Futile, beyond a point
It would be difficult to find fault with the copy of the president’s prose in his recent op-ed in the Washington Post. Its limitation was that it was perhaps as good as it could have been. Public perceptions are an actionable variable, through spin, but only to an extent. Crucial are the other variables, on which the president, despite his government’s recent show of petulance to the Americans, has no actual control.
Talk to, not at, Pakistan is a clever title. And the plea to consult allies, not inform them, is wise. But was the president talking at the Americans, not to them, when he counted out, as the Pakistani government is wont to in all its public diplomacy, the number of Pakistanis killed in the war against terror? That would lie on the assumption that the Americans are strawmen who dispute these facts. They don’t; no one does. Quite the contrary, the Americans ask us to do more because so many Pakistanis are dying.
There is, yes, another way to deflect the whole do-more drill. Pointing out the hypocrisy of wanting to talk to the Taliban in Afghanistan yet forbidding Pakistan to do so on its own. The problem with this line of reasoning is the admission of guilt. Yes, I did it and this is why I did it. Are we ready to go that way? Ready to bear those costs?
Pakistan, like every other state, has to watch out for itself. But whereas the security establishment wants a seat at the post-American Afghanistan table, our political government, indeed almost our entire mainstream political class, wants something else. They realise that the costs that come with this strategy vastly outweigh any possible benefit that a say in Afghanistan would yield us. Do we risk tearing our very own social fabric to the already immoral end of wanting to control another country?
No op-eds, no ads in the Wall Street Journal can begin to affect those variables. Change will come, if at all, from other quarters.