Zardari Meets Nawaz: What Should They Say To Each Other?

Adil Najam

The media is abuzz with petty pontifications about the likely meeting later today between Mr. Asif Ali Zardari and Mr. Nawaz Sharif.

By the time many readers read this, the talks may already have transpired and, then, the media will be abuzz about what they talked about. Here is hoping that what these two will talk about and whatever we will be talking about after their talks will not trivialize the historic existential threat that we are living through today.

There is much that these two have to talk about – the fate of the NRO, the fate of the Kerry-Lugar Bill, the fate of the 17th Amendment, the fate of Messers Zardari and Sharif, the fate of democracy in Pakistan. But more than all of this, what hangs in the balance today is the fate of a Pakistan at war.

Some 9000 Pakistanis have been killed by violent extremists this year alone. And the year is far from done. Pakistani territory has been snatched out of Pakistan’s control. Pakistani military is being attacked. If this is not a threat to Pakistan’s sovereignty, an attack on Pakistan itself, then what is?

Here is hoping that our leaders our getting together to speak with one voice and with great force on this existential threat to our sovereignty, to our future, and indeed to our present.

But to do so, they will both have to become as big as the moment. That, if that were to happen, would truly be news. All else remains, and will remain, mere chatter… not even worth hearing in the din of the war we cannot and must not ignore.