NYT’s duplicitous and dangerous Editorial

Pakistan’s only fault

‘Time to Put the Squeeze on Pakistan’ is the title of the New York Times May 12, 2016 editorial, which describes Pakistan as “a duplicitous and dangerous partner for the United States and Afghanistan, despite $33 billion in American aid and repeated attempts to reset relations on a more constructive course.” It elaborates that nearly 15 years after 9/11, the war in Afghanistan is raging and that Pakistan deserves much of the blame. The opinion piece is malicious and twists facts to support the viewpoint of a selected few US legislators to hide the failure of their own administration in Afghanistan while turning Pakistan into a scapegoat for their gross management.

Pakistan’s only fault is that time and again it has tethered its fortunes to the US and paid heavily for it. During the 1950s & 60s, Pakistan chose to join the US led defence pacts SEATO and CENTO, providing its airbase in Peshawar and highly classified security installation at Badaber to launch the infamous U-2 spy plane sorties for espionage and surveillance missions over the USSR. On May 1, 1960, USAF/CIA pilot Captain Gary Powers was scheduled to overfly the Soviet Union, photographing targets including the ICBM sites at the Baikanur Cosmodrome and Plesetsk Cosmodromes. At the time, the USSR had six ICBM launch pads, two at Baikanur and four at Plesetsk. Mayak, then named Cheyabinsk-65, an important industrial center of plutonium processing, was another of the targets that Powers was to photograph. Unfortunately, the U-2 was shot down in Soviet airspace and Gary Powers was captured alive, causing extreme embarrassment to the US. Pakistan on the other hand was threatened with dire consequences by the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev for aiding the US in its clandestine operations against the USSR. Crossing the Soviet path cost Pakistan dearly. With the backing of the USSR, India decimated Pakistan during the 1971 Pak-India War where East Pakistan was severed to become Bangladesh.

The next time Pakistan joined the US bandwagon was when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Again Pakistan faced the ire of USSR and drugs, Kalashnikovs and terror attacks permeated the milieu in Pakistan. As per its practice, once the Soviets retreated from Afghanistan, Pakistan was left in the lurch by USA to bear the consequences. The millions of jihadists, gathered from all over the world, trained by the CIA in guerrilla warfare, armed to the teeth and motivated to carry out combat, were abandoned for Afghanistan and Pakistan to bear the consequences. Al-Qaeda and Taliban are the direct outcome of this crass neglect and yet Pakistan bears the blame.

9/11 is a direct upshot of ditching the jihadists without de-radicalising them. Looking for adversaries, they chose the US. Once again it was the US that formed a coalition to attack Afghanistan. Caught in the crosshairs and stipulated with the infamous option of “either you are for us or against us”, Pakistan chose the former and supported the US-led coalition with intelligence, the use of its airbases and ground logistic support for its “Operation Enduring Freedom”. In between, before the Taliban and al-Qaeda could be decimated in Afghanistan, in 2003, the US changed gears and diverted its attention towards Iraq, invading it with all its might. The distraction provided the Taliban an opportunity to regroup and remerge with its guerrilla warfare capabilities of hit and run. In 2006, the US refocused on Afghanistan but the damage had been done. Despite a surge in its troops, the US-led coalition failed to subdue the Taliban till the US and NATO forces, war weary and cash strapped, decided to drawdown their forces from Afghanistan. They failed in their task to either defeat the Taliban or engage them in meaningful negotiations for peace. The Afghan National Forces (ANF), which were supposedly being trained to replace the NATO and US forces, were neither battle hardened nor motivated enough to rise to the occasion. There were not only mass desertions but even cases of fragging where the ANF turned on the allied forces, killing and maiming them.

With all its might, intelligence sources, satellite surveillance and massive arsenal of precision guided munitions delivered from drones on targets within Afghanistan as well as Pakistan, the Allies failed to locate the Taliban leadership and instead caused so much collateral damage that the ranks of the miscreants swelled with survivors of the drone attacks or families of those slain.

To make matters worse, CIA operatives permeated Pakistan and were busy in their own clandestine activities of collecting data on Pakistan’s nuclear assets. The instance of Raymond Davis is a case in point. The two-bit CIA contractor was apprehended in a busy locality of Lahore after he gunned down two Pakistanis in broad daylight. The espionage material recovered from him included maps, diagrams and photographs of sensitive and vulnerable points in Pakistan. What is worse is that the entire US administration bent backwards to retrieve Raymond Davis. Even President Obama lied through the teeth when he insisted that Raymond Davis was a diplomat and enjoyed immunity. President Obama is yet to render an apology for his deliberate falsehood.

In between the US chose India as a paramour, which it had been wooing since the cold war era, when the Indo-USSR alliance was a cause of envy for subsequent US administrations. India’s huge market for US goods and services, including civil energy nuclear reactors was highly lucrative, besides the factor that Sino-Indian rivalry could be exploited by the US to prop India as a bulwark against what the US perceived as the rising threat from China.

India too responded to the wooing by USA as it now had an option to acquire arms, nuclear energy and support from the US, Russia and Europe. In the bargain, India also found the situation ripe to subjugate Pakistan. Indian lobbyists in the US have spared no chance to denigrate Pakistan. The case of the 8 F-16s which the US was to provide Pakistan on partial payment for use against the terrorists has also been dropped back owing to Indian lobbyists. The NYT editorial blatantly mentions, the 8 F-16s being held back because of Pakistan’s “double game”. Unfortunately, it is the US, which is apparently guilty of double speak and double dealing. It wants to take punitive action against Pakistan for its own omissions and commissions of faulty strategy in Afghanistan. The American public is being duped by the lies and half truths being presented against Pakistan, whereas the saner elements in the US should question their own administration for squandering trillions of the taxpayer’s money in the futile war in Afghanistan, for needlessly turning its soldiers into cannon fodder and worse, stabbing its erstwhile allies like Pakistan in the back to hide its own failures.