Bad Girl February 5, 1998

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href="/tag/death">death and then that story about the US DEA drug agent being tortured by the Pakistani fauj.  So embarrassed I was. 


Almost wanted to tell people I was Indian.  Imagine!  And just when I had convinced that nice Mrs. White that we are different.  Not like those Indians who are short and dark. Arré my family came from Arabia, we were not lower-caste converts.  But what-to-do, can't even tell people here about the Arab roots.  What with the Palestinians suicide-bombing all the time. Soon they will think Pakistanis and Palestinians are like one.  Then what?  Look at this Kansi. Ruining the chances for my children in the land of opportunity.



Oh these smugglers.  Always they are the Pathan-and-Baluchi-types.  I ask you, why were they ever put in Pakistan?  So uneducated, all of them. And, shooting around like maniacs.  Gun-toting robbers, they all are.  What are they good for?  Okay, bh'ee, kill other savages like yourself, but why come to Umreeka and spoil our good name?  My husband, poor Mr. Vilayatpasand, working day and night at the bank, paying taxes and parking tickets, voting Republican and nev-verrr breaking the law.  So hard it is to make a good image of yourself as model minority.  And then some barbarian Baluchi-type comes and ruins it.  Arre bh'ee, I am tell-ling all my friends, get your green card, quickly-quickly before they label Pakistan a terrorist country. Then getting US visas will be even more difficult. 



During the Afghan war, the United States Central Intelligence Agency had one of its second largest international operations in Pakistan.  Pakistan provided a base for US military and intelligence activities for its proxy war against the Soviet Union.  The mujahideen poured in from Afghanistan and some other Muslim countries, the guns were mostly thanks to the US and the money provided by the CIA, Saudi Arabia and the heroin trade. Pakistan and Afghanistan, therefore, were awash with mujahideen, arms and heroin. As a base for the CIA operation in Afghanistan, Pakistan became a destination for Muslim fundamentalists looking for a holy war and mercenaries looking for a way to make money from murder.  Furthermore, Pakistan also became, and continues to be, one of the largest suppliers of heroin in the world, and its own population of heroin addicts increased many-fold in the mid-eighties.  


It was also in the mid-eighties, at the height of the war, that internal political and sectarian violence erupted in Pakistan that has been escalating ever since. Rocket launchers, Kalashnikovs and other automatic and semi-automatic arms became easily and inexpensively available in the country as arms meant for the mujahideen found their way into the hands of common criminals, ordinary citizens, political parties and domestic terrorist organizations.


Once the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan and transformed overnight into a market-friendly, US-friendly Russia, the CIA beat a hasty retreat out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, leaving the two countries in shambles.  Afghanistan is utterly ravaged after 20 years of civil war and Pakistan has experienced the worst political violence since its inception, short of the civil war in East Pakistan.  What has remained are the mujahideen, now termed "international terrorists" (many of whom turn their anger against the US, their former patron who has spurned them), the guns and the heroin, which the CIA felt no obligation to clean up.  Ironically, and in an Orwellian fashion, so typical of the US, it now denounces the very people and processes it once encouraged, as the new threat to world peace.  Really, who is the real threat to world peace?