Kunwar Khuldune Shahid
Tampa is a town of hot sun and cold beer — the ideal retirement spot, in other words, for a broad-shouldered US general. Yet if Michael Kurilla was all smiles as he bid farewell to military life, at a ceremony in the Florida city on Sunday, he was shadowed by a rather unusual guest. For amid the stars and stripes and smiles stood another senior officer, not American at all but the de facto leader of an Islamic government half the world away.
Offering Kurilla a friendly handshake — and Dan Caine, America’s top military officer, an invite to his Pakistani homeland — Field Marshal Asim Munir is clearly at home in the Land of the Free. In June, for instance, he enjoyed a two-hour private lunch with Donald Trump, while Islamabad has also nominated the President for the Nobel Peace Prize, describing him as a “genuine peacemaker” who’d soon bring peace to Iran and Gaza alike. Never mind that Tehran is bloodied and Rafah a wasteland: such shameless toadying has long been central to Pakistani foreign policy.
After all, there have to be some advantages to sharing your four land borders with the continent’s great powers of India and China, alongside the pariah states of Iran and Afghanistan. And if our new geopolitical era is to be defined by multilateral deal-making, atomic brinkmanship and vaulting duplicity, Pakistan would appear to be extraordinarily well-positioned. There is, perhaps, no nation on Earth better at playing one set of interests off against another — especially when it’s the only Muslim nuclear power, and enjoys a robust tradition of self-interested military leaders keen to consolidate their own power.
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