Permanent
strains in US-Pakistan ties-2

US
Hegemony and Pakistani Gimmicks

-COL DR. ABDUL RUFF





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ONE









At
long last, after tolerating the US hegemony for years, Pakistani
state is revolting against US drone terror operations. Genesis of deterioration
of US-Pakistan tensions is not at all difficult for anyone to ascertain.

It
was a big blow to USA when Pakistan denied the superpower USA
permission for transit of terror and other goods to Afghanistan via
Pakistan. Obviously, America did not foresee the sudden twist in
Pakistani attitude towards the masters. USA is desperate to get the
strained ties with Pakistan renewed to advance its illegal interests, while
Pakistan continues to pursue cumulative interests of rich and elites of
Pakistan as well as the US illegal interests in the region.





Pakistan's recourse
in opposing NATO operations from Pakistani soil clearly
indicates that the boss cannot keep hitting the trapped Pakistanis as
slaves forever. When the pain became intolerable, the affected
people would revolt one day.







USA always imposes its will on its terror partners. One
stumbling block in the US-Pak negotiations was reportedly Islamabad’s demand
that Washington issue an unconditional apology for the slaying last November of
24 Pakistani troops in strikes by US attack helicopters and fighter jets
against a border post inside Pakistan.





Over the past 17 months, the US’s bullying and flagrant
violations of Pakistani sovereignty have been a cause of increasing concern for
the Pakistani elite. Faced with mounting opposition to the war among the
Americans, the USA has been determined to make Pakistan accept more of the
burden of fighting the AfPak War, regardless of its destabilizing impact on its
Islamabad clients and the ruinous impact on the Pakistani people.





Since January, Pakistani authorities, under tremendous pressure
from Washington which shamelessly used the bogus aid to coerce the
regime in Islamabad, have repeatedly made clear that they plan to
reopen the supply routes, but wanted parliament’s approval to provide the
decision with some semblance of popular legitimacy.

















The Obama regime has used drone terrorism as key means to force
Islamabad to help the NATO with killing Pakistanis and Afghans. There have been
some 3,000 Pakistanis killed in drone attacks, of whom only 170 have been
identified for official purposes as “militants” or “insurgents”. Last
month, US Special Envoy Marc Grossman arrived in Pakistan, after a prolonged
delay, to lead two days of high-level talks between senior US and Pakistani
officials on a gamut of issues. These included the US’s plans to intensify military
operations in Afghanistan, while simultaneously seeking “peace talks” with the
Taliban, and reopening the Pakistani land supply route to the US-NATO forces
occupying Afghanistan. The drone strike comes on the heels of last week’s
negotiations in Islamabad between the Pakistani government and a US team led by
US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Marc Grossman. Earlier,
notwithstanding the usual tricks of USA to bully Pakistan, Islamabad had
refused to accept his visit pending the completion of the parliamentary review,
which was launched in response to a NATO air strike on two Pakistani military
posts that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers. It appears that the US is banking
on placating Pakistani authorities by offering economic and other inducements.





Whenever
it faced opposition in Pakistan, USA chose to go slow. As a tactic to fool the
Pakistani leaders and elites, Washington had
formally ended last month a month-long pause in its campaign of drone attacks
in Pakistan’s tribal areas, killing four “suspected militants” in North
Waziristan and provoking a formal protest from the government in Islamabad,
only to restart the terror operations.





What is shocking is Washington’s unconcealed contempt for the
Pakistani sovereignty and Pakistani government, which had publicly conditioned
a resumption of its full collaboration in the so-called AfPak war on a halt to
the drone attacks. The strike by the remotely piloted aircraft on Miranshah,
the capital of North Waziristan, part of Pakistan’s Federally Administered
Tribal Areas is an overt indication of What the USA wants to do in Pakistan.







The Pentagon’s story is that the incident was a result of
“friendly fire,” a mistaken clash in which both sides bore blame. Pakistan’s
military has categorically rejected this account. In any case, the US military
is strongly opposed to issuing any apology, holding Pakistan responsible for
harboring forces fighting the US occupation of Afghanistan, in particular the
so-called Haqqani network, which was blamed for the coordinated attacks in the
center of Kabul and other areas on April 15. The Obama White House is not about
to cross the Pentagon on such an issue in an election year. Moreover, an
apology would cut across the right-wing re-election campaign being waged by the
Democratic Party, which is extolling the US Seal assassination of Osama bin
Laden in Pakistan a year ago and suggesting that Obama is more militarily
aggressive than his presumptive Republican rival Mitt Romney.





However, Pakistani regime continues with its double-speaks,
badly affectibng the future of the nation. It denied the NATO rouges only
the road transit. And Pakistani air space has been open to US and NATO
supply planes throughout the five-month diplomatic wrangle arising from the
November air strike. This provision fitted the NATO terror syndicates
to operate as before.











TWO









Negotiations between Washington and Islamabad on Pakistan’s role
in the Afghan War and the perpetuation of the US-Pakistani strategic alliance
began following the Pakistan Parliament’s passage earlier last month of a
resolution titled “Guidelines for revised terms of engagement with US/NATO/ISAF
and general foreign policy.”





The Parliament resolution did not explicitly say when the US can
resume ferrying supplies to Afghanistan via land. Instead, it leaves the issue
up to President Asif Ali Zardari and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)-led
government. It is widely expected that the supply routes will be opened soon,
now that negotiations have officially resumed, although a possible obstacle
could be Islamabad’s request for sharply increased transit fees. The resolution
calls for deepening Islamabad’s strategic partnership with China, strengthening
Pakistan’s relationship with Russia and the European Union, and pursuing a gas
pipeline project with Iran. In addition to its concerns over the destabilizing
impact of the war, the Pakistani elite has grown increasingly frustrated by
Washington’s aggressive courting of its archrival India as a major strategic
partner. The US has encouraged New Delhi to play a key role in propping up the
stooge regime of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, much to the dismay of the
Pakistani bourgeoisie, which views its influence in Afghanistan as crucial to
its strategy against India. The section of the resolution dealing with
Islamabad’s foreign policy specifically mentions the US-Indo nuclear accord,
which further tilted the balance of power in the region in favor of India.

The resolution merely demanded that the US give an official
apology for the air strike and end its illegal drone missile attacks so that
Pakistani puppet can resume the services to NATO terrorism. Following the
passage of the resolution, Pakistani PM Yousaf Raza Gilani claimed that it has
“brought real and substantive oversight and democratic accountability to our
foreign and security policy.”

May be in a cynical attempt to appear defiant, parliament
imposed the condition that NATO materials passing through Pakistan cannot
include weapons or ammunition, even though the NATO bluffs that their convoys
have only been transporting non-lethal supplies.





The phony nature of the resolution was also demonstrated by
Islamabad’s stance on the issue of reopening the supply routes to NATO forces
in Afghanistan. The same resolution demanded an immediate halt to the drone
strikes. The attack was the first on a target inside Pakistan since March
30. While Grossman left Pakistan Friday night with no agreement, Pakistani
officials reported that a team of 10 US officials from the State and Treasury
departments, the Pentagon and other agencies had remained in Islamabad to iron
out a deal.











Despite
the early French withdrawal, NATO wants to show a united front in the last two
years of combat in an increasingly unpopular war in Europe and America. The
NATO alliance used the summit to reassure Afghan puppet President Hamid Karzai
that NATO will fund his security forces and continue training beyond 2014.
NATO's terror chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen urged Islamabad to back efforts
to stabilize Afghanistan as he prepared for talks with Pakistani puppet
President Asif Ali Zardari, on the eve of a NATO summit.

NATO
announced a milestone in the effort to provide a pan-European missile defense
system, which has now has reached "interim capability. It also formally
endorsed an agreement for 14 countries to jointly purchase five US-made
unmanned drone aircraft. Many claim that austerity has played a role in NATO
leaders' efforts to make progress on "smart defense" - making
resources go further by encouraging NATO allies to share key capabilities.





Resentments over US bullying and Washington’s courting of India
notwithstanding, the reactionary alliance with Washington remains central to
the geopolitical and class strategy of the Pakistani elites and bourgeoisie. The
fact that such a statement had to be made at all demonstrates the neo-colonial
character of the US-Pakistan relationship and the venal Pakistani elite’s
subservience to US imperialism.





Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry issued a formal statement saying
that it “strongly condemns the US drone attack that occurred in North
Waziristan today.” The statement continued: “Such attacks are in total
contravention of international law and established norms of interstate
relations. The Government of Pakistan has consistently maintained that drone
attacks are violative of its territorial integrity and sovereignty. The matter
will be taken up through diplomatic channels both in Islamabad and Washington.”


But meanwhile, Pakistani officials had indicated that a deal was
in the works in which Pakistan would agree to reopen its borders to the
transport of materiel for the US-led occupation troops in Afghanistan in return
for the payment of some $1.1 billion in withheld coalition support funds, money
which Washington and its allies had agreed to pay Islamabad for expenses
incurred in counterinsurgency operations in the border region. No payments have
been made since mid-2010.







The deal is of decisive importance for Washington, given that
the route from Pakistani seaports to Afghanistan is far less costly than the
alternative it has pursued through Central Asia to the north. Moreover, given
the carrying through of a scheduled drawdown of large numbers of US and NATO
troops, it will be next to impossible to ship out the huge quantities of
vehicles, heavy weapons and other equipment that have been amassed in
Afghanistan over more than a decade of war without access to the Pakistani
supply routes.











THREE





So, Pakistani regime remains the enemy of Pakistani nation
and people.





The long-delayed Pakistan Parliament’s Afghan War and foreign
policy resolution received unanimous support, including from opposition parties
that for a time boycotted the review. The fraudulent and hypocritical character
of the resolution cannot be overstated. While the resolution calls for an end
to US drone strikes on Pakistani territory, it proposes no mechanism to enforce
such a ban.





Zardari
was invited to the summit in Chicago amid expectations
that Pakistan will lift a six-month blockade against NATO supply
trucks that was put in place after US air strikes killed 26 Pakistani troops in
November. As expected, the NATO has pressed Islamabad to “do more” to prevent
“insurgents” from taking advantage of the porous Afghan-Pakistani border region
to take sanctuary inside Pakistan. "We can't solve the problems in
Afghanistan without the positive engagement of Pakistan," NATO
Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at a policy forum in Chicago.
"We have to solve these problems," he said, referring to the safe
havens used by insurgents in Pakistan to launch attacks on NATO troops across
the border.







Pakistani regime is eager to pressure Washington to be “more
accommodating” to the geopolitical and economic interests of the Pakistani
elite. The parliamentary resolution was intended to provide the government with
political cover in defying popular sentiment and resuming full and open
cooperation with the US in the illegal neocolonial Af-Pak War targeting Muslims
and Pakistani nukes.







Further, the US reaffirmed its intention to violate Pakistani
sovereignty by regular drone strikes, whenever it deems it in the “national
interest” almost as soon as the resolution was passed. Pakistani Foreign
Minister Hina Rabbani Khar maintained the Pakistani position on the drone
strikes categorically as before.









It seems, the US and Pakistan were prepared to work
out some sort of face-saving statement that would fall considerably short of
the apology, which had been set as part of the “terms of engagement” in a
resolution approved by the Pakistani parliament last month.







--------
د. عبد راف




Dr. Abdul Ruff, Specialist
on State Terrorism; Educationalist;Chancellor-Founder of Centor for International
Affairs(CIA); Independent Analyst-columnist;Chronicler of Foreign
occupations & Freedom movements(Palestine,Kashmir, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Xinjiang, Chechnya, etc); Anti-Muslimism
and anti-Islamism are more dangerous than "terrorism" Anti-Islamic
forces & terrorists are using criminal elements for terrorizing the
world and they in disguise are harming genuine interests of ordinary
Muslims. Global media today, even in Muslim nations, are controlled by CIA & other anti-Islamic agencies. Former university Teacher;/website:abdulruff.wordpress.com/ 91-9961868309/91-9961868309