US should be the last country to be giving lectures to another nation on rights abuses and pressuring the media.
KARACHI: This is with reference to your report on US Admiral Mike Mullen’s statement where he said that there were strong indications that the killing of Saleem Shahzad was sanctioned by the Pakistan government.
Without going into the merits of the actual incident, and in fact it cannot be denied that the journalist’s death was tragic, how can the head of the US military more or less accuse the government of another country in such a manner?
This accusation follows an earlier story carried in a recent New York Times report, which quoted three unnamed senior US officials as saying that the journalist’s murder was done at the direction of the ISI. Could recent fissures between the Pakistanis and the Americans on the Raymond Davis issue, then May 2 and then Saleem Shahzad’s case, not to mention differences over things like North Waziristan, be the cause of these stories? One has to ask this question because of the timing of these reports and the nature of the accusations contained therein.
Clearly, one reading of these developments seems to be that if Pakistan is going to try and defy the US then it should be prepared for such reports to come out of the western, especially American, press.
If the people of Pakistan can stand united at this critical time and support democracy and the Pakistan Army they will demonstrate to the world that they can stand up against a might superpower. Yes Saleem Shahzad’s blood is on somebody’s hands and that needs to be uncovered but the US should be the last country to be giving lectures to another nation on rights abuses and pressuring the media.
Lt-col (retd) Muhammad Ali Ehsan
Published in The Express Tribune, July 11th, 2011.
