Terrorists targeted Quetta a day before President Putin and President Erdogan met in St Petersburg this Tuesday, sealing the fate of US designs on Syria. Don’t let media obfuscation mislead you about the global significance of their historical handshake and how it is connected to the charged-up US-led war against Afghanistan and its neighbors. Hit hard by the prospects of Turkey slipping out of his dirty hands, Uncle Sam is zooming in his demonic gaze on Pakistan with a sharper focus.
Even our clueless Prime Minister has been shaken out of his royal slumber to declare that our country is in a state of war, though he is too lost in the hollowness of his meek rhetoric to spell out clearly who we are at war with. The military leadership is clearer about what’s going on and its bold actions speak louder than any fancy words. The army chief was in China last week to launch the Quadrilateral Counter-Terrorism Cooperation Mechanism with his counterparts from China, Tajikistan and Afghanistan.
It was reported that the participants agreed to establish the QCCM to coordinate and provide mutual support for all aspects of counter-terrorism including intelligence sharing, capacity building, joint training exercises and personnel training. Given the recent terrorist incursions in Chitral bordering the Nuristan and Badakhshan provinces of Afghanistan wedged between Pakistan and Tajikistan, the QCCM makes even more sense.
Actually, it’s really not a long shot to imagine that soon this counter-terrorism alliance will be joined by Afghanistan’s other immediate neighbours; Iran, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. In fact, it would be quite natural for it to be eventually expanded to include the nearby Russia-Kazakhstan-Kyrgyzstan counter terrorism nexus as well. There are many overlapping synergies nudging things along this direction and Pakistan would do well to actively pursue this course.
After all, such regional cooperation is necessary to bring an end to the US-occupation of Afghanistan, which is a pre-requisite for stabilising the region. It is no longer a secret that besides running its trillion-dollar drug-trade racket through sponsored warlords, the US uses its foothold in the occupied country to spawn terrorist proxies and host militant mercenaries from the region and beyond. They are herded under sponsored brand-names and played like pieces on a chessboard to destabilise countries in the region.
Haven’t we seen that in Syria and in Libya and Iraq before that? Haven’t we seen similar armed agents of chaos at work in Ukraine under neo-Nazi banners? Don’t we know a thing or two about Boko Haram in Nigeria and Al-Shabaab in Somalia? Can we ignore the linkages and spill-overs? How members of a rotating cadre of terrorist proxies are herded across borders to become part of ever-changing brand names, like hounds following the scent of dollars and weapons? How they are trained and armed?
Let’s not mistake it for a minute: the Third World War is not a possibility. It is underway as we speak. From the South China Sea to MENA to South America, Uncle Sam is on a rampage, using every hybrid weapon of war from its bottomless dirty bag. Whether the world-wide war escalates to nuclear proportions, and be the end of most of us, will depend on many things, but one thing is clear: the war to end the blood-drenched tyranny of the US-led imperium is raging all over the globe.
There has been no direct confrontation between the giants on both sides so far. But given the US-belligerence on one hand and the resolve of both China and Russia not to back down on the other, independent observers don’t rule out the possibility. Let’s not mistake it: The US and the cabal it leads are the aggressors, using every dirty trick in the book to undermine and subvert the states of Russia and China and all those wishing to integrate into their orbit of win-win multi-polarity. The CPEC is a potent threat to their barbaric hegemony.
The US-led unipolar cabal thinks that it could bring down the core of multipolar power without a direct military confrontation, though the fronts are being readied in Ukraine and Eastern Europe to directly attack Russia and in the South China Sea to target China. But the tables are turning, and turning fast.
Turkey is rapidly warming up to the China-Russia multipolar vision. Iran is already an important member of the emergent bloc. The Central Asian states are realising the centrality of China and Russia in their partnership for security and trade and the shady role that the US is playing in the region. Pakistan is cutting the last strings of its toxic relationship with the US.
Pakistan’s role in the region is crucial. It is the zipper state as geopolitical analyst Andrew Korybko calls it, a country that could finally tip the balance in the favour of the emergent bloc by zipping together the regions of Central and West Asia and the Middle East with China and its closest multipolar partner Russia. The inclusion of Pakistan would create a feasible geographical expanse for the vision of a multipolar win-win order to become operational as a working model for the rest of the world to follow, a model of peaceful mutually beneficial cooperation, trade and co-existence.
The countries in the region must join hands for security against a menacing dying empire and create an empire-free space for win-win trade, a geographically contiguous territory that is consciously guarded against imperialist actions and policies that have brought ruin to humankind; turning beautiful cities to death-filled rubble, killing children and other innocents, throwing peaceful societies in the well of blood-soaked chaos and wrecking them with engineered violence of every hue.
If we come together as friends, we won’t really need anyone else to turn the world around. Countries would stand in queue to join the multipolar bloc and link up with this geographical empire-free expanse where gold doesn’t turn to dust, where babies get their fair chance to live and bloom and where diverse societies learn to coexist and develop in harmony instead of getting bombed back to the stone-age for being different.
