There were no celebrations, and there was no mourning. It did not occur to anyone to make a US President Barack Obama effigy; no US flags were burnt. There were no heated debates about whether Osama bin Laden was a martyr. The buses that were set ablaze in Karachi had nothing to do with the high drama in Abbotabad. The crowd in front of Karachi Press Club was a group of private bank employees wanting their jobs back. The little group at the gates of the electricity company offices was demanding nothing more than some good, clean electricity.
A hunger strike camp with young men’s posters was part of a campaign to recover young men who have nothing at all to do with al-Qaeda.
In fact, the reaction to the killing of bin Laden was so subdued that a colleague said that there weren’t even any text messages in circulation with conspiracy theories and inevitable jokes about Osama’s wives. Pakistanis are not in denial. Just busy. They are busy fighting a hundred little battles that do not involve US Navy Seals or helicopter crashes or Arab tycoons. These battles are as vicious as any that you have seen in the past 10 years, but they don’t make good TV. How do you create high drama out of millions of industrial laborers being laid off because there is no electricity? How do you sex up the banal fact that every tenth child in the world who never sees the inside of a schoolroom is a Pakistani child?
So it fell to our TV pundits to prove that we were also part of this global soap opera. They raged against yet another invasion of our much-molested sovereignty. They demanded transparency from the US. They wanted footage. How many hours of news can you spin out of a single, bullet-riddled mugshot?
In the real world, an -educationist and chronic optimist tried to fantasize.
“So the party is over,” he enthused. “Americans will go home. Our boys will ask their jihadi boys to pack up, surely?”
Someone reminded him: “Have you been to a party lately, sir? Nobody goes home.”
Pakistan’s security establishment, of course, went into a sulky silence, and wasn’t around to reassure us. Were they protecting bin Laden? Or were they so hopelessly inefficient that they couldn’t track the world’s most recognizable face when he was camped out practically at the edge of the Pakistani army’s most famous parade ground? As they are answerable only to their mistrusting partners and permanent paymasters in Washington, they didn’t feel like obliging us with any information.
However, anyone who has lived through Pakistan’s three military dictatorships sponsored by Washington can tell you there is no need to be such a reductionist. Why can’t Pakistan’s security establishment do both? Why can’t they shelter him and then forget about the fact that they were sheltering him? Or why can’t they shelter him and then sell him out at a later stage?
Pakistan’s army is often accused, mostly by their best friends in Washington, of double-dealing and fighting on both sides of this war. In its long role as rent-an-army to the US, it has been accused of becoming a mafia, a secretive clan and a corporation, all at the same time, but what does it feel like to live under this bloody delusion? It is like watching a person whose one hand is hacking away at his other hand.
There is blood, there are cries of pain, and there is the obvious sound of one hand hacking away at the other. The person keeps looking around trying to figure out who is doing this to him. Military operations and house-to-house searches to look for the hidden hand end up where they started.
On Tuesday afternoon, an official from the Inter-Services Intelligence agency did come up with a frank, but not very reassuring explanation about that house in Abbottabad. It was embarrassing, he told the BBC World Service. And then went on to reminisce about their past victories, duly acknowledged and celebrated by their Washington counterparts.
“We are good, but not gods,” he said.
What he really should have said is that we are gods, but not good.
Mohammed Hanif is a journalist and author.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS