Why the West provides cover to Pakistani terrorism

medium121157022The West’s “dirty secret” spilled out during an interview on Britain’s Sky News TV channel with Pakistan’s defence minister Khawaja Asif.Asif blurted out to anchor Yalda Hakim that Pakistan has been doing the West’s dirty work of sheltering and arming terrorists for over three decades.That is the global intelligence community’s best-known secret: Pakistan has been a Western asset in South-Central Asia since the Cold War between the United States-led Western alliance and the Soviet Union began in 1950. While India leant towards the Soviet Union, Islamabad sold itself lock, stock and barrel to the West.It earned the West’s everlasting gratitude in 1972 for being a conduit to facilitate US President Richard Nixon’s pathbreaking visit to China. But it was in 1979 that Pakistan proved its real worth to Washington. During the 1979-89 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan recruited Mujahideen fighters from across West Asia.In 1989, the Soviet Union cut its decade-long losses and withdrew from Afghanistan.In the 1990s, Washington lost interest in South Asia and turned its attention to Eastern Europe. It was absorbed with the restive Balkans after the collapse of the Soviet Union.Islamabad took advantage of America’s distraction by pouring Mujahideen, newly free from their battle against the Soviets, into Kashmir. Terrorism took deep root in Jammu and Kashmir. The forced exile of Kashmiri Pandits was the beginning of Pakistan’s strategy to turn J&K into a festering sore for India.Pakistan has not forgiven India for cutting it into half after the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. It took nearly two decades for the generals in Islamabad to put in place in the 1990s a concerted policy of bleeding India by a thousand cuts. medium nocaptionhttps://ip.tgsession.com/3sw658_7hzteqpqoj/1kaPKKMSOtBWLx?2qxpm=ErgFDMXkmiZsKieDPakistan%E2%80%99s current Army chief, General Asif Munir, is cut from the same jihadi cloth as General Zia-ul-Haq, who died in a mysterious air crash in August 1988. Gen Munir has been described as a “terrorist in uniform” and is widely disliked by his corps commanders. He is seen as the most doctrinaire Islamist Pakistan Army chief since Zia.Why does the US-led West turn a blind eye to the open support Pakistan provides terrorist groups Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and its offshoot The Resistance Front (TRF)? Does this amount to condoning terrorism? In international law, it could be considered complicity.Washington arms the Pakistan Army and Air Force knowing fully well that those weapons will be used against India by the terrorists Pakistan sponsors.Historically, the US has been a predatory power. It is a colonial-settler country. Europeans, mainly British, settled the North American continent starting from the 1600s. By the 1700s, Native Americans who had lived on their land for millennia were killed or driven into impoverished “Reservations”.The brutal transatlantic trade came next. In the 1700s, millions of Africans were captured from Sierra Leone, Ghana and the Ivory Coast by British ships and taken forcibly to the new colonies in North America. They were sold to bidders in auctions to work as slave labour in American cotton plantations.After independence in 1776, the US waged war on Mexico, swallowed half of its territory, and by the late 1800s saw itself as a putative imperial power which would one day replace the British Empire.That day arrived in 1914. With Europe convulsed by the First World War, the US became the world’s most powerful country.To retain its overwhelming global supremacy after 1945 at the end of the Second World War, the US was obsessed with countering the only rival it had left: the Soviet Union.Washington’s primary aim was to break the unity between the two communist giants — China and the Soviet Union. Both had fought on the side of the Western allies in the Second World War. But despite Soviet-China border disputes, Washington saw the relationship as a future geopolitical threat. medium nocaptionhttps://ip.tgsession.com/2qx71_2qxnf/utu.be/7Ihq-A6m_sg?si=fXxxSPXWEzYLt4k_That is when Washington looked at Pakistan with new eyes: here was a corrupt military dictatorship that would do the West’s bidding for cash or kind.Pakistan slipped effortlessly into the role of a gun-on-hire. Apart from opening the door for the US in China and fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Pakistan became a key geography for intelligence gathering in the volatile South-Central Asian region.Ties between Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), welded in the 1970s, have remained unbreakable.For Washington, Pakistan is a necessary evil. The US doesn’t like Pakistan’s corrupt military dictators or the terrorists it supports. Many have killed US citizens like Daniel Pearl in Karachi in February 2002 and six Americans in the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai in November 2008.Despite this, Washington helped Islamabad breed rattlesnakes (as Hillary Clinton called them) in Pakistan’s backyard. Today those rattlesnakes kill many more Pakistanis in terror attacks in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa than Indians or Americans.US President Donald Trump’s administration is transactional. It shrugs away Islamabad’s terror links as part of America’s historical baggage. Western media mimics the Western establishment in Washington, London, Berlin and Paris. Their message to India in public is supportive and the tone palliative. In private the West continues to arm and fund Pakistan.As India becomes the world’s fourth-largest economy this year, the West will not be displeased that Pakistan may slow India’s rise.Columbia University professor of economics Jeffrey Sachs was right when he said recently that the US liked China till it became too big. The same, he warned, will apply to India. It probably already does.Lead illustration: Sandeep AdhwaryuRead more from the author here.