Double Standards
Merely a few weeks before reassuming the U.S. Presidential office, the political antecedents of the rise of ultra-nationalistic demagoguery in the face of Donald Trump, laced with his populist security narrative, have started raising their ugly head. Opposed to his last presidential stint, which kicked off with a bang with a fiery twit blaming Islamabad for its alleged ‘lies and deceit’ in working with the United States, the forthcoming U.S. administration has gone to the extreme this time, showing its sinister motive to beef up sanctions already imposed by the outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden on Pakistan’s long-range ballistic missile program while putting the program under more scrutiny. This was followed by the imposition of additional sanctions on four Pakistani companies linked to the country’s ballistic missile program. This was not even enough when, of late, Jon Finer, the Deputy National Security Advisor for the Joe Biden Administration, pushed the limits by declaring Pakistan’s missile program as “an emerging threat to the United States.” The top US official elaborated on his apocryphal concerns on the pretext that since Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation, is developing long-range ballistic missile capabilities, the country could target regions beyond South Asia, thus making it an “emerging threat” to the United States too.
A shocking yet totally misplaced allegations in all accounts, the aforementioned concerns of a top U.S. official at the very centre of U.S. policymaking underscore how far the once-close ties between a so-called non-NATO ally called Pakistan and the United States have deteriorated since the withdrawal of the U.S. from Afghanistan in August 2021. Most importantly, the latest flurry of political developments in Washington, together with many a deceptive assertion of the U.S. administration concerning Pakistan’s nuclear program, must ring alarm bells in Islamabad because of the latent moves the forthcoming U.S. government is planning to make right after coming into power. Considering many Indian-Americans along with a coterie of well-known anti-Pakistan lobbyists President-elect Donald Trump has chosen for top White House jobs and critical Cabinet posts, the foreboding intentions are clear for a cash-strapped country like Pakistan, which is already fighting a multidimensional fifth-generation warfare while safeguarding its nuclear assets from several threats in parallel.
Other than the U.S., the United Kingdom and the European Union have also expressed concerns over Pakistani military courts trying civilians, together with the continuing imprisonment of Pakistan’s former prime minister. The emerging scenario does not bode well for Pakistan as collective international pressure on several fronts suggests the global powers have an agenda up their sleeves and are thus leaving no stone unturned to corner the world’s 2nd largest Muslim state even on the flimsiest alibi. Israel, on the other hand, is bombarding human populations with the most devastating weapons of mass destruction. However, it can still avoid any liability, flouting all the diplomatic conventions and humanitarian principles in Gaza, Iran, Syria, and now Yemen, that too with the help of the international community headed by none other than the United States. In this specified context ruled by global hypocrisy and double standards, Pakistan must take all pre-emptive measures on military, diplomatic, and political levels to confront any impending threats to its missile and nuclear program while improving its poor socio-economic and political stability indicators on a war footing.
President & Editor in Chief