This one’s a little too early to call but it could be said with reasonable certainty that Hina Rabbani Khar, despite a few detractors back home, won’t do too bad a job in her stint as foreign minister.
Her argument of Pakistan not needing any cajoling in the war against terror is the sort of stuff trained diplomats say. It is this argument that needs to be reiterated endlessly instead of pleas against this injustice by the west or that.
On thin ice, Pakistan is. There has always been more than a nagging suspicion in the west that the Pakistani state has its own parallel math and is playing along in the war against terror because, first, it couldn’t have actually refused and, second, because it can get some money out of the whole thing. This is a belief that has been reinforced in the aftermath of the Osama episode in Abbottabad. The emphatic declaration of our committment to the war against militant extremism and the realisation that this is a war we fight for our own good goes a long way in our diplomatic endeavour to get the west to appreciate our not insignificant struggle against terror.
It’ll take more than words, however. Though the Indians have shown remarkable restraint in the aftermath of the (latest) Mumbai attacks, they’re not taking this thing lying down. Not many would find fault with Home Minister Chidambaram’s statements at Thimpu that nations cannot go on blaming their non-state actors indefinitely. Being a government means responsibility – moral and legal – to crack down on safe havens that are used to export terror out of the country.
Sovereignty, the maiden whose dishonour some circles cry murder about, is not merely granted to nations but is a privilege that must be earned.
The new foreign minister might have her work cut out for her but it is not tougher than the lot of the security establishment, which has to effectively weed out the menace of Islamofascism from our land.
