A STRANGE AND ORDINARY WASHINGTON DINNER PARTY

A couple of nights ago, I attended a dinner party at the Capitol Hill home of a friend of mine.  There was good wine, good food, and good conversation.  Every night there are dinners like this held all over Washington, the normal rationale for which is a guest of honor. 

In this case, the guest of honor was  the leader of a political party in Pakistan, Imran Khan.  This resulted in a quite strange yet equally ordinary evening in DC.

The charismatic and strikingly handsome Imran Khan is one of Pakistan's greatest celebrities.  While other countries go crazy over soccer, Pakistan's sport is cricket – so the entire country went delirious with joy when its national team won the 1992 Cricket World Cup.  Imran Khan captained the team and almost singlehandedly won the final game.

The Oxford-educated cricketer then married, in 1995, the daughter of one of England's richest men, billionaire Sir James Goldsmith – Jemima Goldsmith converting to Islam beforehand.  The following year, with $8 million of Sir James' money, he founded his own political party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice).

As he spoke to us and fielded questions, attired in a Saville Row suit and with an accent of impeccable Oxbridge English, he was urbane, witty, charming, and articulate.  He is also an airhead.

Thus the dinner quickly became surreal.  He was asked questions about the situation in Pakistan and he would berate Musharraf for destroying democracy or give an impassioned plea for an independent judiciary or assure us that there was a "consensus" among "all the parties" to ensure the security of Pakistan's nukes.

There were a number of quite bright folks in attendance but a pall of superficiality hung over the table.  Was anyone aware, I wondered, of the real reason why Musharraf fired Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudry or why Imran Khan was so upset about it?

Pakistan has enjoyed record 7% increases in GDP ever since Musharraf placed former Citibank top exec Shaukak Aziz in charge of the economy over the past few years.  One of Aziz's major goals was the privatization of dinosaur monopolies and denationalization of industries seized by the kleptocrat governments of Musharraf's predecessors, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

Opposed to this were entrenched interests who benefited from these monopolies, government workers and lawyers, and land-owning feudal barons, particularly in the Punjab, like the family of Imran Khan.

The barons got Chief Justice Chaudry to block parts of the economic liberalization program, and when Musharraf fired him, Khan and others bitterly denounced it.  Thanks to demonizing Musharraf and Aziz, all the investment dollars being poured into Pakistan by Gulf oil sheikhs are now flying away, and millions of Pakistanis will remain in poverty – but at least the Punjabi elite like Khan's family will keep their monopolies.

No one at the party thought to ask Khan about his being the political protégé of Hamid Gul, the father of the Taliban as the head of the ISI Pakistan spy agency.  Or of his support for Maulana Fazlur Rehman for Prime Minister.  Rehman is a rabid pro-Taliban cleric who has called for a holy war against the United States.

Naturally, I ended up being the skunk in the garden, although I couldn't smell the place up too much as it was the home of my friend.  So I asked if the dispute over Chaudry wasn't a red herring when the ISI was in the drug business with the Taliban, and wasn't the billions in heroin money so corrupting the judiciary far more dangerous to the rule of law?

Khan deftly side-stepped the question and turned to another guest who asked something innocuous.  The conversation became progressively boring.  I waited for somebody to ask something penetrating, showing a real grasp of what is going on in the most precarious country in the world, but not a chance.

I thought of making another effort, asking if the new army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani was Pakistan's version of our Gen. David Petraeus – but decided there was no point.  For what, indeed, was the point of the entire dinner?

Folks out there in America's hinterlands think that folks here in Washington are better informed about the world, for folks here certainly have better opportunities to be – but it sure isn't true.  What is true is that folks here in Washington pretend they know more about the world than folks in the hinterlands.

The discussion at that table could have been scintillatingly informative.  Pakistan is a crux of the world right now, the locus of Al Qaeda terrorism, Taliban guerrillas enforcing a Stone Age Islam and financed with heroin money, a make-believe country of 160 million Moslems that might fracture into pieces while possessing dozens of nuclear weapons.

The real news about Pakistan at this moment is Musharraf giving Gen. Kiyani the green light to conduct a full-on winter offensive against Al Qaeda and Taliban strongholds in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan – and to do so with American help.

The US military is currently constructing eight bases along the Afghan-Pak border staffed with US, Pak, and Afghan officers working jointly to destroy the bad guys in the border badlands.  Small teams of US Special Forces have already begun conducting joint combat operations with Pakistan commandos inside Pakistan.

It's hard to fight a guerrilla war in the mountains in the winter wearing pajamas.  That's why AQ and the Taliban hunker down during the winter snows and prepare for a spring offensive.  No chance this time.  Kiyani, with our assistance, is going after them, and will continue all winter-long with all the firepower he can muster.  Petraeus is his inspiration.

Kiyani may save Pakistan as Petraeus has saved Iraq. 

None of this was discussed at the dinner table.  That's what made it so strange – and so ordinary, so par for the Washington course.  That's why I don't go to many Washington dinners.

At least Pakistanis have the smarts not to pay much attention to Imran Khan.  He's the only member of his party ever elected to Pakistan's parliament.  He remains a celebrity, a "figure of entertainment, not a serious political authority," as one Pakistan journalist describes him. 

Washington is full of folks who ought to be described the same way.