Ali Afzal Sahi<\/p>\n
The US-Pakistan engagement on military prerogatives is empirical proof of the fact that Pakistan has been an ally rather than a threat in the war against terrorism<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, United States President Joe Biden made a few distasteful remarks about Pakistan\u2019s nuclear policy. If the ethos of globalization rests on the advancement of cross-country diplomacy, Mr Biden\u2019s remarks may just as well have driven an axe to all such development. According to Mr Biden, Pakistan is one of the \u201cmost dangerous nations,\u201d which possesses, \u201cnuclear weapons without any cohesion.\u201d The resounding insensitivity of these words has every Pakistani citizen outraged to their core, yet foreign policy endeavours aimed at tackling such presumptuous words have been rather shallow. Were these words uttered as a result of a miscalculated political move, or was there something more sinister at play? Regardless of Mr Biden\u2019s intentions, his statement not only had a political bearing on US-Pakistan ties but also relegated Pakistan\u2019s diplomatic standing to a position of uncertainty. What is then needed is a thorough reading of Mr Biden\u2019s remarks; a word-by-word dissection of his claims and a critical analysis of the veracity of his statement. Surely, one must exert enough discernment to uncloak the real narrative at hand.
\nIn the first half of his statement, the US President anoints Pakistan as the \u201cmost dangerous nation.\u201d The remarks not only take away the humanness of individual Pakistanis but also labels them as dangerous people in blanket terms. If policy findings on the War on Terror have taught us anything, it is the negative impact yielded by stereotyping, which ranges from scapegoating entire communities to social ostracisation and the very inevitable\u2013and largely prevalent\u2013hate crimes. Pakistan may not be in the most ideal political situation. Rather, its foundation for human, political and civil rights is often shaky, at times.
\nBut this is not to say that Pakistan has not taken the relevant steps to build a coherent policy in the fight against global terrorism. According to a special report by the United States Insitute of Peace, some three hundred Pakistani military troops were killed in 2005 in the war on terrorism, more than any other US ally engaged for this cause.
\nIn addition to deploying its troops on the Afghan border, Pakistan has also given drone airspace to the US for military operations. In short, US-Pakistan engagement on military prerogatives is empirical proof of the fact that Pakistan has been an ally rather than a threat in the war against terrorism.
\nAs if attacking Pakistan\u2019s security mandate was not searing enough, Mr Biden went on to label its nuclear policy as \u201clacking cohesion.\u201d However, Pakistan\u2019s ranking on the Nuclear Safety Index (a benchmarker for nuclear security conditions) paints a completely different picture. In 2020, Pakistan was ranked 19th, India, 20th and the US, ninth. One might then inquire why Pakistan\u2019s strategy is singularly demonised as far from perfect when it has been appraised as the \u201cmost improved country\u201d with weapon-used nuclear materials by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI). To many ears, the US President\u2019s words resonate with utter vitriol; a state that once blew up entire cities and left generations to suffer in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion dares to comment on another state\u2019s supposedly lacking cohesive atomic policy.
\nPost the English Civil War, there was an emerging notion of the independent nation-state, a paradigmatic shift towards self-autonomy. Sovereignty, or the idea that a state is capable of governing itself, was the foundation of this new ideology. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan\u2019s ideology is rooted in the idea of the independent nation-state\u2013a mandate that beckons its subjects to emancipate themselves from the vestiges of a post-colonial mindset. Sadly, a person attempting to break the status quo is met with utmost opposition when trying to overthrow a system created at the behest of a hegemony where the weak are exploited at the hands of the powerful. Hence, this comes as no surprise that the democratic regime of Mr Khan was sabotaged as soon as a handful found their interests in jeopardy.
\nThe dichotomy between the western world and Islam has always been an omnipresent one, yet Mr Khan\u2019s narrative has always been one that calls for self-assertion and legal reform in a bid to interweave the precepts of an Islamic state with that of modern democracy. Yet, when political narratives have undertones of bias and prejudice, such attempts at harmonization are rendered futile by unduly subjecting a country to the guillotine of demonization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ali Afzal Sahi The US-Pakistan engagement on military prerogatives is empirical proof of the fact that Pakistan has been an ally rather than a threat in the war against terrorism Earlier this week, United States President Joe Biden made a few distasteful remarks about Pakistan\u2019s nuclear policy. If the ethos of globalization rests on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[10414,11158,11159],"class_list":{"0":"post-290544","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-article","7":"tag-ali-afzal-sahi","8":"tag-discerning","9":"tag-false-narratives"},"yoast_head":"\n