Obama’s Pakistan trip
Barack Hussien Obama’s revelations last week that he visited Pakistan for three weeks back in 1981 have raised more then a few eye-brows.
What Obama was trying to do was to bolster his foreign policy credentials against his rivals. After all Hillary has visited close to 80 nations as First Lady and McCain served abroad with the military. The fact that Obama has lived in Indonesia as a child is a definite plus (or minus) towards his ambition of White House domination.
It is of interest how an American election campaign contender is able to use such trips to foreign nations as an electoral policy boost. If the late Benazir had ever bragged during a campaign rally that she had spent three weeks in the US her supporters would probably not have been impressed. Some might have even booed. As is widely known, she had actually spend significantly more then three weeks in the US and the UK– during her educational years at Harvard and Oxford and the later years in exile. And let’s not forget that mansion in Surrey which landed her in a lot of trouble over corruption charges.
However as most pious and wise politicians in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan are only too painfully aware: to have lived in the West is nothing to brag about if one is to run for the office. With foreign interference in Pakistani affairs at a record high, there hangs a general wariness of imported leadership.
The fact is that Benazir was far from the only Pakistani leader to have lived or studied abroad. Her charismatic father Zulfikar Bhutto who ruled in the 70s had studied at the University of California and at Oxford. The next potential Bhutto to become Prime Minister, the young Bilawal, is also studying at Oxford in line with family tradition.
Pakistan ’s first Prime Minster, Liaquat Ali Khan, had also studied at Oxford . Even Pakistan ’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was called to bar in the UK . During the movement for independence in the Subcontinent, following a period of disillusionment, Mr Jinnah returned to the UK to lead a quieter life for a while. Shaukat Aziz, who served as Prime Minister under Musharraf during 2004-2007, had worked abroad with Citibank in a number of countries including the UK and US prior to taking the office.
Indeed it is not just Pakistani politicians who have spent time abroad, the generals have done it as well. Serving in the Pakistan army Musharraf attended a one year course at the Royal College of Defence Studies. Pakistan ’s conservative-minded dictator through the 80s, General Zia ul Haq, had trained at the Commander and Staff College of the United States . Both these leader forged a very close alliance with the Americans, Zia against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan and Musharraf against the Taliban who haunt the tribal belt. An earlier General who ruled Pakistan in the 60s, Ayub Khan, had attended the Royal Military College at Sandhurst .
However one important Pakistani leader who has not studied in the West is Nawaz Sharif, who twice served as Prime Minister and holds the second highest number of seats in the current newly elected democratic coalition. Hillary Clinton has already expressed her concerns over the man who helped forge Pakistan ’s close ties with the Taliban during the 90s and then spent 8 years in exile, in Saudi Arabia of all places. He has recently called for a dialogue with the militants causing havoc in the country and has questioned the strategy being used by the US in its War on Terror. Perhaps his failure to see the light is explained by his lack of western education?
Minus Mr Sharif though, it is clear that Pakistani leaders have traditionally understood their British and American counterparts much better then their country has been understood by the West. With those three weeks Barack spent in Pakistan , though, all this could change.
