Hillary, Zardari & One Iranian Bureaucrat

I am stunned, pleased and ashamed. In a few minutes from now, there’s a chance that the foreign minister of the biggest power on earth will meet … who? Not the President of Iran, or Iran’s army chief or any of the seniors, but the Deputy foreign minister of Iran, not a very powerful position within the Iranian system, and that too if the Iranians didn’t decide in the last minute that they don’t want to meet the Americans.

Richard Holbrooke, who has a dubious position as the U.S. special envoy for ‘Af-Pak’ has already met the deputy Iranian foreign minister, and that’s the highest the Iranians are willing to go in giving respect to Mr. Hoolbrooke, unlike the Zardaris, the Gilanis and the Qureshis and the rest of them who fall all over each other to get an opportunity to shake hands with this U.S. bureaucrat.

So desperate is the United States at The Hague to meet the Iranians that they begged everyone they know to convince the Iranians to attend this conference on Afghanistan where Washington hopes to get help getting out of the mess it has created in that country.

And just like typical stooges, our President Zardari and Foreign Minister Mehmood Qureshi rushed to Tehran recently on behalf of the Americans to plead with the Iranians to attend this U.S.-sponsored conference, not knowing that dragging Iran into Afghanistan is actually part of the U.S. plan to ditch Pakistan in the gutter and trample on Pakistani interests by uniting the world against our country. I mean how stupid can you be, Mr. President Zardari and Mr. Foreign Minister Qureshi?

Last week our President traveled secretly to Dubai to meet, not the U.S. president or vice president, not even the U.S. foreign minister, but some bureaucrat with a questionable title called ‘Af-Pak special envoy’. Imagine: the head of the 6th nuclear power, the 5th or the 6th largest standing army in the world, a nation with considerable strategic, political and economic position, flying off like some third-level government officer to meet a third-rate American civil servant in Dubai.

And here are the Iranians being begged by the Americans to meet them. And for what? So that Iran could permit NATO and the U.S. military to use its ports to transport fuel, food and equipment to Afghanistan. The objective is to rob Pakistan of any advantage in negotiations with the United States. Iran is of course dying to replace Pakistan as an equal partner of the U.S. and they will get that status on their terms, not like us in Pakistan where our ex-President Musharraf unfortunately gave the Americans so much access and now the puppet government of Zardari-Gilani has gone much farther than its predecessor [at least President Musharraf had certain red lines drawn for the Americans, which is why they destabilized his government].

President Zardari and the rest of the puppets in his government, especially Ambassador Husain Haqqani and Interior Advisor Rehman Malik [thank God Mehmood Ali Durrani is out] should be ashamed of themselves when Hillary Clinton begs a deputy minister in Iran for a meeting. In our case, any low-level officer in her office can call the President of Pakistan and he’d rush to meet not her but that low-level officer, and that too anywhere the low-level officer wishes, like Dubai for example.

Ambassador Haqqani is doing a great job for the Americans in this case. He arranged that secret meeting in Dubai so that no one in Pakistan can know what Mr. Zardari is cooking with the Americans. Not a single officer in the Presidency, in the PPP, in the media, the intelligence community or the diplomatic community knows what our President discussed with a U.S. government officer in secret in Dubai. Does Ambassador Haqqani not know that he is doing something wrong by arranging this kind of a meeting? Or is it okay as long as it serves American interests?

Holbrook is coming to Pakistan sometime next week after visiting India. Just wait and see how this political elite of ours will be begging the U.S. Embassy here for an invitation to his tea reception and a photo opportunity.

I hope to see the day when these politicians are disqualified from holding public office for the next 20 or 30 years and their little fieldoms, also known as political parties, are destroyed to pave the way for honest Pakistani leaders to emerge. It can happen in Russia (Putin), it can happen in Venezuela (Chavez), it can happen in Turkey (Erdogan), it can happen in Malaysia (Mahatir), it can happen in Iran (Nejad), it can happen in China (Hu Jintao). It certainly can happen in Pakistan.