When Beards and Bros-in-Law Run a Country

A few days ago, our national drama minister—sorry, Information and Broadcasting Minister—Attaullah Tarar blurted out that India will attack Pakistan in the next 24 to 36 hours. Yes, you heard it. This isn’t a leaked military memo or an intelligence briefing—it’s just Tarar channeling his inner doomsday prophet on national TV, probably after binge-watching too much Bollywood espionage thrillers.

Today, I see none other than Ishaq Dar meeting with Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s actual grown-up foreign minister. And I just stood there, blinking at my screen like, Wait, what? Are these the clowns who will now play diplomats in a potential war scenario?

Let’s be honest—in regular life, if you ran into either of these men at a dinner party, you'd actively avoid the table they sit at. You’d struggle to hear two coherent, logical sentences from them without wanting to tear your ears off. I don’t know them personally, thank God, but they radiate the unmistakable aura of dishonest backstabbers who wouldn’t hesitate to sell national interests for a nice seat at the power table and a new Audi.

Tarar, with his mystical beard and comically tragic air of superiority, screams of belonging to a sect that believes women should be in a burqa. Misogynistic, sectarian, and with all the rhetorical grace of a screaming wahabi Islam, is the face of national security hysteria.

Then there’s Dar—whose only credential is being Nawaz Sharif’s brother-in-law. That’s it. No charisma. No degrees in diplomacy. Just a comfy chair at the family dinner table. A man so vanilla, so painfully bland, that the Russians must’ve wondered whether they were meeting a state representative or the account manager of a failed microfinance bank.

And now he’s out there—representing Pakistan in meetings with Russia to mediate peace between us and India. Dar, whose understanding of global diplomacy probably ends at "Sir jee, dollar gir gaya hai", is now deciding the fate of 240 million people.

The current hybrid regime of Pakistan, is a lovechild of greedy capitalists and power-drunk generals—a regime more interested in moving files for business deals than in national sovereignty. They don’t care who’s really in charge (spoiler: it’s not them), as long as their personal bank accounts keep getting fatter and their Swiss vacations uninterrupted.

So here we are: a country in perpetual crisis, led by men with zero charisma, zero credibility, and zero comprehension of history, philosophy, or geopolitics. Watching them lead diplomatic meetings is like watching toddlers try to defuse a bomb with crayons.

God help us all. Or at least send someone who knows the difference between foreign policy and foreign chicken tikka.