generalspeaking

Influence And Goodwill; Pakistan and The United States

Pakistan remains furious that the United States unilaterally planned, without alerting Pakistan's executive branch, its military and its secret service, to launch an ultimately successful raid on Osama bin-Laden's family compound. His presence and the compound's purpose ostensibly unknown to the Pakistani secret service, the military and the government. Despite that the compound was located in greeting distance of an army academy.

One might think, rationally, that Pakistan would be abashed, ashamed and even apologetic that it had allowed the world's ranking terror mastermind to live unmolested for years under their very noses. They perhaps would have evinced all those emotions had they not been instrumental in allowing him to live undetected and in peace, while allowing him to busy himself with his local and international connections to global terror.

But Pakistan takes its sovereignty very serious indeed, taking full moral umbrage at the casual manner in which they see the United States taking it upon itself to enter airspace without prior permission. Let alone launching a lightning-quick and-successful raid in Abbottabad whose purpose was to succeed in destroying an jihad-influential figure seen as an international inspiration to all those who dedicate themselves to emulating their fanatical Islamist hero.

The CIA station chief at the American embassy in Pakistan who liaised with the Inter Services Intelligence Agency appears to have had enough of the pretense that Pakistan is an ally of the United States and the free world, in combatting terrorism. The billions of funding that yearly goes from the U.S. Treasury to Pakistan's military and its government to buy its good will is simply not enough to convince Pakistan to buy into universal values of good government and peace.

Pakistan's paranoia, its hatred and resentment of powerful India, and its continued connivance to do its huge neighbour harm, and to take possession of Kashmir, and to continue growing its nuclear arsenal all mark it as a danger to the world community. Yet the fiction of normalcy within the state and in its relations to the West, in particular the United States, goes on unabated, despite nasty irritations.

Well, then, would Pakistan ever consider going beyond diplomacy to foster an aura of covert lobbying, buying the loyalty, as it were, of U.S. Congressmen, to convince them to push the agenda of Pakistan in Congress? It was recently revealed by the U.S. Justice Department that over several decades there were fairly successful attempts to influence lawmakers and the White House, the goal being to force India to give up control of parts of Kashmir to Pakistan.

Through secret funding of the 'Kashmiri American Council' (good one that; U.S. money shipped back from Pakistan to its source to fund that influence-peddling Council) Washington lawmakers were influenced to set up annual conferences on Capital Hill at the request of the ISI. A network of phony political donors contributed to the campaign, and made donations to U.S. political candidates, illegal under U.S. law.

The members of Congress involved claimed not to have known they were willing participants in a foreign intelligence plot. Claiming that any statements or actions they made expressed their own beliefs about the need for a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir conflict. While others reacted angrily that they were gulled.

Disagreements and misunderstandings between friends.

Labels: Pakistan, Political Realities, Terrorism, United States

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, August 02, 2011