Roving Periscope: Now, Imran hires a US firm to keep Biden in good humor!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: For months, he attacked the US left, right and center, accusing Washington of ‘conspiring’ against his government. With Parliament ousting him from power on April 10, former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Ahmed Khan Niazi is now trying to reset his relations with US President Joe Biden.
This despite the fact that, in innumerable public meetings across Pakistan since, he has also been condemning the US, calling the Shehbaz Sharif government a puppet, and demanding fresh elections.
According to the media reports on Friday, Imran’s political outfit, the Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf (PTI), has hired a lobbying firm in Washington DC for a payment of USD 25,000 per month to support its “goals for good relations with the United States and the Pakistani diaspora in the US.”
According to documents made viral on social media, PTI has engaged Fenton/Arlock LLC, which was also hired by the Pakistan Embassy in the United States in March 2022 for USD 30,000 a month.
Uzair Younus, Director of the Pakistan Initiative at the South Asia Center in the USA, shared a link to where the related documents are publicly available on a US website.
He also shared a screenshot of the documents to corroborate his claim that the firm would support the goal of the PTI Pakistan for good relations with the United States and the Pakistani diaspora in the US.
But Imran Khan has done what the Pakistani Government has been doing for years. Islamabad has, over the years, engaged several firms in the US to lobby American politicians on issues ranging from criticizing India to seeking aid and grants.
Some of these firms allegedly helped build an anti-India narrative and attempted to influence the Democrats on issues like Kashmir and the minority rights in India.
“The Pakistan government has hired Stephen Payne and Brian Ettinger of Linden Government Solutions to lobby on its behalf,” the reports said.
“They had previously lobbied for Pakistan during President George W Bush’s administration,” according to a report published last year in European media outlet Politico.
Apart from this, a former congressional liaison for ex-President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, who later lobbied the administration on behalf of then-Congolese President Joseph Kabila, is now representing Pakistani interests in the US.
Some Pakistani-Americans are also in this lobbying game. For example, Adnan Jalil’s registered firm “Alpha Strategies” has been lobbying Islamabad via the Council on Pakistan Relations, a non-profit started by Michigan-based Pakistani-American healthcare entrepreneurs Mohammad Ashraf Qazi, Adil Jamal Akhtar, and Iqbal Abdul Nasir.
