How dumb can the commentariat get?

Islamabad diary

They couldn’t see it coming and now they are into an overdrive of mourning. The Pakistani coverage of the US election has been the most idiotic of all. Whatever the polls in the US said the Pakistani media swallowed as the entire truth. Now they are shocked as if they have lost one of their own.

On a TV chat-show just a day before the election I heard two of our ex foreign ministers pontificating as if La Clinton’s election was a foregone conclusion. And they spoke darkly of the perils of a Trump presidency as they were discussing Hitler and no one else. This Pakistani love-fest with the Clintons is hard to understand. What were we celebrating and what were we hoping for?

Trump is being portrayed as evil and the soul of danger, which is baffling given the fact that, to the dismay of lingering Bushites, he blasted the Iraq war and spoke out unambiguously against American over-involvement in foreign adventures. The true war champion was La Clinton who has had a supportive or directing hand in the three wars which have torn the Middle East apart: Iraq, Syria and Libya. Indeed if a single person has to be held responsibility for the destruction of Libya and its descent into anarchy it is Secretary Clinton who pushed the Obama administration in that direction.

Yet we Muslims, both in the larger world of Islam and the Muslim diaspora in the US, just didn’t get it. We were outraged by Trump’s remarks about Muslim immigration. But Clinton’s wars, her active involvement in them, never elicited the same indignation.

But regarding the outcome of the US election why should we blame our obtuseness alone?    On Sunday, just two days before the election, I was at a lunch in Islamabad, sitting on a verandah commanding a stunning view of the hills, where almost the entire political section of the American embassy was present. To a man and the last fetching lady they were all pretty convinced, beyond all doubt, that the US was about to get its first woman president.

A few cold mugs of pure barley water emboldened me to deliver a small lecture on the advantages of a Trump presidency and how it might turn out to be a good thing for many parts of the world, not least the war-wracked Middle East, and they gave me strange and uncomprehending looks. One or two, eyeing the hills, said that in case of a Trump win they may have to look for promising real-estate deals in Islamabad. I am sure it won’t be long before they have revises their opinions and come to terms with their new reality. I look forward to the day, and it shouldn’t be long in coming, when they tell us how the Trump election is also an aspect, a manifestation, of the American dream.

I remember Ronald Reagan’s first election – I was then an editorial writer in the defunct ‘Muslim’ that used to come out from Islamabad – when there was much dismissive talk, including in the American media, of Reagan being a B-movie actor. Since then he is remembered as one of the more successful American presidents of the 20th    century…credited among other things with the eventual breakup of the Soviet empire, although the reasons for that lay less in anything the US did as in the internal wreckage wrought by that Soviet hidden explosive device called Mikhail Gorbachev.

My feeling is that contrary to the doomsday scenarios being painted everywhere today – in great part because of the perceptive American media which got this whole thing completely wrong – Donald Trump may well come to be seen in the same light.

He’s no one’s fool – fools are usually not self-made billionaires and fools, except for the odd George Bush who was a pawn in the hands of cleverer men than him, the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds, don’t usually become US presidents, although as H L Mencken, the great writer, was given to pointing out, there could be exceptions to this rule – and he’s proved he’s tough. Given some of the avoidable gaffes he committed during this campaign, gratuitous insults and the like, and the amount of abuse and flak he got as a result of this and other things, a lesser man, someone less colourful, would have been destroyed.

He took on the media. Who does that in American politics? At one point he said he would be neutral between Israel and the Palestinians? Anyone else would have found himself impaled for this. He went against Republican orthodoxy on things like birth control and free trade. In fact he went against the Republican establishment and still won the nomination. And he had sensible things to say about Vladimir Putin. For anyone else this would have been a suicide package.

Compare this with the Secretary who had really nothing new to say. She was boring. She was predictable and in the end this wasn’t good enough. Large sections of the electorate were frustrated and angry: unhappy about lost jobs, shut-down industries and falling or static incomes – the median income of the average American not having risen since 1999. Cursing the ‘establishment’ and the ‘rotten political system’, they wanted something different, and holding out a promise of that was not La Clinton but The Donald. That in the end, through all the clamour and vitriol, was the deciding factor.

As for the verdict of history there will be four long years in which to write it. But whatever it is it will be colourful and exciting. Under Clinton the US would have been condemned to four years of unrelieved dullness, of course with the occasional war or bombing thrown in. With Trump it will be interesting all the way.

We better do our homework. Our foreign policy establishment was tuned in to a Clinton victory. Now they’ll have to do some research on Trump’s profile. We shouldn’t kid ourselves…Pakistan will be low in the list of the new administration’s priorities. But if and when American attention turns to Afghanistan – it may, it may not, a Trump administration can even downgrade the importance of Afghanistan on the grounds that it’s no use pouring more money down that sinkhole – Pakistan will figure in the discussion, geography if nothing else dictating that outcome.

Before that occurs we have a duty to put in some of our smartest people to do the engaging with the new folks coming into Washington. This is not going to be easy. Our entire foreign policy line-up at present is lack-lustre, with little shine to it. Where do we get the smart guys from?

And, although for some time there is not likely to be much of a chance for a White House invitation, looking ahead to that possibility some brainstorming would be in order. It won’t do to repeat what happened with President Obama when in full view of the cameras our PM desperately struggled with a sheaf of papers as he prepared to utter the few bland words that are spoken on such occasions. Trump has a more overbearing personality than Obama. What effect might this have on our standard-bearers?

But there are things in common which could be stressed: certified membership of the billionaires’ club, properties galore and an aversion to paying taxes. This, like nothing else, should help break the ice.

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com