Once upon a time a man called America enticed a woman called Pakistan, promising all kinds of things that Lotharios always do. The giddy girl fell for it. America fathered many children with her. A woman called Saudi Arabia the midwife every time. One child was named ‘Mujahideen al Amreeka’ and later renamed ‘Taliban bin CIA al ISI’. Another, conceived with ova supplied by the midwife, was named ‘Al Qaeda bin Amreeka’. A third was named ‘Haqqani bin Amreeka al Jaal’. There were many others. America fathered them for a purpose.
After the children had served their purpose, the father abandoned them. Naturally, they turned against him and became his enemies. Ever since, he has been doing everything to kill them. The children are killing him back. The children are winning. The father is desperate. He has gone bankrupt. His political system is paralysed. He cannot think logically. He hypocritically blames the mother and the donor-midwife for having fathered them too like self-procreating organisms and also turned on them. But he never blames himself for abandonment as callous fathers do. So he is paying the price, as are the mother and the midwife.
Lacking logical answers, America scoffs at those that question it by trying to portray them as inferior life forms: “That was history. This is now. Forget the past”. Pseudo ‘intellectuals’, themselves looking to help America father more illegitimate children, say, “Right on. Look to the future.” Problem is: the past never allows you to forget itself. If you try, the future becomes bleak. That is America’s prime hypocrisy in this region.
Hypocrisy: There were times when Ronald Reagan likened the Haqqani Network’s founder Jalaluddin Haqqani and America’s other children to the “moral equivalent of America’s founding fathers” who were freedom fighters against the British. America’s children then were freedom fighters against the Soviet Union. Today, they have become the “moral equivalent” of freedom fighters against American occupation. That’s the only difference – just a detail.
Hypocrisy: Retiring Admiral Mike Mullen’s assertion that the ‘Haqqani Network’ is “a veritable arm of the ISI” is a parting-kick of desperate petulance. He forgets that the Mujahideen-Taliban, Al-Qaeda and the Haqqanis started life as “veritable arms of the CIA”. If America’s callous, hypocritical and irresponsible personality hadn’t caused it to become an abandoning father, they would never have turned against it. America forsook its strategic and moral responsibility of looking after its children and is now reaping the harvest.
Hypocrisy: What would you do if someone broke into your house and tried to occupy it? You would bring out your gun and shoot him, wouldn’t you? Well, that is exactly what the Haqqanis and Taliban are doing. Contrarily, America wants Pakistan to wage war on the Afghan Haqqanis on its behalf because they are killing Americans in Afghanistan. That begs the question: what are you doing in Afghanistan in the first place? It is not your country. It belongs to the Afghans. They are fighting to free it. They have every right to do so. Wasn’t that the logic when the Soviet Union was the occupier? Or does logic change with occupier?
Hypocrisy: While America wants Pakistan to wage war against the Haqqanis, it itself wants to negotiate with them. What sense does that make? Talk of being two-faced.
Hypocrisy: America allows its unstable drug lord stooge Karzai to cozy up to India, giving it undue entry and influence in Afghanistan. India should be careful. History shows that whoever befriends America eventually comes a cropper, and not just in the Third World. Europe followed crazy American economic nostrums cooked up by bankers who by definition are limited of living on more and more credit. Today their economies have flatlined. Afghanistan has been totalled. Pakistan followed America slavishly virtually from the beginning and today its very existence is being wondered about. Learn lessons from our pathetic histories, my dear neighbours, learn lessons. Don’t commit suicide in an effort to do Pakistan down. Keep pestering us if it pleases you, but for your own sakes don’t do it by getting into bed with America, else you will get an unmentionable disease. We have.
Hypocrisy: The events of 9/11 started it all. Ten years on and America has still not provided incontrovertible proof that it was Al-Qaeda that did it. Oh, I forget, I’m a ‘conspiracy theorist’.
Hypocrisy: On May 2 this year America claims to have killed Osama Bin Laden in a decrepit house in Abbottabad, while many important Americans say that he died in late 2001. But they are ignored as – you guessed it – ‘conspiracy theorists’. No one was shown the body, not even their own media. They claim to have done a DNA test in 24 hours, which experts say is impossible. They quickly dumped his body in the Arabian Sea. They don’t even show us the photographs because they are too gruesome. Since when did ‘gruesome’ bother America? Since they saw the bodies of cooked Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? There goes the ‘conspiracy theorist’ again. When people don’t have cogent answers to what you are saying, their defense is to discredit you by labeling you a ‘conspiracy theorist’. Their puppets parrot them. When the ‘conspiracy theorist’ abuse is hurled at me, I’m convinced that there is something to what I am saying. Yes, I am a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and proud of the label. You keep hatching conspiracies; I will keep questioning them. When you cannot answer rationally and in a civilised manner, you have lost and I have won.
Hypocrisy: America keeps moaning about the growing heroin addiction in its country. Having ‘successfully’ occupied Afghanistan and installing its satrap Karzai there, couldn’t it have prevented the growth and refinement of poppy? The Taliban government made poppy cultivation history. But if America did it too, how could it assert that the drugs trade is financing its abandoned children, when actually it is financing America’s war: enough has been written about how America part-financed its wars in Latin America, Indo-China and Afghanistan through drugs as a matter of policy. As you sow so shall you reap: there was a time when America and Britain deliberately exported so much opium to China that it turned it into a country of addicts. Today, China is an audacious world climber and America is a pathetic world descender. Too many Americans are drug (and credit) addicts. Which is worse? Such is the bitter fruit of perfidy and hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is the product of stupidity.
So, my two-faced ‘friend’, let’s forget history and talk of today. European economies are finished. America’s economy is in terminal decline. The dollar isn’t dead yet not only because China keeps it on life support to save its loans to America, its investments in America and America’s investments in China.
It is more because the dollar still remains the reserve currency till an alternative is found, which it will be. When people buy dollars (or US bonds), they don’t do so because they think that, “it is as good as gold”. They do so because with all other dollar-pegged currencies also in decline, stock markets in turmoil, equities unstable and real estate falling, they might as well go with the reserve currency until they have something more solid and stable to park their money in. With America’s political system too incompetent to throw up quality leadership to solve its myriad problems, confidence is zero. That, my dear America, is today.
If America doesn’t see sense, stop its hypocrisy and get out of the many messes that it has got into, I wouldn’t bet on it surviving as the global bully much longer. But that is how empires fall: hubris, strategic and intellectual decadence, and imperial overreach.
The writer is a political analyst. He can be contacted at humayun.gauhar786@gmail.com