India planted Pakistan’s flag on both operations. A prejudiced world lapped it up immediately. Now India could strengthen its anti-terrorism laws and make them more demonic. It did just that. ‘Conveniently’ too, the police officer investing the earlier Samjhota train massacre of over 50 Pakistanis and the murder of Indian Muslims in a textile town was ‘accidentally’ shot in the back during the Mumbai melee. Both false flags served India well.
By indulging in terrorism on its own land and people to justify a future objective, India confirmed that state terrorism that begets non-state terrorism is alive and well. Since then India’s terrorism in Kashmir and other areas against peoples wanting independence continues unabated. Many have been killed or hanged, rape has increased and homes destroyed by this largest ‘democracy’ in the world that we are asked to admire and emulate. Not that India’s crimes mitigate the crimes of other states. All states are like that. State terrorism has always been the standard operating procedure of governments of elites, for elites, by elites and of local and foreign hegemons to cow down a people. Rape does that most effectively for shame and disgrace breaks a people’s will. It’s no different in the animal kingdom: when a gang of monkeys takes over a parliament of monkeys the first thing they do is rape the males and females to stamp their authority over them and spread their genes. Mankind is still there. It may have progressed scientifically but has put much of this knowledge to terrorist use because societally it has progressed hardly a jot. All we have done is move from the natural jungle to the concrete jungle. Human behaviour remains akin to monkeys despite God trying His best to make humans of us. Only the sugarcoating has changed.
According to well-worn tradition, the Indian foreign office’s response was unexceptional: the Indian official has since denied his statement, it said. This too is standard operating procedure and shouldn’t be taken seriously until there is a full and transparent international investigation. In all likelihood the official was threatened and withdrew his statement – standard operating procedure again.
The Mumbai story was a sailor’s yarn. The terrorists sailed from Karachi in motorised rubber dinghies to Mumbai right through a joint naval exercise of the Indian navy and customs. Some landed on a quiet beach while others docked at Mumbai’s main pier, some young men disembarked bearing crates, hailed taxis, drove to their destinations buying food and alcohol along the way right under the nose of the Indian police and did the deed. Tell me another.
Without cogent evidence that Pakistan was behind the attacks, many suspected that it was a put up job. Of course ‘believers’ without a rational answer trashed them as ‘conspiracy theorists’. “How can a government kill its own people,” they asked. Naive simpletons, they don’t know how demonically governments work. They don’t know that governments are not burdened by morality or principles but only by self-interest. Human casualties are just statistics. History is replete with government stupidities driven by immorality and lawlessness. Morality, laws and principles are for the ruled. For rulers they are flexible. Ubiquitous national interest is often confused with a government’s and even a ruler’s self-interest. How else would civilisations, empires and states crumble? Our governments have done many stupid things too which is why we are in the pathetic state we are in, but they’re not so stupid as to do something that would so quickly bring opprobrium upon them and so obviously suit India. The age-old question “Who benefits from a crime” is easily forgotten by the self-hating mentally colonised whose intellectual pretentions are based on dislike for their societies for not aping western social and political norms to which they are enslaved. It now transpires that Indian governments are more stupid than ours.
This is not the first time that India has planted false flags. Just before Clinton’s Indian visit he was debating whether to swing by Pakistan or not because of its new military ruler when five Sikhs were killed in occupied Jammu. India immediately fingered Pakistan to stop Clinton’s visit. Unfortunately he did come like a king-emperor – a visitation, really. We allowed him to lecture us on state television, independent television then not being allowed by the democrats who preceded the ‘dictator’ who allowed them afterwards. It later transpired that the Sikh massacre was India’s work. After 9/11, America cozied up to the same ‘dictator’ in a perfect demonstration of flexibility of ‘principles’ and utter hypocrisy. Suddenly, the hated ‘dictator’ became the biggest photo-op in the world.
America leads the way in false flag operations. Many Americans suspect that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job to justify the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and later Iraq. Guantanamo Bay became a gulag. Technically outside American territory it was thus beyond US laws where suspects could be tortured wantonly. Homeland Security was born. The Patriot Act was enacted to strengthen anti-terrorist laws, just what India emulated.
After the London attacks came the anti-Terrorism Bill. Both countries started rendering suspects to other obliging countries to torture suspects and extract information and confessions from them, true or false. States that make laws can easily break them ‘legally’.
The Abbottabad caper was not a false flag but was it based on a falsehood? Many Americans claim that Osama bin Laden died of Marfan syndrome in November 2001 in Afghanistan after being treated in the American Hospital in Dubai by CIA doctors. They say America wanted to create the justification to scuttle from an unwinnable war in Afghanistan by claiming that the purpose had been served with the killing of bin Laden. America did announce the pullout soon after the Abbottabad caper. What fuels suspicions further is that Osama’s body wasn’t displayed. The excuse: it was too gruesome a sight. Since when did ‘gruesome’ bother governments when they have to prove something? Wasn’t televising the hanging of Saddam, the dead bodies of his sons and the televised slaughter of Gaddafi gruesome? Don’t tell me that you really believe that one of Saddam’s hangmen could smuggle in a mobile phone, video his execution and record the abuse and invective rained down on him without occupying America knowing it and allowing it to be televised? Or that US surveillance didn’t identify Gaddafi’s convoy, bomb it, tell their ‘rebels’ where he was hiding, let them proceed with his slaughter and then put his body on display for days in the cold room of a department store, all televised? If you do you’ve got to be worse than naive, a gullible automaton programmed to lap up anything dished out by America. States can be demonic and do satanic things. They dance with the Devil.
Don’t take our partially ‘leaked’ Abbottabad Commission report seriously. The purpose was to demonise our army. Can a commission of slaves really acknowledge the perfidy of its masters? They can only play along and divert attention from the truth by placing much of the blame on themselves while fingering their masters somewhat to create false credibility.
Why do our governments always turn the other cheek, as do our hegemon appeasers? Why did we offer to send our ISI chief to India after the Mumbai attacks? Why did we say we were involved in Mumbai? Whose governments are our governments anyway? Is our foreign office a fiction, good only for issuing denials, reacting and giving statements and briefings? You only have to read and hear some of our retired sit-on-the-fence ambassadors, a few exceptions notwithstanding, to know what material they are made of. What kind of people do we make our ambassadors? Our political ambassadors are usually worse. How could sycophants be better?
In perennially bending over backwards we have not become a ‘soft state’ but a government of softies. Our Ka’aba and Qibla have changed from Mecca to Washington. We worship the Golden Calf. All our leaders want is that the small trickle of money coming their way from America and its tools like the IMF continues and they can cling to power to continue looting us. We take inadequate and inaccurate media reports and western journals as gospel truth. The real truth is entirely absent.
Only when we develop our human capital and arm it with the latest education will we develop economically. Our subjugators will be waiting at our door just as they are waiting at China’s door, indebted to it to their gills. Can’t you see how their economic sovereignty has diminished? Their military sovereignty persists but for how long because without economic sovereignty military sovereignty soon diminishes too. Remember the Soviet Union that broke into pieces despite its 28,000 nuclear warheads and fearsome military might because its economy had failed?
The writer is a political analyst.
This article was published in the 'Pakistan Today' newspaper on 21 July 2013.
