Ingrates!
“The problem is that we want American dollars but we, as a country, hate Americans,” a former ambassador from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to Washington told the McClatchy Washington Bureau in an interview coinciding with Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to the corrupt Southeast Asian nation, where violence greeted the Secretary of State, who concluded at the end of her three-day trip: “We’re not getting through.”
No surprise there, given Pakistan’s double face, beggar’s hand and thirst for revenge.
Pakistanis %u2013 mainstream and militant %u2013 are, seemingly, proud to malign America, even though the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted, unanimously, to triple non-military aid to their land upwards of seven billion dollars over five years.
To no gratitude, Clinton came bearing news that the US would gift Pakistan with $125 million as part of a new American-financed energy program to upgrade its toothless power plants, which have been left to decay by a succession of crooked governments, preoccupied with their nuclear ambitions and personal bank accounts instead of with helping their people to see the light.
Evidently, greedy, dependent Pakistanis are not above accepting US dollars even though Hamid Mir %u2013 a national “Walter Cronkite” and host of the influential news show, Capital Talk %u2013 tells the BBC in an October 30 interview: “The whole of Pakistan is anti-American,” lamely adding, “It would be very easy for me to be the darling of Washington, but then I will become the villain for my viewers and the common people in Pakistan.”
Mr. Mir should use his prominence to address his nation’s shameful human rights record, instead of condemning the US, which continues to welcome Pakistani émigrés and has suspended its magnanimous stream of big bucks to Pakistan only six times in the last 55 years, largely due to atrocities committed against Americans there.
Amnesty International has “long been concerned about the persistent pattern of human rights violations occurring in Pakistan [where] arbitrary detention, torture, deaths in custody, forced disappearances and extrajudicial execution are rampant.”
In November 2007, before he became a vice president and did an about-face on his foreign policy on Pakistan, then-Senator Joe Biden told CBS News’ “Face the Nation”: “I’m not sure how much good that military aid we’re giving [then-President Pervez Musharraf] to fight the extremists is doing us anyway.”
Clearly, no lessons have been learned from our past dealings with this scoundrel state, which continues to capitalize upon its contempt for America.
The Obama Administration should rethink its approach to rogue Islamist regimes, who are also our sworn enemies.
Frustrated and propelled by a near-rabid religious belief, groundless grudges and plain ignorance, even outwardly moderate Pakistanis are relentless in their disdain of America, even though the Pakistani Taliban has recently shifted its attacks from suicide bombings aimed at western targets and security operations to more lethal and random attacks in cities meant to annihilate their own civilians. What’s up with that?
Pakistani Americans should be out in full force admonishing their motherland and their mainstream nationals who lately seem indistinguishable from radicals, and who cannot get their act together despite having inhabited the planet since the Bronze Age. At the very least, it would send a vital message to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan that its expatriates and their offspring are proud to be Americans %u2013 and prepared to uphold Lady Liberty’s honor.
