The bombing of a village, Damadola, in Pakistan’s Bajaur Agency near the Afghan border on January 13 in which 18 ‘civilians’ were killed has triggered a mock battle between the US and its closest ally in the so-called war on terror. The US has rejected the charge that its troops stationed in Afghanistan were involved and also the charge that it targets ‘civilians’ in Pakistan. Furious over the bombing, the Pakistanis expressed their pique in the presence of George Bush Sr, the former US president, who is the father of the present one, at a press conference in Islamabad. Not for the first time Pakistan is supposed to have ‘protested’ against American action inside the Pakistani territory. US sources told the media that no US military planes had carried out the bombing. It was the work of ‘drones’ sent by the CIA.

And before he left on the latest of his periodic American missions to seek favours in cash and kind, the puppet prime minister of Pakistan, Shaukat Aziz, thundered: ‘We cannot accept any action within our country which results in what happened over the week-end.’ But he added in the same breath that ‘relationship with the US is important and it is growing’.

Hence, the bout of impotent rage in official circles in Islamabad. Contrast what the Pakistanis have been saying with what the US secretary of state said after the January 13 bombings. She said that ‘tough tactics’ are necessary to fight the likes of Al Qaeda whose supporters ‘are not people who can be dealt with lightly.’ The US has not said that it would not pursue fugitive terrorists running away into Pakistani territories when the Pakistanis are unwilling to complete the task of eliminating them.

Despite their frustration with the reluctant Pakistanis in the so-called war against terror, the Americans have been maintaining the fiction that relations between Washington and Islamabad are still very warm. Officials in Washington said after the January 13 bombing that Pakistan continued to extend its full ‘cooperation’ to the Americans.

Maybe. But there is something wrong in a ‘cooperation’ in which the Americans have to repeatedly intrude into the Pakistani side of the border from Afghanistan in pursuit of the elusive Al Qaeda militants who are well protected and guarded inside Pakistan.

According to some media reports, it was the Pakistan intelligence that had tipped off the Americans about the likely presence of Al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, in the Bajaur Agency on that January day that led to the bombing attack on the Damadola village. Pakistan denies having shared any intelligence with the US about the presence of Al Qaeda’s number 2 on its western border.

But Pakistan has been ‘protesting’ against these intrusions with increasing level of rhetoric aimed, no doubt, purely at domestic audiences. After all, the country’s dictator, Gen Pervez Musharraf is seen as an American stooge and on this account his popularity—or TRP ratings, given his penchant for frequent appearance on the small screen—has been going down at a fast pace. The Pakistan government might have been quick to protest at the Damadola bombings because of the death of a large number of civilians, but media reports from Pakistan quoted officials to say that at least three or four foreign militants were among those who died there. These reports also said that villagers had seen a few days prior to January 13 groups of foreign militants in the area.

Most of the tribal areas on Pakistan’s western borders have reportedly remained inaccessible to security forces and civilians. A lot of what goes on these areas is not known to even most Pakistanis, much less the rest of the world. But when some journalists tried to get first-hand information about the bombings by the US the Pakistani authorities barred them.

In fact, a BBC (Urdu unit) team was promptly detained, their videocassettes confiscated and the journalists jailed when they landed at the Bajaur Agency. The Pakistani media has said that the officials in Islamabad fear that another ‘Balochistan’ may be in the making in the restive tribal areas adjoining Balochistan.

There may be some other reasons for Pakistan to shield ‘sensitive’ areas from the world and its own people. Islamabad continues to harbour Al Qaeda and Taliban militants; it provides staging grounds to these elements for attack in Afghanistan; the Madrassas of Pakistan continue to produce fanatics and jehadis, despite the government’s alleged drive against them.

The current fit of Pakistani ‘anger’ against the US looks all the more sham because after its ‘U-turn’ in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on American targets, Pakistan has come to depend heavily on the US for all manner of support. It was because of the US support that Pakistan is able to live easily despite the serious nuclear proliferation activities of its now defaced scientist, A. Q. Khan, which were clearly backed by the former civilian and military governments. Thanks to the US initiative, Pakistan does not figure in the controversy over Iran’s nuclear programme, which was started with the help of the rogue Pakistani scientist. Pakistan is under no pressure to divulge the name of the fourth country (other than Iran, North Korea and Libya) that was sold nuclear secrets by Khan network.

Though Afghanistan had embraced the US ahead of Pakistan, the US has titled more towards Islamabad in the face of increasing Afghan complaints that Pakistan was sheltering Taliban activists. After a suicide bomb attack had killed 33 people in eastern Afghanistan early in January, the governor of the Kandahar province said that Pakistan was allowing senior Taliban officials ‘on its soil and in some cases the suicide bombers are even Pakistani nationals.’ Assadullah Khalid also reminded the world that most of the senior Taliban officials had houses in Pakistan which are often used as training camps for terrorists.

Gen Musharraf’s own future is linked to a rising graph of US assistance to him personally and his country. The US ‘help’, of course, is not altogether altruistic. The US seems to think that the best way to win friends in the ‘hostile’ Muslim world is through cash. The US has pledged billions of dollars in support to Pakistan, leading some in the US to think that the demand for ‘apology’ from the US gives Pakistan another opportunity to press Washington for more money! It must be an art that only Pakistan can master: using ‘protests’ for begging.


Courtesy : Syndicate Features

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