Its opponents are after PTI for blocking Nato supply line until the US reneges on its drones policy causing indiscriminate killing of our citizens. If it continues, they warn, the superpower will be very angry and might want to punish us by withholding bilateral as well as multilateral economic assistance and imposing international isolation. Look at Iran, they say, it has finally gone for engagement with the West; we should learn from its example. There are hardly any similarities, though. Last but not least, they tell us, if our people keep protesting by blocking Nato supplies, US will find an alternative route. The protestors' goal, of course, is not to stop the supplies per se, but to draw international attention to something else.
America's apologists never mention the real issue: that the protest is against the killing of innocent Pakistanis who happen to live in the tribal areas, now even in settled areas. PTI is not a radical anti-American party; its campaign is simply about a right, namely the citizens' right to life that the government has a constitutional duty to protect. Iran's example has little relevance to our situation. It has been insisting on its legitimate right, as an NPT signatory, to maintain a peaceful nuclear programme. Tehran has always denied having any intention to build nuclear weapons, saying it needed nuclear technology for scientific research. That way, the deal it signed at Geneva is not a total surrender. The sticking point until Geneva was Iran's insistence on enriching uranium within the country. It had rejected the offer to have another country enrich uranium for it. Tehran still retains the right to do that by itself on its own soil, though at a considerably reduced enrichment level. Considering its stated position, Iran can still claim it has not compromised on its stand. Hence has the Russian President Vladimir Putin described the nuclear deal as a "win for all".
Our case is completely different. First of all, PTI may have stepped into federal area of responsibility in blocking Nato supplies, but as a political party it has every right to protest killing of Pakistani citizens. The federal government is not bound to accept the PTI demand that, we are told, would isolate this country and bring disastrous consequences. Second, America's local lackeys must know that the use of armed drones against a country not at war with the West is a subject of serious debate involving legal and moral questions in relevant UN forums as well as within the US itself. It is a subject of an ongoing debate while no less a person than the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has condemned the loss of innocent lives to drone strikes in Pakistan.
Various international rights groups as well as American think-tanks have amply established that a large number of those killed or maimed in drone attacks have been innocent civilians. According to a Brookings Institution study, ten civilians are killed for every dead militant. It is also important to note that as against US's apologists claims of targets carefully chosen and precision of drone-fired missiles, random killings are also part of the policy. The target selection system includes so-called 'Signature Killings'. It needs to be recalled here how a section of the American media quoted a high official explaining the operation to President Obama at a briefing session: "we can see that there are a lot of military age males down there, men associated with terrorist activity, but we don't always know who they are." This way, said the then CIA chief Mike Hayden, a lot more bad guys can be taken out when groups rather than individuals are targeted. The more afraid militants are to congregate, he went on, the harder it would be for them to plot, plan or train for attacks against America and its interests. In other words, any Fata young man can be a target in America's drone war.
But when it comes to one of its own, everything changes. Early last year, an American-born citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, a frontline al Qaeda leader based in Yemen, was eliminated in a drone strike. The man, it should be noted, was linked to two terror attacks in 2009, one involving a Nigerian student's abortive bid to blow up an American airliner, and the other the shooting by Major Nidal Hassan at Fort Hood army barracks near Texas that left 13 people dead and another 30 injured. Just like the extremists fighting the Pakistani state, Awlaki was fighting his own state from the al Qaeda platform. President Obama hailed the killing as a major blow to al Qaeda and "another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates." Yet he did not claim credit for it. Instead he had to struggle hard in the face of heated debate about legal justification for the targeted killing of an American citizen. Leading a chorus of criticism the American Civil Liberties Union argued that "deliberate and premeditated killing of American terrorism suspects raises profound questions that ought to be the subject of public debate." Here we have countless civilians killed, some simply because they happened to be of military age - stretching the Bush administration's dodgy preventive war idea to a horrific extreme. And yet there are those who have no shame in defending such blatant crimes against humanity involving fellow citizens.
Our own ruling elites and their hangers-on are as much to blame for these crimes as is the US. The argument that we should keep quiet otherwise the US will stop the flow of aid and loans, is typical of the mercenary mindset that is responsible for so much that is wrong with this country. The Gulf states are free to fight their proxy wars through sectarian violence because they provide helpful financial assistance. And of course the US can get any services, political and military, for the furtherance of its interests in this region in exchange for money. It was our own former president who, in his eagerness to win favour, infamously told an American official that "collateral damage [from drone attacks] bothers you Americans, not me." Same is the attitude of most of our politicians and pro-America analysts and commentators. As long as their own families are safe and their pockets lined with money, it bothers them little if innocent civilians get murdered either as collateral damage or in targeted 'Signature Killings.' Anyone unfamiliar with what the Chinese political literature used to call 'running dogs of American imperialism' can see living examples of that among those getting agitated over the PTI protest. [email protected]
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