Pakistan needs to do more

American President Donald Trump continues to foster an agenda of extreme perplexity, triviality and confusion in dealing with urgent global affairs, more particularly in south Asia. Trump wants to make world accept his country’s hegemony without any price or protest. The United States’ move to put forward a motion to place Pakistan on a global terrorist-financing watch-list with an anti-money laundering monitoring group is a stark manifestation of Trump’s desperation for supremacy. Though Pakistan was on this watch-list earlier also (2012-2015), however the latest move by America is to put pressure on Pakistan to toe America’s line on Afghanistan. America blackmailed Pakistan in 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11 attacks and got it on its side in the so called war on terror. George Bush, then American President threatened General Musharaf to bomb Pakistan into ‘stone age’ if he did not follow the American line. Now Trump is using the same blackmailing tactics to pressurize Pakistan for yet another submission. America is fighting a lost war to establish its writ on Afghanistan. Taliban, America’s arch enemy has regained its control on vast swathes of Afghanistan despite America, along with several NATO countries, being directly involved in war for more than 15 years. Over the past some time, American forces and local army have come under intensified attacks, causing them massive casualties. Taliban is currently controlling over 60 percent of the Afghan land. America has faced similar defeats in Middle-east, more particularly in Syria as well. The defeat in Afghanistan has swelled its humiliation in Washington’s face. America’s move against Pakistan has much to do with its crush by Taliban in Afghanistan. To save itself from further humiliation, America is trying to pressurize Islamabad to fights its war with Taliban. America is using Pakistan’s problems with Afghanistan and India to multiple the pressures on Islamabad. Otherwise history bears the witness that the US has long been backing terrorist groups across the world, more particularly in Muslim countries to unstable government’s there. America has used Pakistan soil and its people in an open war with Russia (then USSR) to restrict its influence in south Asia after the Russians invaded Afghanistan in late 70’s. Al-Qaeda and Taliban, which are being termed as the main international terror outfits, are the creation of that very time. America saw the world then in simple terms—the third world nationalism and Soviet Union on one side and the western nations on the other side. In that cold war era America considered Muslim world as a strong ally. Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Indonesia and Malaysia were considered as trusted American partners. It is that very era that America cultivated militant Islam to counter its adversaries in the world at large. Osama Bin Laden and his organization Al Qaedah owed their birth to America. Former British foreign secretary Robin Cook was candid enough to tell House of Commons that Al Qaeda was unquestionably a product of Western intelligence agencies. Even as American foreign policy makers claim to oppose Muslim extremism, they knowingly foment it as a weapon of foreign policy. The Islamic State is its latest weapon. Much like Al Qaeda, the Islamic State (ISIS) is made-in-the-USA, an instrument of terror designed to divide and conquer the oil-rich Middle East and to counter Iran’s growing influence in the region. ISIS is not merely an instrument of terror used by America to topple the Syrian government; it is also used to put pressure on Iran. Unlike past, Pakistan appears little disturbed by American threats. Pakistan army chief General Javed Qamar Bajwa has emphatically told the Americans that his country has done enough to eliminate terrorism, it was now the turn of the world to do more. That could be well understood by a report by a leading British security think-tank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) which said that Pakistan army under the “Bajwa doctrine” is biting back hard against threats issued by the American administration. It said that Pakistan army is now “battle-hardened after 17 years of war on its western frontier and regular skirmishes on its eastern border” and the world, in the shape of China, Russia, Turkey and Iran, have all come to Pakistan’s defence as America loses influence in Islamabad. Pakistan is now adamant that the time for American threats and directives is over. But, at the same time, Pakistan needs more peace at the internal level. Terrorism is a serious threat to the stability of Pakistan. The country needs to keep on its war rather intensify it against the terrorists on its soil. It is good to note that Pakistan has taken several measures to weed out terrorism from its soil but it needs to do more, if not in Afghanistan, but within the country itself to weed out the every kind of internal threat.