, the Indian foreign minister, stands out as a third example of pro-active public diplomacy. She presumably has a team that monitors the social media. But action-oriented response to any issue involving China, Pakistan or Afghanistan is exceptionally prompt.
Particularly requests for urgent, mostly, patient visas, elicit instant and almost real-time response to the respective diplomatic missions of India. And the missions do respond to these instructions by the foreign minister.
These three case studies stand in pretty sharp contrast to our diplomacy in general. Responses by the Foreign Office or our missions abroad to situations with direct implications for Pakistan’s image are usually slow, if not missing altogether. Even the Indian embassy in Kabul outsmarts the Pakistani embassy – as far as social media outreach is concerned. The embassy there is like a closed silo, driven by fears, reeling from inertia and a siege mentality.
Individually all officers – whether in Kabul or Washington – are very hospitable, helpful and forthcoming, but as professional representatives of their country, they are way behind the envoys mentioned above.
And mind you: these are examples of three different systems. Germany is a multi-party functional democracy and an open society. China offers the opposite: a single-party political dispensation where political and economic vision flows from the Party’s Polit Bureau. India too is a multi-party functional democracy with more or less the same governance regime that governs Pakistan. But of course, their military never intervened and the governance structures evolved on their own.
Can anyone from Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry match these three case studies?
Published in Daily Times, December 20th 2017.