Buried at sea?

If you expect this article to be another non-serious dwelling on the alleged demise of Ozymandias Bin Laden, you should wait for next Tuesday’s copy of Pakistan Today. After having written said satirical account of how maturely (sic!) the Pakistani media handled the news, I scrapped it in favour of this, more philosophical examination of the passing of OBL. For the discerning reader, there is nothing new in this article. But for those with chronic amnesia and verbal diarrhoea (like most of our talk show hosts), this should remind you of where we have been and where we are heading.

Turning back the pages of history, one might at first be asphyxiated by the dust that has accumulated on the unconsulted books that make up the sum of all mankind’s knowledge. In the year 1990, when the Cold War officially came to an end after the reunification of Germany, many thought that the United States’ days as a global superpower were numbered. George Bush the Elder was in power at the time and NATO was strapped for cash. There were no wars that needed to be fought and it seemed as if the world was headed towards a period of everlasting peace under the banner of the United Nations. We were all set to adopt Esperanto as our primary tongue and ready to receive our passports as ‘Citizens of the World’ rather than being Pakistani, Arabic or Polynesian, when out of the blue, an old friend’s antics got us all riled up.

Since the superpowers were on a first-name basis with So-damn, everyone thought the old man had lost his marbles. Once the darling of Secretary Rumsfeld, So-damn Insane was raining scuds on Kuwait and Israel like it was Hanukah. Fed up with this blatant aggression, the US launched Operation Desert Storm and several other fancy codenames against the power-mad dictator. They ravaged the Iraqi territories, ensuring that the people of this ancient land would not have the capacity to rebuild themselves to their former glories without Halliburton’s help, and moved on.

Half a decade later, the perverted Clinton was looking for a cause to rally his embattled government. Approval ratings had sunk to an all-time low for the grey-haired Bill, and his wife was becoming more popular than he was. This was then the crafty cat from Arkansas first heard of Slobodan Milosevic, an unruly and incorrigible despot who made Edi Amin look like a toddler with autism. The butcher of Bosnia had killed, maimed, executed and liquidated thousands of Bosnian Muslims and other non-Serbs in the time that he had been big cheese. But it was in 1996, after the population of the modern Czech Republic had been halved through precision ethnic cleansing, that Billy Bob decided that it was time to put an end to Milosevic’s reign of terror. NATO once again came into play and air strikes and ground operations were launched against the newest bad guy the US had conjured up out of thin air. This was also the war where the late viceroy of Af-Pak, Dick Holbrooke, made a name for himself.

I hope you’re beginning to see a trend developing.

Over the years, with interventions in places such as Haiti, Yemen, Venezuela and Libya, the US kept the major arms manufacturers happy by buying and testing all of their latest toys in battlefields far, far away from American soil. The Persian Gulf and Mediterranean became homes away from home for US servicemen stationed at the many aircraft carriers in these regions. From here, they could launch conventional air strikes, precision laser-guided smart bombs and even the clumsier cruise missiles at targets as far inland as Afghanistan and Lebanon. However, these assets remained immobile and motionless in cases where the aggressor was someone from the US camp e.g., the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The years kept rolling by, and the USA needed a new bad guy. By now, Milosevic was all washed up and the Soviet Union was still trying to recover from the hangover of the Yelstin years when, out of nowhere, bearded Arabs decided to fly passenger airliners into the World Trade Centre. Mind you, these same bearded Arabs had been partners with US in the Soviet-Afghan war and later in the first Iraq war. However, they were hardly won over the US’ attractive retirement plan, which included abandoning all allies to a fate worse than torture and decided to carry out a systematic campaign of terror against the US, bombing the USS Cole in 2000 and committing other such felonies. In response to the 9/11 attacks, the Boy King George ‘Dubya’ launched attacks on Afghanistan’s Taliban regime and, later, his father’s arch nemesis So-damn Insane. This second wave was mostly done to erase all the wartime evidence of the Bush family’s involvement with Iraq before the war.

Now that they’ve found, killed and buried at sea the feared Osama Bin Laden, one might be tempted to ask, “What now?” The answer to that is simple and terrifying. A new front is going to be opened very soon, somewhat to the East of Afghanistan. Boots are going to land on Pakistani soil, and they’re not just going to be searching Abbotabad this time. After all, if Osama had a CNIC, then NADRA has to be classified as an Al-Qaeda subsidiary. And you get no points for guessing who else has CNICs issued by NADRA.