Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

From Abbottabad to Worse

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • From Abbottabad to Worse

    Pakistan perfectly summed-up by Christopher Hitchens:
    ===

    From Abbottabad to Worse

    Hating the United States—which funds Islamabad’s army and nuclear program to the humiliating tune of $3 billion a year—Pakistan takes its twisted, cowardly revenge by harboring the likes of the late Osama bin Laden. But the hypocrisy is mutual, and the shame should be shared.

    By Christopher Hitchens

    Salman Rushdie’s upsettingly brilliant psycho-profile of Pakistan, in his 1983 novel, Shame, rightly laid emphasis on the crucial part played by sexual repression in the Islamic republic. And that was before the Talibanization of Afghanistan, and of much of Pakistan, too. Let me try to summarize and update the situation like this: Here is a society where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. In such an obscenely distorted context, the counterpart term to shame—which is the noble word “honor”—becomes most commonly associated with the word “killing.” Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.

    If the most elemental of human instincts becomes warped in this bizarre manner, other morbid symptoms will disclose themselves as well. Thus, President Asif Ali Zardari cringes daily in front of the forces who openly murdered his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and who then contemptuously ordered the crime scene cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation. A man so lacking in pride—indeed lacking in manliness—will seek desperately to compensate in other ways. Swelling his puny chest even more, he promises to resist the mighty United States, and to defend Pakistan’s holy “sovereignty.” This puffery and posing might perhaps possess a rag of credibility if he and his fellow middlemen were not avidly ingesting $3 billion worth of American subsidies every year.

    There’s absolutely no mystery to the “Why do they hate us?” question, at least as it arises in Pakistan. They hate us because they owe us, and are dependent upon us. The two main symbols of Pakistan’s pride—its army and its nuclear program—are wholly parasitic on American indulgence and patronage. But, as I wrote for Vanity Fair in late 2001, in a long report from this degraded country, that army and those nukes are intended to be reserved for war against the neighboring democracy of India. Our bought-and-paid-for pretense that they have any other true purpose has led to a rancid, resentful official hypocrisy, and to a state policy of revenge, large and petty, on the big, rich, dumb Americans who foot the bill. If Pakistan were a character, it would resemble the one described by Alexander Pope in his Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot:

    Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.
    Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike:
    Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,
    A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend …
    So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight
    In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.

    There’s an old cliché in client-state relations, about the tail wagging the dog, but have we really considered what it means when we actually are the tail, and the dog is our goddam lapdog? The lapdog’s surreptitious revenge has consisted in the provision of kennels for attack dogs. Everybody knew that the Taliban was originally an instrument for Pakistani colonization of Afghanistan. Everybody knew that al-Qaeda forces were being sheltered in the Pakistani frontier town of Quetta, and that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed was found hiding in Rawalpindi, the headquarters of the Pakistani Army. Bernard-Henri Lévy once even produced a damning time line showing that every Pakistani “capture” of a wanted jihadist had occurred the week immediately preceding a vote in Congress on subventions to the government in Islamabad. But not even I was cynical enough to believe that Osama bin Laden himself would be given a villa in a Pakistani garrison town on Islamabad’s periphery. I quote below from a letter written by my Pakistani friend Irfan Khawaja, a teacher of philosophy at Felician College, in New Jersey. He sent it to me in anguish just after bin Laden, who claimed to love death more than life, had met his presumably desired rendezvous:

    I find, however, that I can’t quite share in the sense of jubilation. I never believed that bin Laden was living in some hideaway “in the tribal areas.” But to learn that he was living in Abbottabad, after Khalid Sheikh Muhammed was discovered in Rawalpindi, is really too much for me. I don’t feel jubilation. I feel a personal, ineradicable sense of betrayal. For ten years, I’ve watched members of my own family taking to the streets, protesting the US military presence in northern Pakistan and the drone strikes etc. They stood there and prattled on and on about “Pakistan’s sovereignty,” and the supposed invasion of it by US forces.

    Well, what ****ing sovereignty? What ****ing sovereignty were these people “protecting”? It’s bad enough that the Pakistani army lacks sovereignty over the tribal area and can’t control it when the country’s own life depends upon it. But that bin Laden was living in the Pakistani equivalent of Annapolis, MD …

    You will notice that Irfan is here registering genuine shame, in the sense of proper outrage and personal embarrassment, and not some vicarious parody of emotion where it is always others—usually powerless women—who are supposedly bringing the shame on you.

    If the Pakistani authorities had admitted what they were doing, and claimed the right to offer safe haven to al-Qaeda and the Taliban on their own soil, then the boast of “sovereignty” might at least have had some grotesque validity to it. But they were too cowardly and duplicitous for that. And they also wanted to be paid, lavishly and regularly, for pretending to fight against those very forces. Has any state ever been, in the strict sense of the term, more shameless? Over the years, I have written many pages about the sick relationship between the United States and various Third World client regimes, many of which turned out to be false friends as well as highly discreditable ones. General Pinochet, of Chile, had the unbelievable nerve to explode a car bomb in rush-hour traffic in Washington, D.C., in 1976, murdering a political rival and his American colleague. The South Vietnamese military junta made a private deal to sabotage the Paris peace talks in 1968, in order to benefit the electoral chances of Richard Nixon. Dirty money from the Shah of Iran and the Greek dictatorship made its way at different times into our electoral process. Israeli religious extremists demand American protection and then denounce us for “interference” if we demur politely about colonization of the West Bank. But our blatant manipulation by Pakistan is the most diseased and rotten thing in which the United States has ever involved itself. And it is also, in the grossest way, a violation of our sovereignty. Pakistan routinely—by the dispatch of barely deniable death squads across its borders, to such locations as the Taj Hotel in Mumbai—injures the sovereignty of India as well as Afghanistan. But you might call that a traditional form of violation. In our case, Pakistan ingratiatingly and silkily invites young Americans to one of the vilest and most dangerous regions on earth, there to fight and die as its allies, all the while sharpening a blade for their backs. “The smiler with the knife under the cloak,” as Chaucer phrased it so frigidly. (At our feet, and at our throat: Perfectly symbolic of the underhanded duality between the mercenary and the sycophant was the decision of the Pakistani intelligence services, in revenge for the Abbottabad raid, to disclose the name of the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad.)

    This is well beyond humiliation. It makes us a prisoner of the shame, and co-responsible for it. The United States was shamed when it became the Cold War armorer of the Ayub Khan dictatorship in the 1950s and 1960s. It was shamed even more when it supported General Yahya Khan’s mass murder in Bangladesh in 1971: a Muslim-on-Muslim genocide that crashingly demonstrated the utter failure of a state based on a single religion. We were then played for suckers by yet another military boss in the form of General Zia-ul-Haq, who leveraged anti-Communism in Afghanistan into a free pass for the acquisition of nuclear weapons and the open mockery of the nonproliferation treaty. By the start of the millennium, Pakistan had become home to a Walmart of fissile material, traded as far away as Libya and North Korea by the state-subsidized nuclear entrepreneur A. Q. Khan, the country’s nearest approach (which in itself tells you something) to a national hero. Among the scientists working on the project were three named sympathizers of the Taliban. And that gigantic betrayal, too, was uncovered only by chance.

    Again to quote myself from 2001, if Pakistan were a person, he (and it would have to be a he) would have to be completely humorless, paranoid, insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. That last triptych of vices is intimately connected. The self-righteousness comes from the claim to represent a religion: the very name “Pakistan” is an acronym of Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and so forth, the resulting word in the Urdu language meaning “Land of the Pure.” The self-pity derives from the sad fact that the country has almost nothing else to be proud of: virtually barren of achievements and historically based on the amputation and mutilation of India in 1947 and its own self-mutilation in Bangladesh. The self-hatred is the consequence of being pathetically, permanently mendicant: an abject begging-bowl country that is nonetheless run by a super-rich and hyper-corrupt Punjabi elite. As for paranoia: This not so hypothetical Pakistani would also be a hardened anti-Semite, moaning with pleasure at the butchery of Daniel Pearl and addicted to blaming his self-inflicted woes on the all-powerful Jews.

    This dreary story actually does have some bearing on the “sovereignty” issue. In the beginning, all that the Muslim League demanded from the British was “a state for Muslims.” Pakistan’s founder and first president, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a relatively secular man whose younger sister went around unveiled and whose second wife did not practice Islam at all. But there’s a world of difference between a state for Muslims and a full-on Muslim state. Under the rule of General Zia there began to be imposition of Shari’a and increased persecution of non-Muslims as well as of Muslim minorities such as the Shiites, Ismailis, and Ahmadis. In recent years these theocratic tendencies have intensified with appalling speed, to the point where the state contains not one but two secret statelets within itself: the first an impenetrable enclave of covert nuclear command and control and the second a private nexus of power at the disposal of the military intelligence services and—until recently—Osama bin Laden himself. It’s the sovereignty of these possessions that exercises General Ashfaq Kayani, head of the Pakistani Army, who five days after Abbottabad made the arrogant demand that the number of American forces in the country be reduced “to the minimum essential.” He even said that any similar American action ought to warrant a “review” of the whole relationship between the two countries. How pitiful it is that a Pakistani and not an American should have been the first (and so far the only) leader to say those necessary things.

    If we ever ceased to swallow our pride, so I am incessantly told in Washington, then the Pakistani oligarchy might behave even more abysmally than it already does, and the situation deteriorate even further. This stale and superficial argument ignores the awful historical fact that, each time the Pakistani leadership did get worse, or behave worse, it was handsomely rewarded by the United States. We have been the enablers of every stage of that wretched state’s counter-evolution, to the point where it is a serious regional menace and an undisguised ally of our worst enemy, as well as the sworn enemy of some of our best allies. How could it be “worse” if we shifted our alliance and instead embraced India, our only rival in scale as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy, and a nation that contains nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan? How could it be “worse” if we listened to the brave Afghans, like their former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, who have been telling us for years that we are fighting the war in the wrong country?

    If we continue to deny or avoid this inescapable fact, then we really are dishonoring, as well as further endangering, our exemplary young volunteers. Why was the raid on Abbottabad so rightly called “daring”? Because it had to be conducted under the radar of the Pakistani Air Force, which “scrambled” its jets and would have brought the Black Hawks down if it could. That this is true is bad enough in all conscience. That we should still be submitting ourselves to lectures and admonitions from General Kayani is beyond shameful.

    From Abbottabad to Worse | Politics | Vanity Fair

  • #2
    Rants, abuse and denigration of another nation.

    You could go find a bunch of drunkards outside a pub to do much the same thing - of course they don't get paid to put all that into prose have it published ...

    Usual unsubstantiated nonsense and vitriol against Pakistan from some in the Western media.
    Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission - Jinnah
    https://twitter.com/AgnosticMuslim

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by Agnostic Muslim View Post
      Rants, abuse and denigration of another nation.

      You could go find a bunch of drunkards outside a pub to do much the same thing - of course they don't get paid to put all that into prose have it published ...

      Usual unsubstantiated nonsense and vitriol against Pakistan from some in the Western media.
      Its indeed a damning assessment of Pakistan by Hitchens but one which is not unique to him but is a view that is widely held about your country, and not just in 'the West'. However it is an assessment that has been, true to his style, masterfully articulated. Actually, its more than just a view, its the truth about Pakistan, and this is what bothers you isnt it? In any case, you cant argue with a man like Hitchens. You wouldnt last a few minutes in a debate with an intellectual of his calibre, years and knowledge. You know why? Because he just calls it how it is, ie the truth. He doesnt do lies, agendas or any of that bone-headed crap which you and countless like you try to pull all over the internet and through your so-called 'media'. Thats the difference between a genuine intellectual like Hitchens and Pakistan's entire corrupt establishment and all of its ignorant apologists.

      It is you and people like you who 'denigrate' their own 'nation' by refusing to engage with reality, which in the case of Pakistan is a country of 160 + million people, most of whom are uneducated, ignorant and suffering in destitution while only a small few are living comfortable lives at the expense of these millions of poverty-stricken people. You insult them and insult yourself by denying reality, coming here and lying through your teeth and by defending the corruption, lies and crimes of this dirty, greedy regime of yours. Or as Hitchens rightly put it, the 'most shameless' of all 'states'.

      Comment


      • #4
        A.M. Reply

        "Usual unsubstantiated nonsense and vitriol against Pakistan from some in the Western media."

        Hitchens is anything but "nonsense". Vitriol? Yes. Elegantly-penned as only he can muster and yet another example of his amazingly brilliant mind.

        What's usual is your pro forma retort. Ad hominem character attack is to what you've been reduced.
        "This aggression will not stand, man!" Jeff Lebowski
        "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool." Lester Bangs

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by S2 View Post
          "Usual unsubstantiated nonsense and vitriol against Pakistan from some in the Western media."

          Hitchens is anything but "nonsense". Vitriol? Yes. Elegantly-penned as only he can muster and yet another example of his amazingly brilliant mind.

          What's usual is your pro forma retort. Ad hominem character attack is to what you've been reduced.
          Its easy to compound issue, upon issue, upon issue and then make everything sound like hopelessness. Criticism for the sake of ridicule and not improvement usually goes that way. It quite fitting that he started off with Rushdie who quite recently argued that the 170Mn odd of us should be declared as terrorists and buries what should have been his lead when he fesses up how the state's every wrong doing has been rewarded by the US and finally is quite revealing as to his real agenda where he talks about embracing India over Pakistan, as if a power like the US has to choose and not the other way round.

          Comment


          • #6
            To be honest, when he says it like it is, and dishes it out on both sides, he makes some pertinent points with respect to the US. Today the world's eyes are more on the US with respect to Pakistan, than on Pakistan itself (what's the use?). The cure for a bad hangover migraine is strong medicine. Not downing another stiff one to dull the pain and willing it to somehow go away, as you slip back into stupor.
            Last edited by vsdoc; 09 Jun 11,, 09:28.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by S2 View Post
              "Usual unsubstantiated nonsense and vitriol against Pakistan from some in the Western media."

              Hitchens is anything but "nonsense". Vitriol? Yes. Elegantly-penned as only he can muster and yet another example of his amazingly brilliant mind.

              What's usual is your pro forma retort. Ad hominem character attack is to what you've been reduced.
              Beat me to it. Hitchens is about as far from an abusive street drunkard as you can get. Not always right, but always incisive & entertaining.
              sigpic

              Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

              Comment


              • #8
                This article is a accurate description of Pakistan.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Ad hominem character attack is to what you've been reduced.
                  In the context of a nation and its people, Kitchens has offered nothing but 'ad hominems and character attacks' against Pakistan, why should the response to such trip be any more?
                  Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission - Jinnah
                  https://twitter.com/AgnosticMuslim

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    It was entertaining, yes, but terribly skewed and riddled with inaccuracies. You simply cannot characterize a nation of a 180 million, any nation in fact, in such a causally stereotypical manner and expect to be taken too seriously. How hes managed to link the matter of honor killings (a widespread phenomena in South Asia hardly limited to Pakistan) to Pakistan's military and foreign policy formulation, for example, is beyond me.

                    If someone were to write a mirroring account of the United States about their involvement in the many wars and tabulations throughout their history, drawing on the rich themes of American militaristic aggression, hegemonic presumptions, moral dubiousness in foreign policy, consumerist greed, etc and eloquently spin it all into a narrative leading up to the far from perfect war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.. then it'll be the same scholastic worth as this. Pleasurable reading for those who've bias against the US, sure, but not much else.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by Kasrkin View Post

                      If someone were to write a mirroring account of the United States about their involvement in the many wars and tabulations throughout their history, drawing on the rich themes of American militaristic aggression, hegemonic presumptions, moral dubiousness in foreign policy, consumerist greed, etc and eloquently spin it all into a narrative leading up to the far from perfect war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.. then it'll be the same scholastic worth as this. Pleasurable reading for those who've bias against the USa, sure, but not much else.
                      Wasn't that essentially the argument of the founder of the Muslim brotherhood, a spinoff of which is the 'justification' groups like Al Qaeda offer.

                      Hitchen's is in 'good' company.
                      Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission - Jinnah
                      https://twitter.com/AgnosticMuslim

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Kasrkin View Post
                        It was entertaining, yes, but terribly skewed and riddled with inaccuracies. You simply cannot characterize a nation of a 180 million, any nation in fact, in such a causally stereotypical manner and expect to be taken too seriously. How hes managed to link the matter of honor killings (a widespread phenomena in South Asia hardly limited to Pakistan) to Pakistan's military and foreign policy formulation, for example, is beyond me.

                        If someone were to write a mirroring account of the United States about their involvement in the many wars and tabulations throughout their history, drawing on the rich themes of American militaristic aggression, hegemonic presumptions, moral dubiousness in foreign policy, consumerist greed, etc and eloquently spin it all into a narrative leading up to the far from perfect war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.. then it'll be the same scholastic worth as this. Pleasurable reading for those who've bias against the US, sure, but not much else.
                        Because if that 180 million fail to stop something as evil as honor killing and that 180 million deserve to be linked that way. End of story

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          I think Pakistan has a bigger problem than AM or Asim or Kasrkin realizes. Take a look at this video.

                          YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.. WARNING!!! Very disturbing!! May be NSFW.

                          Also there is a video of Pakistan Rangers shooting 5 unarmed Chechens, two of them woman and one of the women was a pregnant woman. On the video, it can be clearly showed that they were trying to surrender but were killed in a hail of gunfire.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            This video has been doing the rounds recently. I'd be quick to regret the loss of life here, but it may be worth explaining what happened. This person had been robbing people at gunpoint in a park, he was identified and dragged up to the Rangers patrol. He was almost certainly guilty as he kept saying 'meh majboor hoon' which can roughly be translated as 'I had no choice'. The Sindh (and Punjab) Rangers are not trained for this sort of thing, Rangers are essentially border guards under the control of the army, and they've been called into cities like Karachi to maintain security at the behest of the city governments, and because the police force is inadequate. This guy was coming on to one of the Rangers personnel, when he should have been on his knees with his arms on his head. These service-men are not trained to make arrests, you can see their technique was hardly refined. At the time he was shot, the kid was shouting 'Ok I'm backing off', the ranger just waited for him to get to a decent range and out of the way of his friends before shooting him in the leg. It was partly the kids stupidity, partly a lack of appropriate police training for the rangers, and lack of immediate medical attention that led to his death. He was shot by a 7.62mm at close range, he a was small, thin guy and would've bled out in a matter of minutes, you could see the blood spilling out of him.

                            Karachi is full of criminals like this, I'm not exaggerating that you'd be hard pressed to come across someone who hasn't been robbed at gunpoint sometime. There is hate for these criminals, I was shocked to see so many people endorse his death. But I'd want to caution that it wasn't a premeditated extra-judicial killing, though such things to tend to happen (and get endorsed) given the state of the justice system.

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              ^^^ Wow, that was such an apology if I ever heard one. I think you got a real bright future as an careerist apologist. Perhaps Germany or Japan can hire your services to apologize for their actions.

                              The man was completely unarmed!! There was no justification for the Rangers to kill him, not even the bloodlust that the Rangers had for him. So what if he was a robber. Stick him in jail, not kill him when he's begging for his life. Besides how do you know that he was a robber or not. Where is the proof? All we had was the word of a guy who dragged him. They could have handcuffed him. But no, this gung ho of a retard point the gun at him and threaten to kill him. Of course, the kid tried to push the gun away as he was pleading for his life. He was trying to defend himself and he was right for trying to defend himself.

                              You have villified the western and Indian forces for less than what the Rangers did. Your post shows what hypocrisy you portray.
                              Last edited by Blademaster; 10 Jun 11,, 21:53.

                              Comment

                              Working...
                              X