THE Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a misnomer; it should be renamed The Ministry of Clandestine Affairs.

There must be few countries where foreign policy is conducted in such a secretive manner, behind closed doors, beyond the pale of public scrutiny. Had Casanova been born a Pakistani and been alive today, he would have qualified to be an adviser to the prime minister, with the rank of a minister.

Mian Nawaz Sharif is simultaneously a peripatetic foreign minister and an absentee prime minister. He lives the subordinate’s dream: answerable only to one boss — himself. This freedom to do whatever, whenever, wherever, and for as long as he wants (his recent three-day sightseeing trip to Sri Lanka was two days too long), is the costly perquisite of both his offices. The snail-like auditor general may in time complain, but for this term at least, Nawaz Sharif is his own master. That explains why he spurns an elected National Assembly, and why it retaliates with the petulance of a scorned mistress.

We Pakistanis refuse to trust each other.

During these trips, Mian Sahib is incurring (ostensibly on the nation’s behalf) monumental obligations to China, Turkey and other countries that stretch beyond electoral terms. Whichever party follows, the PML-N will be bound to honour them; generations of Pakistanis will have to pay for these corporate caprices. Remember the Yellow Cab scheme for unemployed urbanites, the Yellow Tractor scheme for under-capitalised farmers, and now the latest gimmick — the Orange Line — for foot-sore Lahoris.

Has anyone in this government costed the debt needed to finance the open-ended CPEC, the dowager Tapi, or the on-off IPI? Certainly not the finance minister. Mr Ishaq Dar is family, and he dare not ask his prodigal brother-in-law such indiscreet questions.

Does anyone know the cost of CPEC? We Pakistanis certainly do not. The Chinese do. They never enter into a deal without calculation aforethought. The abacus is their third arm. What they did not factor in was the noisy reaction by Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, and now Gilgit-Baltistan, who feel left out of this distribution of boons. Tired of importuning Islamabad for equitable treatment, they glanced expectantly towards China for redress. China gave them the advice that bickering concubines in the Forbidden City were once told: “Go, resolve it amongst yourselves.”

Some say this should have been the advice ‘foreign minister’ Nawaz Sharif conveyed to his Saudi counterpart, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, during the latter’s visit to Pakistan last week. (The Saudi had come to enlist our support for the fight against Iranian/ Shia militancy.) Sharif might have done, had he not been so personally beholden to the Saudis. In 2000, they resurrected him like some modern Lazarus after he had been interred in Attock Fort by Gen Musharraf.

For this reason alone (and there are other less altruistic ones), Nawaz Sharif can never say ‘no’ to the Saudis. Yet, he does not want to say ‘no’ to the Iranians. So, he has chosen a middle way. He believes he can please both by acting as the honest broker between them.

How is Pakistan, which has unresolved arguments with each of its neighbours, qualified to be a mediator in someone else’s squabbles? One is reminded of the jibe a political satirist made when, in the 1960s, Great Britain offered itself as an honest broker in some forgotten international dispute. His acidic comment was: “No nation could be more honest, and for sure none could be broker.”

Could any nation be less honest than Pakistan, or any other state be broker?

There was a time when the Saudis were our brothers in hydrocarbons, the Iranians our brothers in RCD. Today, they have been replaced by our iron brothers, the Chinese. Unfortunately, none of them trusts us completely, because we Pakistanis refuse to trust each other. Our provinces do not trust each other, our politicians do not trust each other, and our public does not trust its bipolar government.

Our assets are geography, a racehorse army which needs to be exercised regularly, and a nuclear capability whose efficacy is yet to be tested. The Saudis see the latter two as its third arm. Our weakness lies in a government which can be annoyingly fickle. It denies in public what it does in private. Such oscillation may be clever. It may even be justified in the conduct of foreign policy which is premised upon deniability. Prevarication though cannot masquerade as national policy.

Ballots are necessarily secret, but are leaders once elected justified in hiding their policies from their voters? No public expects its government to show its hand. That might be against the national interest. All it does ask is an assurance that its government has nothing up its sleeve. As a haberdasher turned US president (Harry Truman) observed: “Secrecy and a free, democratic government don’t mix.”

The writer is an author.

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

Published in Dawn, January 14th, 2016