The recent trilateral swing of COAS Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, in which he visited Azerbaijan, Turkey and Germany, may well have marked yet another success in his flying the flag abroad, but it does raise the question of what Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi was doing in the meanwhile. Mr Qureshi has been off the scene recently, which has not been explained, and his absence has been unexplained. As the nation was kept abreast almost by force of his struggles with the coronavirus, it is only to be hoped that this silence does not bode ill, or that Mr Qureshi’s natural bent towards revealing all, has not been defeated by something serious.
However, if Mr Qureshi was not available, or if the matters to be discussed were of a matter too closely related to defence to be left to the Foreign Minister, the Defence Minister, Pervez Khattak, should have stepped up. Mr Khattak has of late done two notable things. First, he led the PTI to a defeat in a KP by-election on a seat which it held, in his home district. Then, hardly that the stink from that died down, he rose in the National Assembly during the Budget debate to say that there was no inflation.
There would be relevant questions raised about the expenditure on these two ministers, if the COAS has to do their jobs for them abroad. If there is a hybrid system of government, it still does not mean that ministers are there merely as a form of decoration. Visits abroad on behalf of a country are actually tiring, and with General Bajwa now into his fourth year as COAS, whatever charm there might have been in such visits must now be exhausted. He has had to pull the government’s chestnuts before, with China and Saudi Arabia, the latter upset because of Mr Qureshi, and the burden of visits abroad should be taken off his shoulders by ministers who are presently enjoying their leisure, untroubled apparently by their absence.
