Muhammad Ali Jinnah once said, ‘’weakness attracts aggression’’. The reality of the saying is more relevant today than past where the principles of morality just seem to have faded away in the realm of international politics.
It all began in 1991 with the collapse of Soviet Union the power to determine the destiny of the world was put into the lap of one nation, America, leading to starting of an era of unprecedented oppression.
On September 11, 2001, we woke up to find that twin towers in New York had been blown away by some faceless people, alleged to be hiding in mountains of Afghanistan. Although never proved how the American security services found the information but the blame was squarely put on Al-Qaida and Taliban. It was much later when American actual designs hidden behind aggression in Afghanistan came to fore.
It is no secret today what brought the US in Afghanistan. Besides its own massive mineral wealth, Afghanistan is the gateway to resource-rich Central Asia and in close proximity of oil rich Caspian Sea. The main interest of Corporate America was without any doubt to gain access to this resource rich region and carve out a regional corridor to take these back to their mainland. Other interests which are now no more secret are considered to be containment of a new rising China and to obstruct resurgent Russia. Afghanistan’s proximity is ideal for both objectives.
To gain these for over ten years, poor people of Afghanistan have been subjected to the worst atrocities. Over a hundred thousand innocent people in Afghanistan have been killed or maimed by US actions and millions exiled for a crime no one is sure about
Pakistan too was ruthlessly dragged into the Afghan conflict and we paid a heavy price for fraternizing with the devil. Besides costing us the lives of forty thousand of our countrymen it has also caused a colossal material loss of $86 billion to us.
Having consolidated their position in Afghanistan on March 19, 2003, America invaded Iraq on the excuse that it possesses weapons of mass destruction. Today the whole world knows these weapons never existed. The bloodshed that began eight years ago has taken almost half a million Iraqi lives, orphaned 4.5 million, made 1.3 million Iraqis refugees and 1.3 million more have been internally displaced. Their crime might only be that they possess world’s third largest oil reserves.
Eight years late it was Libya’s turn. A year ago, reports began to appear on BBC and CNN portraying the Libyan chief Muammar Kaddafi as a madman, after the lives of his people. On the pretext of human rights abuses NATO, backed by the USA started arming rebels and bombing Libya. The real reasons, of course, were not only the enormous oil reserves present in Libya but also the newly built man-made river project which would have effectively turned Sahara desert into arable farmland; one which the Americans and their cronies had long envied.
What’s interesting is that if the NATO bombing was about protecting civilians than how come thirty thousand Libyans were killed in the first few months of the bombing alone and why the civil infrastructure of the country which had nothing to do with the conflict was targeted. It is widely believed that the main purpose of targeting infrastructure was to gain lucrative reconstruction contracts for NATO countries which may provide an instant boost to their recession-hit economies.
What these countries are paying is a price of weakness. Could all of us resist US and cronies, they would have never asked for it. A terrible price but to be weak is surely a heinous crime and a lesson for all.
