GREETINGS,
EVERYWHERE WE TURN ,WE CAN SEE THE POWER AND INFLUENCE OF AMERICA BEING BROKEN. WHETHER WE LOOK ABROAD OR WITHIN HER OWN BORDERS, AMERICA IS INDEED FALLING. EVEN HER ALLIES ARE STARTING TO ABANDON THE SELF ABSORBED IMPERIAL RACIST EXTREMIST ONCE SUPER POWER.
” America is falling. She is now losing the power and authority that she was enjoying in foreign lands. Her fall is very visible. Wherever her authority has been exercised the people are now crying out in one voice, “Leave us, leave us; American’s go home to America.” The citizens of other countries are telling the American citizens, “Leave us.” America no longer has friends. “–pg.171(TFOA)
Just when it seemed Pakistan’s always volatile relations with the United States couldn’t get any worse, Islamabad further annoyed Washington by sentencing the Pakistani physician who had aided the CIA in pinpointing the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden to a 33-year prison term.
Even before the Pakistani court in the northwestern Khyber Tribal Agency delivered its harsh verdict, U.S. patience with its major non-NATO ally seemed to be running out.
The U.S. has been waiting six months for Pakistan to reopen the strategic supply corridor between the port of Karachi and the Afghan border in the historic Khyber Pass, over which flows some 40 percent of the coalition’s supplies for its troops in Afghanistan.
Although privately furious about Pakistan’s foot dragging on reopening the supply route and reluctant to reward Islamabad in the midst of the controversy, the U.S. and its NATO allies had hoped that extending an invitation to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari to last weekend’s NATO summit in Chicago would encourage Pakistan to allow the cargo trucks and fuel tankers to begin running again.
Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, had hinted just days before the summit that Pakistan was ready to let bygones be bygones. “Pakistan has made its point and now we can move on,” she said, referring to the supply route, shut down in protest over the deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers in November in a U.S. air attack on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
But Zardari’s trip to Chicago did nothing to break the logjam. With the supply route still closed upon Zardari’s arrival, the White House decided to treat him with less than full honors. Afghan President Hamid Karzai had a lengthy private meeting with Obama, but Zardari was not given the same one-on-one treatment.
Obama spoke with Zardari twice, both times briefly: once while walking into the conference and again during what was largely a meeting between Obama and Karzai. Clearly the Pakistanis felt the sting. The Pakistani press even talked of his “humiliation” in Washington.
Although it sounds like a stretch, Pakistani journalists and some Western diplomats in Islamabad tried to link the apparent slight Zardari suffered in Chicago with the sudden and harsh jail sentence Wednesday for Pakistani doctor Shakil Afridi. Nonetheless, with the sentencing Pakistan is sending out a clear message to Washington and to Pakistanis that it would not tolerate the recruitment of its citizens by the CIA.
The CIA presence in Pakistan has been a major political issue for more than a year, ever since Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor, shot and killed two Pakistanis on at a traffic light in Lahore in January 2011.
Spy fever was fueled further in last May’s commando raid by U.S. Navy SEALs that killed bin Laden inside his three-story house in Abbottabad, the military’s garrison town and tourist destination, less than 100 miles from Islamabad. The unilateral U.S. raid, which Pakistan knew nothing about until it was over, deeply embarrassed the Pakistani government and military and further angered the already anti-American public.
Then came the U.S. air attack last November on two Pakistani military positions along the border. The strike, which the U.S. said was the result of errors made by both sides, brought relations nearly to the breaking point and led to the immediate closure of the supply corridor. In retaliation, the U.S. decided to freeze hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and reimbursements to the Pakistani military for its role in the fight against al Qaeda and Taliban militants along the border.
Angered over all three incidents and the aid freeze, the Pakistani military and the Zardari government decided to “reset” the relationship with the U.S., which they said ignored Pakistani sovereignty.
Pakistan’s clear message to the U.S.: don’t violate our sovereignty. Its message to its own citizens: don’t even think about cooperating with the CIA. To ensure that Afridi would be found guilty and sentenced harshly, Islamabad arranged to have him tried in a government court presided over by a tribal political agent in consultation with a council of elders under the 19th-century Frontier Crimes Regulations that were drawn up by the British colonial power at the time.
Under the FCR, the court is not subject to the Pakistani constitution, and its sentences are usually harsher than those handed down by the mainstream Pakistani court system. Nor can the sentences of tribal courts be appealed in normal Pakistani courts. Once sentenced, Afridi was transferred immediately out of the Khyber tribal agency and thrown into the Central Prison in Peshawar.
Given the burst of publicity surrounding the case and Afridi’s sentencing by a tribal court, he is unlikely to be freed anytime soon. “Pakistan now will never release Dr. Shakil,” says a senior Pakistani security official in Peshawar.
Whatever happens to Shakil, Pakistan’s relations with the U.S. will remain rocky, and there is no sign they will improve in the near future.
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