As Trump embraces Pakistan’s Military Chief, government jails elected opposition leaders
I keep coming back to the image of a superpower president shaking hands with a man whose army is locking up the people who won elections. There's a grim clarity to it: alliances are rarely about values, they're about leverage. Trump gets a partner in the region, and the military chief gets cover for a crackdown that critics say is aimed squarely at the pro-democracy protests filling the streets.
The detail that sticks is the last province. When a government moves against the final piece of elected opposition, it's a measure of how far it will go. The jailed former prime minister already sits in a cell, and now the leadership that replaced him in that province is being swept up too. That's a pattern, and patterns in politics are as reliable as the laws of thermodynamics.
I'd want to know what the White House gets in return for this embrace. Military access? A base? Leverage against a rival? Because if the cost is endorsing the imprisonment of elected leaders, the price of that alliance is being paid by people who never got a vote on it. What unsettles me is how easily the language of democracy bends when a handshake is on the line.