Last week Pakistan’s parliament passed a unanimous resolution declaring that the great state of Pakistan will decline to send troops into Yemen. This did not go down well in the Arab countries. Not well at all.
The foreign minister of the Emirates (a.k.a. yet another prince) angrily said that Pakistan would pay a steep price for the refusal. Then our own Interior Minister, Chaudhry Nisar (whose defiantly noir toupee remains proof that once you go black you don’t go back), released his own statement. In it he said that the angry reactions and threats from the U.A.E minister were “ironic” since we feel nothing but “brotherly sentiments” for both Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
If you were to believe the press, it was a show of strength against the bullies of the peninsula, a spectacle to prove that we have a national spine and are not always to be found in a supine position of seduction and shame. Some of us were outraged (outraged!) that the GCC and others would dare to criticize the decision of our hallowed parliament. Really? You’re surprised that a collection of absolute monarchies, where women have no rights and expats even fewer, don’t actually respect parliamentary procedures? Would you like some fries with that delusion? A lot of the articles that celebrate the decision (its unanimity was widely touted) touched on how many Pakistanis live in the Emirates, as if this fact were a bargaining chip. For some reason we think that the 1.6 million Pakistanis working in the emirates are a silent army that we could recall at a moment’s notice, crippling the economy of the emirates and sending the Burj-ul-whatevers crashing down into the sand dunes below. This is ridiculous. You can recall every Pakistani working there (remember, they left for a reason) but you know that Indians and Bangladeshis would fill their vacated places faster than you can say ‘Oh, right’.
Drawing room experts scoff at how Dubai is nothing but a credit card booth and therefore has no real power. Now, I hate Dubai as much as the next thoughtful person, but Dubai isn’t the only part of the U.A.E. and to think that the country has no real power is naïve. Especially over us. As one of the only places that still lets Pakistanis set up and maintain businesses abroad (think of GEO TV), they could for instance just stop issuing licenses overnight. Or withhold aid, contracts and other financial assistance to us. They could, in short, stop the money and cause some serious damage. As that’s to say nothing of Saudi Arabia.
It is because we all know that our recent posturing of strength – the unanimous resolution of the parliament, the angry press releases — are all slightly suspicious. It reeks of the kind of political optics that you hear about in memoirs and reruns of the West Wing. Could it be that the Arabs are letting us go through the motions of independent decision making, confident in the knowledge that in the end they’ll get what they want anyway? Our prime minister said as much in his recent speech, when he assured the Arab states that their anger was owed to a “misunderstanding” over what the parliament’s edict meant.
It’s not a surprise of course that the Arabs are getting all hot and bothered (haha, desert joke). They think of our army as theirs to rent. It was Saudi Arabian money that led to the development of our nuclear weapon, all so that they didn’t have to do it themselves. In so many ways we have always been the regional equivalent of a car rental. As with so many things, they outsource what they don’t have, which is everything but money.
Observe: I recently read that Blackwater, the notorious supplier of private mercenaries, still reeling from bad press because of Iraq and other atrocities, has changed its name and settled in Abu Dhabi, where its owner is making billions in contracts to protect all sorts of things (though not, one imagines, human rights).
And here is where the hypocrisy really kicks in. The Saudis say Al-Qaeda is in Yemen. I don’t doubt it. My question is: since when do they care? Are you fighting al-Qaeda (a Saudi export) or the Iranian backed militia? Because you can have it both ways. Also, how is it that al-Qaeda, or any of the other loonies out there who keep bombing our people for being aligned with the West, have not once tried anything in Dubai, or Bahrain? Both have booze and prostitutes and Americans galore. But not once has a suicide bomber found his way there. The same way that the Arab Spring didn’t. Remember, these aren’t nations, they are despotic Kingdoms. And kings, as medieval literature tells you, don’t play by the same rules as everyone else. They aren’t part of the same war. Partly, we all suspect, because they are rich enough not to declare a side.
It’s the same hypocrisy that we displayed this week. Despite the show of a unanimous parliament and ergo, a unified country, intelligence officials shut down a talk on Baloch missing persons to be held at LUMS, a private university, because it would ‘malign Pakistan’. It’s come to the point where we are not even allowed to talk about Balochistan. At all. Like our largest province doesn’t even exist (or shouldn’t). The talk was later held in Islamabad’s Kuch Khaas, after which authorities suddenly woke up to the fact that the space was a commercial enterprise in a residential zone and are now trying to close it down as I type.
To claim the virtues of a strong parliament the same week as you try to shut down any discussion of Balochistan is a textbook case of why the parliamentary resolution is an act in a political theatre and, sadly, a badly acted one.
The foreign minister of the Emirates (a.k.a. yet another prince) angrily said that Pakistan would pay a steep price for the refusal. Then our own Interior Minister, Chaudhry Nisar (whose defiantly noir toupee remains proof that once you go black you don’t go back), released his own statement. In it he said that the angry reactions and threats from the U.A.E minister were “ironic” since we feel nothing but “brotherly sentiments” for both Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
If you were to believe the press, it was a show of strength against the bullies of the peninsula, a spectacle to prove that we have a national spine and are not always to be found in a supine position of seduction and shame. Some of us were outraged (outraged!) that the GCC and others would dare to criticize the decision of our hallowed parliament. Really? You’re surprised that a collection of absolute monarchies, where women have no rights and expats even fewer, don’t actually respect parliamentary procedures? Would you like some fries with that delusion? A lot of the articles that celebrate the decision (its unanimity was widely touted) touched on how many Pakistanis live in the Emirates, as if this fact were a bargaining chip. For some reason we think that the 1.6 million Pakistanis working in the emirates are a silent army that we could recall at a moment’s notice, crippling the economy of the emirates and sending the Burj-ul-whatevers crashing down into the sand dunes below. This is ridiculous. You can recall every Pakistani working there (remember, they left for a reason) but you know that Indians and Bangladeshis would fill their vacated places faster than you can say ‘Oh, right’.
Drawing room experts scoff at how Dubai is nothing but a credit card booth and therefore has no real power. Now, I hate Dubai as much as the next thoughtful person, but Dubai isn’t the only part of the U.A.E. and to think that the country has no real power is naïve. Especially over us. As one of the only places that still lets Pakistanis set up and maintain businesses abroad (think of GEO TV), they could for instance just stop issuing licenses overnight. Or withhold aid, contracts and other financial assistance to us. They could, in short, stop the money and cause some serious damage. As that’s to say nothing of Saudi Arabia.
It is because we all know that our recent posturing of strength – the unanimous resolution of the parliament, the angry press releases — are all slightly suspicious. It reeks of the kind of political optics that you hear about in memoirs and reruns of the West Wing. Could it be that the Arabs are letting us go through the motions of independent decision making, confident in the knowledge that in the end they’ll get what they want anyway? Our prime minister said as much in his recent speech, when he assured the Arab states that their anger was owed to a “misunderstanding” over what the parliament’s edict meant.
Kings, as medieval literature tells you, don't play by the same rules as everyone else
It’s not a surprise of course that the Arabs are getting all hot and bothered (haha, desert joke). They think of our army as theirs to rent. It was Saudi Arabian money that led to the development of our nuclear weapon, all so that they didn’t have to do it themselves. In so many ways we have always been the regional equivalent of a car rental. As with so many things, they outsource what they don’t have, which is everything but money.
Observe: I recently read that Blackwater, the notorious supplier of private mercenaries, still reeling from bad press because of Iraq and other atrocities, has changed its name and settled in Abu Dhabi, where its owner is making billions in contracts to protect all sorts of things (though not, one imagines, human rights).
And here is where the hypocrisy really kicks in. The Saudis say Al-Qaeda is in Yemen. I don’t doubt it. My question is: since when do they care? Are you fighting al-Qaeda (a Saudi export) or the Iranian backed militia? Because you can have it both ways. Also, how is it that al-Qaeda, or any of the other loonies out there who keep bombing our people for being aligned with the West, have not once tried anything in Dubai, or Bahrain? Both have booze and prostitutes and Americans galore. But not once has a suicide bomber found his way there. The same way that the Arab Spring didn’t. Remember, these aren’t nations, they are despotic Kingdoms. And kings, as medieval literature tells you, don’t play by the same rules as everyone else. They aren’t part of the same war. Partly, we all suspect, because they are rich enough not to declare a side.
It’s the same hypocrisy that we displayed this week. Despite the show of a unanimous parliament and ergo, a unified country, intelligence officials shut down a talk on Baloch missing persons to be held at LUMS, a private university, because it would ‘malign Pakistan’. It’s come to the point where we are not even allowed to talk about Balochistan. At all. Like our largest province doesn’t even exist (or shouldn’t). The talk was later held in Islamabad’s Kuch Khaas, after which authorities suddenly woke up to the fact that the space was a commercial enterprise in a residential zone and are now trying to close it down as I type.
To claim the virtues of a strong parliament the same week as you try to shut down any discussion of Balochistan is a textbook case of why the parliamentary resolution is an act in a political theatre and, sadly, a badly acted one.