Is it Joe Biden or Joe the Plumber?

By Saeed Minhas

ISLAMABAD: Whether members of the National Assembly were too cautious or too fearful of speaking against the United States remained a big question when hardly three parliamentarians in the Lower House stood up on Friday to talk about the tale of our six senators who had to curtail their US State Department-sponsored visit to Washington in protest against the full-body scanning policy.

Even outside the House, very few wanted to say anything on record as some more sponsored trips to the US are in the pipeline for the parliamentarians, perhaps even for their children and other family members. Currently, children of a few ministers (including the law minister) and some watchdog groups (read PILDAT) are on a tour, revealed a visibly upset senator from FATA. He said many more had made a beeline to enjoy the State Department’s generosity for their children and for themselves by hovering around public affairs’ officers and the US ambassador in Islamabad.

Since our ever-absent Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi failed to grace the House for a successive third session, his second-in-command, Major (r) Malik Amad managed to hush up the matter by telling the House that it is being investigated and the senators should have taken the Foreign Office into confidence before accepting such offers. But he too failed to tell the House that it’s beyond his department’s preview to seek exemption for anybody. His department even failed to provide a proper protocol to premier Gilani during his first visit to the US when only an under-secretary of state received Gilani and his wife and that too not at the apron where a red carpet or an ordinary one was laid, but in the reception room towards which the premier and his wife had to walk after disembarking from the aircraft.

An outspoken member of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a party which carries the portfolio of anti-imperialism, agreed to speak but on condition of anonymity. On why he was shying away from speaking against a country who has never been in their good books, he said, “So much has changed in the past decade or so that it’s better to avoid unnecessary confrontation.”

Finding such a symbolic gesture from a party which has always stood against the US despite that it fought the Afghan jihad war on the CIA-sponsored stingers, weapons and medicines left only a few reporters in awe. But this shows why the US had never asked to ban this organisation, but all others involved with the CIA in the past.

However, off-the-record, everyone was churning out remarks about the recent report of the US State Department on human rights which highlighted every sin committed in this country by police, judiciary, government and politicians, including NRO beneficiaries, besides praising the heroic lawyers’ movement. However, the FATA senator while sitting in the galleries and fuming with anger whispered to the journalists nearby if this report mention Joe Biden (the US vice president) being “involved” in our “heroic” lawyers’ movement? What followed was just reactionary: a group of flabbergasted journalists was led by the senator out to the assembly cafeteria, where the senator was like a hot cake and everyone was trying to get a pie.

“It all started by the State Department trying to get rid of Musharraf during the last days of president Bush, but the task was handed over to Biden after his elections in November 2008 as vice president,” he added. He asked to recall when the leaders of the lawyers’ movement were “summoned” to visit the US, and without waiting for our response, he said it was November 2008. He claimed that it’s an open secret in the power corridors of the country and since these satellite rulers of our
beloved country are so powerful that no one wants to annoy them, these things would never come on record.

Coming back to the issue of the six senators, he launched himself into a typical chest-beating style to say that had this been an issue of Punjabi senators, the entire House would have taken it more seriously. But since his provincialism was of no use for any one, journalists kept bringing him back to his earlier disclosure about Joe Biden’s involvement.

By then, perhaps, his guts had also buckled and all he kept repeating was “you will be able to get much more details about this, once the State Department declassifies its information in the next 10 to 15 years and if not banned by the then Pakistani government, people would come to know how a genuine public movement was hijacked by a few self-claimed leaders.”

Since I have been covering the 2008 US elections and know the impact of “Joe the Plumber” on them, I dared to ask him if it was Joe Biden or plumber to which he said “it’s Joe Biden not the other one”.