Afghan Press Author: Rooh-ul-Amin

The US predator drones midnight attack on November 22, 2008 purportedly killed five people including Abu-al-Asr Misri and Rashid Rauf. It is the 46th incident of US reconnaissance and predator drones’ intrusion. The story of the US intrusion crept in into tribal regions during Musharraf regime but it went its zenith during PPP-led government. By now more than ten thousand Pukhtoons in tribal belt has been left dead and no less than 20 thousand physically disabled in the so-called war on terror. Yes the same war on terror, which has been detested by US intellectuals, who had the gumption of battering Mr. Bush for his sanguinary foreign policy and waging a war in Iraq, Afghanistan and the likely one in Pakistan. It has taken its initiation, which will surly touch its impetus in January 2009 after Obama inters White House. The Pakistan of Jinnah and Iqbal is under the intrigue of the belligerent and world’s only super power. But this is all possible for the US with the accomplice of Jinnah’s ostensible political heirs.

Iqbal wanted to endow his nation with essence of independence, self-ego and self-respect through his writings while Jinnah practically showed his nation how to live as an independent nation in world community. But their posteriors defaced their great names badly by American toadyism and roaming after begging with begging-bowls. They are moaning before England to exert the US to stop its ongoing series of drones’ attacks. Is it the way to live as a free and independent nation? Because our great Jinnah has given us a great legacy of self-respect but his descendants have adopted the other way—self-will-servility.

Once Sir Winston Churchill said Jinnah “if you were an English then I would have placed you in my cabinet”. What this tall and frail man of 52 Kg—Jinnah told him is ever remembering. Contrary to Churchill’s expectation he responded him; “no, if I (Jinnah) were an English then I would have kept you in my cabinet”. Though in those days he was not the Governor General of Pakistan but a representative of a subject (slave) nation—the Muslims of subcontinent. At that time Churchill was the Prime Minister of Great Britain. He is the same Churchill, who took England to a safe harbour against the Hitler’s Germany when it was crushing country after country. But in present day world Pakistan has went politically bankrupt because the public has confidence in no party and no leader. Even Syria, which is geographically not greater than our province of Balochistan but how boldly it detested the American aerial attack, is exemplary for Pakistan. When it is asked of our Prime Minister that why we cannot begrudge the US intrusion in FATA and now the settled area of Bannu, which is near to Waziristan, the answer the public receives is too frustrating that Pakistan is a small country and cannot challenge the US. Yes, Mr. Cower Prime Minister it is true that Pakistan cannot fight America and the journalists and intellectuals will not prod you to do so but at least a nation must have courage to detest foreign intrusion as an independent nation. And Pakistan in reality is not that much small which the political oligarchs are trying too show. England, which has ruled over half of the world, is comparable geographically with our two provinces—Punjab and NWFP. For greatness of a nation, area and geographical size of a country is not measured but it has its own principal but like dearth of edible commodities and jobs there is also a dearth of such principal and great.

It is because from this now-to-be-free-nation there is no political character that has the gumption to respond to the US in a manly but positive manner that the ongoing series of drones attacks must be stopped and the war on terror, which has unleashed a deadly loss in men and material, is not ours. Contrary to the hopes and wishes every now and then the docile political elite in Pakistan has always tried to delude its nation into elusive and evasive explanations and called it our war.

For instance whenever there is a US drone attack in tribal belt, it is denied by the inter services public relations (ISPR) and the government. In this regard the press conference of Munsif Afridi, the spokesman for Amar-bel-Maroof (one of the three local Taliban outfits) speaks volumes when he explained the US drones attack in valley Tirah, a far-flung area of Khyber Agency wherein at least 8 people were mowed down and injured no less than five. The next morning the ISPR’s denial proliferated the entire press. The same day when I went through the statement of its denial a curiosity popped up in my mind to check out the credibility of the news. My brain reeled with the words of my source when he told me that he is right now in the funeral prayer of a lady who succumbed to news of her only nephew, which was killed in the incident of valley Tirah. Second example is the news, which obliterated the matter about the killings of Rashid Rauf and Abu-al-Asr Misri when the local populace told the journalists that those who were targeted and killed were the local people and not foreigners. So the denials and the song of foreign inclusion have badly tarnished the image of elected government. Similarly the news went controversial in Britain where its public demanded explanation about.

Prior to the incident, a news for public and allegation for government emanated from ‘Washington Post’ that the present government in Pakistan has a clandestine deal with the US, which allows American drones for selected surgery in the tribal belt? Under the deal, the government in Pakistan has no right for calling explanation from the US but it can go merely on denouncing the drones intrusions.

The newspaper has named the deal, ‘don’t ask and don’t tell’, which enables the US to attack tribal belt in pursuit of Al-Qaida activists.

But the denial-addicted government, in its typical style, rebuffed the news of the paper a mere allegation against the democratic government.

If the news of the ‘Washington Post’ has no tinge of reality then why it does not come up with a neat and clear stance instead adopting the path of equivocal and hoax explanations.

The public has no concern with it, whether the news report of Washington Post is allegation or a reality but it wants an immediate halt to the on going series of US predator drones incursions. After getting votes with the slogan of peace the role of ANP has been under battering but Minister for Railways Bashir Ahmad Bilour exhumed the bitter realities that “the fire has been brought to this land by the government itself and not the masses. And it is not so easy to put a halt to it just with a magic wand and mere lip service. The government is fighting war on terror against the wishes of its public and it seems difficult that it will win over it.

The government must take the wishes and hopes of its public and it will have to scotch its dual policy”. Now it is necessary for the government to rethink and reshape its domestic and foreign policy instead keeping the current military operations and steering the old wagon of Musharraf’s reeking policy. At the same time it is a dream to hope for a seismic shift in our foreign policy until it rests with GHQ.