- Afghan tweet trespasses into foreign affairs domain
The Trumpian tweet, with its combination of angry rhetoric, truth distortion and judgmental, patronising, final-word air, has caused unprecedented disruption within the US, with the outside world also feeling its shock waves. It has spawned a tsunami of copycats who employ this popular social media facet to ‘enlighten’ the hooked public on diverse, but mostly frivolous, matters. It could be said that if President Trump were to abandon this terse mode of communication and stick to writing formal letters, as he recently did when garnering support from PM Imran Khan for the Afghan peace process (with far better results), the world, if not a better, sweeter place, would at least be a less impulsive and confused one.
The outspoken federal minister for information is what is termed in political jargon a ‘hardliner’ or ‘loose cannon’, or as in the American ‘good cop, bad cop’ cliché, he is ‘officially’ expected to play the latter role. He has ruffled many feathers and stepped on numerous toes belonging to political rivals, in speech and tone that could have been less fiery. But in his Monday tweet, he has ventured into the precarious Afghan imbroglio, where till last reports came in, angels still feared to tread. A high-level security shake-up in Kabul on Sunday bringing two rigidly anti-Pakistan individuals as interior minister and acting defence minister, led to the vexed information minister addressing a condescending, even rude tweet, to the former. This, apart from being tantamount to meddling in Afghan internal affairs, also represents brazen infringement on Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi’s jealously guarded turf and is likely to invite the wrath, in private, of that martinet occupant. The FM’s ‘productive meetings’ in Kabul on Monday with the top Afghan leadership were held in the backdrop of the US’s still unofficial decision to withdraw 7,000 troops from Afghanistan, a development that makes the latter more amenable to the peace process, talks on which are ongoing between the Taliban and US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, forcefully facilitated by Pakistan. The information minister’s outburst also undermines President Ghani’s ‘soft’ position on Pakistan, long under threat by the pro-Indian lobby. Displaying impressive ministerial self-control goes a long way than indignant gabbling.
