Pakistan wants more from Biden

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With Joe Biden assuming charge as the President, Pakistan hopes to improve its bilateral relations with the US. Pakistan expects US to have bilateral relations based on mutual understanding rather than clouded by the US’s interests in other regional countries like Afghanistan. This is what Dr Moeed Yusuf, the Prime Minister’s Special Assistant on National Security, tried to convey a day after Biden’s inauguration on January 20.

Dr Yusuf addressed a gathering of US policymakers on January 21 in Washington. He tried to convey a message that Pakistan was a changed nation which aspires to become a geo-economic melting pot. He regretted that the US looked at Pakistan in the past through the prism on terrorism and politically unstable Afghanistan.

“We are talking about providing the world with economic-bases, not military-bases,” he reportedly said at the gathering. He tried to draw attention towards the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to underpin that Pakistan is a good connecting point for western countries.

Dr Yusuf claimed that all western multinational companies in Pakistan earned profits well above their global average. He tried to sell Pakistan as a lucrative investment destination for US-China co-investment. At the same time, like all other Pakistani diplomats, he tried to paint India in a negative picture calling the neighbour as “intolerant” which has “serious internal tensions”.

Dr Yusuf’s stand was a pathetic attempt to portray Pakistan as an investment destination at a time the country is facing a severe economic crisis. On the verge of bankruptcy, Pakistan is surviving on the aid provided by China. His advocacy for US-China co-investment in Pakistan is considered to be another China ploy to control the Pakistani economy.

Under President Donald Trump, the US had significantly downgraded relationship with Pakistan. Trump did not even appoint a full-time ambassador to Islamabad while reducing the official level engagement to the level of assistant secretary of state. Imran Khan believes that Biden knows Pakistan better than any US presidents as he had chaired the powerful US Foreign Relations Committee for decades.

Also Read: Imran Khan faces opposition ire over foreign funding

Biden like Trump would like to withdraw US troops peacefully from Afghanistan, which is a major priority of the US at the moment. Biden also intends to review peace deal with the Taliban. Pakistan’s strategic partnership with China, however, is one thing which upsets the US. The US cannot back Pakistan if it wants to stop China as the next global power. 

Tale of a scandal

Nowadays the political debates in Pakistan are hovering around a revelation on former PM Nawaz Sharif’s alleged scam known as Broadsheet scandal. The issue was fanned when Kaveh Moussavi, Chief Executive Officer of Broadsheet, a British rating company, told a TV channel that Sharif had offered them bribe for abandoning probe against his foreign assets in 2012.

The CEO claimed that his company was approached by a person who claimed to be a nephew of Sharif. Moussavi declined the offer retorting that the Broadsheet did not negotiate with crooks.

The Sharif family has assets not only in the United Kingdom (UK) but across the globe. They required plenty of explanation about their resources of amassing these assets. The Broadsheet has been investigating how hundreds of millions of dollars had been stolen from Pakistan and stashed abroad.

According to Moussavi, former president and Chief of Army Staff General (retd) Pervez Musharraf was particularly interested in tracing the overseas assets of Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari. So the money allegedly looted from Pakistan could be brought back. “But we did not want to be part of any political victimisation that Musharraf was trying to do at the time. So we made it clear that we would not go only after these three personalities,” he said in the interview.

Now, PM Imran Khan has appointed Justice (retd) Sheikh Azmat as head of the inquiry committee into the Broadsheet scandal. Interior Minister Sheikh Rashid claims that the scandal would prove to be “Panama-2 of Pakistan” in next two to three month. He says US$100 million worth property of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) could come up from the scandal.