For those who haven’t heard, former Pakistan president/dictator and retired general, Pervez Musharraf, has just launched his own political party and wants his old job back. But if this editorial from Pakistan’s Frontier post is anything to go by, he has precious little chance of winning an election. The newspaper rips him for
According to the editorial, his coddling of ‘cowardly’ U.S.-led invaders’ and failure to defend Pakistan’s military and intelligence services from false charges of terrorist collusion have durably damaged the country’s image – and his political viability.
Below is just a small part of the Frontier Post editorial, which excoriates Musharraf for speaking up now – and not when he was in power – against the ‘U.S.-led invaders’:
While embedded Western journalists went to town shouting about how Pakistanis weren’t preventing or nabbing devious fighters, Musharraf took the tirade quietly, loath to utter some home truths. For one, he could have told the puny 20,000-strong force of U.S.-led raiders that Afghanistan, one of the world’s more obstreperous nations, has been vanquishing and expelling huge invading armies for ages.
This petty force never showed the spine to take on the fleeing Taliban and al-Qaeda, obviously for fear of death and injury. They remained immovably ensconced in their Kabul and Bagram redoubts. Yet, instead of demanding some soldiering from the invaders and insisting that they come out and corral the fleeing Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants, Musharraf was slavishly defensive and apologetic, behaving as though the invaders need only munch on pistachios in their fortified holes while Pakistan’s military does all the fighting. Musharraf’s slavishness cost this nation horrendously. Thanks to embedded Western journalists and media with global reach, without putting in much fighting, the invaders came across as great heroes. So for Musharraf’s silence, our military came to be viewed around the world as a scheming force colluding with Afghan Taliban and their allies. And this, despite the sacrifice of so many precious lives in fighting those who were permitted to sneak onto our land by the cowardly invaders.
For this unforgivable sin, this baneful impression of Pakistan’s military has permanently stuck in the global public mind. Not only that, we’re still viewed as playing a double game in the spurious war on terror – even as a horrific double game is being played on us.
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.
Founder and Managing Editor of Worldmeets.US