The Dark Long Night

Without Jinnah, it is safe to say, there would have been no Pakistan. Rarely, in the history of human endeavour, have so many owed so much to one, single, solitary person. 

JINNAH’S VISION of PAKISTAN

& WHAT WE ARE, NOW!

 

by Roedad Khan

“Few individuals significantly alter the course of history,” wrote Stanley Wolpert in the preface to his book on Mr. Jinnah. “Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.” 

By 1940, the mystical bond linking Jinnah and the people was so profound that nobody could challenge Jinnah’s leadership of the Muslims of India. He was their sole spokesman.

Beverly Nichols, who first met Mr. Jinnah on December 18, 1943, called him a giant, the most important man in Asia. “India is likely to be the world’s greatest problem for some years to come, and Mr. Jinnah is in a position of unique strategic importance. He can sway the battle this way or that as he chooses. His 100 million Muslims will march to the left, to the right, to the front, to the rear at his bidding and at nobody else’s… that is the point.”

Without Jinnah, it is safe to say, there would have been no Pakistan. Rarely, in the history of human endeavour, have so many owed so much to one, single, solitary person. 

Mr. Jinnah envisioned Pakistan as a modern, progressive, democratic country drawing its inspiration from the true, dynamic, pristine, revolutionary Islam of its early years with its emphasis on egalitarianism, social justice and accountability. Jinnah was a fervent believer in the sovereignty of the people, the inviolability of constitution, supremacy of civilian rule, an absolutely independent, incorruptible judiciary, rule of law and a strong, neutral, honest civil service. The ruling passion of Jinnah’s life was the love of law and liberty. On innumerable occasions, before and after the establishment of Pakistan, he affirmed his faith in democracy, social justice and the equality of men as taught by Islam. In a broadcast to the people of the United States of America in February 1948, he said, “The Constitution of Pakistan has yet to be framed by the Pakistan constituent assembly. I do not know what the ultimate shape of the constitution is going to be, but I am sure that it will be of a democratic type, embodying the essential principles of Islam… Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission.”

With Mr. Jinnah’s death, it was as if a great light had gone out, and people were left groping in the dark. The hands of the nation’s clock stopped the day the Quaid’s heart stopped beating.

Sometimes, I wonder if it ever occurred to Mr. Jinnah that, one day, Pakistan will be stripped of all its core values; the constitution, the supreme law of the land will be abrogated or suspended, defaced, disfigured and changed beyond recognition; Pakistan will be ruled by a corrupt president and his dream will turn into a nightmare.

As he left the constitutional convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked by an admirer, “Dr Franklin what have you given us.” Franklin turned to the questioner and replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Not too long ago, we too possessed a great country earned for us by the sweat of the brow and iron will of one person. Where giants walked, midgets pose now. Our rulers, both elected and unelected, have done to Pakistan what the successors of Lenin did to the Soviet Union.

Many nations in the past have attempted to develop democratic institutions, only to lose them when they took their liberties and political institutions for granted. Pakistan is a classic example. Born at midnight as a sovereign, independent, democratic country, today it is neither sovereign, nor independent or democratic. Today it is not just a “rentier state”, not just a client state. It is a slave state, with a puppet government set up by Washington, ill-led, ill-governed by a power-hungry junta.

Think about where we stand today? We have President Zardari. And little hope and no cash. The Pakistan Mr. Jinnah founded is gone. It disappeared the day power-hungry generals and corrupt politicians hijacked Pakistan. On that day, the lights went out. Pakistan slid into darkness. Thanks to eight years of General Musharraf’s illegitimate rule, followed by over two years of Zardari’s corrupt administration, today Pakistan is a ghost of its former self. If it were to look into a mirror, it won’t recognise itself. Today Pakistan looks like a bad parody of the miracle we witnessed on August 14, 1947. If Mr. Jinnah came today and saw President Zardari, in occupation of his august office, he would say, “I am afraid I need to erase this and start all over again.”

“When the head is rotten, it affects the whole body,” King Abdullah is quoted as saying with reference to Pakistan. A country that tolerates a situation in which people who are corrupt to the bone rule, is a sick country. I have always believed and always shall, that indifference to corruption at the summit of power is treason.

Who is there to inspire the people? Who is there to lead the people? Who is there to cleanse Pakistan of the filth surrounding it? We need a committed, passionate person to lead our country, not a Sunday school teacher taking baby steps cautiously. Pakistan is hungry for a person who will light a candle in the gloom that is our morale; who has a passion burning within him to set our nation alight; who will be the standard-barrier of the disenchanted; who can give voice to our humiliation; who places country above self; who gives the country a new agenda; one that does not replace one set of corrupt leaders by another; who offers the genuine hope of a new order to take us into a new millennium; and, most important, whose hands are clean.

Is the dark long night about to end? And has the time come for us to leave the valley of despair and climb the mountain so that we can see the glory of another dawn? Cast off despair. The darkest hour is the one just before dawn and as generally happens in history, it is at the darkest hour that a bright star arises when you have almost given up hope. When a nation is in crisis, it needs a man to match the time. ‘You don’t create such a man, you don’t discover such a man. You recognise such a man’. Time cries out for leadership. Cometh the hour, so cometh the man. The hour will find the man who has the will and power to restore the Pakistan dream.

Talking about social justice and equality in the Pakistan of his dream, Mr. Jinnah said in a speech delivered in April 1943, “Here I would like to give a warning to the landlords and capitalists. The exploitation of the masses has gone into their blood. They have forgotten the lesson of Islam. Do you visualise that millions have been exploited and cannot get one meal a day? If this was the idea of Pakistan, I would not have it.”

Today all the symptoms which one had ever met in history previous to great changes and revolutions exist in Pakistan. Men and women of Pakistan, now is the hour to claim your rights, your core values, your stolen money. The cabal that rules this poor country is degenerate to the very bones and nauseatingly corrupt. We must extirpate it root and branch. Be prepared to march. It is time to go to the barricades. The great are great only because we are on our knees. Let us rise.

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Source

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A carnival atop a volcano

A carnival atop a volcano

by Roedad Khan

In the farcical system we have today, things are not what they appear to be. Realism does not exist in Islamabad because life in Islamabad is itself a fiction.

The Constitution says one thing. What happens on the ground is something quite different. Behind the constitution, there is an unwritten constitution which governs the state.

Prime Minister Gilani, known for his sartorial elegance, is obsessed by externals and is addicted to appearances with a passion for clothes, collar and cuff.

He shocked the nation when, just before midnight on July 22, he appeared on television, looking quite bedraggled, visibly nervous, overwhelmed by the “momentous” decision he was about to announce. His address lasted for a little more than two minutes. All he wanted to tell his people was that he had decided to extend Army Chief Kayani’s term by three years in recognition of his services to the nation or words to that effect! Many questions come to mind. Gilani says it was a simple administrative matter. If so, why did he have to make the announcement on TV at that late hour in such a terrible hurry?

Was it his own decision? Was it the supreme commander’s decision? Was it their joint decision? My answer is no. Everyone knows where such decisions are made. Everyone knows where the true pole of power lies in this country. But more of that some other time.

These are dangerous times in our country. These are also anti-elitist times. Angry mobs are howling for retribution. Pakistan is seething in ferment and in disarray. This is dangerous. Under an imbecile and feeble government, as we have today, there is but one step from discontent to revolution. A sad situation, but true. The country appears to be adrift. Nobody knows where it was headed without wise and mature leadership to guide or direct it. Pakistan, a fractured and despondent society, unable to imagine a decent future for itself as it plunges into listless desperation and radicalisation, stands on the edge of the abyss. Signs of danger abound, but like the proverbial boiling frog, we seem unable to rouse ourselves. In our political life, we wait until things reach the emergency room.

What is most intriguing is that the rhythm of life remains, more or less, unchanged. “Everything seems”, as Goethe said, “to be following its normal course because even in terrible moments in which everything is at stake people go on living as if nothing were happening”. In Pakistan, as in geology, things can look perfectly stable on the surface – until the tectonic plates shift underneath. The straws in the wind are there. Time will show whether there are enough of them to make a bale of hay.

Sixty-three years after independence, are we really free? Are the people masters in their own house? I am deliberately putting the case with all its bluntness to highlight what is at stake. Today say “Pakistan” and what comes to mind – military coups, sham democracy, an accidental and powerful president, a non-sovereign rubber-stamp parliament, and a ceremonial prime minister. Today Pakistan is not just a “rentier state”, not just a client state — it is a slave state, ill-led, ill-governed by a power-hungry junta and a puppet government set up by Washington.

If you want to see the chasm between the grotesquely rich and the abject poor, come to Pakistan. The privileged few own the country and all the sources of life; the rest just pray or die. Pakistan today is a land of opportunities for corrupt, unscrupulous, unprincipled politicians holding fake degrees, dishonest civil servants, smugglers and tax-evaders who have bank accounts, luxurious villas, mansions and apartments in the west. A great divide, a yawing chasm – some call it a new Iron Curtain – separates them from their less fortunate countrymen, whose life is “nasty, brutish and short”.

They have a stake in the status quo or the system as they call it. While life at the top gets cushier, millions of jobless people and those at the bottom of the social ladder are forced to resort to crime merely to survive. Many of them are fleeing the country and desperately trying to escape to the false paradises of the Middle East and the west.

The rich are getting richer, while the poor are sinking deeper and deeper into a black hole of abject poverty.

THUS ARE WE GOVERNED

President Asif Ali Zardari's alleged corruption - in the $2-3 billion range, according to the New York Times ---has not stopped his western patrons from funding, supporting and propping up the government of a man whose legacy has been marked by political unpopularity, instability, large scale graft and violence. No wonder that his party (Pakistan Peoples Party) is popularly referred to as the Permanent Plunder Party.

by Roedad Khan

The Zardari government treats truth as an insignificant value which can be suppressed, distorted and readily sacrificed to the will of power. Every now and then ministers make outrageous statements and spread blatant lies without the slightest regard for truth or principle.

Prime Minister Gilani told journalists recently, “There is no corruption in Pakistan.”

Everybody knows this government is corrupt from top to bottom, from the bark to the core. “Talks held with US on equal footing,” said Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi. Everybody knows this government deals with the US with its “knees on the ground”. Nobody believes a word they say. The time for such stupid remarks is over. Such cruel jokes cannot amuse a country that is prostrate, exhausted, impoverished, humiliated, abandoned and no longer independent. 

Today we have a government that is not a government of the people, by the people, for the people. It is a criminal syndicate, an organised crime ring. If you want to know how this cabal plunders this poor country, visit the Supreme Court and watch the proceedings.

The farewell address of George Washington will ever remain an important legacy for small nations like Pakistan. In that notable testament, the Father of the American Republic cautioned that “an attachment of a small or weak toward a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.” “It is folly in one nation,” George Washington observed, “to look for disinterested favours from another…it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character.” 

No truer words have been spoken on the subject. Pakistan is paying and will continue to pay a very heavy price for the folly of attaching itself to America. In this country democracy is only permissible when the results are favourable to America. Not otherwise.

We lost our independence years ago. The decolonisation of Asia, triggered by the Second World War, led to the retreat of foreign powers and the creation of a number of nation-states, including India and Pakistan, in the region. Of all the de-colonised, newly-independent countries, Pakistan is perhaps the only country which has lost its independence, has been re-colonised and turned into an American colony. Today it is not just a “rentier state”, not just a client state. It is a slave state, ill-led, ill-governed by a power-hungry junta and a puppet government set up by Washington.

“Liberty once lost,” Adams famously told his countrymen, “is perhaps lost forever.” We Pakistanis lost our independence and all our democratic institutions in October 1999 when General Musharraf toppled an elected government. Sadly, Pakistan also lost her honour and became a ‘rentier state’ on Musharraf’s watch when he capitulated, said yes to all the seven demands presented to him at gunpoint by Secretary Colin Powell and joined the “coalition of the coerced”. Regrettably, this situation remains unchanged even though the country is now under a democratic dispensation!

Marx once said: “Neither a nation nor a woman is forgiven for an unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who comes along can sweep them off their feet and possess them.” October 7, 1958 was our unguarded hour when democracy was expunged from the politics of Pakistan with scarcely a protest. The door was opened to Bonapartism. The result is the mess we are in today. Today there is not much independence or democracy left in Pakistan to celebrate.

A lesson to be drawn from the works of Gibbon is that Rome’s enemies lay not outside her borders but within her bosom, and they paved the way for the empire’s decline and fall – first to relentless barbarian invaders from the north, and then, a thousand years later, to the Turks. Many early symptoms that heralded the Roman decline may be seen in our own country today: the ever-present threat of military intervention in the affairs of state, concentration of power in one person without responsibility and accountability, contempt for the constitution and the Supreme Court, absence of rule of law, high-level corruption and greed. Today what is at stake is the survival of the state itself. At this time, all those who see the perils of the future must draw together and take resolute measures to secure our country.

“After joining the coalition of the coerced”, this is what we get: a spurious democracy brokered in Washington, an accidental president facing corruption and criminal charges, a rubber stamp parliament, a figurehead and corrupt prime minister, and to add insult to injury, Zardari regime – a facsimile of the Musharraf regime in civilian clothing. Potemkin villages dotted all over the country, the nation’s army at war with its own people; flagrant violation of our air space and national sovereignty by US aircraft, resulting in the killing of innocent men, women and children. No protest by our “democratic government”, no expression of remorse by our coalition partner in the so-called war on terror, no regret. The state of the federation is chilling. It would stun someone who went to sleep soon after Independence Day in 1947 and awakened in the present.

All philosophers tell the people they are the strongest, and that if they are sent to the slaughterhouse, it is because they have let themselves to be led there. In other countries there are men and women who love their liberties more than they fear persecution. Not in Pakistan. Here the elite who owe everything to this poor country do not think in terms of Pakistan and her honour but of their jobs, their business interests and their seats in a rubber stamp parliament. Surrender rather than sacrifice is the theme of their thoughts and conversations. To such as these talk of resisting foreign intervention is as embarrassing as finding yourself in the wrong clothes at the wrong party, as tactless as a challenge to run to a legless man, as out of place as a bugle call in a mortuary. What is tragic is the total failure of the politicians, the intelligentsia, the intellectuals, in fact, the entire civil society to comprehend the threat posed by surging American imperialism to the country’s very existence.

How can authentic democracy flourish in this country when people are not prepared to defend the core values of the nation – sovereignty of the people, inviolability of the constitution, supremacy of civilian rule, a fiercely independent, incorruptible judiciary, rule of law, an independent, incorruptible chief election commissioner, a neutral, non-politicised and honest civil service, social justice, egalitarianism and ruthless accountability of rulers? How can authentic democracy take root if people have no faith in their democratic institutions; if they do not value representative governments; if they are not prepared to make any sacrifices for its sake; if they are unwilling to defend it and if they are unable to do what it requires?

In this atmosphere of gloom and doom, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry’s act of courage, his defiance of the military dictator, promised a resurrection, a rebirth of the nation. Today he alone is the incarnation of the values for which we are fighting. Rarely, in the history of human endeavour, have so many owed so much to one single, solitary individual. The conspirators who have ganged up against him and the reborn Supreme Court must not succeed.

The writer is a former federal secretary. Email: roedad@comsats.net.pk

Source: The News International, Title Image: Siyasat PK

 Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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RETURN OF MUSHARRAF, AND PAKISTAN’S BALKANIZATION

by Zainab Cheema

[If Musharraf survives disembarking from the plane in Karachi, then he is certain to finish turning Pakistan into America's great plantation.  The matter of Musharraf seems pretty clear--he is bringing the new American "Raj" to Pakistan.]

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“This is clearly spelled out in our would-be Napolean’s campaign trail. If Musharraf has learned a lesson from his 2008 exile, it is that his sole duty is to be a loyal employee of US War Inc. Plunging Pakistan into chaos and fear is hardly a source of regret — it is that he didn’t do enough for the Pentagon while in office. He promises to immediately redress this in his second reign over the hapless country. In a speech given last year at Trinity College, he made headlines with his statements that Pakistanis will simply have to buckle up and accept casualties from the war on terror.”

At times, one may wonder at the seeming irrationality of US foreign policy toward Pakistan. When the floods struck, the US government was the most prolific donor, with USAID politicos expressing ready sympathy for the victims. American officials have declared that it is imperative to broadcast a beneficent image of the United States, worriedly citing polls that track the rise of anti-American sentiment in the Pakistani public. This is sandwiched by CIA bombing campaigns in Waziristan and hired mercenaries like Blackwater (now Xe) Corporation conducting terrorizations that alienate hearts and minds throughout Pakistan.

A fresh development in this schizophrenic saga is the return of Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf to the political arena. From his current perch in London, Musharraf announced on October 1 that he is creating a new political party — the All Pakistan Muslim League — to run for office in Pakistani elections. Proud collaborator of the War on Terror, his speechmaking shows that the destabilization and social terror he helped inflict hasn’t impaired his flair for the grandiose. “Today, God has given me the opportunity to set the tone for my political legacy,” he announced at his London press conference. “Come join me in changing Pakistan’s destiny. It is not an easy task but one we must work for, as Pakistan is ours.” Frederick Turner would be gratified — Manifest Destiny indeed.

But Musharraf’s return is hardly possible without international — or shall we abbreviate and say, American — support. As with Iraqi counterparts such as former spook Iyad Allawi, he belongs to the pool of collaborators who court funds and favor in order to return to their posts of glory in the Third World.

Let’s cue the rewind button here. Musharraf assumed power in October 1999 after a military coup deposing then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. However, his political fortunes changed only after 9/11. Prior to this, US officials had sneered at the architect of yet another military coup, admonishing Pakistan with the example of democratic India which was then on the fast-track to becoming America’s bosom-buddy. With 9/11, US representative in South Asia, Richard Armitage, offered Musharraf an elegantly simple choice — either join us or “we’ll bomb you back to the Stone Age.” Musharraf likes his cigars and whiskey, those macho pleasures of civilization, so he opted for the Faustian handshake.

But like the necromancer’s curse, the grizzly reality of Stone Age was not to be escaped. As Henry Kissinger once observed, while being America’s enemy is dangerous, America’s friendship is disastrous. A discarded Cold War ally, Pakistan’s coffers had been dry and creaky. With the handshake, military aid poured in to the tune of $7 billion. Besides graft and elaborate pay-offs for army officers, Musharraf was even able to reroute some of the funds earmarked for fighting the war on terror into F-16 fighter planes for Pakistan’s armed non-aggression against India, or as one independent observer put it, toys for his boys in uniform.

Pakistan’s politicos have always shown remarkable generosity in passing down the costs of their decision-making to the people. It is a self-evident truth, bordering on a truism, that Pakistan has been turned into a war on terror parking lot: 3000 American Special Forces units operate in Pakistan at the present. The cost? Aafia Siddiqui is only the most famous case of secret abductions and kidnappings run by the FBI and CIA throughout the country.

To elaborate, thousands of people simply disappear, after commando style raids on their homes during night-time or high-speed kidnappings in public. Human Rights Watch has flagged this unconstitutional disappearance, noting the pain and terror this spreads in families and neighborhoods. When Pakistani Special Forces and the FBI stormed Zain and Kashan Afzal’s home in Karachi, they broke through the concrete walls, tied up their ailing mother, and threatened to kill the family. The brothers’ 5-month sojourn in prison reaped a burst eardrum, lacerations on the back, and other souvenirs of US attempts to win the “hearts and minds” of the Pakistani public.

As it turns out, Guantanamo is a thriving industry in Pakistan and the foremost field of Pakistan-US collaboration. In fact, Pakistan’s police, army, and other law and order institutions have been subsumed in the American security apparatus. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan conservatively notes that 5,000 cases of police torture are connected with the war on terror. The methods used in these interrogations should be familiar as cinnamon-scented apple pie: beating, burning with cigarettes; whipping the soles of the feet; prolonged isolation, electric shock, denial of food or sleep; hanging victims upside down, and forced spreading of the legs with bar fetters. The Iraq and Afghanistan playbook is clearly not gathering dust-mites.

And while most of the dirty work is done by Pakistani policemen, American interrogators stamp the whole operation as “Made in the US of A” in the victim’s minds. When Zain Afzal asked to be formally charged and tried in court, the FBI interrogators threatened to ship him to Cuba and told him, “We are the court.

SHOULD PAKISTAN SHOOT DOWN A DRONE

 

 Multiple Drone Attacks

by Dr. Haider Mehdi

On that side there is much mistrust, on this side such weakness!

Neither can she ask, nor am I able to speak. Let me pull myself together, O despair! What calamity is this?                                                      

I am beginning to lose even the thread of thought about my love.                                                                              (Narrate/translate here “love” as the “love” of my country – this thought added.)

Ghalib – Translated by Aijaz Ahmad

Today, Pakistan is at the crossroads of its destiny: Either the deprived masses of this country, through a strongly demonstrated expression of their political will, will transform it into a sovereign, independent and dignified nation – or the incumbent ruling regime in Islamabad will turn this country into a permanent US-Nato subservient state fighting a war against its own people to infinity and auctioning out its armed forces to fight proxy wars for their “masters” in Washington, London, Bonn, Paris and elsewhere. It is a desperate situation, a calamity, the beginning of losing even “the thread” of one’s “love,” as Ghalib would have described it.

Zalmay Khalilzad, true to the literal meaning of the phonetic sound of his name (in the Urdu language the word “Zulam,” sounding like Zalmay, means the embodiment of cruelty), was one of the most vocal and staunch advocates of the war and a formidable and influential political actor in the invasion and destruction of his native land, Afghanistan. Now, in a New York Times article entitled “Get Tough on Pakistan,” Zalmay Khalilzad is advocating a similar US foreign policy/military approach towards Pakistan: namely the unilateral invasion of Northern Waziristan by American troops and to carry the war into Pakistan’s territory using massive air-power and the incursion of troops by land routes.

The Zalmay approach is a recipe for the destruction of Pakistan.  In addition, he also calls for a larger presence of CIA operatives in the country and, in a nutshell, advocates a blue-print of turning Pakistan into a paid military-political satellite for serving the global financial interests of the US neo-conservative elite and multi-national corporations. 

 Right: Zalmay Khalilzad: An Afghan Zionist

Obviously, Zalmay is the front-line salesman of future American expansionist global policies. It is quite evident in the aforementioned article that Zalmay Khalilzad is projecting the mainstream American thinking on Pakistan and Afghanistan in terms of the future directions of US foreign policy in the South Asian region and in the Central Asian Islamic states.

Expounding on future American resolve in regards to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, Zalmay states, “More fundamentally, the United States needs to demonstrate that, even after our troops depart Afghanistan, we are resolved to stay engaged in the region.” This is the crux of thinking in the elitist military-corporate oligarchies within the American political establishment. Pakistan is to be transformed into a precise American political-military tool, an instrument of US policy affirmation; in this context Zalmay states that “… among the options being discussed by American and Pakistani officials this week is a security pact that would mean billions of dollars more. But such efforts have led to only the most incremental shifts in Pakistan’s policy… to induce quicker and more significant changes, Washington must offer Islamabad a stark choice between positive incentives and negative consequences.”

In the context of Pakistan’s on-going contemporary political-military engagement with the US, it is vitally important to fully understand the mindset and political conduct of important American political actors, such as Zalmay Khalilzad, as they reflect the mainstream ideological and strategic thinking of the inner-most ruling elite in Washington. Zalmay, like the majority of the powerful inner circle of foreign policy decision-makers in the US, suffers from a historically macho but pathological psychosis related to insecurity. In psychological terms, it is called the “megalomania” syndrome: the desire to feel superior and the deeply imbedded compulsion to have “power” over others – with a self-induced perception of grandeur and majestic command. The psychological impetus in this kind of behavior, though not genetic, comes from deep-seated feelings of inferiority, reasserted as brutal, unscrupulous pursuit of power, prestige and domination. These are the driving forces in the American psychic.

It is true that America has been an innovative leader in science, technology, medical science, information technology and above all in weapons engineering, but advancement in science and technology, in itself, does not produce a humanitarian ideology of compassion for human life. It is precisely this element which has been the missing link in the sociological paradigm of American political conduct when it comes to dealing with non-white, non-Judeo-Christian people and nations with diverse economic-political ideologies different from the US belief system. America has carried out massive killing and destruction all over the world on account of these factors. And now, American political heavyweight neo-conservatives, among them Zalmay Khalilzad, are advocating more destruction and killings in Pakistan, Iran and possibly in the entire region in the near future. 

Left: An Afghan Child wounded in a Drone Attack

This is 21^st century and the US-Nato are still wholly devoted to the 19^th and 20^th century colonial mindset. However, they cannot fool the world any longer.

Pakistan’s national tragedy in its deadlock of alliance with the US-Nato is that the incumbent political clan in Islamabad is not very different in its “megalomaniac” affliction than its counterparts in Washington and West European capitals. The incumbent regime in Pakistan is power hungry – it will do anything to stay in power – even marginalize the nation to an onerous, oppressive and burdensome existence of a total subservient state serving US-Nato global interests and hegemonic objectives at the expense of its people. It will surrender Pakistan’s sovereignty, its dignity, its territorial integrity and even push the nation into an endless war – to please its “masters” in Washington and the Nato capitals. Megalomaniac leaderships have no limits and no boundaries in their irrational political conduct. But the question is: how long will the Zardari-Gilani clan defy growing public discontent with the intrusive American-Nato political behavior in this country?

What Pakistan needs is a surgical strike at the US-Nato military adventurism inside Pakistan’s territory. Should it shoot down the next drone that violates Pakistan’s air space and kills Pakistani citizens?

Indeed, the choice rests with Washington and Nato headquarters. If Zalmay and neo-cons can advocate the extension of a full-scale American war inside Pakistan, then why can’t Pakistan respond in kind to defend itself against a blatant “act of war”?

Zalmay, in his article “Get Tough on Pakistan,” wrote, “… The United States should…carry out operations… with or without Pakistani consent. Arguments that such pressures would cause Pakistan to disintegrate are overstated. Pakistan’s institutions, particularly the country’s security organs, are sufficiently strong to preclude such an outcome.”

Indeed, Zalmay is right in assessing the power of Pakistan’s armed forces. Hence, I advocate the shooting of the next drone that flies Pakistan’s skies – a sufficiently powerful communicative political act for pre-damage control against an evolving US-Nato policy and possible emerging military adventurism inside Pakistan.

Indeed, Obama would not want to put his presidency and re-election at stake by dragging his feet into yet another war. Would he? He knows better than that.

Oh despair! What calamity is this?

Let me pull myself together…  As Ghalib would have said!

First and foremost, the entire nation should speak out and let the “megalomaniac” ruling elite in the power corridors of Islamabad know that they will not take any more “torments” of their “love”… the destruction of their country.

The Zardari-Gilani regime cannot be a part of the solution to Pakistan’s problematic…!

They are a part of the problem!

The writer is a professor, political analyst, published author and a conflict-resolution expert.
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Source: text & images Opinion Maker 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the ‘Wonders of Pakistan’. The contents of this article too are the sole responsibility of the author(s). WoP will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this post.

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DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF YOUR COMMENT

Wonders of Pakistan supports freedom of expression and this commitment extends to our readers as well. Constraints however, apply in case of a violation of WoP Comments Policy. We also moderate hate speech, libel and gratuitous insults.