The Imperial US Mind

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

The Imperial Mind​

American rage at Pakistan over the punishment of a CIA-cooperating Pakistani doctor is quite revealing

BY GLENN GREENWALD

Americans of all types — Democrats and Republicans, even some Good Progressives — are just livid that a Pakistani tribal court (reportedly in consultation with Pakistani officials) has imposed a 33-year prison sentence on Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani physician who secretly worked with the CIA to find Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil. Their fury tracks the standard American media narrative: by punishing Dr. Afridi for the “crime” of helping the U.S. find bin Laden, Pakistan has revealed that it sympathizes with Al Qaeda and is hostile to the U.S. (NPR headline: “33 Years In Prison For Pakistani Doctor Who Aided Hunt For Bin Laden”; NYT headline: “Prison Term for Helping C.I.A. Find Bin Laden”). Except that’s a woefully incomplete narrative: incomplete to the point of being quite misleading.

What Dr. Afridi actually did was concoct a pretextual vaccination program, whereby Pakistani children would be injected with a single Hepatitis B vaccine, with the hope of gaining access to the Abbottabad house where the CIA believed bin Laden was located. The plan was that, under the ruse of vaccinating the children in that province, he would obtain DNA samples that could confirm the presence in the suspected house of the bin Laden family. But the vaccine program he was administering was fake: as Wired‘s public health reporter Maryn McKenna detailed, “since only one of three doses was delivered, the vaccination was effectively useless.” An on-the-ground Guardian investigation documented that ”while the vaccine doses themselves were genuine, the medical professionals involved were not following procedures. In an area called Nawa Sher, they did not return a month after the first dose to provide the required second batch. Instead, according to local officials and residents, the team moved on.”

That means that numerous Pakistani children who thought they were being vaccinated against Hepatitis B were in fact left exposed to the virus. Worse, international health workers have long faced serious problems in many parts of the world — including remote Muslim areas — in convincing people that the vaccines they want to give to their children are genuine rather than Western plots to harm them. These suspicions have prevented the eradication of polio and the containment of other preventable diseases in many areas, including in parts of Pakistan. This faux CIA vaccination program will, for obvious and entirely foreseeable reasons, significantly exacerbate that problem.

As McKenna wrote this week, this fake CIA vaccination program was “a cynical attempt to hijack the credibility that public health workers have built up over decades with local populations” and thus “endangered the status of the fraught polio-eradication campaign, which over the past decade has been challenged in majority-Muslim areas in Africa and South Asia over beliefs that polio vaccination is actually a covert campaign to harm Muslim children.” She further notes that while this suspicion “seems fantastic” to oh-so-sophisticated Western ears — what kind of primitive people would harbor suspicions about Western vaccine programs? – there are actually “perfectly good reasons to distrust vaccination campaigns” from the West (in 1996, for instance, 11 children died in Nigeria when Pfizer, ostensibly to combat a meningitis outbreak, conducted drug trials — experiments — on Nigerian children that did not comport with binding safety standards in the U.S.).

When this fake CIA vaccination program was revealed last year, Doctors Without Borders harshly denounced the CIA and Dr. Afridi for their “grave manipulation of the medical act” that will cause “vulnerable communities – anywhere – needing access to essential health services [to] understandably question the true motivation of medical workers and humanitarian aid.” The group’s President pointed out the obvious: “The potential consequence is that even basic healthcare, including vaccination, does not reach those who need it most.” That is now clearly happening, as the CIA program “is casting its shadow over campaigns to vaccinate Pakistanis against polio.” Gulrez Khan, a Peshawar-based anti-polio worker, recently said that tribesman in the area now consider public health workers to be CIA agents and are more reluctant than ever to accept vaccines and other treatments for their children.

For the moment, leave to the side the question of whether knowingly administering ineffective vaccines to Pakistani children is a justified ruse to find bin Laden (just by the way, it didn’t work, as none of the health workers actually were able to access the bin Laden house, though CIA officials claim the program did help obtain other useful information). In light of all the righteous American outrage over this prison sentence, let’s consider what the U.S. Government would do if the situation were reversed: namely, if an American citizen secretly cooperated with a foreign intelligence service to conduct clandestine operations on U.S. soil, all without the knowledge or consent of the U.S. Government, and let’s further consider what would happen if the American citizen’s role in those operations involved administering a fake vaccine program to unwitting American children. Might any serious punishment ensue? Does anyone view that as anything more than an obvious rhetorical question?

There are numerous examples that make the point. As’ad AbuKhalil poses this one: “Imagine if China were to hire an American physician who would innocently inject unsuspecting Americans with a chemical to obtain information for China. I am sure that his prison term would be even longer.” Or what if an American doctor of Iranian descent had done this on behalf of the Quds Force, in order to find a member of the designated Iranian Terror group MeK who was living in the United States (one who, say, has been working with Israel to help assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists and wound their wives, or one who was trained by the U.S.), after which Iranian agents invaded his American home, pumped bullets in his skull and shot a few others (his wife and a child) and then dumped his corpse into the Atlantic Ocean? Or take the case of Orlando Bosch, the CIA-backed anti-Cuban Terrorist long harbored by the U.S.; suppose a Cuban-American doctor sympathetic to Castro had injected American children as part of a fake vaccination program in order to help Cuba find and kill Bosch on U.S. soil; he’d be lucky to get 33 years in prison.

In fact, the U.S. Government tries to impose the harshest possible sentences on Americans who do far less than Dr. Afridi did in Pakistan. The Obama administration charged former NSA official Thomas Drake with espionage and tried to imprison him for decades merely because he exposed serious waste, corruption and illegality in surveillance programs — without the slightest indication of any harm to national security. Right now, they’re charging Bradley Manning with “aiding the enemy” — Al Qaeda — and attempting to impose life imprisonment on the 23-year-old Army Private, merely because he leaked information to the world showing serious war crimes and other government deceit (something The New York Times does frequently) which nobody suggests was done in collaboration with or even with any intent to help Al Qaeda or any other foreign entity. Given all that, just imagine how harshly they’d try to punish an American who secretly collaborated with a foreign intelligence service — who created a fake vaccine program for American kids — to enable secret military action on U.S. soil without their knowledge.

But of course none of these comparisons is equivalent. It’s all different when it’s done to America rather than by America. That’s the great prize for being the world’s imperial power: the rules you impose on others don’t bind you at all. I’m quite certain that none of the people voicing such intense rage over Pakistan’s punishment of Dr. Afridi would voice anything similar if the situation were reversed in any of the ways I’ve just outlined. Can you even imagine any of them saying something like: yes, this American doctor injected American kids with ruse vaccines in order to help the intelligence service of Iran/Pakistan/China/Cuba conduct clandestine operations on U.S. soil without the knowledge of the U.S. Government, but I think that’s justified and he shouldn’t be punished.

If you read or watch any accounts of life in the Roman empire, what you will frequently witness is someone being severely punished for an act against a Roman citizen. That was the most severe crime and the one most harshly punished: one could do any manner of bad things to non-citizens, but not so much as raise a hand to a Roman citizen.

Watch how often that formulation is used in our political discourse: he tried to kill Americans, people will emphasize when justifying all sorts of U.S. government actions. In other words, there are ordinary, pedestrian crimes (like this one, from today: “An American drone fired two missiles at a bakery in northwest Pakistan Saturday and killed four suspected militants, officials said, as the U.S. pushed on with its drone campaign despite Pakistani demands to stop. This was the third such strike in the country in less than a week”). But then there is the supreme crime: he tried to kill Americans! It’d be one thing if this outrage were honestly expressed as self-interest (we give massive aid to Pakistan so they should do our bidding), but instead, it is, as usual, couched in moral terms.

That is the imperial mind at work. Its premises are often embraced implicitly rather than knowingly: American lives are inherently more valuable; foreign lives are expendable in pursuit of American interests; the U.S. has the inalienable right to take action in other countries that nobody is allowed to take in the U.S. (just imagine: “An Iranian drone fired two missiles at a bakery in the northwest U.S. Saturday and killed four suspected militants, Iranian officials said, as Iran pushed on with its drone campaign despite American demands to stop. This was the third such strike in the country in less than a week” or “Thirty five women and children were killed by a Yemeni cruise missile armed with cluster bombs which struck an alleged Marine training camp in Texas”).

These self-venerating imperial prerogatives are the premises driving the vast bulk of American foreign policy and military discourse. It is certainly what’s driving the spectacle of so many people pretending that the punishment of Dr. Afridi is some sort of aberrational act which the U.S. and other Decent, Civilized Countries would never do.

* * * * *

Two related points:

(1) NPR emphasizes what appear to be the genuine due process deficiencies in the punishment imposed on Dr. Afridi, though he certainly is receiving more due process than those informally and secretly accused of Treason by the U.S. Government and given the Anwar Awlaki treatment, or accused of Terrorism and targeted with a U.S. drone or locked for a decade or so in a cage without charges of any kind.

(2) Zaid Jilani, formerly of Think Progress, asks a really good question about the Hollywood Election Year film depicting the bin Laden raid being produced by Sony Pictures with the help of the Obama administration: “Will the movie feature Pakistani kids tricked into getting fake vaccines? Probably not.” If the film does mention this, I’d bet it will be to marvel at and celebrate the James-Bond-like ingenuity of the CIA.

The Imperial Mind - Salon.com

 

[lem34]

It's simply known as double standards which can not be justified

 

[shuttler]

^ you are kind on the us! their standard is as capricious as the temperature in a day!

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Some Accuse US of Hypocrisy Over Pakistan Doctor Case

Jim Randle
May 25, 2012
Tensions rose higher between Pakistan and the United States this week after a tribal court gave a long prison term to a Pakistani doctor who tried to help U.S. forces gather information about Osama bin Laden. American forces later killed the terrorist, and the doctor's actions angered many Pakistanis. Some critics say the case of Dr. Shakil Afridi has some parallels to the plight of a U.S. citizen who sold U.S. secrets to Israel, and who is serving a life term in an American prison.

U.S. forces found and killed Osama bin Laden after Dr. Shakil Afridi gathered some information for them. He was accused of running a fake vaccination campaign designed to help the CIA collect DNA from bin Laden's family in the town where bin Laden was hiding.

Pakistan charged Afridi with treason and Interior Minister Rehman Malik says the judge's decision should be respected.

"The person happened to be a traitor, the person happened to be before the court. The court has obverted, the court has taken the due process of law, and accordingly he has been convicted. So we have to respect our courts," Malik said.

"The U.S. does not believe there is any basis for holding Dr. Afridi," said U.S Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who pressed Pakistan to release Afridi.

Angry members of the U.S. Congress voted in favor of cutting U.S. aid to Pakistan by $33 million -- one million for every year of Afridi's sentence.

Some analysts say the case of Johnathan Pollard shows Washington has an inconsistent policy. Pollard was convicted of selling U.S. secrets to Israel and sentenced to life in prison. Washington has rejected Israeli pleas to release Pollard.

But the Middle East Institute's Marvin Weinbaum says those who accuse Washington of hypocrisy have a superficial view of the situation; Pollard cost the United States some of its most closely-guarded secrets, while Dr. Afridi worked against a threat to both the United States and Pakistan.

You have to look at what in fact was the purpose of the action. Was it just simply to help a foreign country, or was it to do something to serve the interest mutual interest of the two countries?

Shuja Nawaz, a scholar with the Atlantic Council in Washington, says Pakistan does not see it that way. "They see it as the subversion of a Pakistani citizen and his willing participation in an act that was to support the United States intelligence operations inside Pakistan," Nawaz said.

Weinbaum says the further souring of U.S.-Pakistani relations is unfortunate because it keeps the two nations from working together on shared interests.

Both analysts say if relations improve in the future, the two nations might find a way to make a deal to reduce Dr. Afridi's sentence.

Some Accuse US of Hypocrisy Over Pakistan Doctor Case

Editorial
Shakil Afridi


Sunday, May 27, 2012 From Print Edition

No country in the world will allow its citizens to spy for another country’s intelligence agency. Why should Pakistan be any different? While the 33-year-long jail sentence for Dr Shakil Afridi – the Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA find Osama bin Laden under the cover of a fake vaccination drive – may have caused much outrage within and outside Pakistan, the fact of the matter is that Pakistan is well within its right to charge him for colluding with a foreign agency. After all, other countries have reacted in a similar manner when their citizens have been found working for foreign intelligence agencies. Hasn’t Jonathan Pollard, an American citizen, been in a US jail since 1987 for providing information to the Israelis? In fact, the US even has laws – the Foreign Agents Registration Act, for example – that require citizens who receive funding or lobby on behalf of a foreign government to register as foreign agents. Wasn’t it under this law that Dr Ghulam Nabi Fai, a US citizen of Kashmiri descent, was convicted for lobbying for Kashmir without registration and allegedly spying for Pakistani intelligence agencies?

Why, then, is it so scandalous that Dr Afridi has been charged? The United States’ protestations over Dr Afridi’s sentencing ring hollow and hypocritical in light of its own actions against ‘unpatriotic’ citizens. Let’s also not forget that treason or no treason, Dr Afridi’s fake vaccination drive has had a negative impact on immunisation programmes in Fata and KP by heightening the already strong suspicions about vaccination programmes. Not only that, the case has shaken up the humanitarian community, giving rise to a wave of restrictions that have compromised multimillion dollar aid operations serving millions of vulnerable Pakistanis. If for nothing else, shouldn’t Dr Afridi be punished for potentially putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis, especially children, at risk?

However, while Pakistan has every right to charge Dr Afridi for colluding with a foreign agency, the doctor also has every right that the charges against him be proved in a fair and transparent trial. As the HRCP said in a statement on Friday, while the country’s security is extremely important, “that cannot be made the basis for denying rule of law to anyone.” Indeed, as many are arguing, it is still not entirely clear why the doctor was tried in a tribal court, when the supposed offence took place in Abbottabad. Also, why has the PPP, with its professed determination to disband the Frontier Crimes Regulation, allowed Dr Afridi’s sentencing under these draconian laws that deny defendants the right to a lawyer? Why was he not tried by a regular court? Why was his fate put in the hands of the political agent – an executive officer with judicial powers but by no means a part of the independent judiciary of the country? Did his trial really meet due process standards? Unless these questions are clearly and honestly answered, it would not be unfair to conclude, as many have, that once again, the security establishment has won against rule of law, and got its job done without any concern for doing it the right way. Hopefully, the facts of Dr Afridi’s case will be allowed to be uncovered through a fair trial. This case is a delicate balance of facts and perceptions. Already, Dr Afridi’s conviction has heightened tensions between Pakistan and the US and could not have come at a worse time, adding to the growing anti-Pakistan sentiment in the US. Pakistan must protect its security and national interests, but it must do so while staying on the right side of the law, and of the international community.

Shakil Afridi - thenews.com.pk

 

[fd24]

I think i find it difficult to understand why Americans are getting so excitable as regards to the decision made by the judiciary stem of Pakistan. They fail to see that the actions and role carried out by Afridi were those that can by ANY court of ANY land to say the least resulting in him being guilty of treason. The eventual outcome of the result of him committing treason is a completely seperate issue. If it resulted in the the finding of OBL - that as far as Pakistan is concerned is irrelavant.
Perhaps the issue is that the Americans in the passed have been getting away "with calling the shots" in Pakistan due to the bribing of our corrupt politicians hence on this occassion - they want Pakistan "to play ball".

 

[Pakistanisage]

The US does not care what happens to any country as long as they get what they want. Pakistan needs to find alternative markets for its products and totally stop doing business with the US.

 

[FaujHistorian]

Ordinary Pakistanis and NGOs should be very careful. They ought to focus on their primary job. Doctors should especially focus on heeling instead of becoming pawns in the great game.

USA in the long run will work with Kiyani for military planning in the area. That's the best way to go. Ben Fing Ladeen's case was unique that he was able to run from Pakistani law enforcement agencies for such a long time. In the end BFL didn't turn out to be a master planner, so his tracking and shooting by Americans is a huge black mark on Pak army. It showed them as incompetent bumbling organization which they obviously are not.

Once BFL is sent to hell, Americans do not have huge interest in chasing down other Qaida clowns hiding in Pakistan at this stage. So there will not be any more Afridis in near future.

However this should not lull Pakistani government into complacency. it too should learn from the Ben Fing Ladeen's fiasco that Arab Muj in Pakistan do not care about our reputation in the international arena, so it is time that we look for any Qaida hiding in the plane site.

peace.

 

[AbhimanyuShrivastav]

I think i find it difficult to understand why Americans are getting so excitable as regards to the decision made by the judiciary stem of Pakistan. They fail to see that the actions and role carried out by Afridi were those that can by ANY court of ANY land to say the least resulting in him being guilty of treason. The eventual outcome of the result of him committing treason is a completely seperate issue. If it resulted in the the finding of OBL - that as far as Pakistan is concerned is irrelavant.
Perhaps the issue is that the Americans in the passed have been getting away "with calling the shots" in Pakistan due to the bribing of our corrupt politicians hence on this occassion - they want Pakistan "to play ball".

Hardly a fair judicial trial when the defendant does not even have access to a lawyer..

 

[FaujHistorian]

Hardly a fair judicial trial when the defendant does not even have access to a lawyer..

He was tried under FCR laws that have been in place since the time of independence.

However his role in shining the light on the rat known as Ben Fing Ladeen is a bit overplayed. He went around and took blood samples in FATA area and perhaps in Abbotabad. Once can always argue, how on earth he was working in Abbotabad with the knowledge of relevant authorities.

So there is more than what meets the eye.

And most of us will end up speculating.


peace.

 

[Hulk]

If it was a normal case for any country which was behaving normally than this case would have got Pakistan sympathy. But one has to look at how Pakistan is perceived by the world when this event happened. They were seen providing safe heavens for terrorist, it was blamed of leaking information to terrorist before the raid. All this happened before this incidence and given all of that it is not unfair that US did not trusted in eliminating worlds most wanted terrorist which was difficult to find.

What Pakistani's completely fail to understand is that they give a very bad impression to the world.

What is fair and what is unfair is discussed, only when the image of the person is clean. Anyone with a bad image, who cares if he is getting a fair treatment Do you care if OSAMA or Baitulla Meshud gets a fair treatment? Same logic applied to countries.

Pakistan has been seen as a country not helping with full potential to eliminate terrorism which is not a good image at all.

Pakistani's are only criticizing the world and continuously questioning them without asking those hard questions to themselves or their establishment.

Has anyone asked why after so long time Pakistan has not found a single person who helped OSAMA stay in Pakistan, if you can find so fast who helped US trace OSAMA, how much work you did to find who helped OSAMA stay in Pakistan. I am sorry to say but the way I see things you are not even thinking or talking to do it.

 

[FaujHistorian]

If it was a normal case for any country which was behaving normally than this case would have got Pakistan sympathy......

Those who chirp like little birds are not looking for sympathy from the "world", they are looking for sympathy from Arab sheik sheesh-kabobs who send petro dollars.

And then the rest are looking for sympathy from Ayatullahs.

You have to understand their minds dear poster. Understand their bird chirping, shor machao minds,.


peace,

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

US paralysed by lack of vision on Pakistan policy: report

WASHINGTON - Richard Holbrooke would never have let relations between the United States and Pakistan decline to this level, his widow, Kati Marton, said this week, according to a National Journal analytical report in which experts criticize the Obama White House’s lack of vision in formulating a coherent policy toward the key regional country.

“The day after [Osama] bin Laden was killed, Richard would have been on a plane to Pakistan, and he would not have come home until the relationship was mended,” Marton, an author and journalist, told National Journal.

“We never went for a walk in Central Park without calls coming in from Pakistan.”

“He knew not only the ISI [Pakistani intelligence] folks, but the generals and all the politicians and dissidents. He crawled into tents in refugee camps,” Marton said.

“He wouldn’t have allowed [this] to happen.”

Marton was referring to the freeze in U.S.-Pakistan relations that began after the Obama administration’s raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad a year ago – tensions that may now pose the single biggest obstacle to ending America’s longest war, writer Michael Hirsh wrote in the Journal.

The writer calls Pakistan a nominal U.S. ally, alleging that it has stepped up its support of violent extremists intent on attacking U.S. and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan and undermining stability there.

“ But according to critics in the United States, Europe, and Pakistan, the issue is still being largely shunted aside by Washington out of fear, inertia, and a lack of a strategic vision on the part of the U.S. and NATO,” says the report.

“It is a failure of diplomacy of the highest order, where we have had the lives of our people at stake,” Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and the United Nations, told NJ for the cover story in this week’s issue, “Paralyzed by Pakistan.”

Before he was forced out of office last year, Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani—who worked closely with Holbrooke—urged U.S. officials to adopt a “holistic” approach to the region.

“It never happened. And today, rather than coming up with a new overarching strategic policy for Pakistan and the region that is commensurate with the deep commitments that President Obama and NATO have now made, Washington and other capitals continue to watch, helplessly, as a middle-sized developing country defies a superpower and the NATO alliance with virtual impunity.”
“The Americans are completely paralyzed by this situation,” said one European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. A senior NATO official also laid the problem on the Americans.

“It’s quite difficult at times to find a single U.S. policy on Pakistan, much less coordination with others.”

White House officials, responding to Marton’s comments, said on Friday that the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is poor mainly because of “a series of events that were impossible to foresee but had nothing to do with our policy,” as one senior administration official put it.

The incidents began with the diplomatic furor over a CIA contractor who killed two Pakistanis in early 2011 and culminated in the accidental NATO strikes that accidentally killed 24 Pakistani troops last November. That had nothing to do with “poor diplomacy,” the official said.

The administration’s paralysis has been evident in an intense, months-long debate over whether to issue an apology to Pakistan over the errant NATO strikes, even though several months have passed since the completion of an official Pentagon investigation that partially blamed mistakes made by U.S. forces for the incident, U.S. officials said.

The State Department resurrected the idea earlier this year after repudiating the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, early on when he pressed for an immediate apology following the incident last November.

But Obama, facing charges of appeasement from Mitt Romney, has hesitated, says the account.

Marton said that by the end of the summer of 2010, Holbrooke, before he died suddenly that December at the age of 69, had begun to grow confident that he could deliver a strategic vision for the region that would address the fundamental issues in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

“I think it was in August, when I caught him with a faraway look, the kind he had when he was working on something in his head. I said, ‘Richard what are you thinking about?’ He said, ‘I think I’ve got it. I think I can see how all the pieces can fit together.’

It looked like he was working a Rubik’s cube in his head…. The thing that keeps me awake some nights is that I’m not at all sure he had that conversation with the president.”

It’s not clear that would have made a difference, however. Widely acclaimed as one of America’s most masterful diplomats, having orchestrated the 1995 Dayton peace accord, Holbrooke was intensely frustrated by White House interference, according to observers inside and outside the administration.

After being named Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009, Holbrooke was said to have been curtailed by then-National Security Adviser James Jones and a coterie of close aides around Obama, the analytical piece says.

The report adds , this was especially true when Holbrooke sought to tackle the larger regional issues, in particular the tense relationship between India and Pakistan.
US paralysed by lack of vision on Pakistan policy: report | Pakistan Today | Latest news | Breaking news | Pakistan News | World news | Business | Sport and Multimedia

 

[SMC]

If it was a normal case for any country which was behaving normally than this case would have got Pakistan sympathy. But one has to look at how Pakistan is perceived by the world when this event happened. They were seen providing safe heavens for terrorist, it was blamed of leaking information to terrorist before the raid. All this happened before this incidence and given all of that it is not unfair that US did not trusted in eliminating worlds most wanted terrorist which was difficult to find.

What Pakistani's completely fail to understand is that they give a very bad impression to the world.

What is fair and what is unfair is discussed, only when the image of the person is clean. Anyone with a bad image, who cares if he is getting a fair treatment Do you care if OSAMA or Baitulla Meshud gets a fair treatment? Same logic applied to countries.

Pakistan has been seen as a country not helping with full potential to eliminate terrorism which is not a good image at all.

Pakistani's are only criticizing the world and continuously questioning them without asking those hard questions to themselves or their establishment.

Has anyone asked why after so long time Pakistan has not found a single person who helped OSAMA stay in Pakistan, if you can find so fast who helped US trace OSAMA, how much work you did to find who helped OSAMA stay in Pakistan. I am sorry to say but the way I see things you are not even thinking or talking to do it.

Quick question for you -- why is image and other's approval so important for you and for bharatis in general? So if others don't like you for certain reasons, you'll try to gain their approval, even if may not be in your own interests to carry out those actions? This is basic inferiority complex. Do you see Americans trying to gain approval of anyone? Please grow up. This is not some TV show where you must have everyone's approval.

 

[Bobshouse]

This a unique situation and the outcome should be accordingly.
The OP asks
"Imagine if China were to hire an American physician who would innocently inject unsuspecting Americans with a chemical to obtain information for China"
Thats not fair enough or based on reality. This statement is far removed from the continual denials by the Pakistanis that A. OBL in not on your territory and B. he has or has not been given any special protection or treatment. Maybe only now all the media reports that OBL has been in Pakistan is now correct, not all the 10 years on reports by the media he has been in Pakistan has all been a lie right?
Lets look at the reality on the ground for a minute.
-The Pakistan military and government has been infiltrated by extremist Islamist forces
-The Pakistan government has no control over the military
-The military has no control over the government

Yes the doctor has done the wrong thing here but the 30+ years political statement only makes the Pakistani government and military look even more stupid here.

 

[FaujHistorian]

US paralysed by lack of vision on Pakistan policy: report...

Unfortunately Pakistan too is paralyzed by lack of vision on policies regarding America in particular and West in general.

Our state of paralysis is due to the strong leftist and Islamists (call it Islamo-socialism or precisely Islamo-communism in green dress) holding the government at gun point and dragging it over hot coal.

While American paralysis is bad as it deals with an important country Pakistan,

Pakistani paralysis is deadly, as it is messing up our relationship with 95+% of the world. Our paralysis makes only two groups happy: the Mullahs of Saudi, and Ayatullahs of iran.

Our trade has plummeted, our factories are shut down, our unemployment is sky high, our electricity supply is now comparable to shining examples of poverty and death aka African and Arab primitive tribals. As a result our ethnic and religious minorities have lost hope for the unified Pakistan, while Wahabi supported goons are on killing spree all over Pakistan.

And yet we are chirping like little birds, chirping like the "shor machao" group that will surely result in more death and more destruction in Pakistan.


Why it is so?

Because our intellectuals love to copy and paste Western news articles while using ZERO brain power to think from Pakistani point of view.

peace.