US game in the region has entered its most dangerous phase

[Faheem Uddin]

What a pity! What has become of our sovereignty? The incisive American
interference was now for pretty long no secret. And whatever little
mist was there that has been cleared off completely by the cartload of
WikiLeaks diplomatic cable stuff. Of late, the Americans’ voice is not
just decisive in the making of this country’s governments. Their mere
frown is enough for our quarreling power players to set aside their
fracas and disputes. But have been turned into their slaves, courtesy
our hierarchs, that now they feel not the least inhibited in telling
us who we must take as our friend and who as our enemy? India, they
tell us, couldn’t be our enemy but only friend. It doesn’t matter if
it keeps the bulk of its huge military might deployed against us; or
if it has raised a rapid-action strike command to attack Pakistan
along its Punjab-Rajasthan sector; or if its military commanders have
been menacingly propounding the doctrines of fighting a war under
nuclear overhang with Pakistan simultaneously along with China. It
doesn’t matter either if the nuclear sale deal that America has
wangled from its own Congress, the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAE A) and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, providing all the space to
India to divert its own indigenous nuclear materials to making bombs.
Nor does it matter if India worked decisively at the WTO to get
quashed a limited EU trade preferential treatment to Pakistan. The
American lords want Pakistan to gulp up all this ungrudgingly and take
India as its friend, since they have determined it to be so. But would
have they taken a similar determination from any outsider when the
Soviet Union had deployed a battery of nuclear missiles in Cuba?
Wasn’t it that so threatened they felt that in retaliation they set
their own nuclear assets in Turkey targeted at the Soviet Union,
leaving the world cold with fear of an imminent nuclear war? And
didn’t they scream out deafeningly then that Cuba was an enemy they
would knock out of the earth if worse came to the worst?What indeed is
it that the Americans think that they just to command and we,
Pakistanis, are only to obey? As if the shenanigans of their CIA and
its contractors and agents in this country were not enough of it, they
reportedly now want their military officers to be post in each and all
our corps headquarters. Not just that. They want us to stop producing
ammonium nitrate at once, as they claim this popular fertiliser is
used by Afghan insurgents for making improvised explosive devices
(IEDs) to fatally attack the American and coalition forces in
Afghanistan. So it doesn’t matter if our agriculture goes to the dogs;
but stop we must this productive fertiliser’s manufacturing. But
plugging off the border to stop its trafficking, if at all it is going
from Pakistan, doesn’t come to them as they think this is none of
their job but the others’ job. Presently, the Mexicans are having a
big dose of this American medicine. On the stiff urgings of
Washington, they have launched into a blood-soaked war against the
drug of mafias in their country. But they are shouting from the
rooftops that the war is costing them intolerable human and material
losses, primarily because the Americans are not controlling the border
on their side, leaving it free for drug mafias to escape into the
American territory as well as to procure arm supplies from there
freely for their fight against the Mexican security forces. But the
Americans would have none of it. They just want the Mexican
authorities to keep on fighting but secure the border they would not
as it not possible to secure. But the same they are doing to us.
Destroy safe havens and sanctuaries of the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda
fighters that they assert exist in our tribal areas. But destroy they
would not militants’ sanctuaries on their side, say in Kunar and
Nuristan provinces, from where the thugs have launched at least five
attacks on our villages, police stations and border posts in these
very times. So is it that they think we have turned into their slaves
whose lives, limbs and blood count for not even a dime? Over these
times, President Barack Obama has said so many times he would do all
to secure the American people’s lives. Yes, he must. But after the
9/11, the American lives are secure and safe as no terrorist strike
has occurred in America again. But in the US-led spurious war on
terror, we have lost at least 35,000 precious lives of our men, women
and children. Then how many more lives have to sacrifice for this
American slavery?