Chasing Shadows In Pakistan

By Iftekhar A Khan
December 18, 2009
Courtesy of "Information Clearing House"

Pakistan -- - Prime Minister Gordon Brown has asked Pakistan to track down Osama bin Laden as according to him Laden has sought refuge in FATA. When world leaders’ statements are equivocal and banal, understand that there’s a hidden agenda behind them and you’re on the deceiving end. Mr Obama and Mr Brown take turns in making similar statements to coerce Pakistan to do more. Doing more, in their parlance, means to ‘sanitise’ the turbulent tribal belt, which is the future route of oil and gas pipelines from the Central Asian States to Pakistani port - Gawadar. Today, if the US department of geological survey (USGS) were to announce that CAS contained no energy reserves, US and its partners in exploitation of energy resources would declare victory and withdraw from Afghanistan post haste. Imperialist powers would quickly forget whether or not the Afghan people were protected against the Taliban or the apocryphal Al-Qaida, women emancipated from their blue cloaks, and democracy spread in the country.

Mr Brown's predecessor, Tony Blair, faces an inquiry headed by John Chilcot for fabricating Iraq dossier before the US-led forces began to wreak death and destruction in a sovereign Muslim country on the pretence that it had WMDs. Simon Jenkins's article in the UK Guardian had an attention-grabbing title: “We want Blair's head. Chilcot will not give it to us.” Today it's Blair tomorrow it could be Brown. One lied to people to fabricate his case for Iraq and the other is doing the same by sending more troops in the harm way. The British premier is aware that Laden died long ago. UK's top sniffing agency, MI6, must have informed him that Laden was no more yet Mr Brown browbeats Pakistan to produce him. Laden alive is more useful to the imperialist powers than Laden dead.

Mythical Laden was a kidney patient on dialysis before the US-led NATO forces invaded Afghanistan. He could have never survived the Tora Bora bombing and indiscriminate use of daisy cutters and bunker busters. Yet Mr Brown goes on parroting the demand of his senior, Mr Obama, to locate him. British have a knack of and penchant for mendacity and twisting facts with a poker face. The world knows that the war in Afghanistan, costing billions of dollars, has nothing to do with capturing Laden or eliminating Al-Qaida; it’s primarily a war to control energy resources and to dominate the region. That’s the game being played out.

Truth is that Mr Obama seems to have lost control of US foreign and defence policies. The hawks of the military industrial complex and national security advisers who war-game with public lives and resources in alien lands dictate US policies. Would Lockheed Martin, manufacturer of Hellfire missiles and General Atomics, manufacturer of Predator and Reaper drones that fire these missiles want the war to end? Would defence contractors Blackwater (Worldwide Xe), DynCorp or Krestal and reconstruction giants Halliburton and Bechtel want the flames of war to extinguish? No, because war is their industry and killing their business. Such corporations, on the other end, finance politicians’ election campaigns. So wars are lucrative corporate projects.

Prime Minister Gillani said a few days ago that troop surge in Afghanistan will destabilise Pakistan, but our superior ally, instead of paying heed to it, has decided to inject more troops. Some of the young soldiers will probably spend last Christmas at home. The US agenda in Pakistan is not obscure anymore; the superpower intends to stretch war with drone strikes in Balochistan beside FATA. The US already knows that the weak-kneed Pak government beholden to it will make superficial noises of little consequence and not much else. This supports the oft-repeated stance that destabilisation activity surrounds the arc: CAS-Afghanistan-FATA-Balochistan (Gawadar). With surge in US and coalition troops in Afghanistan, the region round the arc is likely to boil over. People are seething with anti-Americanism; they attribute deaths and destruction of property because of daily blasts to US war on terror the country has been sucked into. Email:pinecity@gmail.com

Iftekhar A Khan - Pakistan