Musharraf proved excessively compliant from the beginning and this came as a shock even to the Bush Administration, but they realised his limitations in terms of compromises at the tactical level because of the military – which often put a spanner in the US agenda for Pakistan. Hence the constant critique of the Pakistan military and its intelligence outfits – especially once the CIA fell out with the ISI two years ago over whom to target in FATA.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—There is a dangerous pattern connecting the events happening in and around Pakistan today. Unless we can see this larger picture, we will be overwhelmed by the fallout and our detractors like the US will have fulfilled their agenda for this nuclear capable country.
The roots of this US agenda go back to Musharraf’s hasty embrace of the US “war on terror”. What was not realised at the time was the psychological trauma the US had undergone as a result of 9/11, which had led to the bolstering of the already suspicion-tinted view the US had of the Muslim world. Of course, some pliant Muslim leaders were reluctantly embraced as “allies”, but always on a tight leash, but by and large nationalist Muslim leaders and their nations were something the Americans never felt comfortable with. If these nations were also militarily or economically strong, the US felt even more uncomfortable. In this context, Mahathir’s Malaysia, Revolutionary Iran and nuclear Pakistan certainly stood out as irritants in one way or another. So when 9/11 happened, even though it was Saudi citizens who were responsible for the actions, Pakistan was brought centre-stage and the US saw this as the opportunity to cut the country down to size and finally gain control of its nuclear assets.
I am no hero. I just acted as an Iraqi who witnessed the pain and bloodshed of too many innocents
I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.
Zaid Hamid on the events before and after 9/11, the US Objectives and the global security situation since. This program was recorded in 2008 before the violence erupted in Pakistan’s NWFP and Balochistan regions.
Zaid Hamid will be doing an uncensored program on events since 9/11 and the current situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan – exclusively on Waqt News, on Sunday 13th September, at 4:00 pm. Don’t forget to tune in.
Zaid Hamid and Waqt TV explains the Christian world’s brutal assault on Muslims world under the name of Crusades. The program explains how the crusades have started again after 9/11.
This report, first published in August 2008, is reproduced here to provide context to the determined Pakistani military operation against terrorists coming from Afghanistan. Pakistan’s largest English-language daily, The News, ran this on its front page, written by Kamran Khan, an investigative reporter who has worked for The Washington Post.
Two senior U.S. military officials who secretly visited Pakistan in July 2008 faced tense moments when former President Musharraf, Army Chief Gen. Kayani and the ISI chief at the time confronted them with evidence that portrayed a pattern of American support for separatist, sectarian and religious terrorism inside Pakistan with help from Indian intelligence operatives based in major Afghan cities.
The two embarrassed Americans, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen and CIA Deputy Director Stephen R. Kappes, came to lecture Pakistanis on what role ISI should play but ended up receiving an earful. It is a rare inside story of how Islamabad confronted Washington about what appears to be a clear case of betrayal, where Washington conspired with Karzai and the Indians against its own staunch ally.
“At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.”, writes Duncan Gardham of Telegraph for inhumane treatment and fierce torture on illegal detainees in Abu Ghuraib jail.
“Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.”, “Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.”, Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq writes in his investigative report.
Despite of this, Obama administration is defiant to bring perpetrators to justice by providing full cover to officials of Bush administration by blocking the publication of at least 2,000 of such photographs.
Obama says, “The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to inflame anti-American public opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”
This blueprint is being used by India in Kashmir and Americans in Iraq — to explore more on “filthy face” of claimants of freedom, liberty and democracy, click here:
In The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Naomi Wolf takes a historical look at the rise of Fascism, outlining the 10 steps necessary for a Fascistic group (or government) to destroy the democratic character of a nation-state and subvert the social/political liberty previously exercised by its citizens, she further explains how it was done in Nazi-Germany, Fascist Italy and how the blue-prints were followed by Bush Administration after 9/11.
President Obama is also ratcheting up the rhetoric and activity in Pakistan. There’s a significant increase in ground forces, Predator drones and air attacks. In his announcement on March 27th, President Obama referred to the border region of Afghanistan/Pakistan as, “the most dangerous place in the world….This is not simply an American problem – far from it. It is, instead, an international security challenge of the highest order. Terrorist attacks in London and Bali were tied to al-Qaida and its allies in Pakistan, as were attacks in North Africa and the Middle East, in Islamabad and Kabul. If there is a major attack on an Asian, European, or African city, it, too, is likely to have ties to al-Qaida’s leadership in Pakistan. The safety of people around the world is at stake.
President Obama and his advisors should learn from history, some ancient some modern, and not repeat it. This is a region of the world that has never been defeated militarily. It is where empires go to die. The Greeks, Indians, Persians, Mongolians, British, and Russians have tried to hold Afghanistan but never succeeded.
General Gul (r) quotes Bush Senior as “clip the wings of ISI”. Further talks about how in Pakistan, we do not have democracy, neither dictatorship nor even humanitarian-ship. Sheds some light on “modern day terrorism”, talks about his meeting with Osama Bin Laden, a report called “World at Risk” is given to Obama which concludes that all roads of terrorism and nucleus of weapons of mass destruction are from Pakistan. General Gul (r) says that Israeli belief, from Ben Gurion to Netanyahu, that Pakistan is the only threat and should be neutralized, and confirms that there are two Talibaans, one true and pro-Pakistan who are being missiled by US drones and the other American sponsored anti-Pakistani terrorists.
He also talks about General (r) Musharraf very frankly as his student and as a soldier and that he has suspicions on Americans for Ojri Camp incident.
He mentions that three points were given to him by Benazir and an American ambassador for Talibaans to be recognized as a Government and conveying these to Talibaans in Afghanistan were his biggest mistake in life.
Pakistan’s enemies are preparing to deliver a decisive blow. Pakistan has suffered grievously on all counts and its very foundations have been jolted in the seven years of America’s occupation of Afghanistan. It is most unfortunate that in this gory plan, some of the political parties friendly to India, western sponsored NGOs, intellectuals and writers have also contributed towards disinformation campaign and bringing bad name to Pakistan.
Obama’s policy is clear: drone-launched missile attacks will continue inside the territory of any nation because he considers that international custom and law do not apply to America. He is endorsing a dreadful precedent, and may well come to regret his decision to permit these illegal forays.
India operates Israeli drones and is receiving more. It is possible it could obtain missile-firing Hermes 450s, like the ones that blitzed Sudan and Gaza. And if India believes that there is an installation in Pakistan whose occupants it considers to be terrorists, will it then follow the American example and launch drone-borne missiles to kill people on Pakistan’s soil? What would Mr Obama say about that? Would he condemn the action?
Read this remarkable expose by a renowned American journalist as he paints a picture of our ally, the United States, waging two wars: one against the enemies of its occupation of Afghanistan, and another covert war against Pakistan that involves a lot of psyops backed by sponsored terrorism. Chamberlin writes, ‘“Al Qaida” is an invention of the Bush/Cheney cabal. It never existed before 1999-2000. The bin Laden group, which has been dubbed “al Qaida” is a CIA fabrication, used as a conflict generator/force multiplier. The incident that began Bush’s terror war was also a manufactured event.’
After promising quick solutions, one former senior official said, the Obama administration is now “backpedaling and trying to buy time” by blaming its predecessor. Unless political appointees decide to overrule the recommendations of the career bureaucrats handling the issue under both administrations, he predicted, the new review will reach the same conclusion as the last: that most of the detainees can be neither released nor easily tried in this country.
WASHINGTON — President Obama intends to adopt a tougher line toward Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, as part of a new American approach to Afghanistan that will put more emphasis on waging war than on development, senior administration officials said Tuesday.
Mr. Karzai is now seen as a potential impediment to American goals in Afghanistan, the officials said, because corruption has become rampant in his government, contributing to a flourishing drug trade and the resurgence of the Taliban.
Obama’s order to close Guantanamo Prison means very little. Essentially, Obama’s order is a public relations event. The tribunal process had already been shut down by US courts and by military lawyers, who refused to prosecute the fabricated cases. The vast majority of the prisoners were hapless individuals captured by Afghan warlords and sold for money to the stupid Americans as “terrorists.” Most of the prisoners, people the Bush regime told us were “the most dangerous people alive,” have already been released. Obama’s order said nothing about closing the CIA’s secret prisons or halting the illegal practice of rendition in which the CIA kidnaps people and sends them to third world countries, such as Egypt, to be tortured.
The archival evidence is now clear that Prescott Bush, the president’s grandfather, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from and collaborated with key financial backers of Nazi Germany.
That business relationship continued after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and even after Germany declared war on the United States following Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It stopped only when the U.S. government seized assets of Bush-connected companies in late 1942 under the “Trading with the Enemy Act.”
Wondering why war monger son of war mongering fore-fathers restarted half complete job of his daddy?
To fully understand the present manifestation of the Bush family and its excesses, one must consider its history over several generations, a difficult and painful undertaking since it reveals so much about the self-destructive apathy of the American people.
Prescott Bush’s business and personal connections were to have a profound impact on the course of American history. Many of his wealthy friends bankrolled his son, George Herbert Walker Bush, in launching his first oil business in Texas – and then a political career that would take the Bush family to the White House.
America’s military policy is following its foreign policy which follows the smell of oil. Forget freedom and democracy. That’s for fools. Pakistanis are fooling themselves if they think President Obama will be able to change this. Let’s pray he does. The Karachi-Torkham-Afghanistan supply route and the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline means that U.S. will have to take effective control of Balochistan, Gwadar and Karachi. This will also help deny Iran and China any stake in their own pipelines across Pakistan. America can’t do this by going to war with a strong Pakistani military. Destabilization is part of the plan, with some margin for unintended consequences. Now you understand the game.
Since 11th September 2001, in particular, hardly a day has passed when the western leaders, their media and some of their counterparts in the Muslim world have not talked about the so-called ‘war on terror’. Terrorism is an abstraction. In the past, countries have waged wars against other countries, nations, tribes and peoples but war against an abstraction is something new and remains undefined.
It’s been a long time since a voice from Pakistan spoke with this authority. Here in this video clip, former President Musharraf, in Michigan for a speech, gives a solid response to those who say that Pakistan is the headquarters of bin Laden & Co. A clip from a local TV network, aired on 14 Jan. 2009. For all his mistakes, the man has charisma. If only had he not made the mistake of becoming a democrat, just like the rest of them in Pakistan.
We have information that both Mr. Husain Haqqani and Mr. Husain Haroon, our ambassadors to the U.S. and U.N. respectively, were instructed by the Zardari-Gilani government to coordinate with the British and the American ambassadors to ensure that the name of former ISI chief Hameed Gul, in addition to other Pakistani citizens and organizations, are included in a Security Council resolution. We have a government with shady characters in key places, strongly backed by the Bush administration, acting and behaving as if they were representing a U.S. occupation government in Pakistan.
Brian Cloughley
