WASHINGTON - Former President and PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari has urged President Donald Trump to quickly appoint a high-level envoy to South Asia to underscore US leadership in the region and seize an opportunity missed by the Obama administration to coordinate a top-level response to the regional terrorist threat.
In an interview with The Washington Times, Zardari, who is in Washington in connection with Trump’s inaugural festivities, even suggested the name of Anne Patterson, a former American ambassador to Pakistan and Egypt, saying she would be a “good pick” for such an assignment.
He said US leadership reached a high point in 2009 when President Barack Obama appointed Ambassador Richard Holbrooke to be a special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, but that the administration lost focus after Holbrooke’s death a year later from heart complications.
He said Ambassador Patterson, as a special envoy to South Asia, could carry the kind of diplomatic weight that regional leaders hoped Holbrooke would bring — the kind of weight that results in “executive level” dialogues that are more robust “than Obama had”, Zardari said.
“With the world being as it is, with the mindset of terrorism as the new war in the world,” he said, “the least [the US] can do is sit down with us and have a long, drawn-out strategy, which we can work on together to fight this mindset.”
On Kashmir, the former Pakistan president blamed India for the failure to resolve the dispute over Kashmir and argued that Washington and other international powers have a responsibility to “nudge” New Delhi toward a deal.
He lamented the status of peace talks involving international powers, the Afghan government and the Taliban.
The “warlords” who dominate the Taliban, he said, “don’t want to fight in an election; they don’t want to fight in a democratic way.”
“Dialogue is the only democratic form of moving forward, but obviously it hasn’t succeeded in the last 10 years,” he said.
About Pakistan’s political landscape, Zardari said he is working toward building his party’s base ahead of elections next year. He declined to comment on whether he would seek the prime minister post, The Washington Times said.
But he openly criticised Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, saying he hasn’t played a constructive role in the nation’s parliament and has failed to put forward a coherent foreign policy.
“The man hasn’t even appointed a foreign minister,” Zardari was quoted as saying. “He’s got two aides on foreign affairs, but he’s got no foreign minister. He doesn’t have a point man. You’ve got to have a point man.”
“In 64 years, for 50 percent of the time we’ve had dictators ruling,” Zardari said, while referring to the country’s institutions. “Then we’ve had democracies that have never completed their term. Mine was the first that completed its term. And, in spite of the fact that I had reservations on the way the elections were conducted, I accepted the results begrudgingly and I stuck to the position of transferring power — which was the first time that a peaceful transition of power was made.”
He said that Trump’s critics should not dismiss him out of hand but rather give him a chance to make his mark in the region, beset by conflicts in Afghanistan, jihadi terrorist movements and the increasingly tense Indian-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir.
“It’s too early,” Zardari said. “Wait for the first 90 days at least, and then we see how the cookie crumbles, or talks and walks.
“The man has managed to get a majority in states where it was never imagined that the Democrats could lose,” he said. “So how do we underestimate him?”
Zardari, who is staying at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in downtown Washington, also urged President Trump to do what President Obama never did — “Obama never had proper interaction with any Pakistani chief executive.” Zardari met President Obama in 2011.
What is needed today, Zardari said, is a US president who can breathe new life into the relationship by realising that the wars against extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan are the same — and are no different from those being waged against the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda-aligned groups from Syria and Iraq to Yemen and Libya.
“We’re losing the battle of minds against extremists in Afghanistan, we’ve lost it in Pakistan, we’ve lost it in Syria, we’ve lost it in Yemen, we’ve lost it in Iraq, we’ve lost it in Libya, we’ve lost it everywhere,” the 61-year-old former president said.
“I would humbly request the new president of America to sit back and interact with world leaders — present and past leaders and regional leaders — and think forward toward a policy which is doable,” he said. “That would entail, basically, confidence-building between the different countries in the region and meaningful actions” toward defeating the extremist mindset.