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U.S. Military Overrules Elected Government?
On the night of Dec. 1, President Obama announced his plan for a surge of 30,000 troops to be dispatched to Afghanistan. The troops would top 100,000 after this surge, but Obama offered the condition that they would start to withdraw from Afghanistan by June of 2011.
Coming on the heels of the President's speech, however, the announcement made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates removed any reassurance that was offered. Contradicting the President’s words, Gates clarified that there are no deadlines on the horizon for withdrawal.
Around the same time as the surge announcement, media reports revealed that the U.S. army is planning to expand its undeclared war in Pakistan, through drone attacks targeting the Baluchistan region. These drone attacks, the primary means of warfare that the U.S. army deploys in Pakistan, continue to cause the death of dozens of civilians each time they are put to use, and are thus a blatant violation of the international law.
Over the past eight years of Bush and Chaney the U.S. government has made a habit of bypassing international law through the use of the latest innovations of its military-industrial complex, such as drone attacks. These cutting-edge technologies of cruelty are developed so rapidly that the U.N. regulations can only follow them with a time-lag.
It is this lag in time that the U.S. administration cashes in on to claim more civilian lives in Pakistan, a country where it has not even officially declared a war, and in the neighboring nations. The people of Pakistan have, at this moment of crisis, no food and no jobs. The youth have no future. Any attack on the sovereign integrity of Pakistan the patriotic youth will take as assault on their dignity, which is all that they have left.
As Pakistanis living abroad, and particularly in the U.S., we condemn the U.S. administration’s decision to escalate war in the region, a decision that is made hastily and in utter disregard of the widespread opposition throughout the world. The militarists are trying to get the upper hand of the civil government of the U.S., as evidenced in the manner in which Gates and other military figures contradict the President's speech. Their haste is obvious in their decision for fast-track deployment of the troops planned to take place within a mere two weeks, so that they can turn a deaf ear to the rampant public outcry and protest--protests that began as soon as the president made his announcement at West Point.
If the U.S. militarists have no time to lose in muffling the voices in the U.S. and in the international community, nor can the people of Pakistan, the people of the Middle East and working people here in the U.S. have a minute to lose in opposing the decision to escalate war in Afghanistan. The people of the whole world need the hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on war and destruction to be spent on providing jobs through building schools, hospitals, roads and housing. In this time of economic crisis we need programs to stop housing foreclosures and layoffs not to wage endless war.
The U.S. and its European allies in NATO have done nothing to stop these wars of aggression; in fact, they have been active in promoting and participating in them, in the interest of their own profits and against the demands of their own people. Therefore, we call on the governments in the region, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Russia and China to convene a meeting to discuss the pending consequences of the U.S. and European military aggression in the region and to seek a solution to the problems of Kashmir and Palestine, all of which poses a grave threat to the national sovereignty of each of these countries.
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| Shahid Comrade | Dr. Mohammed Shafique |
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