How long this standoff will continue is debatable but what we need to consider is how this situation has deteriorated to a point that the US feels it can attack and kill Pakistanis at will.
The world is babbling with news about Iran being on the threshold of going nuclear, in a military sense. Israeli words are coming out of American mouths. US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told CBS news that Iran could build a nuclear bomb in a year or less (music to Israeli ears).
Pakistan’s relations with the US have never been easy but recent developments have brought them to such a point that even the polite and usually soft-spoken Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani was forced to concede: “we do not trust the Americans.”
In contemporary global politics, two ingredients are considered essential to project power: wealth and military might. The two are inter-related. Obviously, without wealth, military hardware cannot be acquired and without military might, wealth can neither be protected nor additional amounts accumulated. There is also a third factor: the power of iman (faith-commitment).
There are a host of organizations — the United Nations (UN) with its Security Council, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — that are touted as world bodies whose function is to maintain peace, security and stability — financial and nuclear — in the world. The UN and IMF were created around the time of World War II.
Is the US endgame in Afghanistan real? If so, it appears to have entered a crucial phase under the cover of a series of international conferences to facilitate US troop withdrawal from the war-torn country. Some observers, however, believe America is playing a double game trying to give the impression of preparing to leave while working behind the scenes to establish permanent military bases in the country.
In the face of its collapsing economy and spiraling domestic unrest, the US is blithely proceeding with its blueprint of remaking world cartography. After dispatching Muammar Qaddafi in a hail of gunmetal, US imperialists are confronting the Syrian stumbling block, item No. 2 on its regime change wish-list.
Only the demented minds of American officials could concoct a story of the alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir. In making this scandalous allegation on October 11, US Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller looked shifty and visibly uncomfortable.
Early month, as much of the western world was either wallowing in sentimental commemorations of the 10th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001, or reflecting on the far greater atrocities perpetrated by the US in its aggressive exploitation of 9/11 in pursuit of their imperialist interests worldwide, warnings of an emerging tragedy of potentially even greater proportions were largely ignored.
Two Americans accused of spying were released on September 21 as part of a humanitarian gesture by the Islamic Republic of Iran. A delegation of American Christian and Muslim leaders had traveled to Tehran to meet President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other officials to seek the release of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal.
Since April 1978, the Afghans have experienced nothing but war. An entire generation has grown up with violence, murder and mayhem. First it was the Russians, followed by various Afghan factions fighting it out among themselves, then came the Taliban and now the Americans and their NATO allies.
Disturbing evidence has emerged of continued abuse and torture of prisoners by sadistic American guards in Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo), the American gulag in the illegally occupied Cuban island. To protest mistreatment and continued illegal detention, many prisoners resort to hunger strikes.
Colonel Muammar Qaddafi is an easy figure to hate. Given his eccentric behaviour, he is the butt of many jokes that are easily conflated into hate against the man and his policies. Qaddafi need not be our favourite tyrant but the West’s attack on his regime as well as the country’s infrastructure is not motivated by the desire to rescue the Libyan people.
Since he entered the White House in January 2009, Barack Obama has made war on Pakistan the most important policy of his presidency even while he has maintained a broad grin on his face. the presidential campaign: speak softly but carry a big stick.
Pvt. Bradley Manning’s case is cutting through the calcified US domestic landscape with a sword of sympathy. After his incarceration, the public is associating the Guantanamo images associated of “those Muslim terrorists” — shackled bodies, sexualized humiliation, minds breaking under psychological torture — with the cheery and too relatable photograph of the young American soldier.
Has the American dream of permanent supremacy in the oil-rich region of the world been shattered? It’s a question that not only haunts influential institutions that function as pillars of power in America’s global hegemony, but also torments a wide array of rightwing think tanks masquerading as “impartial analysts”.
The global political scene is not only changing, it has changed quite dramatically over the last decade or so. The pompous notion of a unipolar world in which the self-proclaimed “sole superpower” maintains perpetual full-spectrum dominance a la Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is no longer tenable.
As he was wheeled into the operation theatre at a Washington hospital, Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, must have prayed the Pakistani surgeon tending to him would successfully stitch his torn aorta to save his life so he could “save” Afghanistan.
Wikileaks has proved to be the kingmaker of all news, defying the short lifespan of most news cycles to reign for a solid week-and-a-half over world headlines. Reactions over the release of secret US State Department cables ranged from shock, titillation, amusement, or apoplectic fury.
When Wikileaks arrested world headlines, the mainstream media coped by focusing on the gossip dished up by embassies on US allies, “frenemies” (friendly enemies), and outright foes
