- After skipping the summit
Prime Minister Imran Khan has done the right thing by personally going to Malaysia to smooth things over with his counterpart Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. Had he attended the KL Summit as promised, perhaps this latest trip would not have been necessary. By first bowing out himself and agreeing to send the foreign minister, only to skip the moot altogether on Saudi Arabia’s insistence no less, PM Khan made a spectacle of the country, displaying an embarrassing ineptness to execute basic diplomacy. The rationale being peddled is that Saudi Arabia had some ill-conceived ‘misconceptions’ about the intent behind the KL summit and that those reservations had now been removed, which is why PM Khan has firmly committed to attending the event this year. This commitment was in response to a question from the media about his attendance, during a joint presser, not from the Malaysian government, so perhaps it would have been better that a very public “of course I’ll attend” was not the response just yet. Who is to say that the Saudi’s will not throw a paranoia-induced fit over Pakistan’s presence at the next KL Summit and persuade PM Khan to skip it yet again?
There was also discussion over trade between the two countries, particularly with regards to palm oil that Malaysia exports, which India has stopped importing since the former threw its support behind Pakistan on the Kashmir issue. PM Khan has, in some haste, verbally agreed to import more palm oil from Malaysia to offset the effect of the Indian embargo. The question of whether or not there is enough demand for palm oil in the country or the money to purchase it in the state’s coffers to be importing more of the product just to compensate Malaysia for its diplomatic support seems to have been ignored. Either the PM is not briefed in detail prior to such bilateral visits or he is simply not receptive to the necessary input from more experienced professionals. One hopes that he becomes more amenable to the more constructive advice coming from his subordinates in the very near future.
