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Dollars, Drones and Development
By Jalees Hazir at The Nation and Information Clearing House.
Last week, the United States of America threatened to hold back some $800 million it owes Pakistan in military aid. The move was aimed at pressurizing Pakistan, or more specifically the defense and intelligence apparatus of the country,............ to unquestioningly execute plans and strategies prepared at the Pentagon and CIA and to start blindly obeying orders from Washington DC.
To add to the pressure and give more teeth to this openly belligerent no-holds-barred US policy, the IMF also decided to further delay the release of its billion-dollar no-good loan installments. From Afghanistan, the US-led NATO allies continued to send regular gifts of drones that attack our tribal belt with missiles and kill innocent Pakistanis (1500 innocent civilians dead and counting....NO compensation for the families for the loss of their loved ones either).
Lately, they have made it convenient for militant hordes to attack our security check posts and villages in FATA.(From Kunar province in Afghanistan) Surely, these are no ordinary problems between two allies but signs of open hostility.
The question is:
(1) Is it possible to reconcile the differences between the two countries?
(No as Hamid Gul stated plainly very recently, and Imran Khan, and Nawaz Sharif.....the interests and strategic objectives of the JEWSA and their poodles in the region, and the strategic objectives of Pakistan don't match....in fact they collide with each other and are widely divergent. What is remarkable is the sham pretense that has been maintained to sustain this false relationship ignited by 9/11 and the consequent threats from the JEWSA that Pakistan would be bombed back to stone age if it did not cooperate with the JEWSA from 2001.
The last 10 years has been a slow painful process of finding out precisely WHY this relationship never was going to work in the first place.....it has cost Pakistan upwards of $70 billion in economic loss, and obviously the JEWSA aid given of mainly of a military nature don't match the losses sustained so far, OR the lives lost 35,000 dead, or the general suffering, or converting Pakistan into a failed state from 2006, or the destabilization, or the routine hidden threats made to Pakistan)
(2) And more importantly, are we ready to defend ourselves?
(Turn to China, sign a security pact, station Chinese troops in Gwadar, AND turn to India asap....its that simple as argued on this blog. Spiraling down the path of a failed state year in year out as a result of following JEWSA security policy doggy style can't be good for Pakistan)
Against the backdrop of this heightened bullying by the doomed superpower, the never-ending rounds of meetings between the defense and intelligence top brass of the two so-called allies intensified, and according to latest reports, the two sides have decided to mend fences.
Nothing official has been forthcoming about the agreements reached in the meetings if any. Even the information attributed to unnamed officials only talks about the points of disagreement. Yet, the impression created by these reports is that the two sides have managed to iron out some differences. As a proof of progress, the US would start releasing the funds that it had earlier threatened to withhold. In the absence of any authentic information regarding the rules of cooperation agreed upon in these meetings, it is difficult to say how long the precarious and superficial peace between the two sides would last. And given the essential divergence in the way the two sides would like to sort out the Afghanistan mess, it is not bound to last very long.
(YES, but it is also highly destabilizing that top Pakistani security officials meet their American counter-parts with any presence of the civilian government having any knowledge of what the agreements are..........clearly the military control SECURITY and FOREIGN policy in Pakistan)
Those arguing for a continuation of this roller-coaster relationship like to talk about the tensions between the two countries as if they were issues between a married couple.
They say that the spouses will continue to bicker, but divorce is not a possibility. They say the two countries are indispensable to each other and, therefore, it is imperative that they find a way to reconcile their conflicting positions. The US needs Pakistan's cooperation to ensure a favorable end to the deathly game it has been playing in Afghanistan for a decade and Pakistan cannot be on the wrong side of the sole superpower that sponsors its civilian government and military operations with its dollars, they say. Actually, this is not a fair assessment of the relationship that was obviously not made in heaven. While the US is clearly dependent on Pakistan to fulfill its hegemonic designs in the region, notions about Pakistan's dependence on the global bully are exaggerated. When it becomes obvious that the continuation of a marriage would result in murder, a divorce is the only option.
(Only JEWSA paid hacks, the likes of Farhat Taj, Irfan Husain of the Israeli lobby and Farrukh Saleem....make such monstrously silly analogies trivializing the suffering and death of 35,000 people in Pakistan since 2001 as if the result of a mere tiff between two spouses.....decidedly false analogies)
