Soft coup on the nation
The writer is a geopolitical analyst. She also writes at globaltab.net and tweets @AneelaShahzad
According to a study, between the end of WW2 and 2000, the USA has overtly or covertly influenced 81 elections in outside countries. In its two and a half centuries’ long lifespan, it has been involved in over a hundred wars, which means that practically there has been no day in its history when it has not been a part of aggression upon another part of humanity.
But ironically so, even entering into the 21st century, after having experienced innumerable humanitarian and progressive movements, and after experiencing the power of international institutions under the UN, the beast under the white skin, has remained intact; and this beast uses all the good words like democracy and humanitarianism to do exactly the opposite things — things that kill democracy and mutilate humanity.
Entering the 21st century, with the arrogance of being the only superpower, the US has been ever more lethal and totalitarian in its avarice for power and control. Staring from occupying Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, and enveloping several Arab states in the 2011 Arab Spring, the US has been involved in the destruction of several Muslim countries including Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria, causing widespread destruction of property and lives of uncounted millions. The 21st century seems to have been a kill-Muslim spree for the US and its friends, and it was surprising why Pakistan would be left out from this hysteria! When all the houses in your neighborhood are on fire, it would only be foolhardy to think yourself as safe and at peace — but we are like that!
We are foolhardy! The US used us as a proxy in the Russo-Afghan War and we kept insisting it’s our friend; it toppled the Pakistan-backed Taliban government and invaded our neighbour Afghanistan to start a war at our doorstep that continued for two decades and we kept insisting it’s our friend; it intervened in our Northwest Frontier province from 2004 to 2018, conducting 430 drone attacks, killing thousands of our brethren and destroying their families. This went on with Bush, Obama and Trump on that end and the Nawaz and Zardari regimes on this end, only ending when Imran Khan took power in 2018.
We are foolhardy! The US implanted al-Qaeda right under our nose, used it to disperse terrorism throughout the Muslim world, and allied with India to aid and abet the TTP in Pakistan that bombed and killed 70,000 of our people in 10 years until the Army started its counterterrorism operations. Yet we kept insisting that the US is our friend!
All this is because being human we are quick to forget, and being human we tend to disregard the crimes of those we tend to like, even if those crimes are genocidal. There are few among many who keep reverting to history and keep record, but ironically, the vote belongs to the many.
Keeping all this in the backdrop, we should reckon that Pakistan, because of backing the Taliban in their long fight for freedom, has been in the churning pivot between two poles of global power. Our necessity of having to proxy in Afghan Wars to prevent ourselves from an eminent existential threat posed at us by the US and its allies has made Pakistan stand at the opposite side of superpowers in both Afghan wars. And having the US to retreat from Afghanistan after a two decades’ long unfruitful and shameful venture was especially a downer, for it not only defeated the US, NATO and India alliance in the heart of Asia, but also plucked out the US influence from its last pivot in Asia.
The US retreat meant the strengthening of Russia and China as regional powers, and Russia did not waste a moment to assert this new regional order by starting to send grave warnings of attack on Ukraine. One should reckon that Pakistan’s act of standing behind the Taliban till their victory has smoothen the region for China’s Belt and Road Initiative on the one hand, and emboldened Russia’s conjunction in oil and gas pipelines projects of the region on the other. One country’s saying ‘no’ to US interest in the region, and our steadfastness along with that of the Afghans, against superpowers for four decades, has potentially changed the game from a scenario of one war after the other to a scenario of inclusive peace and progress.
But the problem is that the nation is not only foolhardy, it has also been engineered to be shortsighted and sluggish — shortsighted because we refuse to prioritise the larger, regional, futuristic macro-economic realities that will affect us in the coming decades, and look forward to a short-term, local, micro-economic viewpoint that affects our immediate pockets; and sluggish because we are happy in our local, petty environment and our self-consuming internal politics, and do not want to irritate our minds to go one step further and think nationally in an international environment. And ‘engineered’, because sadly our own mainstream media is constantly bombarding upon us a narrow, materialistic and self-centred way of thinking. We have entered a belief system wherein the body has taken over the heart and mind, where the dominance of material wellness and individualism have rendered the larger identities of nationalism, humanitarianism and globalism into a kind of national oblivion. Values that relate to spiritual needs, like national conduct and national pride, like our integrity as a people, like our role and place among the community of nations — all these have simply been taken out of our vocabulary list.
This is the reason why, when a foreign, invading power tries to breach our integrity and sovereignty as a nation, when it wants to interfere in our national democratic process, when it wants to dictate its will upon our highest offices, we fail to appreciate that as a threat, we fail to feel entrapped, we fail to disregard our petty interests in the face of vital, existential challenges, we fail to apprehend that our short term petty interests are jeopardising the progress and future of our coming generations.
We fail to apprehend that a similar, heinous game of power and greed is being played upon one nation after the other in the community of nations, and we are happily giving up to it. Is this not a kind of fitnah portrayed by the West upon us, of which the Quran warns us of in ‘and fitnah is worse than killing’ (2:191).
Published in The Express Tribune, April 22nd, 2022.
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