Victims of folly of our own

EDITORIAL:THE FRONTIER POST

Couldn’t our movers and shakers speak out in time what US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has confessed to now publicly? She admitted, going by a transcript of question and answer session by the US state department, that the US government, through the CIA, had funded jihadis like the Haqqanis “to cross the border or to, within Afghanistan, be part of the fight to drive the Soviets out and bring down the Soviet Union”. Yes, our spooks spoke this out just a short while ago and probably her confession was prompted by this. But it is not for weeks or for months but for pretty long that the Americans had been shouting from the rooftop that the Haqqani group of the Afghan Taliban was holed up in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal agency from where it launched attacks on the coalition forces in Afghanistan and that the Pakistani military was not going after the group to dislodge and dismantle it. Yet our security establishment sat quiet, letting the erroneous impression embed in the public minds worldwide that the Haqqanis were not only enjoying the protection and backing of the Pakistani state but were also its creature. And even as this world impression was gaining in currency because of the constant loud American refrain, none in Islamabad set out to put the record straight and offset the American tirade from poisoning the public minds against Pakistan. This country’s spooks couldn’t be unaware that the Jalaluddin Haqqani was the Americans’ much favourite and admired Afghan mujahideen commander during their proxy war against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan and their principal handler of Arab zealots they had herded up from all around the world to fight that war. Nor could they be any ignorant how the American headhunters poached on rabid religious outfits worldwide, and armed, bankrolled and infiltrated their recruits into Afghanistan to fight on the side of their Afghan proxies there. The CIA had, to our great misfortune, taken our spy agency ISI on board of its adventurism in our western neighbour. So our intelligence people knew a lot about the Americans’ shenanigans and there was no reason whatsoever for them to be taken in for a ride so easily by the perfidious devices of the children of Uncle Sam. But outrageously they lovingly submitted and gyrated to the trickery of the American adventurists, who had showed no soldiering or manly spine of their own in their occupied Afghanistan after ousting the Taliban and dexterously heaped every indignity and insult on the Pakistan military, even as it had put up a tough fighting to the militants who for the timidity of the American occupiers had sneaked into our tribal territory as well as those spawned by the CIA in league with India’s RAW intelligence agency and Afghanistan’s spy service, the National Directorate of Security, A CIA subsidiary.Never ever Islamabad asked the American occupiers publicly to secure the eastern Afghanistan, which they for fear of fighting had let under the sway of the Afghan insurgents, principally the Haqqani group. Never ever the Islamabad establishment y made an issue of vacating intriguingly the few security posts that the American occupiers has established in the region when the Pakistani military mounted a powerful operation in our neigbouring Bajaur tribal agency to fight out obviously foreign-sponsored militants. After making a small short noise, our security establishment too went into silence on the massive flow of arms, munitions and infiltrators from across the border to refurbish the militants fighting against the military in the agency. Never ever it raised any furor over the widely known infestation of our tribal areas by the CIA and its colluding alien agencies. Only recently, sacked Afghan spymaster Amrullah Saleh bragged publicly of having infested our sensitive tribal areas vulnerably; and the CIA too stated having laid out its own spy network in the region. And yet our security establishment has refrained from telling the world whose men actually were the militants who threw the armed challenge to the Pakistani state in the tribal areas and nearby settled regions over these past few years and in whose protection are they living now in Afghanistan after escaping the Pakistani military’s powerful response. But for long will the Pakistani establishment keep getting the rap for the aliens’ acts of omission and commission and let the name of this nation and country to be sullied on every world street? Perceptions, it must know, matter and greatly; indeed, even more than realities. So will it ever stand up and lift its purdah to speak out some home truths to the world. Its silence fast, it must know, has hurt this nation badly for no fault of its own. In fact, the nation has become the worst victim of the folly of its own. If the movers and shakers of this establishment have no spine to speak out publicly, at least they can do it via background briefings and leaks to our own media, as do the others, principally the Americans.