Faking feminism over Afghan fiasco

“Feminism is not a dustbin to consign your diplomatic failures.” Of all the people, Minister for Climate Change Sherry Rehman should have been mindful of this principle when delivering a fiery speech in the National Assembly on December 12, 2022.

In her speech, and later on social media, she defended the decision to send Hina Rabbani Khar to Kabul on November 29, 2022. The be-all and end-all of her argument was that Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) is proud to encourage women to play their part in mainstream politics and policy-making process. She also highlighted Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) MNA Abdul Akbar Chitrali’s comment. He had said that some tribal elders should have accompanied Khar to Kabul.

Justifying his stance, he insisted that he was not against a woman being a minister. He rather endorsed Rehman stating that gender is irrelevant in running state affairs and that performance matters. However, it is unfortunate that Rehman did not utter a single word on Khar’s performance other than describing the merits of feminism. It seems that to Rehman being a woman is the only credential for Khar to justify her office.

Hardly a week after Khar’s visit, Pakistani Embassy in Kabul came under attack on December 4. Though the ambassador escaped unharmed, his guard was wounded. Exactly a week after the first blow, terrorists from Afghanistan unleashed hell on Chaman border, killing seven civilians and injuring about 20 others. Hours after this attack, Chinese nationals were attacked in Kabul at a hotel prompting Chinese authorities to advise Chinese nationals to vacate Afghanistan. But Rehman is persistent that Khar’s gender is more important to rant about than her streak of failures as a minister to cry at.

This is a pattern. At the time of Khar’s visit, I had alarmed in this space that the visit will be lost to the optics as Pakistani media was filled to the brim with photos of Khar, a woman, received by Afghan Taliban, a group of fierce-looking bearded men. An army of social media influencers and anchors went into an overdrive of commentary to claim that it was a victory for Pakistan to send a woman minister to Kabul, which they related to their self-perceived concepts of women empowerment and feminism.

The reason I can say this is the very fact that I had done a PhD in mediatization of gender in Pakistani politics and have been researching media patterns for commodification of gender. Feminism or other human rights activism of these media influencers are rooted in the projects they are paid for. Like other projects, feminism is also a project for them. They decorate these projects in their CVs as medals instead of observing a moment of silence and looking at a mirror to see the merchants of misery they have grown into. Hence, the arguments of these project directors are not logical conclusions which can reflect an accurate picture of the reality or predict a future trend.

There are many questions that the Foreign Office had to answer. It is about time our foreign ministers and diplomats stop playing victims like politicians. For over 70 years, they have been telling the masses that conspiracies are hatched to harm them right, left and centre. If not to counter these conspiracies, what on earth is the Foreign Office made for?
Rehman, in her speech, talked about Benazir Bhutto being a beacon of light for women leaders. I had done content analysis of Bhutto’s autobiography in which she gave an account of how opposition parties politicised even their pregnancies. I was the first journalist to write an analogy between late Benazir and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, when the latter gave birth to her first child back in 2018.

Never ever had BB tried to justify her failures with being a woman. Rehman also stated that the decision to send Khar to Kabul was made by Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari. It has been reported in the media that about Rs2 billion have so far been spent on trips in hardly six months after he took over as the foreign minister. At the time when these lines are written, he is off to Washington.

Kabul is one of the most important destinations for any foreign minister of Pakistan. There has been no foreign minister in the country’s history who has not visited Kabul. Why then did Bilawal not accompany Khar on her journey to Kabul? Days before sending her to Kabul, Bilawal had issued a statement that terrorists from Afghanistan were posing a threat to Pakistan. International watchdogs had been regularly pointing out that an intervention was needed to bring the Taliban to table. Did Bilawal not know that Thomas West’s, the US Special Representative for Afghanistan, visit to Japan from India will coincide with Khar’s one-day visit to Kabul?

After India, he flew straight to the UAE where he met the Taliban leaders, not least Maulvi Mohammad Yaqub. Yaqub is the son of Taliban founder Mullah Omar’s, heading the Taliban ground forces. Though he is virtually leading the Taliban government, Khar was unable to have a meeting with him, but officials and commentators in Pakistan again wrapped up this failure into feminism. Yaqub did meet men and women from the US and UAE in Abu Dhabi three or four days after refusing to meet Khar in Kabul. The commentators hid this fact from the Pakistani audience.

The US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink and National Security Council Senior Director for China Laura Rosenberger in Langfang were off to China, where Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng held talks on regional affairs. Indian media was reporting skirmishes with the Chinese army on the Himalayan border – the Chinese foreign officer has rejected these reports.

The European Union and United Nations have been issuing warnings against human rights abuses by the Taliban in Afghanistan regularly. Was our foreign minister as undiplomatic as unable to read from these omens that the odds were stacked against Pakistan in Kabul and he could no longer have the luxury to sojourn at wealthy capitals until he binds loose ends in his own neighbourhood?

His critics and fans equally compare Bilawal to his grandfather, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (ZAB). This means he really has big shoes to fill. Amazing, though, are arguments of his fans who believe that the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) will be his next stop, just like ZAB. My advice to them is that they should be rest assured that ZAB was not just rubbing shoulders with top-level diplomats to be accepted as the prime minister of Pakistan. He had given the US a window to reach out to Chinese leaders. The connection was precious for Henry Kissinger never shared this cooperation with other cabinet members until he succeeded in opening the first embassy of People’s Republic of China (PRC) in Washington so the two world giants could have diplomatic relations. The US returned this favour during the 1971 war by pressurising India to bring an end to hostilities and come to the table.

Is it not before Bilawal that Afghanistan be the ground where he brings China and the US closer to each other so that chances for India and other spoilers to create unrest in the region diminish? If the answer is “yes”, it is the end of discussion. If the answer is “no”, then it generates more questions.

Pakistanis will be thankful to Sherry Rehman if she does some soul-searching and has the honesty to say that Khar’s failure in Kabul as a state minister was actually Bilawal’s failure as foreign minister. This admission will be the first step towards improving the regional security situation. Attempts to put a blanket of feminism on diplomatic disasters are deliberate and deplorable.

The writer teaches mediatization at IIUI