Pakistan’s former Prime Minister likened the US-backed parliamentary coup that removed him from power in April 2022 to the violent CIA operation that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953.
Ali Imam (Pakistan), Untitled (Deserted Town with a Black Sun), 1956.Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Calamities are familiar to the people of Pakistan who have struggled through several catastrophic earthquakes, including those in 2005, 2013, and 2015 (to name the most damaging), as well as the horrendous floods of 2010. However, nothing could prepare the fifth most populated country in the world for this summer’s devastating events, which began with high temperatures and political chaos followed by unimaginable flooding.
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN – AUGUST 04: Pakistan Justice Movement (PTI) party supporters hold a protest led by former Prime Minister Imran Khan against the coalition government and the Election Commission at Fatma Jinnah Park in the F-9 region of Islamabad, Pakistan on August 04, 2022. ( Muhammed Semih Uğurlu – Anadolu Agency )
Politicians in Pakistan rise to power and fall from grace with alarming regularity, so much so that not a single prime minister has ever completed a full term in office. The one constant has been the genuine love and affection ordinary people have for the military. However, that could be about to change now that some inconvenient truths are beginning to surface in the increasingly clumsy attempts to silence Imran Khan.
When the nation’s most popular leader in living memory is also the state’s public enemy number one, what will become of Pakistan?
Photo Credit: The CradleProminent defense analyst and former Pakistani military officer Haider Mehdi has vociferously claimed that Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa colluded with US authorities to topple the Imran Khan government on 9 April.
Imran Khan, a former cricket star who went into politics and became Prime Minister of Pakistan, had been ousted by bribing and threatening politicians of his coalition to turn against him. Khan had developed good relations with China and Russia and was against allowing the U.S. military to use Pakistan as a base for attacks in Afghanistan.
“In Pakistan’s history, it may be the first time that people’s power has been honored by the judiciary in the face of open threats on the judges’ safety, including an attack on the chief justice. The lawless and powerful corrupt politicians did everything to derail the process of the rule of law, but justice prevailed. The U.S. government that initiated the current political crisis in Pakistan through its extremely unwise and self-destructive act of regime change in Pakistan has, hopefully, learned that it cannot impose corrupt and servile politicians on the 220 million people of Pakistan whose steady progress in the past three and a half years under the leadership of Imran Khan has been nullified by those incompetent and self-serving politicians that the U.S. installed in Pakistan. Pakistan now faces the challenge of going back to square one and re-starting its road to recovery. Congratulations to the people of Pakistan, to Pakistan’s Tehreek-e Insaaf Party (the Movement for Justice), and to the Party’s leader Imran Khan for this valiant and successful fight against foreign intervention and the powerful mafias.”
– Prof. Abdul Jabbar, longest-serving Pakistani academic in American history, professor of literature, global politics, Muslim world affairs. Based in San Francisco, California.
H/t Junaid Ahmad
ISLAMABAD – Following weeks of high drama and controversy that have racked the nation, Imran Khan has been removed from office. The Pakistani prime minister suffered a vote of no confidence and a loss in the supreme court, ending his rule after less than four years. Coalition partners abandoned him, leaving his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party in the minority.
20 June 2020 — Global Research
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), founded in 2001 by the Shanghai Five (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan) and to which Uzbekistan, India and Pakistan were later added would be the ALBA and Iran countries hard core of resistance to world hegemony of the United States and Great Britain. Consequently, the avowed objective of the United States would be to dynamite this organization, having Balochistan, Kashmir and Xinjiang as scenarios for its destabilizing operations.8 August 2019 — Indian Punchline
The site where a Taliban car bomb detonated in Kabul on Aug 7, 2019, killing 14 people and wounding 145.
The statement issued by the Taliban on Thursday regarding the situation surrounding the state of Jammu & Kashmir merits serious attention.
The statement recalls media reports on the abrogation of the special status of J&K by the Modi government, the deployment of additional troops in the state, and the lockdown in the valley that have created “difficulties and hardships for the Muslim population.”
7 August 2019 — Indian Punchline
by M. K. BHADRAKUMAR
Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir, on lockdown. File photo.
In the aftermath of the Modi government’s decision to remove ‘special status’ for J&K and bifurcate the state into two union territories, the most keenly awaited regional and international reaction — and a hugely consequential one — would be that of China’s, not the US’ or even of the other three P5 member states.
27 July 2019 — New Eastern Outlook
Much is being said of US activities aimed at China. Recent protests in Hong Kong together with a US-led propaganda campaign aimed at Beijing’s attempts to quell a growing terrorist threat in Xinjiang are aimed at pressuring the nation to fall back into line within Washington’s enduring unipolar international order.
14 May 2019 — FAIR
In commenting on what’s holding back the conquest of polio, the Washington Post(5/10/19) didn’t mention the humans at the CIA.
If the last three years have taught us anything, it’s that it’s much easier to blame “fake news” than to look in the mirror and see how one’s own country, and their powerful institutions, may bear responsibility for a social ill. This jingoistic narcissism is on full display in a Washington Post editorial (5/10/19) that blamed a recent upsurge in polio in Pakistan on “guns, fear and fake news”—while ignoring the CIA’s central role in the crisis entirely.
1 February 2019 — National Security Archive
Reagan administration supported India’s active role in connection with Soviet withdrawal, but changed position when Delhi tried to keep extreme fundamentalists from coming to power
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program was major Indian concern in connection with U.S. aid to Islamabad; New Delhi and Washington consulted closely on arms control, cables show
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4 October 2018 — Drone Warfare
Since 2004, the US government has attacked thousands of targets in tribal areas along the Afghan border in Northwest Pakistan. It used unmanned aerial vehicles operated by the US Air Force under the operational control of the CIA’s Special Activities Division. Attacks increased substantially under Bush’s successor, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.
20 May 2014 — RT
The promise was made in a letter to the deans of 12 public health schools – who have criticized the Obama administration for using a vaccination effort as a cover for reconnaissance – and was written by the president’s top counterterrorism and homeland security advisor, Lisa Monaco.
8 May 2014 — FAIR Blog
Polio had been battled to near-extinction after decades of effort, but this year the WHO confirmed 68 new cases and declared it an international public health emergency. Nearly 80 percent of those cases are in Pakistan.
8 July, 2013 — Unredacted
A before and after shot of the Abbottabad Compound, site of the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden. Adm. McRaven seems to be trying to erase the US records of the raid the same way Pakistan tried to erase the compound itself.
What could possibly compel the government to go out of its way to hide the official record on the most important raid in history? It’s hard to fathom, but a recent Associated Press article by Richard Larner shows that the Pentagon is doing just that by sending all its records on the Osama bin Laden raid to the CIA, effectively sealing them into the “FOIA black hole” of government secrecy, and it has Archive Director Tom Blanton wondering if we have a “shell game in place of open government.”
18 February 2013 — Land Destroyer
Baluchistan, Pakistan – long target of Western geopolitical interests, terror wave coincides with Gwadar Port handover to China.
9 January, 2013 — Dissident Voice
In October 2011, 16-year-old Tariq Aziz attended a gathering in Islamabad where he was taught how to use a video camera so he could document the drones that were constantly circling over his Pakistani village, terrorizing and killing his family and neighbors. Two days later, when Aziz was driving with his 12-year-old cousin to a village near his home in Waziristan to pick up his aunt, his car was struck by a Hellfire missile. With the push of a button by a pilot at a US base thousands of miles away, both boys were instantly vaporized—only a few chunks of flesh remained.
1 March 2012 — The Real News Network
Sana Saleem: People are fed up with drone attacks and blame US policy for Afghan war
The New Dark Age 