Trump must appoint envoy to South Asia: Zardari

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump must appoint a high-level envoy to South Asia to seize an opportunity missed by his predecessor to coordinate a response to the regional terrorist threat, PPP Co-chairman Asif Zardari has said, criticising Barack Obama for never interacting with Pakistani leaders properly. 

“[Do] what [President] Obama never did - Obama never had proper interaction  with any Pakistani chief executive,” he said. Zardari, who met with Obama at the White House in 2011, said he was not interested in openly criticising Obama.

However, his comments sounded at times like an indictment of Obama’s handling of what has, for more than two decades, been one of Washington’s most vexing and complex foreign relationships, Washington Times said. 

Tensions between the US and Pakistan soared to new heights during Obama’s tenure during which US Special Forces conducted a raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Zardari said what is needed today 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, the paper said. 

“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 Libya, we’ve lost it everywhere,” the 61-year-old former president was quoted as saying by the paper. 

“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.  

Trump should appoint an envoy like Richard Holbrooke early in his term and not allow Washington partisanship to influence the move, Zardari said. 

The former Pakistani president suggested that a good pick might be Anne Patterson, a career Foreign Service officer and a former ambassador to Pakistan and Egypt. “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.” 

Zardari, the only elected Pakistani president ever to have completed a full term in office, 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 India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir. “Wait for the first 90 days at least, and then we see how the cookie crumbles, or talks and walks.” Zardari was in Washington to participate in Trump’s inaugural festivities.