Yesterday, Fauzia Kasuri, a senior member of the Pakistani political party Movement for Justice (Tahrik-e Insaf), went to the U.S. Consulate General in Lahore to take the Oath of Renunciation of United States Citizenship. Unlike we ordinary renunciants — who depending on the consulate might get sent away without any proof at all that our renunciation is in progress — Kasuri got a signed letter from Consul Marc A. Snider (pictured at right) confirming her renunciation and even committing publicly to a timeline for issuing a Certificate of Loss of Nationality to her:

The oath of renunciation taken on the above date is the final act that Ms. Kasuri must take in the relinquishment process. The U.S. Consulate General has retained Ms. Kasuri’s passport and will forward the information from the renunciation to the Department of State in Washington, D.C. for final processing, which normally takes two to four weeks. Once complete, the Department of State will forward a copy of the final certificate to Ms. Kasuri for her records.

Anyone reading this managed to get a CLN in two weeks? It took Petros more than a year to get his, and while we’ve had reports that it’s taking somewhat less time these days, two to four weeks is certainly not the “normal” timeline — this is a flat-out lie by State to try to keep themselves from looking ridiculously slow. Clearly, the boys & girls in Mordor Washington are rushing Kasuri’s paperwork through the system; in a country which was allegedly founded on the premise that “all men are created equal”, politicians get special treatment while the rest of us have to wait … and wait … and wait …

For those of you who haven’t been following South Asian politics recently, last year Pakistan started along the same road that Jamaica went down in 2008: with the breaking of the old truce under which parties on all sides turned a blind eye to illegally-held dual citizenships, election petitions are being filed left and right to invalidate the results of races in which one candidate held a non-Pakistani passport, and elected officials are scrambling for proof that they have rid themselves of all outside allegiances.

On the whole, Pakistani legislators have shown themselves to be far brighter than their Jamaican counterparts in their choice of foreign citizenship: most of the disgraced politicians turned out to have British or Canadian passports buried in their sock drawers. Only two or three people in the 342-member National Assembly of Pakistan seem to have been hiding U.S. passports, in contrast to more than half a dozen in the 63-seat Jamaican House of Representatives. They had to hide their U.S. passports from not only the public but from the “Internal” Revenue Service — one of only two tax agencies on earth which invades other countries to collect information & income from non-resident citizens.

The other Pakistani politician who was foolish enough to keep a U.S. passport was Nuzhat Sadiq of the Pakistan Muslim League (N). Sadiq resigned from the National Assembly in March 2012, and then her name showed up just four months later in the U.S. Federal Register Q2 2012 list of persons losing U.S. citizenship. Incidentally, Sadiq is well above the $2 million wealth threshold required to be a covered expatriate for purposes of the U.S. exit tax — in her 2008 electoral asset declaration, she declared her net worth to be Rs. 912.81 million, or about US$9 million. Some people think this may have even been an understatement, given that her 2011 asset declaration did not list any cars, while her 2012 asset declaration was challenged as false and incomplete.