KARACHI, Pakistan — In the strongholds of hard-line Pakistani Islamist thought, they are talking about Donald Trump and laughing. Then they shake their heads with concern. “He doesn’t belong in the White House, he belongs in a mental hospital,” 46-year-old Hafez Tahrir Ashrafi, a Muslim cleric who is head of the country’s Ulema Council, told me with a throaty roar. An obese man with a wild dark beard, Ashrafi is an advisor to the Pakistani government and a former jihadi who fought in Afghanistan as a youth — Pakistani media has quoted him endorsing suicide bombing against U.S. troops in Afghanistan. “We do not believe the Americans will elect a man like that with his very dirty statements,” Ashrafi continued. “But if that happens, then he creates the problem not for the Muslims, but for the Americans and for himself.”
Strategic Perspectives Through Research and Dialogue
