Maybe it’s a good thing that the world is spinning so fast. It could hasten the change that our battered mother earth needs to heal, in body and in soul. As international power-play heats up, the sooner Pakistan decides where it stands the better it would be for all of us. Clearly, standing on the sidelines is not an option when you’re bang in the middle of it all.
While staying neutral sounds great, it is essentially another name for staying passive in this time of international upheaval being thrust upon us. It boils down to making half-hearted clichéd resolves to mediate between brother Muslim countries while doing precious nothing; picture the continuing destruction of Yemen. So, should we be silent observers as the Third World War unfolds all around us?
I’m not suggesting that we send our troops to fight in another country. In fact, even those serving in useless UN peacekeeping missions should be brought home to augment the successful military operation against terrorists. All indications are that the real war on terrorism, not the farce with a similar name enacted by the US mind you, is about to get tougher in the international arena and at home. Patrons of terrorists have laid out their intentions on the table and they don’t look good.
Don’t tell me, in this day and age, you need me to tell you who the patrons of global terrorism are and what they intend to do. Don’t you see what they have done in recent years in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, Yemen and Syria? Can’t you see them claiming to fight terrorism while continuing their policy of funding, training and arming terrorists and playing them as pieces of chess to foment chaos and violence where they wish to?
The members of the US-led cabal, complete with allies, vassals and mini-me puppets like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, gather coalitions in the name of fighting terrorism and pretend to engage in dialogues for negotiated settlements, all the while employing terrorists as tools of perpetual war for crushing resistance to their designs for world domination. Caught with their terrorism-laden pants down in Syria and desperate to save their proxies, the US-led gang would now like to deflect the attention from their terrorist-crimes by shooting down planes and fuelling sectarian identities within the Muslim world.
Surely, what we are dealing with is much bigger than a sectarian spat triggered by the hanging of a cleric and the burning of an embassy.
It’s not even about the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran and balancing our relations with two brother Muslim countries. What we are witnessing is a full-blown global war for the future of our planet and staying neutral doesn’t make sense when one side is hell-bent on destroying it completely.
The last masks are now flying off the face of those defending the continuation of the world order as we know it, a cleverly crafted facade for aggressive imperial exploitation under the law of the jungle. This rotten order has lately come to stand upon the arrogance of US exceptionalism and the lawlessness of its unilateralism. It is an order sustained by military interventions without a UN mandate on one hand and a dollar-based international economy on the other, by donor-driven NGOs on one hand and proxy terrorists on the other. Of course, not everyone is happy with this arrangement.
The biggest challenge for the US-led cabal and the rotten order it lords over has come in the shape of the China-Russia nexus and the change it portends for how our world is run. At the last UN General Assembly session, President Xi and President Putin both took an exception to the US claims about being an exceptional nation and its self-proclaimed right to militarily intervene in other countries without a mandate by the UN Security Council.
Clearly, diplomacy is only one aspect of the multi-faceted cooperation between China and Russia that is growing deeper at a tremendous pace. Together, they are building a parallel international finance architecture that bypasses the dollar. Their security doctrines are converging and as they coordinate efforts to genuinely tackle terrorism, the symbiotic relationship between global terrorism and the US-led gang is being laid bare.
The tentacles of the terrorist monster bred by the US cabal go way beyond Syria; from the Middle East to Africa, from countries in Central Asia to regions within the Republic of China and the Russian Federation. We should know a thing or two about these terrorist tentacles, engaged as we are under the current military leadership in cutting them off from the roots. We should know also because we bred them in collaboration with the US and Saudi Arabia in the 1980s.
The course correction in our strategic alignment has been brought about by the current military leadership that has distanced itself from the US-led cabal and is strengthening security and intelligence cooperation with the China-Russia nexus to effectively fight the proxy monster of terrorism. Obviously, it makes sense to cooperate with other targets of terrorism rather than its patrons.
The Saudi antics, whether it is the announcement of the doomed 34-member coalition or playing up the sectarian narrative, are designed to cover up its role as a prime patron of terrorism by drowning important developments on the world stage in a whirlpool of deception and distractions. Don’t tell me that, in this day and age, you would like me to tell you why our government announced that Pakistan was very much a part of the 34-member coalition though it was formed without consulting it.
So, whether we like it or not, we’re in the middle of it all; what with the Saudis and the US trying to drag us back to their chaotic laps on one hand and Iran right next door to us, a country that is clearly a part of the China-Russia resistance to the imperial world order. Staying neutral doesn’t make sense. In any case, withdrawing from the hoax of the Saudi-led coalition of 34 countries is the least our government could do to bring any credibility to its claims of neutrality.