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THE PAKISTANI
 
BOOMERANG
12008
 
contents 
no.
1/2008 
 
 
 THE PAKISTANI BOOMERANG EDITORIAL
2
EDITORIAL
 
 Allah’s Moths
1.
“M 
OTH-EATEN TRUNCATED PAKISTAN”. THIS WAS HOW, IN 1947,Pakistan’s founding father Mohammad Ali Jinnah, baptised his new-born country, aCaesarean birth resulting from the British fleeing colonial responsibilities. It is rare for a parent to speak of his own creature with such despair. And perhaps it is nocoincidence that a distinguished anglophile barrister, both in his soul and his choice of suits, Jinnah was to die only a year after this ill-fated delivery.Pakistan is still in search of an heir comparable to Quaid-i-Azam, the “great leader”. On the other hand the country intermittently co-exists with a grand godfather: the United States of America. In the Eighties, Ronald Reagan chosePakistan as the lethal weapon to be used against a Soviet Union bogged down in Afghanistan. As instructed by the CIA, in agreement with the Saudis, the Pakistanisecret services launched a multi-coloured international collection of Islamist warriorsagainst the Red Army. It worked brilliantly. In the autumn of 2001, this time rather more reluctantly, George W. Bush resorted once again to Pakistan as the logistic platform for entering Afghanistan, for liquidating the Taleban and tracking downOsama bin Laden and his associates – among them numerous veterans of this strangeanti-Soviet alliance – from the caves of Hindu Kush from where they were supposed tohave unleashed the attacks of 9/11. Initially this seemed to work. Seen from the White House today, this well-tested instrument has assumed the characteristics of aboomerang, threatening to complete its trajectory hitting the thrower on the forehead. In Washington they believe that after spreading chaos throughout Afghanistan, jihadists are aiming for the “big prize”: the destabilisation of Pakistan. This would bea great coup that might lead to the most evil of scenarios: terrorists attacking the heart of America using the scraps of the Pakistani nuclear complex taken from adeliquescent regime. The director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, hasspoken of the Pakistani tribal areas as a sanctuary for terrorists ready to carry out suicide missions in the United States. The American Ambassador to Islamabad, Ann W.Patterson, felt the need to evoke the “catastrophic” effects of a possible “attack against the USA launched from Pakistani territory”. While Hillary Clinton warns that if she is elected to the White House, she will place Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal under direct American control. How on earth did Bush get himself into this dead end road? And how will hissuccessor manage to get out of this situation?2. If they had more closely observed the weapon they were handling, perhaps the Americans would have used it more prudently. And they would also have agreed with Jinnah, because that vast territory, two and half times the size of Italy, inhabited by165 million souls (of which three quarters survive on less than two dollars a day), set between the Central Asian mountains and the Arabian Sea, between the Persian Empire and Indian civilisation, really does seem “moth-eaten” and “truncated”.Truncated because four of its main ethnic groups – Pashtuns, Balochis, Punjabis
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