Playing with our solidarity

Pakistan has paid a huge price in the shape of cross border militancy, durg trafficking, instability and turmoil in FATA, Khyber Pukhtun Khuwa and Balochistan, suicide attacks across Pakistan, illicit refugees, drone strikes, IDPs and fragile econimy.According to latest survey report by Regional Institute of Policy Research and Training, 67% people of Swat believe that drone strikes have caused anger among the people and fueled extremism and terrorism. In an another survey by Pew Research Cebtre in Washinghton on July 2010, two-third of Pakistanis oppose the US-led war in Afghanistan and roughly six in 10 think the US is an enemy.

This CIA South Waziristan drone incursion is an outrageous arrogance out-and-out. It comes as the reports were afloat that the ISI chief in his Washington confabulations with his CIA counterpart had pressed for restricting these drone attacks to North Waziristan and that too not to undertake them without first securing Pakistani security authorities’ concurrence. Yet they launched this assault the very next day of that Washington conclave. They thus projected their arrogance as haughtily as had they by attacking a tribal jirga in North Waziristan a day after CIA double-murder contractor Raymond Davis’s release. At least 45 tribal elders and tribesmen, including children, were slaughtered. Yet neither were they apologetic nor contrite. The ISI chief may have raised the issue of drone incursions in the talks. But that doesn’t mean they had acceded his plea. In fact, their media leaks tell neither had they accepted his demand nor had they held out any assurance to him to this effect. Rather, they had averred no letup in their drone adventurism. But the question is why is our military establishment so submissive and so subservient in the face of this provocative American arrogance? Are we their client state or a colony? Are we no sovereign state? Of course, our rulers, too, have much to explain. It is pointless going over General Pervez Musharraf’s mean and demeaning surrender. Shamelessly, he sold out the country cheap, making of it a vassal state of America, giving to their military adventurists, spy agencies and mercenary killers a free run of our land for their vile enterprises. But the incumbents have shown themselves no better. The WikiLeaks’ one released cable quotes President Asif Zardari telling his visiting American interlocutors that collateral damage in their incursions could be their problem, not his. And another cable reports Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani saying as long as they hit the right targets, he wouldn’t care; he would just deny it in the parliament and then forget. Both may have taken the cover of denial, as is routine in such events with state functionaries, including the ones holding topnotch positions, when caught with pants down. But their very mantra that these American drone incursions are proving counterproductive is as big a charade as is the prime minister’s latest chant of trying to mobilise world diplomatic pressure on America to dissuade it from this drone adventurism. Do they think the Americans to be so stupid as not to understand such a simple thing as incursions’ counterproductive factor? And do they really think if the world has the power enough to subdue the American elephant when it runs amuck? When will they realise that big American individual careers and institutional reputes are at great risk because of the US-led Afghan war that has palpably run so awry? Even once incorrigible optimists have now turned into incurable pessimists about this war. And the Americans themselves, once loath of even hearing of Taliban as people of peace, are now openly vying for peace negotiations with them. Plainly, they want to pullout of this war as quickly as possible, but they want some scapegoats to show a varnished face to their people whose lot of treasure and some blood they have expended on this practically lost war. All too apparently, Pakistan is to be this scapegoat. For this, apart from methodically denouncing its ruling political leadership as weakling and its military and ISI as uncontrollable genies, they have deviously picked on, notably only for the present, its tribal regions for their military aggressiveness to mislead the America people that Afghanistan they had pacified and the problem is only these Pakistani areas from where insurgency flows into their occupied country. And while they claim killing in drone incursions only militants, their assertions are amazingly instantly endorsed by our security establishment’s personnel, even as it contends that the CIA no more takes it into confidence on these assaults. So much so, our senior military commanders of the region have publicly categorically stated only militants are killed in these assaults. But the tribal people are crying. They yell mainly their civilians are being massacred. And their anger is now increasingly being directed against the Pakistani state, its military and its leadership. A big threat to our national solidarity is indeed in the offing in the tribal regions. And if this American adventurism continues, this solidarity could come under alarming strains. Hence the political and military leadership must sit together and think out how to put paid to this dangerous American campaign.