And an uneasy Pakistan
The real surprise in Donald Trump’s so-called Muslim ban is not that it is really playing out – he said he’d do something like this all along the campaign trail – but rather in the utterly self-defeating nature of its implementation. Way back in the day, when a certain Osama bin Laden headed al Qaeda, he and their chief ideologue Abu Musab al Suri devoted considerable time and literature towards provoking Muslim specific xenophobia in the west. The idea was, of course, to embitter Muslims who’d taken refuge in the American Dream, etc, to the point of providing fresh recruits for the Islamists.
Trump’s ban is doing just that. Already hundreds of working class professionals are stuck at airports and uncertain about their future. More than harming the extremists, this move is playing right into their hands. And since much of the Muslim world has stayed typically mute, while Arab monarchs have actually endorsed the ban (typically), this move may have advanced yet another of the Islamists’ rallying cries – that Muslim rulers are but western puppets, etc. There must be a reason, after all, that the only popular official opposition to the ban has come from the west. It was the German chancellor that staked her political future by welcoming Muslim refugees when even Muslim countries turned them out. And it was the Canadian prime minister that met the refugees and said “welcome home” even though they had been driven from their homes and just escaped almost certain death.
For Pakistan the stakes are different, yet high. True, the Afghan endgame makes us indispensible. But how long will that last? And if the headlines about the JuD chief are true, and the one-phone-call thing just happened again, there’s a lot more we can be asked to cave in on very soon. For far too long we’ve weaved a policy of ambiguity around our once unquestionable policy of strategic depth. And we frustrated two two-term presidents with it. From the looks of things, it’s not likely that that policy can last another week, if even a day. If the players in Islamabad and Rawalpindi know what’s good for them, and us, they’d have already rubbished the old ways and put together a transparent, progressive replacement. It’s not just US goodwill we need, after all, it’s also their money; and a lot of it.
