No one knows his real name. Or his place of birth and background. Or even the date, he was enrolled on in our mental institution. His co-inmates call him “Wi-Fi”, i.e. the wisest of fools. He falls under the category of ‘politically incorrect’, in the official documents - meaning the guy got cracked under the socio-political pressure of the land. I’d run into this particular Wi-Fi every now and then at work. His only obsession is foreign affairs. He’d read English papers and watch foreign news channels to keep himself abreast, even in his insanity. Keeping aloof most of the time, all you would hear from his mouth are his ravings-cum-monologues. That is when something of his interest happens. And there is always something, which fires his wacky imagination. Here he goes: “Shame on you, Uncle Sam! You say one thing and do the other. You do one thing and say the other. What the hell is wrong with you? Do you suffer from the split personality syndrome? Or you’ve lost your mind? Either way, I am your brother-in-arm. A madman. Let’s shake hands.“Speaking of shaking hands, it reminds me of a row the other day. The Fatemi-Hoagland one. The latter was summoned by the Foreign Office for an explanation over the June 7 drone attack. However, things got ugly and the charge d’affaires left in anger, even without shaking hands with Fatemi. That is a pity. Had he stayed, the Foreign Office would have offered him a milkshake to cool him down.  “So what do you think of it, Uncle Sam? Your first interaction with the new regime. The same old Nawaz Sharif. The pragmatist Nawaz Sharif, as you’d call him - unlike the ideologue, Imran Khan. Well, welcome aboard. Is that enough? Or do you want more? Don’t tell me: do more. As too much of anything is never enough. And then just how much more is enough? A thousand? A hundred thousand? Or a million? We are already at forty thousand, you see. Please don’t turn us into another Iraq. First bombs. Then democracy. We already have democracy, albeit a sham one. “But that is not really what drives me mad. It is this news of your global snooping. The 29-year old, Edward Snowden. The whistleblower. And his courage to come up with the mighty revelation. The biggest leak in the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) history, they say. George Orwell’s nightmare is finally turning out to be a living reality: ‘Big Brother is watching you’.  “Funny thing, the guy would take shelter in Hong Kong, part of your 21st century bogeyman, China. ‘One country, two systems’. That is odd. You incessantly blame China for spying. And your valued NSA asset seek refuge in it and eulogise it for its ‘spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent’.  “You claim to be the champion of basic human rights, Uncle Sam! But either you don’t have any respect for those rights. Or you don’t take us for humans. That’s what is abundantly clear from your spy chief, James Clapper’s statement: ‘The Prism programme targets only the non-US citizens’. Phew, like the non-US citizens are no humans at all. Like they have no right to the civil liberties.  “What a shame. What a double standard. What a double face. What a diplomacy of sheer duplicity. And what a contradiction between your domestic and foreign policy. You protect your people at the price and peril of other people’s lives. You sneak into their bedrooms. You scan through their windows. You hover over their roofs. You pry into their personal information. You steal their personal lives. Personal email accounts. Personal social media accounts. Personal phone calls. “Don’t you have any regard for the international law? What happened to your universal values? Where is your modesty? Whence goes your civility? Don’t you have any modicum of decorum? Don’t you have an iota of dignity? “Is this how you pay homage to your founding fathers? Is this how you represent your values? Don’t you think you only fortify the age-long criticism by such programmes that you are a country founded by the slave-owners, who, paradoxically enough, fought for freedom in their political life? So, yes. Land of the free. Home to the brave. Just spare no one. Send everyone to grave. “You divide the world into two, Uncle Sam! Like the Nazi Germany’s eugenics, you slice it into two: us and them. The Aryans and the Semites. The master race and the slave ones. The white man and the coloured: black, yellow and brown. You are the same magician with a different wand. The same thief in a different garb. The same spy with a different mask. “And by the way, thank you so much for your latest drone attacks. They reminded our KPK and central governments just in time how important an ally you are. We value your alliance. We are just so proud of your friendship. With friends like you, who would need any enemy anyway? “Do you take us for a pariah state? Do you really think we are your non-Nato ally? What a joke! It is high time you admit, Uncle Sam, you are only having a marriage of convenience with us. And that we are merely a ‘non-natural’ partner. Who is the natural one? Well, that is just so obvious - India.“And tell you what. Your ad on the net and our TV channels just suck. The ad made by the USAID. They make us laugh like madmen. They make us sick to our stomach. Can there be something more ridiculous than that? Roshan Pakistan. Roshan Pakistan, my foot. You should know no one ever watch them. Thanks to your selfless friendship, there is an average 18-hour power cut throughout the country. “Besides, the 12-year war on terror with tip-top top-notch state-of-the-art 21st century weaponry and still no end in sight. You cannot fool us with your 2014 withdrawal plan. We know just too well that you will stay on. Do stay. We Pashtuns and Afghans are a hospitable people. But just keep in mind, the terrain is the ultimate black hole. The graveyard of great empires. The cemetery of superpowers. “The fate of the USSR is in front of you. The ‘evil empire’ of the Cold War. And the actual reason of your coming to the region. For, what goes around, comes around. Still, you act like an ostrich and bury your head in sand. You love to look at things in isolation. You refuse to admit 9/11 had any causes in history. What an amnesia. What a myopia. What a claustrophobia. “There is a problem with you since 9/11, you know. You got paranoid. You lost your sense of judgment. And your sense of balance, too. You just panicked. You failed to differentiate between real and perceived threat. One reason why you lost  the war in Afghanistan. You blew the WMD threat in Iraq out of proportion and ended up with more terrorists throughout the world. Thus, far from winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world, you only pierced our hearts and drove us out of our minds. “Shame on you, Uncle Sam! No uncle has ever been so cruel and unkind like you are. Sixty-five years of service and the fruit is mere blood and bones. We better had Mother Russia in your place. No worries, though. We still got our Chairman Mao. Meanwhile, you just spy on your own spies, lest more of your Edward Snowdens leave your ranks and defect to the ‘enemy forces’.” 
nThe writer is a researcher and a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.