Donald Trump is mad at India. For reasons galore. We laughed at his claim to have stopped our war with Pakistan; we didn’t nominate him for a Nobel; we are haggling with him over tariffs; we aren’t buying his F-35; we do business with Iran; we buy his enemy’s oil. Finally, a frustrated Trump said, “I don’t care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care.”
We laughed at that too. Then he turned the knife in the stab; said he had “concluded a deal” to develop Pakistan’s “massive oil reserves” and he is “choosing the oil company that will lead this partnership…. Who knows, maybe they’ll be selling oil to India some day!”
That got our goat. Choosing a terrorist state and a bankrupt economy over a resilient democracy and a robust economy, a Quad member and a strategic partner? Many in India were hurt, shocked, upset, angry or outraged. A few smirked, knowing Pakistan has as much oil under its soil as the Thar has water under its sands.
Imaging: Deni Lal/Ai
What if Trump is throwing a red herring? A red herring is the kind of thing that we see in whodunnits where the murderer plants wrong clues to mislead the sleuths—like the word ‘rache’ (German for revenge) scribbled on a wall next to the corpse in the Sherlock Holmes story 'A Study in Scarlet' that misled sleuths to think the killer was a German. The term was popularised in 1807 by William Cobbett, who told a story of having used a strong-smelling smoked fish to divert hounds from chasing a rabbit.
Let’s leave crime stories and get back to geopolitics. Trump is known for his red herrings in political narratives. As Sam Kwait-Spitzer, who called him king of red herrings, wrote in 2018, Trump “has a profound need to distract, deceive, and gaslight”, and there have been “seemingly infinite occasions in which the president has wilfully sought to mislead the public”.
What if he is now trying it on the world?
As most of us know, Pakistan has no oil. Then what is Trump prospecting for? My unintelligent guess is—gold and more.
Gold in Pakistan? Yes, folks! They are said to have it in plenty—not just gold but more. Reko Dik has the world's fifth largest copper-gold reserves, Thar has the second largest coal reserves, Khewra and Bahdarkhel have the second largest salt reserves. Geologists say 92 minerals worth $6 trillion are buried in the land stretching from Gilgit-Baltistan (we flinch) and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to the hills of Balochistan, the sands of Sind and the plains of Punjab—coal (185 billion tonnes), copper (7,000 million tonnes), gold (1,658 million), salt (10 billion), silver (620 million), lead-zinc (24 million), manganese (1.597 million), chromite (three million), iron ore (1,450 million). If mined well, prospectors say, Pakistan could become “the Saudi Arabia of copper” in 20 years!
Shehbaz Sharif and Asim Munir have been going to China for investments and knowhow to mine these out, and China has been snaring them into its CPEC loan trap. The duo would want to balance the Chinese, and who else can do it but the yanks? Was that what Munir and Trump talked over their lunch in the White House?
But can you be friends with the mutually warring Americans and Chinese?, many may ask. Remember the boast of the Yahyas and the Bhuttos of the cold-warring 1970s?—that Pakistan was the only country that could be friends with the capitalists and the communists.
Geostrategists in the soon-to-be-vacated South Block! Let’s stop flinching at Trump and smirking at Pak, and get our act together.
prasannan@theweek.in