Wikileaks and the Terrorist State of Pakistan

I have read arguments that what Wikileaks is doing is not good. I have read them arguments but not understood them. For the love of everything sensible, I cannot for the life of me understand why information that is good for the leaders is somehow not good for the people. I can understand that dictators don’t want people to know the truth. But in democratic societies? Why?

Just yesterday in Spain, they caught a bunch of people who were supplying stolen and forged passports to Al Qaida. All of them were of the Religion of Peace persuasion. You surprised? Most of them were from the Terrorist State of Pakistan. Surprised again?

I hope Dr Manmohan Singh does not get to hear of these arrests. He loses sleep worrying about what will happen to the families of the terrorists. We don’t want Dr Singh to not get his sleep, do we? How will he carry out his boss’s orders if he misses out on his beauty sleep?

The cables that Wikileaks leaked make for fascinating reading. In one, it says (I paraphrase) that no amount of money will make the Pakistanis give up their support for the Taliban. That is, the US government can continue to pump billions of dollars every year into Pakistan and still the Pakistanis will work with the Taliban and against the US.

One report I heard said that a top ranking US official was asked about this. The question posed to the official was this. Since no amount of bribes is going to work, why not do the exact opposite — threaten to withhold all aid to Pakistan unless they fall in line? The official flatly replied, “That option is permanently off the table.”

Let’s think about why it is off the table, for a bit. I have been saying this for a long time — over 10 years. The US uses Pakistan as a simple tool for extracting wealth out of India. It is the auctioneer in the dollar auction in which India and Pakistan are willing players. (Indian and Pakistani leaders, to be more precise.)

The men (and they are overwhelmingly men, regardless of the color of their skins or their eyes) in charge of the military-industrial complex create the war machine for their own amusement and aggrandizement. They have the power to create ever more lethal, ever more expensive components of the war machine, and that power extracts ever more resources from the global economy to ratchet up the destructive power of the machine monotonically. The machine almost literally sucks up life out of the people who have no power over it but who eventually pay for it with their blood, sweat and tears. The men controlling the machine, however, get more of what motivates them — raw, naked, unimaginable power.

Every nation on earth is involved in this insanity, directly or indirectly. The desperately poor third-world nations starve their own people to buy ever more expensive weapons from the advanced industrialized countries. By keeping these nations fighting amongst themselves, the advanced industrialized countries achieve two goals. First, income.

The desperately poor third-world nations pay the advanced industrialized countries for weapons they cannot afford. If one side of a particular conflict involving two desperately poor third-world countries is unable to afford the weapons, the advanced industrialized countries give out “aid” to prop it up so that it does not lose and thereby end the conflict. The other side, to maintain balance, then has to become a paying customer and buy an equivalent set. This is a source of income for the advanced industrialized countries, and more damagingly, a transfer of wealth from the desperately poor to the amazingly prosperous. [Source: “The War and the Circus.” March 2009.]

Here’s more from a July 2009 post — The NYTimes Lays it on Thick and Heavy:

Since Sept 11, 2001, the US has paid Pakistan $12 thousand million in aid. To paraphrase the NYT editorial: “With access to billions of dollars from the US, Pakistan can use its limited domestic finances for funding terrorism directed against India.” It must take immense chutzpah to pretend that the US has nothing to do with the global terror that Pakistan funds.

I think it is entirely fitting that Clinton is the Secretary of State for the US administration. She epitomizes the double-standards and the hypocrisy that the US has perfected in matters pertaining to the Indian subcontinental conflicts. It loudly proclaims itself as a champion of democracy and simultaneously works hand in glove with Pakistani dictators whose raison d’etre appears to be the destruction of India.

The reason that the option of stopping all aid to the Terrorist State of Pakistan is that without it Pakistan will totally collapse, and that would mean that India will have a better shot at not continuing to be the world’s largest banana republic.

Why banana republic? Because leaders of banana republics are bribed by the US and other nations to do their bidding. Part of the mandate of agencies like the CIA and KGB is to bribe the leaders of banana republics. Did they do that to Indian leaders? I suspect so. In fact, I am pretty certain that one of these days, something like the Wikileaks will reveal all this. The world is becoming a dangerous place for secrets and for those whose fortunes depend on keeping people in the dark (and throwing manure at them, as if they are in the mushroom growing business.)

(A thought just struck me. If Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi give up “journalism”, perhaps they will go into mushroom growing.)

Well, a bit more from a previous post fromOct 2004, “India’s Development and the Terrorist State of Pakistan.”

India lives in a dangerous neighborhood. At the drop of a hat, the Terrorist State of Pakistan threatens “thousand-year wars” against the kuffar state of India. The dictator of the terrorist state of Pakistan, General Musharraf, threatens to vaporize major Indian cities if India were to go in hot-pursuit of the terrorists that Pakistan sends across the border.

A reader, Zenil, recently wrote that labeling Pakistan a terrorist state is a serious charge. Indeed it is, for terrorism is a serious matter. Pardon me for calling a spade a spade. Pakistan is a terrorist state. Pointing that out at every possible occassion is a duty of anyone who does not hold a brief for terrorists. It would be wonderful if by denying reality we could change it, but it ain’t so. I could proclaim how “India is Shining” till the cows come home. But that would not alter the fact that India is an abjectly poor overpopulated misgoverned third world country. And I make it a point to say it is so because I want others to realize that it is so with the hope that they will wake up and do something to change that unfortunate reality. I am as patriotic as the next guy but I am not blind.

So I suggest to Pakistanis that don’t like their motherland labeled as a terrorist state to please do something about it rather than object to someone calling Pakistan a terrorist state.

Let me be clear about one thing: it does not give me any particular pleasure that Pakistan is a terrorist state that is hell-bent on the destruction of India merely because India is largely Hindu and the Islamic god has decreed that Hindus cannot be allowed to exist in peace. Killing “non-believers” is a deep religious obligation in Islam. Nearly an infinite set of references can be given to support that but I will confine myself to just one source from the land sacred to Islam — Saudi Arabia.

It is our opinion that whoever claims the acceptability of any existing religion today — other than Islam — such as Judaism, Christianity and so forth, is a non-believer. He should be asked to repent; if he does not, he must be killed as an apostate [sic] because he is rejecting the Quran.

That is from a booklet in English circulated by the Jeddah D’awah Center in Saudi Arabia.

Let me end this one with the reason that I love the leaks from Wikileaks and the Radia-active leaks. It is time that the military-industrial complex is dismantled. It is time for the world to realize that enough is enough. We have had enough of the pretense of governments protecting people from external threats. They actually make the bombs and those weapons of mass destruction. They tax the people to fund these deadly toys. They then sell these same weapons to others — including Islamic states. Then they justify doing things in secrecy because of “national security” issues.

They are playing war games. The winners are those in power, which include the political leaders and weapons manufacturers. The people are like sheep. They are being led to the slaughter and they meekly go along with this. They are the losers. And the whole absurd theater is made all the more unbelievable because the people are brainwashed to believe that it is for their benefit that they are getting the shaft.

Those leaks will reveal how absurd the whole shebang is.

Author: Atanu Dey

Economist. View all posts by Atanu Dey