Kasuri urges proactive foreign policy

Pakistan is the only Islamic nuclear power and has many other pluses which make it the pivot state by all standards, so the present Pakistani government must pursue a proactive foreign policy.

These views were expressed by former Foreign Minister, Mian Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri, during an exclusive talk with The News.  Answering a question about the US-Pakistan relations, Kasuri said that the United States’ dependence on Pakistan would increase in the coming days following the Trump administration’s decision to keep its presence in Afghanistan. Without Pakistan’s cooperation, it would not be easy for Washington to properly pursue its new Afghan policy because handling logistics through the alternate route, Northern Distribution Network, is many times expensive, cumbersome and time-consuming as compared with the supply route via Pakistan.

Not only that, it is not only in the area of logistics that Pakistan’s cooperation becomes pivotal for the US but also in terms of Pakistan’s ethnic and historic relevance- and ties- in the Af-Pak region besides its globally acknowledged geo-strategic location that increases Pakistan’s significance in all international moves revolving around Afghanistan and the entire adjoining region, added the former Foreign Minister. It was in this backdrop that Zbigniew Brzezinski once described Pakistan as a pivot state.

This strategic significance calls for a proactive foreign policy, opined Kasuri.

Whether sanity will at last prevail in US-Pakistan relations now that the Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif has gone to the United States for talks with his counterpart and other American functionaries concerned, a question was asked. Replying to this query, the erstwhile Foreign Minister said, “It would be more appropriate to use the term ‘self-interest’ instead of ‘sanity’ because sanity is sometimes given specific meanings by different people. So, it is the self-interest which, I think, will prevail”.

Explaining the term ‘self-interest’, Mian Kasuri said self-interest leads to a realistic approach which now seems to have been adopted as there is an understanding in Washington about Pakistan’s increased significance and relevance especially with reference to the new vigorous policy that Trump administration wants to pursue in this region. Meeting between our Foreign Minister and American functionaries in Washington is a manifestation of this realization. Americans might have liked to come to Pakistan but one guesses they had information about peculiar atmosphere prevailing inside Pakistani society vis-à-vis US”.

Mian Khurshid Kasuri also reminded this scribe of Pakistan’s pivotal position which was asserted when Pakistan once suspended NATO supplies to Afghanistan following a NATO helicopter attack in which two Pakistani soldiers were martyred within Pakistan’s borders.

What was Pakistan’s weight in the world of today? Kasuri replied, “All the pivotal sectors and institutions ought to be on the same page and there is dire need for economic stability as well otherwise the end result has to be a negative impact. And, Government of Pakistan has to lead from the front in the present regional-cum-global scenario in general and in the matter of dealing with the United States in particular which still holds a lot of sway over the west as well as over large parts of the world.”