Imran Khan makes some great points here. Someone who could probably do a lot of good if he were ever elected.
http://www.dawn.com/2006/04/21/ed.htm
For a democratic future
By Imran Khan
MICHAEL SCHUEUR, former head of the CIA’s Al Qaeda Unit, warned in an opinion piece in the Washington Times that if the US keeps pushing Gen Musharraf to “do US’s dirty work against his country’s national interest”, he could be toppled and the US would lose an important ally in the region. The two areas, according to him, where Musharraf has gone against Pakistan’s national interest to please the US, are:
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Helping the US to destroy the pro-Pakistan Taliban regime and replacing it with the Pro-India Karzai one which immediately allowed an enormous Indian presence in Afghanistan.
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By sending the Pakistan army into the tribal area bordering Afghanistan. Musharraf has created a “heaven-sent environment for Pakistan’s enemies to fuel the Pashtun fire against the Pakistan army. In time the country could become ungovernable which would be “a boon for India”.
According to him, “the US officials believed that they could add untold pressures to Musharraf’s burden and still find him willing to do America’s most important dirty work of killing Osama bin Laden”.
When Pakistan sent its forces to Waziristan two years ago on American orders, the most shocking aspect was that a political solution was about to be struck between the tribal jirga and the government, whereby the tribes would have taken the responsibility of not allowing any attacks on Afghanistan from Pakistani territory. The second shocking aspect was that the Pakistan army went in Waziristan with a total disregard of the history of the tribal area left behind by the British. Had they paid any attention to the vast amount of material left behind by them, they would never have made this monumental blunder.
In their 200-year Raj in India the British suffered the highest amount of casualties in Waziristan. In 1935 half of the British Indian army was camped outside Waziristan and British officials and soldiers kept dying there till 1947. The British had very early on in their interaction with the tribals come to the conclusion that the nature of the people and the hostile terrain made military action unfeasible both in terms of men and material.
Thus, the superpower of the time preferred political negotiations and offered financial incentives to maintain peace and achieve its objectives. Military action was always the last resort. Yet here is a country that after paying for its debts and defence has to borrow and scrape and still cannot provide basic necessities to its people. The big question is: what happens if the US achieves its objectives in the region and walks away as it did after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan and stops paying the Pakistan army $70 million a month to do “its dirty work”? How will the country cope with the mess that is being created?
But much more shocking is the moral dimension of sending the army in Waziristan on the US administration’s orders. While researching on a travel book on the tribal area, I came across British Intelligence weekly accounts of unrest in the tribal areas in reaction to the massacres of Muslims in Kashmir and East Punjab in November 1947. On their own the tribes gathered volunteers and pooled their resources to send lashkars into Kashmir. Today Azad Kashmir is part of Pakistan because of the sacrifices, especially, of the people of Waziristan.
In both 1965 and 1971 volunteers from the tribal areas came to assist the Pakistan army. The country has never had to spend anything to protect its 1,500 kilometre border with Afghanistan because of the tribes’ fierce loyalty to Pakistan. One of the reasons why the Pakhtoonistan movement failed was because the tribal area acted as a buffer and remained loyal to Pakistan. It was because of this loyalty that the Soviets failed in the ‘80s to stir up trouble in the tribal areas for the Pakistan government.
Today Pakistan army is treating them no differently from how the Americans are treating the Iraqis or the Israelis the Palestinians. Even the terminology used by our government is the same — ‘miscreants’, ‘terrorists’, ‘foreign militants’, ‘Islamic extremists’, etc. For two years we have been hearing that there were a handful of foreign terrorists whose back was broken and everything was under control. Yet despite the strict press censorships and a complete ban on any independent enquiries, it has emerged that now the Pakistan army is pitted against its own citizens and the foreign element is insignificant.
The awful fact is that the tribesmen have risen up against our army. The more “extra-judicial killing” our army does the more the ranks of the tribesmen fighting our army grows, revenge being an integral part of the tribal culture. Even those not involved in fighting have complete sympathies with those who have taken up arms against the army — as was abundantly clear from the demands of 8,000-strong tribal jirga at Miranshah a few days back. Today no one in Waziristan dares talk to the Pakistan army for fear of being killed.
So far, according to Independent observers at least five times more Pakistani troops have died in Waziristan than US troops in Afghanistan. Like in Iraq no one has any idea about the number of civilians killed. There are tens of thousands of refugees in Bannu, Tank and D.I. Khan. And yet the war is being lost. Not only is the hatred and resistance to the Pakistan army growing, but also the once intensely loyal part of the country is now a fertile ground for Pakistan’s enemies to operate from.
Meanwhile, the senseless army action in Balochistan is producing a similar situation in the province. Another swamp created for foreign mosquitos to breed. No lessons learnt from the East Pakistan debacle. Rather than settling the province’s sense of deprivation politically and economically, opting for military action has further exacerbated the problem.
Pitting our army against our own citizens at the behest of George Bush’s neocons (war on terror is perceived by the vast majority of our population as a war against Islam) by a general to secure US support for his dictatorship, has raised many questions about the role of the Pakistan army. The people of this country have taken a lot of pride in their army and have sustained it at a great cost. One of the main reasons why we have not achieved our potential as a nation is because our resources have been diverted from developing our human capital to defence. We have watched countries in South East Asia overtake us in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Now all other South Asian countries are higher up the ladder in the human development index than us.
Even a bigger question being asked is who owns Pakistan — the tiny ruling elite or the people of this country. While the rulers have been bowing and boot-licking foreign powers, they have shown utter contempt and disdain for their own people.
When those Pakistani youth who were fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and were captured and butchered, our government never spoke out against this violation of the Geneva convention. This job was left to the western human rights organisations.
Similarly, it has remained silent about those Pakistanis lying in Guantanamo or other detention centres who have not been given their basic human right to prove their innocence in a court of law when Gen Musharraf triumphantly declared on CNN that he had handed over 700 Al Qaeda suspects to the US. In trying to please his foreign patrons he had shown contempt for the law of the land.
When our own government has shown such lack of respect for its citizens why would any other country respect us? Hence the problems faced by the Pakistanis in the US, the murder of six Pakistanis in Macedonia under the pretext of them being of Al Qaeda terrorists and most recently the imprisonment and torture of Pakistanis in Greece. The amazing thing about the last incident is that rather than help them in getting compensation for being put through such pain and humiliation, the Pakistan embassy tried to buy their silence.
Even within the country the contempt of the rulers for their people is so blatant. The way during the VIP movement the people are herded behind barriers for hours when our rulers travel within the country and sometimes attending frivolous social functions.
There have been reports of patients on their way to hospitals, stuck in traffic jams, and dying. Equally jarring is the ostentatious lifestyle of the rulers on taxpayers money — the luxurious PM, presidential and governor palaces; the purposeless and extravagant foreign tours the private jets and crores of rupees worth bullet-proof cars, the army of ministers, etc. All this while the majority of the population falls below or around the poverty line.
The time has come for all patriotic forces to join hands and put Pakistan first. The longer Gen. Musharraf stays in power the worse. The only way out is for us to demand genuine democracy which can only come through holding free and fair elections under a caretaker government, with an independent election commission and judiciary.
Only a genuine democratic government with a sovereign parliament which derives its power from the people (rather than from Washington) will stand up and promote our national interests. Only a strong and independent judiciary will be able to protect the rights of our citizens of the federating provinces as well as state institutions and only an empowered public can ensure that the fruits of economic growth are equally distributed. The public will throw out such a government that enriches the rich and impoverishes the poor. After all, the BJP government which boasted of an over eight per cent growth rate and Shining India was rejected by the rural masses who felt they had been excluded from the benefits of economic growth.