Some answers, please

The US has gotten rid of public enemy number one and given Obama an unexpected popularity boost.

So the world’s most wanted man is dead, terror in the world is a thing of the past, and everything will be all hunky-dory from here on. Or, has a new can of worms just opened up? Now is the perfect time to look back at the almost ten-year long Afghan War and re-examine the war on terror, specifically, the winners and losers.

The United States has gotten rid of public enemy number one, and given Obama an unexpected popularity boost. However, with Osama bin Laden gone, a new face will have to be found for the enemy. For Pakistan, after years of denying that al Qaeda’s head honcho was in the border regions of Afghanistan — and certainly not inside Pakistan — we now know that he was residing on a border for sure: the one between Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

It would be fair to say that Pakistan has been hugely embarrassed and it remains to be seen how our government and military try to save face following the wholly foreign-manned and planned operation. After all this was not a matter of crossing over an undefined border. This was a foreign military taking action on the soil of a sovereign country.

That raises the next set of questions; are we so incapable of running a counterterrorism operation on our soil that we need America to come in? Were we so scared of someone on a dialysis machine that we needed the US marines to do our dirty work? After all, if this is true, we should probably be eligible to qualify to become America’s next state. Otherwise we, the people of this country, deserve a detailed, and credible, explanation of what just happened here, and not the ludicrous scenarios that governments have been feeding the people for the past many years.

We say the defence budget needs to go up to fight terror, and we plan to spend over Rs500 billion on defence this year, but we need the ‘great’ US Army, the same one that hasn’t won a direct war in over 66 years, to save us. Some answers to these questions would be very useful to help understand exactly what is going on.