A word is out on the ISI chief’s confabulations with his American
interlocutors in Washington. Among other things, they statedly have
agreed to avoid using media to pressure Pakistan. But will they? You
must be kidding. For them, their media is not conformist just to deceive
their own people and mislead the world community. It is their war
battalion that acts conspiratorially like Goebbels to project victories
where exist none and muffle up reverses that are too many. And
unarguably for the quandary they are presently in Afghanistan so
irretrievably, this conformist media of theirs is no lesser responsible.
Had it been an independent truthful media, not a compromised outlet
as it essentially has been, it would have reported realities, not
produced fictions. And that would have brought home to the American
people and their western allies very early after the invasion and
occupation of Afghanistan by the US-led coalition armies that instead of
fighting their warriors had cooped up in their cages – the ISAF
contingents in Kabul and the American expeditionary force in Bagram. The
public chagrin would have possibly shamed them into showing a little
bit of soldiering.
But as they kept sitting on their haunches in their redoubts,
munching on pistachios and hamburgers immovably, the American media kept
its guns trained at Pakistan and for long, long five years. The upshot
of their fictional serials was that the Pakistani security forces were
not putting in the fighting and letting the fleeing Taliban and al-Qaeda
rumps to sneak into their territory. Never ever they took a pause nor
gave a break to their audiences worldwide from their fictional barrage
to think if it was not an equal, if not bigger, responsibility of
Afghanistan’s invaders to prevent on their side this crossing over of
the Taliban and al-Qaeda fleeing remnants.
Of course, a cringing military dictator Pervez Musharraf, out to
court the American blessings for the legitimacy of his illegitimate
usurpation of power, took all this barrage lying down, loathsomely
sheepishly and defensively when he had had no reason to be on the
retreat. Culpably, the invaders were failing in their essential task
spectacularly for their sheer spinelessness and blatant cowardice. But
he kept mum even when the Taliban would launch an attack on a target
hundreds of miles away from Pakistan and the conformist media would
mislead their audience at home and abroad by shouting that the invaders
had come from the Pakistan direction.
But as this compromised embedded media was obsessed with
denigrating and demonising Pakistan and its military, a bigger reality
was in the works to become a strangulating albatross around the necks of
the invaders. The fleeing Taliban who had returned to their homes, to
their families and to their tribes were regrouping, reorganising and
rearming freely to take on the invaders. And when the invaders moved out
of their Kabul and Bagram forts, somewhere in 2006, the whole of
Afghanistan’s east and south was under the complete sway of Taliban and
other insurgent groups, with large chunks in their total administrative
control as well. The invaders now are endeavouring only failingly to
reclaim the south and east from their suzerainty. Yet the American media
is keeping up with its old game, talking of victories that have to do
more with fantasy than with reality.
The ground realities, nonetheless, mock at the invaders’ claims of
having subdued the south. And their outgoing top commander Gen. David
Petraeus’ recent outpouring that the coalition forces would now move
into the east to act is a clear confession that this vast territory has
never been under the invaders’ control. Indeed, the invaders are finding
it hard to confess that they have lost the Afghan war and to concede
defeat. And they will keep using the conformist media to put the entire
burden of their collapse on Pakistan. The media will certainly keep
playing ball with them as spiritedly as has it been doing so far.
Pakistan is thus destined to get all the wrap on the knuckles from
this media at the behest of the invaders, their commanders and their
political bosses. It is as simple as that. Their agreement with the ISI
chief will be just that, just an agreement on the paper, only for show.
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