No more crawling

Can we live on our feet?

It has never been this bad. How far the tension between America and Pakistan escalates depends on the real intentions and wisdom of both. America seems to be spoiling for a fight and hopes that we will retaliate militarily to provide them ‘international justification’ to widen its attacks. Why would America want a fight with Pakistan? Iran is the real target of the US-Israeli Combine; our nuclear weapons are the joker in the pack. While we have given no nuclear umbrella to Iran (or anyone else), if it comes to the crunch America can never be sure.

As always, America has painted itself into a corner. With the financial and military relationship gone and our money stolen, Pakistan no longer needs America. Their conundrum is: they still need us to get out of Afghanistan in one piece.

Irrationality is a hallmark of a superpower in decline, lashing out like a wounded bear, making its decline sharper. After losing their wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and unable to find their way out, common sense dictates that America shouldn’t open yet another front. Instead, desperation to revive their economy compels them to open more. Yes, “Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.” Problem is, they will cause immense destruction and loss of life before they bite the dust.

Let’s get one thing straight: America is no longer an ally. It is an enemy. Undoubtedly America also thinks the same about us. We are both expert gravediggers – of our own graves. What both take to be self-interest is in fact self-destruction. In bombing countries to smithereens and occupying them for a while, America might destroy their infrastructure and kill many people, but they turn mobs into nations and cause themselves greater harm.

America still lives in outdated paradigms. The era of conquering territory for economic advantage is over. The era of conquering world market shares has begun. The era of fighting or causing wars to create orders for their arms industries is a thing of the past. The era of hegemony, consensual or coercive, is gone. America needs to get with the times. So do we: the era of dependence on others in return for indebtedness and obsequiousness is over too. Learn to stand on your own feet, you 64-year old infant. You can no longer crawl.

The Pakistan-USA relationship started moving towards flashpoint with the Raymond Davis affair and then the Abbottabad incident when America claims to have killed Osama Bin Laden, spirited away his ‘body’ and drowned it with suspicious alacrity. These incidents were regularly interspersed by highly incendiary US official’s statements. Our military’s stock fell. The high command woke up. The army reacted by saying that US ‘aid’ should go to the civilians. America not only stopped all ‘aid’ but also refused to honour our invoices for money it owes us under the Coalition Support Fund.

Now comes the US-Nato bombing of two of our bases in Salala killing 24 Pakistani soldiers in cold blood despite the fact that Pakistan was talking to the Nato command on the hotline constantly. No one believes that the incident was an accident. The ‘accident’ continued for nearly two hours. Pakistan didn’t retaliate. We wisely didn’t send in our own America-made jets or helicopters (what a contradiction, fighting the enemy with the enemy’s weapons) for that would have been rising to the bait. Instead, we are kicking them out of Shamsi airbase, denying them supply routes, boycotting the forthcoming Bonn summit and launching a diplomatic offensive. China and Russia immediately condemned America. A lot will depend on how India reacts, whether it remains neutral or not. India’s future place in the New Free World is in its hands. Will it go with the forces of history or go against them?

Pakistan’s army chief raised the temperature by ‘breaking’ the chain of command and authorising officers and soldiers on the spot to take whatever actions deemed necessary in future attacks in order to save time. Psychologically, it’s eyeball-to-eyeball. Relations have fallen to rock bottom. Flashpoint has been reached.

America ‘regretted’ the ‘accident’: no apology, no talk of reparation. Instead, we are to get an inquiry, either to get to the truth but more likely to hide it. The findings will not be known till December 23. That could be too late.

However, the era of living in isolation is gone too. As our current odious relationship winds down we have to reset a new, more balanced and equitable relationship based on mutual interest rather than America’s interest only and our general degradation. They can no longer order us around and we can no longer comply dutifully. This bully-bullied relationship has to end. That can only happen if we alter our state of mind, where we wrongly imagine that we cannot live without America. In fact, this can and should lead to self-reliance and proper multi-alignment and multilateralism, rather than putting our future in America’s basket.

In the last decade most of the people of both countries have come to be very suspicious of each other, even to the point of hatred. ‘Trust Deficit’ has become ‘Trust Absence’. The peoples of both countries are human beings who didn’t, as far as I know, choose to be born where they were. At heart, they are mostly good. They have been conditioned, even brainwashed, by the circumstances of their birth. If only they would allow their innate humanity and common sense to dominate other conditioning forces the world would be a better place.

The majority of people are simple too. In their simplicity they tend to go for easy solutions. That leads them to treating symptoms rather than the malaise. They don’t recognise that the malaise actually lies within, not without. No wonder well meaning but simple people’s prescriptions are simplistic. Many Pakistanis think that getting totally out of any meaningful relationship with America would be the best for Pakistan. They little realise that in no relationship they would be the bigger losers, for America has a lot to offer by way of its knowledge bank alone. What we really need is to get out of America’s ‘War on Terror’. They don’t realise that our deep malaise is a collective colonised mentality that has fostered a constitution that begets an alien, unworkable political system that causes the oppressed to elect their oppressors who protect an inequitable anti-people status quo. Bullies of the weak are naturally the bullied of the powerful.

America is even more simplistic, thinking that if it can cast the world in an image that works for it even if it doesn’t work for others, all will be well with the world –their ‘world’ starting from Los Angeles and ending in New York. It also needs to stop irrationally protecting Israel and destroying itself. Stop getting bullied by Israel.

Breaking free from our current relationship with America and resetting a new one would be the greatest blessing. The lesson: never break the universal, indivisible principle of not siding with wrong – no matter what the imagined short-term ‘benefits’. Better to suffer temporary harm, for in the end you will come out on top. That is God’s promise.

The writer is a political analyst. He can be contacted at [email protected]