Aid or no aid, our message must reach the Americans: Pacify Afghanistan, no war in Pakistan, and cease turning Afghanistan into a source of regional tension.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—A couple of international English-language television news outlets and three U.S. officials is all that it took to throw the state of Pakistan, its sprawling media and the nation at large into a spin. There cannot be a better example to underscore that we need to create a stronger state. For almost two days last week, American news outlets created an international scare over the capital of nuclear-armed Pakistan falling to 300 militants. One international news network went as far as instructing its reporter here to end his piece with the line, ‘… from the outskirts of Islamabad,’ creating a chilling impression of a real war front.
If that was not preposterous, not a single senior official in Islamabad came out to set the record straight. The result was that the constant American-led demonization of Pakistan, which started around 2007 premised on the idea – again, a theory peddled by our allies in the U.S. – that the world should get ready for a possible military intervention in a balkanized Pakistan, gained more currency than at any other time. A few hundred hillbillies sneaking into a small town 100 kilometers from the capital were portrayed as a mortal threat capable of wiping out the state. The story created a panic in several friendly capitals and Pakistani diplomats were inundated with calls from worried foreign officials. It is stunning that two senior army officers – Generals Tariq Majeed and Ashfaq Kayani – had to intervene in strong words to counter the malicious propaganda. Our leadership-deficient political elite has apparently lost the ability to infuse confidence.
The Americans are clearly pushing Pakistan toward a civil war. Their morbid predictions for Pakistan if we don’t send our army to our tribal belt and kill every single Pakistani Pashtun are almost convincing if not considering that the core problem of instability in the entire region is the U.S. failure to bring reconciliation and peace to Afghanistan.
In their public statements, designed to generate increased pressure on Pakistan and isolate it internationally, Washington officials are pretending as if the root cause of their Afghan troubles is the Buner or Dir districts. This is deliberate misrepresentation. Are the so-called ‘Swat Taliban’ or the so called ‘Pakistani Taliban’ planning attacks on the United States? Hillary Clinton says so. But she is not telling the whole truth. Yes, Pakistan needs to ruthlessly quell any challenge to the state and kill the terrorists. That is our problem. But we need to do this in our own way using a combination of soft and hard power without turning our territory into a war zone and our ordinary people into enemies. The U.S. needs to help us in this with money and weapons because this problem is a spillover from the huge American blunders in Afghanistan.
But Islamabad needs to draw a line at the feverish American effort to shift the failed Afghan war to Pakistan and insist that Washington defuse the tensions inside Afghanistan first. We need to explain this to NATO member nations. Our media needs to hammer the point. Washington is using its powerful media projection ability to remove Afghanistan from news headlines and focus on Pakistan. Pakistani officials need to be skeptics. They should remember the saying, ‘Only the paranoid survive.’ A nuclear-armed nation that cannot be confronted militarily is being engaged through multiple insurgencies bred and groomed in Afghanistan. A segment of the power elite in Washington clearly wants a transformed Pakistan to fit its wider regional outlook.
And then there is this strange overlap: The American pressure for war in Pakistan is matched by more and more shadowy terrorists sneaking in from Afghanistan to fight and kill Pakistanis, with open supply lines and endless stock of sophisticated weapons. Pakistani commentators and civil society activists need to see this wider picture and not get carried away by moralistic U.S. statements that hide hardcore strategic goals.
Take Buner for example. When the government and the military decided to eliminate the terrorists who call themselves Pakistani Taliban, our people discovered that these shadowy fighters are no ragtag rebels moving around in decrepit jeeps. In the words of the army spokesman, ‘over 500 militants equipped with a sophisticated communication system are holed up in various parts of Buner who are constantly receiving money and arms from outside Pakistan.’
Aid or no aid, our message must reach the Americans: Pacify Afghanistan, no war in Pakistan, and cease turning Afghanistan into a source of regional tension.
The Americans are clearly pushing Pakistan toward a civil war. Their morbid predictions for Pakistan if we don’t send our army to our tribal belt and kill every single Pakistani Pashtun are almost convincing if not considering that the core problem of instability in the entire region is the U.S. failure to bring reconciliation and peace to Afghanistan.
In their public statements, designed to generate increased pressure on Pakistan and isolate it internationally, Washington officials are pretending as if the root cause of their Afghan troubles is the Buner or Dir districts. This is deliberate misrepresentation. Are the so-called ‘Swat Taliban’ or the so called ‘Pakistani Taliban’ planning attacks on the United States? Hillary Clinton says so. But she is not telling the whole truth. Yes, Pakistan needs to ruthlessly quell any challenge to the state and kill the terrorists. That is our problem. But we need to do this in our own way using a combination of soft and hard power without turning our territory into a war zone and our ordinary people into enemies. The U.S. needs to help us in this with money and weapons because this problem is a spillover from the huge American blunders in Afghanistan.
But Islamabad needs to draw a line at the feverish American effort to shift the failed Afghan war to Pakistan and insist that Washington defuse the tensions inside Afghanistan first. We need to explain this to NATO member nations. Our media needs to hammer the point. Washington is using its powerful media projection ability to remove Afghanistan from news headlines and focus on Pakistan. Pakistani officials need to be skeptics. They should remember the saying, ‘Only the paranoid survive.’ A nuclear-armed nation that cannot be confronted militarily is being engaged through multiple insurgencies bred and groomed in Afghanistan. A segment of the power elite in Washington clearly wants a transformed Pakistan to fit its wider regional outlook.
And then there is this strange overlap: The American pressure for war in Pakistan is matched by more and more shadowy terrorists sneaking in from Afghanistan to fight and kill Pakistanis, with open supply lines and endless stock of sophisticated weapons. Pakistani commentators and civil society activists need to see this wider picture and not get carried away by moralistic U.S. statements that hide hardcore strategic goals.
Take Buner for example. When the government and the military decided to eliminate the terrorists who call themselves Pakistani Taliban, our people discovered that these shadowy fighters are no ragtag rebels moving around in decrepit jeeps. In the words of the army spokesman, ‘over 500 militants equipped with a sophisticated communication system are holed up in various parts of Buner who are constantly receiving money and arms from outside Pakistan.’
Aid or no aid, our message must reach the Americans: Pacify Afghanistan, no war in Pakistan, and cease turning Afghanistan into a source of regional tension.
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