The US and its Deadly Faustian Bargain — Part 2

This is a follow up to an Oct 2010 post, “The US and its Deadly Faustian Bargain” which needs revisiting because of new information. I urge you to read that post to get a sense of the insanity that is going around. What the new information does is just add more evidence to confirm my hypothesis that the US is the auctioneer in the dollar auction formulation of the conflict between India and Pakistan.

It is hard to make sense of what’s going on — unless you take the point of view that the US administration’s goal is to sell weapons to both sides of any conflict. See this article in The Hindu of 19th May, 2011. “After Mumbai attacks, U.S. initiated steps to help Pakistan military address ‘conventional disadvantage’ against India“:

Less than a year after the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the United States Mission in Islamabad urged Washington to commit $2 billion over a five-year period beginning April 2011 to enable the Pakistan military to address, among other security needs, its “growing conventional disadvantage vis-à-vis India,” in order to secure its cooperation in the “war on terror.”

The U.S. Government accepted the recommendation. A report in the Washington Post on October 22, 2010 said: “The [US] administration will ask Congress to expand military aid to Pakistan, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday, announcing a five-year, $2 billion package that would increase current financing for weapons purchases by about one-third.”

. . .

The cable said the two initiatives would provide a powerful signal to the Pakistan military of the U.S. commitment to a true, long-term strategic partnership with Pakistan.

. . .
The Mission said the first two years of PCCF required the execution of $1.1 billion over 14 months, and the need for future PCCF was $1.2 billion for FY2011, and $900 million for both FY2012 and FY2013 — a total of $2 billion over that three-year period.

. . .

In addition to the proposed military aid, Washington is committed to provide $1.5 billion a year (beginning with 2010) for a period of five years.

A cable dated December 2, 2009 (237503: unclassified) from the State Department on the Af-Pak strategy of the [US] administration said:

“We are now focused on working with Pakistan’s democratic institutions, deepening the ties among our governments and people for our common interests and concerns. We are committed to a strategic relationship with Pakistan for the long term.

“We have affirmed this commitment to Pakistan by providing $1.5 billion each year over the next five years to support Pakistan’s development and democracy, and have led a global effort to rally additional pledges of support.”

Let’s remember that Pakistan’s long-term strategic goal is the destruction of India. So why does the US insist that that goal is shared by it and therefore it has to continue to have that relationship with Pakistan despite the fact that the Pakistanis hates the US more than any other people on earth?

This is bloody shameful. I am convinced that the US administrations (and not just the current one) are really the enemies of humanity in general, and in particular its interests are opposed to those who wish to live and let live. The interests of the US are aligned with that of Pakistan — as revealed by their continued support of that terrorist nation. What else can explain why the US is continually pumping money and weapons into Pakistan?

The US wants India to be a client state. The US therefore supports Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi and her bunch of unmentionables. She is suspected of being a foreign agent by many, but it may be hard to prove in a court of law. What most people suspect is that she has billions stolen from India in her foreign bank accounts. Unleashing her running dogs on peaceful demonstrators demanding an end to corruption led by Baba Ramdev points to the fact that she is indeed guilty of massive corruption. Does the Indian government beat up on Hasan Ali and other criminals who have stolen by the billions? No. But Baba Ramdev is fair game for them.

The US would be happy to see Antonia Maino continue to rob India of billions. Conversely, the one thing that the US government will not like to see is someone like Narendra Modi come to power. Modi is incorruptible. The US can only do business with the corrupt and the criminally compromised. The same goes with Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi. She works with the corrupt and the criminally compromised because then she had a hold on them.

The US likes to deal with corrupt dictators and with authoritarian regimes: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, etc. Though it speaks loudly about democracy, the last thing it wants is democracy in poor Third World nations.

I am disgusted with the whole affair. I cannot express my disgust in the unholy nexus between the US and Pakistan. For that, I will have to just quote Christopher Hitchens’ piece in Vanity Fair. Hitchens is awesomeness personified when it comes to polemics. “From Abbottabad to Worse:

Hating the United States—which funds Islamabad’s army and nuclear program to the humiliating tune of $3 billion a year—Pakistan takes its twisted, cowardly revenge by harboring the likes of the late Osama bin Laden. But the hypocrisy is mutual, and the shame should be shared.” —

Let me try to summarize and update the situation like this: Here is a society [Pakistani] where rape is not a crime. It is a punishment. Women can be sentenced to be raped, by tribal and religious kangaroo courts, if even a rumor of their immodesty brings shame on their menfolk. In such an obscenely distorted context, the counterpart term to shame—which is the noble word “honor”—becomes most commonly associated with the word “killing.” Moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.

If the most elemental of human instincts becomes warped in this bizarre manner, other morbid symptoms will disclose themselves as well. Thus, President Asif Ali Zardari cringes daily in front of the forces who openly murdered his wife, Benazir Bhutto, and who then contemptuously ordered the crime scene cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation. A man so lacking in pride—indeed lacking in manliness—will seek desperately to compensate in other ways. Swelling his puny chest even more, he promises to resist the mighty United States, and to defend Pakistan’s holy “sovereignty.” This puffery and posing might perhaps possess a rag of credibility if he and his fellow middlemen were not avidly ingesting $3 billion worth of American subsidies every year.

There’s absolutely no mystery to the “Why do they hate us?” question, at least as it arises in Pakistan. They hate us because they owe us, and are dependent upon us. The two main symbols of Pakistan’s pride—its army and its nuclear program—are wholly parasitic on American indulgence and patronage. But, as I wrote for Vanity Fair in late 2001, in a long report from this degraded country, that army and those nukes are intended to be reserved for war against the neighboring democracy of India. Our bought-and-paid-for pretense that they have any other true purpose has led to a rancid, resentful official hypocrisy, and to a state policy of revenge, large and petty, on the big, rich, dumb Americans who foot the bill. [Highlight added.]

Don’t believe me that the US administration is evil? Read on, and remember that Christopher Hitchens is a proud naturalized American citizen. He loves the US. His ire is not directed at the US but rather to its government. The same goes for me — both in the case of the US and India.

If the Pakistani authorities had admitted what they were doing, and claimed the right to offer safe haven to al-Qaeda and the Taliban on their own soil, then the boast of “sovereignty” might at least have had some grotesque validity to it. But they were too cowardly and duplicitous for that. And they also wanted to be paid, lavishly and regularly, for pretending to fight against those very forces. Has any state ever been, in the strict sense of the term, more shameless? Over the years, I have written many pages about the sick relationship between the United States and various Third World client regimes, many of which turned out to be false friends as well as highly discreditable ones. General Pinochet, of Chile, had the unbelievable nerve to explode a car bomb in rush-hour traffic in Washington, D.C., in 1976, murdering a political rival and his American colleague. The South Vietnamese military junta made a private deal to sabotage the Paris peace talks in 1968, in order to benefit the electoral chances of Richard Nixon. Dirty money from the Shah of Iran and the Greek dictatorship made its way at different times into our electoral process. Israeli religious extremists demand American protection and then denounce us for “interference” if we demur politely about colonization of the West Bank. But our blatant manipulation by Pakistan is the most diseased and rotten thing in which the United States has ever involved itself. And it is also, in the grossest way, a violation of our sovereignty. Pakistan routinely—by the dispatch of barely deniable death squads across its borders, to such locations as the Taj Hotel in Mumbai—injures the sovereignty of India as well as Afghanistan. But you might call that a traditional form of violation. In our case, Pakistan ingratiatingly and silkily invites young Americans to one of the vilest and most dangerous regions on earth, there to fight and die as its allies, all the while sharpening a blade for their backs.

Hitchens is incomparable both in style and substance.

This is well beyond humiliation. It makes us a prisoner of the shame, and co-responsible for it. The United States was shamed when it became the Cold War armorer of the Ayub Khan dictatorship in the 1950s and 1960s. It was shamed even more when it supported General Yahya Khan’s mass murder in Bangladesh in 1971: a Muslim-on-Muslim genocide that crashingly demonstrated the utter failure of a state based on a single religion. We were then played for suckers by yet another military boss in the form of General Zia-ul-Haq, who leveraged anti-Communism in Afghanistan into a free pass for the acquisition of nuclear weapons and the open mockery of the nonproliferation treaty. By the start of the millennium, Pakistan had become home to a Walmart of fissile material, traded as far away as Libya and North Korea by the state-subsidized nuclear entrepreneur A. Q. Khan, the country’s nearest approach (which in itself tells you something) to a national hero. Among the scientists working on the project were three named sympathizers of the Taliban. And that gigantic betrayal, too, was uncovered only by chance.

Again to quote myself from 2001, if Pakistan were a person, he (and it would have to be a he) would have to be completely humorless, paranoid, insecure, eager to take offense, and suffering from self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. That last triptych of vices is intimately connected. The self-righteousness comes from the claim to represent a religion: the very name “Pakistan” is an acronym of Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and so forth, the resulting word in the Urdu language meaning “Land of the Pure.” The self-pity derives from the sad fact that the country has almost nothing else to be proud of: virtually barren of achievements and historically based on the amputation and mutilation of India in 1947 and its own self-mutilation in Bangladesh. The self-hatred is the consequence of being pathetically, permanently mendicant: an abject begging-bowl country that is nonetheless run by a super-rich and hyper-corrupt Punjabi elite. As for paranoia: This not so hypothetical Pakistani would also be a hardened anti-Semite, moaning with pleasure at the butchery of Daniel Pearl and addicted to blaming his self-inflicted woes on the all-powerful Jews.

And here’s the final point that Hitchens makes and which adds substance to my allegations against the US administrations:

If we ever ceased to swallow our pride, so I am incessantly told in Washington, then the Pakistani oligarchy might behave even more abysmally than it already does, and the situation deteriorate even further. This stale and superficial argument ignores the awful historical fact that, each time the Pakistani leadership did get worse, or behave worse, it was handsomely rewarded by the United States. We have been the enablers of every stage of that wretched state’s counter-evolution, to the point where it is a serious regional menace and an undisguised ally of our worst enemy, as well as the sworn enemy of some of our best allies. How could it be “worse” if we shifted our alliance and instead embraced India, our only rival in scale as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy, and a nation that contains nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan? How could it be “worse” if we listened to the brave Afghans, like their former intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, who have been telling us for years that we are fighting the war in the wrong country?

I think Hitchens needs to look at the situation from the point of view that the US administrations’ and Pakistan’s interests are aligned when it comes to India. And I think that Indians need to understand that the UPA government’s interests and Pakistan’s interests are aligned — the destruction of India.

NOTES:

I have been writing about the US’s military support of Pakistan for years. By now I have about 20 posts on the matter. Here’s a bit from a post from way back in 2004, “The True Weapons of Mass Destruction” —

A report by Josey Joseph in the Oct 14th Times of India warmed the cockles of my heart. The story is about the supply of military equipment from the US to Pakistan.

… On the pipeline are more than $1.5 billion worth of military supplies over five years. Plus, numerous futuristic deals.

The arms supply is now in full flow and icing on the cake is the F-16 fighters that Pakistan Air Force has been dreaming of for long. The Navy can look forward to a new generation of torpedoes to maritime aircraft.

But the biggest gainer would be the Army: a generational upgrade in almost its entire armoury including top of the line attack helicopters, radars.

Richard Armitage in a recent interview to a Pakistani TV channel said there are “more helicopters in the queue. We have gotten now a steady stream of dependable funding to help the Pakistani armed forces… We realise they need the proper equipment, so we have embarked on a five-year programme of support.”

Armitage was referring to the $1.5 billion military aid that Pakistan is receiving over the next five years.

While Americans justify them in the name of terrorism, the supply is adding teeth to Pakistan’s offensive capabilities that are almost completely focused on India.

Why is the US so hell-bent on supporting the terrorist nation of Pakistan? What is in it for the US? After all, Pakistan is also broke. Why, one could ask in puzzlement, would anyone want to sell military hardware to Pakistan? My answer is this: so that India would be forced to buy weapons from the US to keep up with the terrorist nation of Pakistan.

The story goes like this. The US gives away $1.5 billion worth of weapons to Pakistan. In effect, the US is paying its own producers of weapons, who in turn support the US policy makers by locating their factories of weapons of mass destruction in the policy makers’ constituency. Read more jobs for the merchants of death. Then India’s defense establishment looks over the border and says we now need $2.5 billion worth of stuff from the US. More jobs for the merchants of death. Total benefit to the merchants of death: $4.0 billion. Total cost to the impoverished populations of Pakistan and India: $4 billion.

Author: Atanu Dey

Economist. View all posts by Atanu Dey