Demonising Pakistan – The Result of Obama’s speech

· MAY 2, 2011

When US President Obama told the world that US special forces had killed Osama Bin Ladin in Abbotabad, Pakistan, it provoked a storm of media commentary. He claimed that justice had been done, blaming Bin Ladin for the 9/11 attacks.

It should surprise people that after Obama’s announcement, that there was so little comment about what America has done supposedly to secure this ‘justice’: wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military operations in Yemen and elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed, millions more injured and displaced, an estimated US$ 1.3 trillion expense, the destabilisation of different regions of the world, and the promotion of sectarianism … all allegedly to ‘get their man’.

The United States has given itself the right to be judge, jury and executioner when it feels a crime has been committed against it – ignoring its own moral deficit when it comes to foreign policy crimes, which invalidate any judicial pretensions they have. And even if it had been their aim to take revenge for 9/11, it is not ‘justice’ to act like a US Marshal in the ‘wild west’, policing the world with the ‘justice’ of the gun. It is simply the expression of naked power, and does nothing to make the world a safer and more just place.

Indeed, if anything it is an echo of US ‘justice’ in the ‘war on terror’, such as in Guantanamo Bay and its programme of extraordinary rendition.

The main result of Obama’s carefully crafted speech – aside from the boost in his domestic approval rating – is that the western media now portrays Pakistan, in particular its military, as ‘public enemy number one’ to its own population.

US foreign policy has thrived for decades on the exaggerated manufacture of an enemy, around whom they can construct plans to execute predetermined strategies. Previous examples have been Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, the Soviet Union, Communism, Iran etc. Where an individual or a regime or a system has indeed committed crimes, it makes the case easier to construct, and the subsequent policies easier to execute.

Once again, the government of Pakistan has tolerated [and maybe even assisted] a violation of its sovereign territory by a foreign military. No country in the world would do this, especially allowing the United States – with its blood-stained record of black-ops, duplicity and sights on Pakistan’s nuclear assets – free reign within Pakistan.

The basic function of securing the people has been sold off by the government in Pakistan, whose duty should have been to demand the expulsion of US military, security and intelligence personnel from Pakistan; and an end to bombing Pakistan and killing more civilians with their unmanned drone aircraft – withdrawing the vital support they give the US for this.

The only way to harness security for the sake of the people in Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, is by the justice and rules of Islam, under the authority of the Ummah, and independent of western colonial powers. This will only be achieved by restoration of the Khilafah State, and we call all people to work politically on the method of the Prophet (SAW) for this.