Stop being defensive

The hearing on the Pakistani province of Balochistan by American legislators is the latest sign of the deep anti-Pakistanism prevalent among US politicians and media. Since 2002, the United States has probably produced more anti-Pakistan propaganda than our traditional rival India has in decades.
The US is not an enemy for us but has been certainly acting like one for quite some time now. It would be a miscalculation to ignore powerful quarters in Washington pushing for a confrontation with Pakistan.
Apart from the deliberate murder of 25 Pakistani soldiers in November, the Central Intelligence Agency works closely with the Indians and US-trained Afghan intelligence officers to hide, support and organise terrorists killing innocent Pakistanis in southwest Pakistan. The Americans have even shifted some of these terror leaders to Europe to use them to blackmail Pakistan over Balochistan. There already is unusual activism in the US media and think tanks over Pakistani Balochistan.
We need to understand that we can’t be friends with the Americans if they don’t want to be. But that’s not the only thing we need to consider.
We need to stop being apologetic about Afghanistan. We’ll be in Afghanistan for some time to come. The bulk of Afghan food and trade passes through our seaports and Afghan politics impacts Pakistan more than any other neighbour.
If others don’t stop using Afghan soil against us, we shouldn’t either. Pakistan must stop obsessing about being the good kid on the block. From 1948 to 1991, Afghanistan was used by other countries against Pakistan.
First it was the USSR and India. Now it is the US and India. The first time we meddled in Afghan affairs was on Afghanistan’s request when their tribesmen asked for our help in the 1970s to thwart foreign-backed communists.
Pakistan should stop being too defensive when it comes to links to Afghan resistance groups. First, we are not helping Afghans resist foreign occupation.

Afghans are doing this themselves. Then no matter what we do, we can’t stop the natural links and bonds that tie Pakistanis and Afghans. So if the Afghan Pashtun tribesmen from Afghan Taliban link up with Pakistanis, there’s only so much that Islamabad can do to stop that short of going to war with its own citizens. Washington needs to find ways to stop Afghans from helping and joining resistance. The problem
is there, not here.
We abused and mistreated the Taliban government’s last ambassador in Islamabad before delivering him to the CIA in 2001. We could have apologised to him for having no choice, if that was the case. We shouldn’t have humiliated him en route to the airport. That incident is a poster example of how eagerly we helped an ungrateful Washington.
Now, we should do the right thing: declare neutrality in the Afghan conflict and announce opening up our own direct talks with the Afghan Taliban. We have no conflict with this or any other Afghan political faction.
The last point that we need to accept is the American anti-Pakistanism in Afghanistan. Groups like the TTP and the BLA kill Pakistanis in streets and market places. They sprang up after Americans landed in Afghanistan. The TTP was founded by an unknown Pakistani in American custody at Gitmo and released into Afghanistan. His first act of terror was to kill Chinese government engineers in Pakistan in 2004.
Even now, we choke the TTP from the Pakistani side but it continues to get money, fuel and weapons from the Afghan side. The TTP terrorists have a support network in Afghanistan that operates with the CIA’s knowledge and is sustained by Indians and anti-Pakistan elements in the Afghan intelligence, which, again, is an offshoot of the CIA.
The CIA’s help in targeting the TTP through drone strikes has been limited and cosmetic at best. The same goes for the BLA. Washington refuses to designate it as a terror group. Its links to multiple intelligence agencies in Afghanistan was exposed in 2009 when a UN worker in Quetta who was kidnapped by the BLA turned out to be a US citizen.
A detailed probe by Pakistani officials and US diplomats in Islamabad and Kabul found the kidnapping remote-controlled from a house in the Afghan capital not far from President Karzai’s residence. Since then, the US intelligence has moved the BLA assets to Europe.
The TTP and the BLA will die a natural death the day the CIA leaves Afghanistan. These are realities that Pakistan needs to talk about openly to improve its position in the Afghan endgame.

The writer works for Geo TV.
Email: aq@paknationalists.com