Daily Times

Politics in Pakistan are becoming quite boring. Even the results of the recent elections in Lahore were so very predictable. The PML-N was not going to lose that election under any circumstances. At the same time it could not afford to win it too overwhelmingly, so they won it by a mere percentage point or so. Or perhaps the results represent the true number of votes cast — a possibility but a remote one at best. Besides the election nothing much else is unexpected. The superior courts seem to reverse virtually every important decision made by the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP). Load shedding persists, new roads are being built and rebuilt, and then built again with great regularity. In contrast, news from the US is quite out of the ordinary.

It seems that Pakistan has suddenly become less of a pariah as far as the Obama White House is concerned. For most of his tenure, President Obama has treated Pakistan with undisguised contempt. However, he is now warming up to Pakistan. No, it is not something nice about Pakistan that has made him a convert. Rather, it is the stuff around us that has brought about this ‘change of heart’. In a few days, our Prime Minister (PM) will visit the White House at Obama’s invitation. The PM, as expected, will take a large retinue of assistants who will assist him to do whatever it is that he requires all these assistants to assist him with, or not. Whatever agreements, if any, that the PM and the US president might sign have already been worked out by other assistants on both sides and have been agreed on by our real foreign office.

The interesting question though is why President Obama has suddenly warmed up to Pakistan. I do not think it is our PM’s personality that has bowled Obama over. So, what else is it then? Two obvious things come to mind: first of course is that the US needs some help from Pakistan to keep things relatively quiet in Afghanistan. Obama has already deferred further US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. So, he would prefer not to have a Kunduz repeat during the rest of his term in office. Whether Pakistan can help him in that regard is questionable. The other reason behind why Obama seems to have warmed up to Pakistan has to do with the tactical nuclear weapons that Pakistan is developing or so it has been reported by some major US newspapers. To prevent Pakistan from developing and deploying tactical nukes, the US might offer the PM not just some carrots but possibly a US version of carrot halwa (gajar ka halwa). Whether such halwa will charm the PM, his assistants and advisers remains to be seen.

Other than the sudden warming up of the US towards Pakistan, US politics in general are much more interesting these days than Pakistani politics. The process to choose eventual presidential candidates for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party is speeding up a bit and, on the Republican side, is becoming quite peculiar. A few weeks ago, I suggested in one of my articles that having an eventual US presidential election in 2016 between Hillary Clinton and Republican Senator Rand Paul might be interesting but it seems that Senator Paul is nowhere near becoming the eventual Republican nominee. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton remains the favourite to win the nomination. On the Republican side, it is up in the air. The ‘establishment’ of the Republican Party seems to be supporting either Senator Rubio or former governor Jeb Bush, both from Florida. However, neither one of them seem to have caught ‘fire’ with the Republican ‘rank and file’.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Republican race for the presidential nominee is the emergence of three rather unusual candidates as leaders in the polls so far. First, of course, is the rather flamboyant billionaire Donald Trump whose major claim to fame besides being a real estate magnate is his television show, The Apprentice. When Trump became the leader in the polls, ‘conventional wisdom’ was that he would fade away soon enough. However, his persistence at the top of the polls has been quite surprising and finally people have started wondering if Trump could eventually emerge as the Republican nominee. A retired brain surgeon with peculiar views and a female former executive of a major tech company who might or might not have been fired for incompetence are the other two candidates that, along with Trump, presently command the leads in most polls for the future Republican nominee. The rise of three non-politicians in the polls is unusual and perhaps suggests the Republican Party members’ distrust of the Republican establishment.

On the Democratic side, even though Hillary Clinton continues to lead in most polls, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has emerged as a reasonably popular alternative. What is interesting about Sanders is that even though he does not belong to the Democratic Party, he is running to become the Democratic Party nominee for president. The more interesting thing about Senator Sanders is that he is a self-avowed socialist. This at least as far as I know is the first time that a socialist is trying to get the nomination of a major political party. In the early part of the last century, Eugene V Debs ran for president quite a few times as a nominee of the US Socialist Party. Debs is perhaps the most famous socialist in US history. Since Debs, no other socialist has gained the same fame. Senator Bernie Sanders could well be the most famous socialist since Debs to contest at least in the Democratic Party nomination process to run for president of the US. It is extremely unlikely but it would be very interesting if the 2016 US presidential election was between a Socialist representing the Democrats and a capitalist billionaire representing the Republicans.

The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians of North America (APPNA)