How Obama Administration Covered Up Swine Flu Pandemic?

It baffles the mind whether it’s willful blindness or anterograde amnesia but while drawing parallels with coronavirus outbreak, mainstream media appears to vividly recall Spanish flu of 1918 from a century ago and doesn’t seem to have an inkling about a much more pertinent example of H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009-10, even though it shared a lot of common characteristics with COVID-19 pandemic.

Although official statistics are much lower, according to subsequent peer-reviewed studies [1], H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009 infected 700 million to 1.4 billion people world-wide and caused 1,50,000 to 5,75,000 fatalities only in the first year of the outbreak in 2009.

Cumulative number of fatalities in subsequent years could be well above a million of which hundreds of thousands of deaths could have occurred in the worst affected countries, the US, Mexico and Brazil, though unreported because extensive testing wasn’t done at the time of the outbreak.

Even though vaccine was invented in 2010, the H1N1 virus was eventually defeated, particularly in the developing world, by natural immunity and not be medical remedies. WHO reclassified it as “variant of seasonal flu” and the dreaded designation “pandemic” was removed in August 2010.

The reason why corporate media and international health organizations shirked their responsibility to create public awareness on the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in the US, Mexico and Brazil was due to the fact that the US economy was going through economic recession that began in 2008 and lasted into 2009, whereas the swine flu epidemic began in March 2009 and lasted into 2010.

Extensive media coverage of the outbreak could have further exacerbated the recession, which it did in part, but thankfully no sweeping lockdowns or quarantine measures were enforced then. Mainstream news outlets were hushed up from reporting on the H1N1 epidemic by then newly elected Obama administration, and self-censorship from a decade ago appears to have restrained corporate media from mentioning the name of swine flu pandemic even now.

Whether it’s swine flu of 2009 or coronavirus outbreak of today, pandemics are like a deluge that can be managed to minimize the damage but cannot be contained. All it takes is a small crack in the embankment for the force of nature to unleash its fury and eliminate all obstacles coming in its way.

When the epidemic is surging exponentially, the contagion infects millions of people within the short span of several months, of which only a minuscule fraction exhibits symptoms and is diagnosed with the infection, while the rest are asymptomatic and go unnoticed. But they develop resistance against re-infection, thus contributing to achieving herd immunity.

Had political correctness been the remedy, designating coronavirus outbreak as seasonal flu would solve the dilemma, as WHO reclassified swine flu pandemic as common cold in August 2010 and gave the international economy breathing space in the aftermath of 2008-9 global recession.

Technically, a patient tested positive for HIV virus isn’t said to be suffering from AIDS. AIDS is the severe form of the infection when dormant HIV virus becomes active, begins replicating and starts causing harm to the body tissues and organs. Similarly, a patient tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 isn’t actually suffering from COVID-19, unless the patient develops symptoms of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Treatment and hospitalization is only needed for severe cases of COVID-19, and asymptomatic and mild cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection simply have to be quarantined for a couple of weeks either at homes or at quarantine centers until their natural immunity overcomes the virus so they don’t pose a risk of spreading infection among communities.

Periodically, epidemics come and go. They are defeated by body’s natural immune system and don’t need treatment. Certain contagions, like Ebola with case fatality ratio of 90%, require preventive measures, such as quarantines and lockdowns, but the rest, like H1N1 swine flu, H5N1 bird flu and SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19 with infection fatality ratio of less than 0.2%, are treated like common cold that causes tens of thousands deaths every year in the US alone. Common cold influenza spreads across the world in yearly outbreaks, resulting in about three to five million cases of severe illness and about 290,000 to 650,000 deaths.

Even though the infection fatality rate of H1N1 swine flu was lower, at 0.02%, compared to COVID-19’s 0.2%, if the total number of cases in the calculation is reduced from 1.4 billion to a few hundred million and the actual number of fatalities caused by swine flu in 2009-10 is accurately calculated, then H1N1’s infection fatality rate would probably be comparable to COVID-19’s fatality rate. Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 could even be less than 0.1% once the outbreak subsides and accurate number of infections and fatalities are correctly known.

Even the most accurate COVID-19 test RT-PCR only has an accuracy level of 50-60%, especially in asymptomatic individuals or if the virus has penetrated deep into respiratory tract. Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, RT-PCR (viral testing), is considered the gold standard of diagnosis for COVID-19 and other viruses. Although it has high sensitivity and specificity in a laboratory setting, chances of finding virus in specimens are: 90% in Bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, 70% in sputum and 50-60% in nasal swabs, though used most frequently.

If extensive sero-epidemiological studies are done, it would be found out that actual prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 is much higher than 25 million reported infections, perhaps comparable to H1N1 swine flu’s 700 million to 1.4 billion world-wide infections.

At the peak of the outbreak in March and April, Italian doctors reported the actual number of cases could be as high as 6,50,000, particularly in the worst-hit Lombardy and Milan regions, though total cases in Italy until August are still reported to be only 2,67,000.

Similarly, Iranian epidemiologist Ehsan Mostafavi recently said: “About 15 million Iranians may have experienced being infected with this virus since the outbreak began.” That amounts to 1 in 5 Iranians or 20% of Iran’s population.

Coronavirus may have infected ten times more Americans than reported, according to a report [2] by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Thus, the actual number of infections in the US as well as Europe could be ten to twenty times higher than the official statistics, which is enough for the viral infection to reach endemic steady state and for the population to develop herd immunity against the contagion.

An extensive study [3] in Spain shows 5% population has developed antibodies, which means number of infections is ten times higher than reported 4,40,000 cases. People in urban areas have up to 10% prevalence of antibodies.

Though widely believed to have originated in Wuhan in January, the exact date and place of origin of SARS-CoV-2 are also doubtful. A Spanish research team found [4] traces of the virus in a March 2019 sewage sample whereas the outbreak began in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January 2020. In fact, several Chinese diplomats recently cast doubts over the widely accepted theory that the flu virus mutated by consuming bats in wet markets of China.

Coronavirus outbreak is fundamentally the failing of highly commercialized medical science. Billions of dollars are invested in Big Pharma. But for what purpose, to make skin care products and aphrodisiacs, for performing needless cosmetic surgeries; and hundreds of billions are spent on manufacturing state-of-the-art weapon system as deterrence against adversaries. Yet no preparations were made for dealing with a contingency as catastrophic as a pandemic. That’s criminal negligence, and we have nobody to blame but the capitalist social order and commercialization of essential public services.

Even though corporate media promptly declared Trump’s “drug of choice” antimalarial chloroquine for treating a viral infection to be a hoax, its own prescriptions fared no better than placebos. For instance, dexamethasone would be as effective against coronavirus infections as it is in treating arthritis. Competent orthopedics seldom prescribe it because it’s a steroidal drug having more adverse effects than therapeutic ones. Apparently, the manufacturers of remdesivir and dexamethasone in Big Pharma paid millions of dollars bribes to the mainstream media to market the drugs, which in turn is inclined to sensationalize any news story pertaining to COVID-19.

The only remedy that has proved effective in treating COVID-19 thus far has been convalescent plasma therapy. Plasma therapy works on the principle that antibodies contained in the blood of previously infected person would provide resistance against infection through transfusion of convalescent plasma into a COVID-19 patient’s circulatory system.

Thus, it basically works on the same principle that vaccination does, though plasma therapy would be classified as therapeutic vaccine instead of more common prophylactic ones for treating widespread epidemics. A word of caution, though, it should only be used in severe cases of COVID-19 as prescribed by physicians. Because the treatment is still in experimental stages and antibodies could prove potentially harmful in patients with mild symptoms of the disease.

Globally, the leading causes of 56 million deaths every year are: 15 million deaths from heart diseases and strokes; 5 million from lung diseases; 2 million from dementias; 1.5 million from diabetes; over a million each from diarrhea, tuberculosis and AIDS; and 1.5 million deaths in road traffic accidents. In comparison, coronavirus pandemic has claimed less than a million lives thus far but is getting undue media coverage due to politicization of the pandemic debate.

Footnotes:

[1] H1N1 swine flu caused 1,50,000 to 5,75,000 fatalities:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/pandemic-global-estimates.htm

[2] Coronavirus may have infected 10 times more Americans than reported, CDC says:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-cases-idUSKBN23W2PU

[3] An extensive study in Spain shows 5% population has developed antibodies:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/06/health/spain-coronavirus-antibody-study-lancet-intl/index.html

[4] A Spanish research team found traces of the virus in a March 2019 sewage sample:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science-idUSKBN23X2HQ

Dangerous Escalation between Nuclear-armed Rivals India and Pakistan

Pervez Musharraf and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

In a pre-dawn airstrike at 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday, 12 Indian Mirage 2000 fighter jets intruded into Pakistan’s airspace and dropped their payload on the top of a mountain at a terrorist training camp, allegedly belonging to a jihadist group that had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack in the Indian-administered Kashmir on February 14 in which more than 40 Indian soldiers had lost their lives.

Although the Pakistan Army’s official spokesman, Major General Asif Ghafoor, tweeted after the Indian incursion that the Indian jets had intruded 3-4 miles in Muzaffarabad sector of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, according to location provided by local residents, as reported by BBC Urdu [1], the site of the airstrike was dozens of miles inside the Pakistani territory between Balakot and Mansehra.

In order to understand the underlying causes of the Kashmir dispute, the history of India and Pakistan needs to be revisited. Although secularism, pluralism and multiculturalism are the accepted social axioms of modern worldview, the demand for separate nationhood on the basis of ethno-linguistic identity is accepted in the Western discourse; and it cannot simply be dismissed on the premise that since pluralism and multiculturalism are the accepted principles, therefore the creation of a nation state on the basis of ethno-linguistic identity becomes redundant. The agreed-upon principles of pluralism and multiculturalism become operative after the creation of a nation state and not before it.

Similarly, even though secularism is an accepted principle in the Western discourse, but an ethno-religious group cannot be denied its right to claim separate nationhood on the basis of religious identity; in this case also, the principle of inclusive secularism becomes functional after the creation of a state and not prior to it.

The Muslims of Pakistan share a lot of cultural similarities with their Hindu brethren as well, because we share a similar regional culture and lingua franca, Urdu or Hindi; however, different ethno-linguistic groups comprising Pakistan – the Punjabis, Pashtuns, Sindhis and Baloch – have more in common with each other than with the Hindus of India, because all of them belong to the same religion Islam.

Before joining the Muslim League, Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was one of the leading proponents of Hindu-Muslim unity. He attended the meetings of the inner circle of the Indian National Congress, and reached a well-considered conclusion that the outwardly liberal and secular Congress was nothing more than a thinly veiled Hindu nationalist party.

Even today, 70 years after the independence, Muslims constitute 15% of India’s 1.2 billion population, that’s more than 180 million Muslims in India today. Although we do find a few showpiece Muslims in ceremonial positions, I would like to know what is the representation of Muslims in India’s state institutions, their proportion in higher bureaucracy, judiciary, police and army, and their presence and participation in India’s civic and political life?

Fact of the matter is that just like the Indian National Congress, the Republic of India is also nothing more than a thinly disguised Hindu nationalist state. The Indian Muslims have lagged so far behind and they have been disenfranchised to such an extent that they need some kind of an “affirmative action,” like the one carried out in the US during the 1960s to improve the miserable lot of Afro-American communities.

Regardless, here we must try to understand the attitudes and mindsets of the British Indian leaders that why did they favor certain rallying calls and disapproved the rest? In my opinion, this preferential treatment had to do with personal inclinations and ambitions of the British Indian leaders and the interests of their respective communities as perceived by the leaders in heterogeneous and multi-ethnic societies like the British India.

A leader whose ambitions were limited only to his own ethnic group would rally his followers around their shared ethno-linguistic identity, but politicians who had larger ambitions would look for common factors that unite diverse ethnic groups, that’s where the role of religion becomes politically relevant in traditional societies.

It suited the personal ambitions of the Muslim League leadership to rally their supporters around the cause of Islamic identity, and it benefited the political agenda of the Congress leadership to unite all Indians under the banner of a more inclusive and secular Indian national identity in order to keep India united under the permanent yoke of numerical Hindu majority.

However, mere rhetoric is never a substitute for tangible actions, no matter how noble and superficially appealing it may sound. The Indian National Congress right from its inception was a thinly disguised Hindu nationalist party that only had a pretense of inclusive secularism, that’s why some of the most vocal proponents of Hindu-Muslim unity, like Jinnah and Iqbal, later became its most fierce critics, especially after Gandhi and his protégé Nehru took over the leadership of Congress in 1921.

Although Orientalist historians generally give credit to Jinnah, as an individual, for single-handedly realizing the dream of Pakistan, in fact the Pakistan Movement was the logical conclusion of the Aligarh Movement. This fact elucidates that how much difference a single educational institution can make in the history of nations. Aligarh Muslim University bred whole generations of educated Muslims who were acutely aware of decadent state of Muslims in British India, and most of them later joined the Muslim League to make the dream of Pakistan a reality.

Regarding the allegation that the Muslim League leaders were imperialist collaborators, until Lord Wavell, the British viceroys used to take a reasonably neutral approach toward communal issues in British India, but on the eve of the independence of India and Pakistan, the Indian leaders Gandhi and Nehru specifically implored Clement Attlee’s government in the UK to appoint Lord Louis Mountbatten as the viceroy of British India.

More importantly, the independence of India and Pakistan was originally scheduled for June 1948, but once again the Indian National Congress leadership beseeched the British Empire to bring the date of independence forward to August 1947. It was not a coincidence that on both critically important occasions, Her Majesty’s government obliged the Congress leadership because the British wanted to keep the Dominion of India within the folds of the British Commonwealth after the independence.

Had the British Raj in India not brought forward the date of independence by almost an year, the nascent Indian and Pakistani armed forces and border guards could have had an opportunity to avert the carnage that took place during the division of Punjab on the eve of independence.

Furthermore, Lord Mountbatten served as India’s first governor general and he helped Jawaharlal Nehru’s government consolidate the Indian dominion by forcefully integrating more than 500 princely states. Mountbatten also made a similar offer to Jinnah to serve as Pakistan’s governor general, too, and when the latter refused, Mountbatten threatened Jinnah in so many words: “It will cost you and the dominion of Pakistan more than just tables and chairs.”

No wonder then, it was the collusion between the Congress leadership, Radcliffe and Mountbatten that eventually culminated in the Indian troops’ successful invasion of the princely state of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir by using the Gurdaspur-Pathankot corridor that was provided to India by the Radcliffe boundary commission. Thus, creating a permanent territorial dispute between two neighbors that has not been resolved 70 years after the independence despite several United Nations resolutions and mediation efforts.

Kashmir’s Savior and the Frontier’s Gandhi

There are only two illustrious South Asian leaders who never went to jail during their otherwise stellar political careers. One was the founder of Pakistan, Jinnah, and the other a crusader against corruption who has been given the sobriquet ‘Pakistan Khan’ by his cultist followers. Perceptive readers are already well aware of the reason why nobody can dare to arrest the latter, even if he lays a four-month-long siege to the paramount institutions of state and stops the state machinery from functioning.

Regarding the allegation levelled against Jinnah by Orientalist historians that he was an imperialist collaborator, it is so preposterous that it would be a waste of time trying to dispel the ludicrous accusation. Instead, I would implore the readers to allow me the liberty to scribble a tongue-in-cheek rant here.

It’s an incontestable fact that Jinnah, Iqbal and Sir Syed were imperialist collaborators who fell prey to the divide-and-rule policy of the British Raj. There were only two progressive Muslim leaders who joined forces with Mahatma Gandhi’s socialist and anti-imperialist Congress against the tyranny of the Raj. One was Sheikh Abdullah of Kashmir and the other was Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Bacha Khan) of Pashtunistan.

After the partition of British India, Sheikh Abdullah worked hand in glove with Pundit Nehru to make Muslim-majority Kashmir a part of secular Indian utopia. The Muslims of Kashmir trusted the charismatic messiah with their lives and the latter met their expectations by conniving with the Congress’ pundits. Today Kashmir is thriving and prospering under the suzerainty of India and the dynamic leadership of Sheikh Abdullah’s descendants, Farooq Abdullah and Omar Abdullah, the true representatives of Kashmiri Muslims.

Had it been up to the visionary and tactful Bacha Khan, he too would have made sure to make Pashtunistan a colony of India. However, a plebiscite was held on the eve of independence in the erstwhile North West Frontier Province; and regrettably, the gullible Pashtuns of the doomed province overwhelmingly voted to become part of an Islamist and reactionary Pakistan.

Let me clarify here that I am not against Bacha Khan and his Red Shirts, ‘Khudai Khidmatgar,’ movement, as such. It was a laudable achievement that he politically mobilised the Pashtuns for independence and enfranchisement. But I have doubts about his political acumen. From his bearing, he appeared like a simpleton who was given to whims and personal attachments. But the people that he was dealing with, Gandhi, Nehru and Patel, were shrewd politicians.

The astute leadership of Congress wheedled and coaxed Bacha Khan and Sheikh Abdullah to form a political alliance with the thinly veiled Hindu nationalist Congress against the interests of Pashtun and Kashmiri Muslims, whom the aforementioned leaders respectively represented. And the way I see it, it had less to do with any political convergence of ideas; rather, it was more about their personal bonding with the shrewd leadership of Congress.

Jinnah was a brash and forthright statesman who used to treat his party workers and associates as subordinates. And Pashtuns, as we all know, are given to ‘Pashtunwali’ (honour), courtesy and other such trappings of symbolic respect. Gandhi and Nehru struck a chord there with feigned cordiality and ensnared two leading Muslim luminaries of freedom struggle, hence striking a political marriage of convenience between the Congress and the Pashtun and Kashmiri nationalists.

In the end, Sheikh Abdullah legitimised the Indian occupation of Kashmir by becoming its first chief minister, though he was later imprisoned by none other than his good old friend, Pundit Nehru. But when Pakistan and, more importantly, the Kashmiri Muslims needed his leadership and guidance the most, he backstabbed them simply because of his personal friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru.

More to the point, in the British Indian context, the divide-and-rule policy originally meant that imperialists used this strategy to sow the seeds of dissension and communal hatred to prolong their tyrannical rule in India. However, some Indian historians later came up with the fancy notion that the colonial powers lent their support to the idea of creation of Pakistan in order to use the latter as a bulwark against communist influence in the region; this latter conspiracy theory is farthest from truth.

Firstly, the British imperialists took immense pride in creating a unified and cohesive British Indian army, and it’s a historical fact that the latter organisation was vehemently opposed to the division of the British Indian armed forces. It simply defies common sense that if the colonial power was apprehensive of the expanding influence of Soviet Union in the region; in that case, it would have preferred to leave behind a unified and strong India army, rather than two divided armies at loggerheads with each other.

Secondly, although Pakistan joined the Washington-led and anti-communist SEATO and CENTO alliances in the 1950s and it also fought America’s Jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s, but we must bear in mind that there were actually two power-centres of communism during the Cold War, i.e. the Soviet Bolshevism and the Chinese Maoism.

If the intention of the colonial powers was to use Pakistan as a bulwark against communist influence in the region, then how come Pakistan established such cordial relations with the communist China during the 1960s that it voted in favour of China’s membership into the United Nations in 1971, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto played a pivotal role in arranging Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

Fact of the matter is that both India and Pakistan had good relations with the Western powers during the Cold War. However, India had friendly ties with Soviet Union and adversarial relations with China, while Pakistan had adversarial relations with Soviet Union and friendly ties with China. The relations of India and Pakistan with the communist powers were based more on their national interests than on ideological lines.

The relatively modern Indian historians who came up with this fancy conspiracy theory have actually retrospectively applied the theory to the historical chain of events: that is, they conceived the theory after Pakistan joined the anti-communist alliances and after it played the role of Washington’s client state during the Soviet-Afghan Jihad. At the time of independence movement in 1940s, neither the Hindus nor the Muslims knew anything about the aftermath of their respective freedom struggles.

Is Strasbourg Attack a False Flag to Thwart Yellow Vests?

On Tuesday evening, a brazen terror attack occurred in the French city of Strasbourg, claiming three lives and injuring a dozen, six of whom are said to be in critical condition. The suspect was known to police as an Islamic extremist and has been identified as 29-year-old Cherif Chekatt.

The suspected shooter evaded capture from a police dragnet and is still on the run, prompting fears of a follow-up attack. The suspect was shot and injured by soldiers guarding the Christmas market in Strasbourg, but escaped in a hijacked taxi.

Cherif Chekatt is said to be on a watch-list of around 26,000 people, of whom 10,000 are believed to have been radicalized. He had previously served prison sentences in France and Germany for common law offences and fought twice with security forces.

It’s worth noting that although the Western powers are ostensibly fighting a war against terrorism, they had worked hand-in-glove with the Islamic jihadists from 2011 to 2014 to topple the hostile regimes of Qaddafi in Libya and Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

In line with their foreign policy, Britain, France and Germany gave a free hand to the Islamic jihadists and their patrons based in those countries to wage proxy wars against the governments in Libya and Syria. France was particularly vulnerable because it has a large Muslim diaspora from its former North African colonies.

The seven-year-long conflict in Syria that gave birth to scores of militant groups, including the Islamic State, and after the conflict spilled across the border into neighboring Iraq in early 2014 was directly responsible for the spate of Islamic State-inspired terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq, an informal pact existed between the Western powers, their regional Sunni allies and jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a Iranian axis. In accordance with the pact, militants were trained and armed in the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan to battle the Syrian government.

This arrangement of an informal pact between the Western powers and the jihadists of the Middle East against the Iranian axis worked well up to August 2014, when the Obama administration made a volte-face on its previous regime change policy in Syria and began conducting air strikes against one group of Sunni militants battling the Syrian government, the Islamic State, after the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

After this reversal of policy in Syria by the Western powers and the subsequent Russian military intervention on the side of the Syrian government in September 2015, the momentum of jihadists’ expansion in Syria and Iraq stalled, and they felt that their Western patrons had committed a treachery against the Sunni jihadists’ cause, that’s why they were infuriated and rose up in arms to exact revenge for this betrayal.

If we look at the chain of events, the timing of the spate of terror attacks against the West was critical: the Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014, the Western powers began conducting air strikes against the Islamic State’s targets in Iraq and Syria in August 2014, and after a lull of almost a decade since the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005, respectively, the first such incident of terrorism occurred on the Western soil at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and then the Islamic State carried out the audacious November 2015 Paris attacks, the March 2016 Brussels bombings, the June 2016 truck-ramming incident in Nice, and three horrific terror attacks took place in the United Kingdom within a span of less than three months in 2017, and after that the Islamic State carried out the Barcelona attack in August 2017.

More to the point, the dilemma that the jihadists and their regional backers faced in Syria was quite unique: in the wake of the Ghouta chemical weapons attacks in Damascus in August 2013, the stage was all set for yet another no-fly zone and “humanitarian intervention” a la Qaddafi’s Libya; the war hounds were waiting for a finishing blow and then-Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, and the former Saudi intelligence chief, Bandar bin Sultan, were shuttling between the Western capitals to lobby for the military intervention. Francois Hollande had already announced his intentions and David Cameron was also onboard.

Here it should be remembered that even during the Libyan intervention, the Obama administration’s policy was a bit ambivalent and France under the leadership of Sarkozy had taken the lead role. In Syria’s case, however, the British parliament forced Cameron to seek a vote for military intervention in the House of Commons before committing the British troops and air force to Syria.

Taking cue from the British parliament, the US Congress also compelled Obama to seek approval before another ill-conceived military intervention; and since both the administrations lacked the requisite majority in their respective parliaments and the public opinion was also fiercely against another Middle Eastern war, therefore Obama and Cameron dropped their plans of enforcing a no-fly zone over Syria.

In the end, France was left alone as the only Western power still in favor of intervention; at that point, however, the seasoned Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, staged a diplomatic coup by announcing that the Syrian regime was willing to ship its chemical weapons stockpiles out of Syria and subsequently the issue was amicably resolved.

Turkey, Jordan and the Gulf Arab states, the main beneficiaries of the Sunni Jihad against the Shi’a-led government in Syria, however, had lost a golden opportunity to deal a fatal blow to their regional rivals.

To add insult to the injury, the Islamic State, one of the numerous Sunni Arab militant outfits fighting in Syria, overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in 2014, from where the US troops had withdrawn only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

Additionally, when the graphic images and videos of Islamic State’s executions surfaced on the internet, the Western powers were left with no other choice but to adopt some countermeasures to show that they were still sincere in pursuing their dubious “war on terror” policy; at the same time, however, they assured their Turkish, Jordanian and Gulf Arab allies that despite fighting a war against the maverick jihadist outfit, the Islamic State, the Western policy of training and arming the so-called “moderate” Syrian militants will continue apace and that Bashar al-Assad’s days were numbered, one way or the other.

Moreover, declaring the war against the Islamic State in August 2014 served another purpose too: in order to commit the US Air Force to Syria and Iraq, the Obama administration needed the approval of the US Congress which was not available, as I have already mentioned, but by declaring a war against the Islamic State, which is a designated terrorist organization, the Obama administration availed itself of the war on terror provisions in the US laws and thus circumvented the US Congress.

But then Russia threw a spanner in the works of NATO and its Gulf Arab allies in September 2015 by its surreptitious military buildup in Latakia that was executed with an element of surprise unheard of since General Rommel, the Desert Fox. And now Turkey, Jordan, the Gulf Arab states and their jihadist proxies in Syria find themselves at the receiving end in the Syrian conflict.

Keeping this background of the quagmire created by the Western powers in Syria and Iraq to appease their regional allies, Israel and the Gulf states, in mind, it becomes amply clear that the Western powers are not sincere in pursuing their dubious war on terror policy as they have worked hand-in-glove with the Islamic jihadists in the Middle East.

Then how is it possible that a terror attack has occurred in Strasbourg when the Yellow Vests demonstrations have taken France by storm, which are demanding reduction in fuel tax, the reintroduction of wealth tax on large businesses, the raising of the minimum wage, and the resignation of the former investment banker and current President of France, Emmanuel Macron.

The only beneficiary of the Strasbourg shooting, it appears, is none other than the French government itself, because after the incident, the government would now put restrictions on freedom of assembly and all kinds of political demonstrations.

Thus it is quite likely that the French deep state might have instigated one of jihadists on its payroll to carry out the Strasbourg atrocity to break the momentum of the Yellow Vests protests, which have posed the single biggest threat to the elitist Macron administration since coming to power last year.

How Khashoggi’s Murder Influenced US Midterm Elections?

A question would naturally arise in the minds of astute readers of alternative media that why did the mainstream media, Washington Post and New York Times in particular, take the lead in publicizing the murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2?

One apparent reason could be that Khashoggi was an opinion columnist at The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon. Washington Post has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA because Bezos had won a $600 million contract [1] in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service.

It’s worth noting here that despite the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman being primarily responsible for the war in Yemen that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and has created a famine in Yemen, the mainstream media hailed him as a “liberal savior” who had brought radical reforms in the conservative Saudi society by permitting women to drive and by allowing cinemas to screen the Hollywood movies.

So what prompted the sudden change of heart in the mainstream media that the purported “moderate reformer” was all of a sudden vilified as a brutal murderer? It could be the nature of the brutal assassination as Khashoggi’s body was barbarically dismembered and dissolved in acid, according to the Turkish sources.

More significantly, however, it was the timing of the assassination and the political mileage that could be gained from Khashoggi’s murder in the domestic politics of the US. Khashoggi was murdered on October 2, when the US midterm elections were only a few weeks away. Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in particular have known to have forged close business relations with the Saudi royal family. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Donald Trump chose Saudi Arabia and Israel for his first official visit in May last year.

Thus, the neoliberal media’s campaign to seek justice for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was actually a smear campaign against Donald Trump and his conservative political base, which is now obvious after the US midterm election results have poured in. Even though the Republicans have retained their 51-seat majority in the Senate, the Democrats now control the House of Representatives by gaining more than 30 additional seats.

Regarding the nature of the steadfast alliance between Washington and Riyadh, it bears mentioning that in April 2016 the Saudi foreign minister threatened [2] that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack. (Though the bill was eventually passed, the Saudi authorities have not been held accountable; even though 15 out of 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals.)

Moreover, $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment in the Western Europe and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investments in North America and Western Europe.

Furthermore, in order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil in the energy-starved industrialized world, here are a few rough stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves of 265 billion barrels and its daily oil production exceeds 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq, each, has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day, each; while UAE and Kuwait, each, has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3 million barrels per day, each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold more than half of world’s 1477 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry’s sales of arms to the Gulf Arab States, a report [3] authored by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during its eight-year tenure.

Similarly, the top items in Trump’s agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May last year were: firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led “Arab NATO” to counter Iran’s influence in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia. The package included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales, and over a period of 10 years, total sales could reach $350 billion.

Therefore, keeping the economic dependence of the Western countries on the Gulf Arab States in mind during the times of global recession when most of manufacturing has been outsourced to China, it is not surprising that when the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia decided to provide training and arms to the Islamic jihadists in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Obama administration was left with no other choice but to toe the destructive policy of its regional Middle Eastern allies, despite the sectarian nature of the proxy war and its attendant consequences of breeding a new generation of Islamic jihadists who would become a long-term security risk not only to the Middle East but to the Western countries, as well.

Similarly, when King Abdullah’s successor, King Salman, decided on the whim of the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman to invade Yemen in March 2015, once again the Obama administration had to yield to the dictates of Saudi Arabia and UAE by fully coordinating the Gulf-led military campaign in Yemen not only by providing intelligence, planning and logistical support but also by selling billions of dollars’ worth of arms and ammunition to the Gulf Arab States during the conflict.

In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab states by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf’s petro-sheikhs contribute substantial investments to the tune of trillions of dollars to the Western economies.

After the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the publicity it got in the mainstream media, some starry-eyed dreamers are wondering is there a way for Washington to enforce economic sanctions against Saudi Arabia? As in the case of Iran nuclear sanctions from 2006 to 2015, sanctioning the Gulf states also seems plausible; however, there is a caveat: Iran is only a single oil-rich state which has 160 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day (mbpd) of crude oil.

On the other hand, the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies are actually four oil-rich states: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar and Kuwait. Together, their share amounts to 466 billion barrels, almost one-third of the world’s 1477 billion barrels of total proven oil reserves.

Therefore, though enforcing economic sanctions on the Gulf states sounds like a good idea on paper, the relationship between the Gulf’s petro-monarchies and the industrialized world is a consumer-supplier relationship. The Gulf states are the suppliers of energy and the industrialized world is its consumer, hence the Western powers cannot sanction their energy suppliers and largest investors.

If anything, the Gulf’s petro-monarchies have “sanctioned” the Western powers in the past by imposing the oil embargo in 1973 after the Arab-Israel war. The 1973 Arab oil embargo against the West lasted only for a short span of six months, during which the price of oil quadrupled, but Washington became so paranoid after the embargo that it put in place a ban on the export of crude oil outside the US borders and began keeping 60-day stock of reserve fuel for strategic and military needs.

Hindu Majoritarianism and Pakistan Movement

Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan.

The prefix ‘Pak,’ which is the root of the word Pakistan, literally means clean or pure in Urdu language. Choosing the name Pakistan for their newfound country sheds light on the mindset of our founding fathers. As the readers are well aware that Hindu religion is a caste-based religion which regards people belonging to other faiths, and even low-caste Hindus, as sleazy untouchables.

The Muslims of India suffered this discrimination at the hands of the numerical majority during the British Raj, that’s why they chose the name Pakistan: the land of the clean or pure, for their newfound sanctuary. Thus, Pakistan and the oft-quoted pejorative, ‘the land of the pure,’ isn’t as much about some conceited sense of superiority as it was about redressing a historical injustice, and the demand for a separate homeland was basically a reaction to the discrimination and persecution suffered by the disenfranchised Muslims of India at the hands of Hindu nationalists.

Sociologically, ethno-linguistic groups are generally regarded as distinct nations but sometimes one’s religious sect can take precedence over ethno-linguistic identity. The Syrian and Iraqi Shias speak Arabic while the Iranian Shias speak Persian; despite the linguistic difference, during the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, the Shia-led Baathist regime of Syria took the side of Iran against the fellow Arabic-speaking and Sunni-led Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. After the fall of Saddam, when the government in Iraq has now been led by the Shias, the three Shia-led states have formed an alliance comprising Iran, Iraq and Syria against the Sunni-led Gulf Arab States.

Having a secular bend of mind, I personally find Sunni and Shia Muslims to be virtually indistinguishable. Although they do have a few minor theological and doctrinal differences but culturally they belong to the same religion and civilization. I have drawn attention to the Sunni-Shia conflict in the Middle East only to emphasize the importance of religion in the Eastern societies. Modern secularists regard the social aspect of religion as some outdated medieval notion, but conformity to ethno-religious identity is a visible and ubiquitous reality in our part of the world.

Now, Sunni and Shia are only two sects of the same religion, Islam, and these minor sectarian differences can make their followers forget their ethno-linguistic identities in choosing friends and forming alliances, while Hinduism and Islam are two radically different religions, so much so that many Muslims in Pakistan don’t even know what deities the Hindus worship. By uncritically imitating Orientalist historians, however, many secularists assume that the creation of a nation state on the basis of ethno-religious identity was an imprudent decision by Jinnah and the Muslim League.

Regardless, here we must try to understand the attitudes and mindsets of the British Indian leaders that why did they favour certain rallying calls and disapproved the rest? In my opinion, this preferential treatment had to do with personal inclinations and ambitions of the British Indian leaders and the interests of their respective communities as perceived by the leaders in heterogeneous and multi-ethnic societies like British India.

A leader whose ambitions are limited only to his own ethnic group would rally his followers around their shared ethno-linguistic identity, but politicians who have larger ambitions would look for common factors that unite diverse ethnic groups, that’s where the role of religion becomes politically relevant in traditional societies.

It suited the personal ambitions of the Muslim League leadership to rally their supporters around the cause of Islamic identity, and it benefited the political agenda of the Congress leadership to unite all Indians under the banner of a more inclusive and secular Indian national identity in order to keep India united under the permanent yoke of numerical Hindu majority.

However, mere rhetoric is never a substitute for tangible actions, no matter how noble and superficially appealing it may sound. The Indian National Congress right from its inception was a thinly disguised Hindu nationalist party that only had a pretence of inclusive secularism, that’s why some of the most vocal proponents of Hindu-Muslim unity, like Jinnah and Iqbal, later became its most fierce critics, especially when Gandhi and his protégé Pundit Nehru took over the leadership of Congress in 1921.

Moreover, while I concede that the colonial divide-and-rule policy was partly responsible for sowing the seeds of dissension amongst the British Indian religious communities, but generally most outcomes cannot be understood by adopting a simplistic and linear approach that tries to explain complex socio-political phenomena by emphasizing a single cause and downplaying the importance of other equally significant, albeit underestimated, plurality of causes.

Islamic nationalism in British India had as much to do with the divide-and-rule strategy on the part of the British colonisers as it was a reaction to exclusionary Hindu majoritarianism. As I have described earlier that different rallying calls are adopted as political agendas by politicians to rally support for their individual ambitions.

Looking at the demeanour of ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi and his aspirations of being a Hindu saint and a messiah, did he look like a secular leader by any stretch of imagination? But he chose the rallying call of secularism because it suited his personal ambitions and the interests of Hindu community which he really represented.

Finally, every political rallying call has its express wordings but it also has certain subtle undertones. It is quite possible that some Westernised Congress leaders might have genuinely believed in the ideals of secularism and pluralism, but on the popular level of the traditional Indian masses, the Hindus of British India coalesced around Congress not because of its ostensible secularism but due to its undertones of Hindu Raj. A fact which has now become obvious after the election of an overt Hindu nationalist, Narendra Modi, to the premiership of India 70 years after the independence.

Petro-Islam: Nexus between Oil and Terrorism

Inquisitive observers of the Middle Eastern politics would naturally wonder why do Western powers prop up the Gulf’s petro-monarchies, knowing fully well that they are the ones responsible for nurturing Islamic extremism? Does this not run counter to their professed goal of eliminating Islamic radicalism and terrorism?

Seemingly, the Western powers support the Gulf’s autocrats because it has been a firm policy principle of the Western powers to promote ‘stability’ in the Middle East instead of representative democracy. They are mindful of the ground reality that the mainstream Muslim sentiment is firmly against any Western military presence and intervention in the Middle East region.

In addition, the Western policymakers also prefer to deal with small groups of Middle Eastern ‘strongmen’ rather than cultivating a complex and uncertain relationship on a popular level, certainly a myopic approach which is the hallmark of so-called ‘pragmatic’ politicians and statesmen.

Left to their own resources, the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies lack the manpower, the military technology and the moral authority to rule over the forcefully suppressed and disenfranchised Arab masses, not only the Arab masses but also the South Asian and African immigrants of the Gulf states. One-third of the Saudi Arabian population is comprised of immigrants. Similarly, more than 75% of UAE’s population is also comprised of expats from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka.

The rest of the Gulf states, including Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, also have a similar proportion of immigrant workers from the developing countries. Unlike the immigrants of the Western countries, however, who hold the citizenship status, the Gulf’s immigrants have lived there for decades and sometimes for generations, and they are still regarded as unentitled foreigners.

Regarding the question that is there a way for the international community to persuade the Gulf states to implement democratic reforms, it’s worth noting that the nuclear sanctions on Iran from 2006 to 2015 have brought to the fore the enormous power that the Western financial institutions wield over the global financial system.

Despite the sanctions being unfair, Iran felt the heat so much that it remained engaged in negotiations throughout the nearly decade-long period of sanctions, and the issue was finally settled in the form of the Iran nuclear deal in April 2015. Such was the crippling effect of those ‘third party’ sanctions on the Iranian economy, however, that had it not been for Iran’s enormous oil and gas reserves, and some Russian, Chinese and Turkish help in illicitly buying Iranian oil, it could have defaulted due to those sanctions.

All I am trying to suggest is that there are ways to persuade the Gulf’s petro-monarchies to implement democratic reforms and to desist from sponsoring Islamic extremism, provided we have just and upright international arbiters. As in the case of aforementioned Iran sanctions, sanctioning the Gulf states also seems plausible, however, there is a caveat: Iran is only a single oil-rich state which has 160 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day (mbpd) of crude oil.

On the other hand, the Persian Gulf’s petro-monarchies are actually three oil-rich states. Saudi Arabia with its 266 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and 10 mbpd of daily crude oil production, and UAE and Kuwait with 100 billion barrels of proven reserves each and 3 mbpd of daily crude oil production each. Together, their share amounts to 466 billion barrels, almost one-third of the world’s 1477 billion barrels of total proven oil reserves. Moreover, if we add Qatar to the equation, which isn’t oil-rich as such, but has substantial natural gas reserves, it will take a morally very upright arbiter to sanction all of them.

Therefore, though enforcing economic sanctions on the Gulf states to implement democratic reforms sounds like a good idea on paper, but the relationship between the Gulf’s petro-monarchies and the industrialized world is that of a consumer-supplier relationship. The Gulf states are the suppliers of energy and the industrialized world is its consumer, hence the Western powers cannot sanction their energy suppliers and largest investors.

If anything, the Gulf’s petro-monarchies have ‘sanctioned’ the Western powers in the past by imposing the oil embargo in 1973 after the Arab-Israel war. The 1973 Arab oil embargo against the West lasted only for a short span of six months during which the price of oil quadrupled. But Washington became so paranoid after the embargo that it put in place a ban on the export of crude oil outside the US borders -- which is still in place -- and began keeping 60 days stock of reserve fuel for strategic and military needs.

Recently, some very upbeat rumours about the shale revolution have been circulating in the media. However, the shale revolution is primarily a natural gas revolution. It has increased the ‘probable recoverable’ resources of natural gas by 30%. The shale oil, on the other hand, refers to two starkly different kinds of energy resources: first, the solid kerogen -- though substantial resources of kerogen have been found in the US Green River formations, but the cost of extracting liquid crude from solid kerogen is so high that it is economically unviable for at least 100 years; second, the tight oil which is blocked by the shale -- it is a viable energy resource but the reserves are so limited, roughly 4 billion barrels in Texas and North Dakota, that it will run out in a few years.

More than the size of oil reserves, it is about per barrel extraction cost, which determines the profits for the multinational oil companies, and in this regard, the Persian Gulf’s crude oil is the most profitable. Further, regarding the supposed US energy independence after the so-called ‘shale revolution,’ the US produced 11 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil in the first quarter of 2014, which is more than the output of Saudi Arabia and Russia, each of which produces around 10 million bpd. But the US still imported 7.5 million bpd during the same period, which is more than the oil imports of France and Britain put together. More than the total volume of oil production, the volume which an oil-producing country exports determines its place in the hierarchy of petroleum and the Gulf’s petro-monarchies constitute the top tier of that pyramid.

Neocolonialism and the myth of sovereignty

It’s an evident fact that the neocolonial powers are ruled by behemoth corporations whose wealth is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, far more than the total GDP of many developing nations. The status of these multinational corporations as dominant players in national and international politics gets official imprimatur when the Western governments endorse the congressional lobbying practice of the so-called ‘special interest’ groups, which is a euphemism for business interests.

Since the Western governments are nothing but the mouthpieces of their business interests on international political and economic forums, therefore any national or international entity which hinders or opposes the agenda of corporate interests is either coerced into accepting their demands or gets sidelined.

In 2013, the Manmohan Singh’s government of India had certain objections to further opening up to the Western businesses. The Business Roundtable, which is an informal congregation of major US businesses and which together holds a net wealth of $6 trillion, held a meeting with the representatives of the Indian government and literally coerced the latter into accepting unfair demands of the Western corporations.

The developing economies, like India and Pakistan, are always hungry for foreign direct investment (FDI) to grow further, and this investment mostly comes from the Western corporations. When the Business Roundtables or the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) form pressure groups and engage in ‘collective bargaining’ activities, the nascent and fragile developing economies don’t have a choice but to toe their line.

State sovereignty, that sovereign nation states are at liberty to pursue independent policies, especially economic and trade policies, is a myth. Just like the ruling elites of the developing countries who have a stranglehold and monopoly over domestic politics; similarly, the neocolonial powers and their so-called ‘multinational’ corporations control international politics and the global economic order.

Any state which dares to transgress becomes an international pariah like Castro’s Cuba, Chavez’s Venezuela and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe; or more recently, Iran which was cut off from the global economic system from 2006 to 2015, because of its supposed nuclear ambitions. Good for Iran that it has one of the largest oil and gas resources, otherwise it would have been insolvent by now. Such is the power of global financial system, especially the banking sector, and the significance of petro-dollar because the global oil transactions are pegged in the US dollars all over the world, and all the major oil bourses are also located in the Western financial districts.

The crippling ‘third party’ economic sanctions on Iran from 2006 to 2015 have brought to the fore the enormous power that the Western financial institutions and the petro-dollar as a global reserve currency wields over the global financial system. It bears mentioning that the Iranian nuclear negotiations were as much about Iran’s nuclear program as they were about its ballistic missile program, which is an equally dangerous conventional threat to the Gulf’s petro-monarchies just across the Persian Gulf.

Despite the sanctions being unfair, Iran felt the heat so much that it remained engaged in negotiations throughout the nearly decade-long period of sanctions, and the issue was finally settled in the form of the Iran nuclear deal in April 2015. However, such was the crippling effect of those ‘third party’ sanctions on the Iranian economy that had it not been for Iran’s enormous oil and gas reserves, and some Russian, Chinese and Turkish help in illicitly buying Iranian oil, it could have defaulted due to those sanctions.

Regarding the exploitative neocolonial system and the stranglehold of the Western financial services sector on the global economy, in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister threatened [1] that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible for any role in the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

It’s worth noting that $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the US, if we add its investment in the Western Europe, and the investments of oil-rich UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investment in North America and Western Europe. Similarly, according to a July 2014 New York Post report [2], the Chinese entrepreneurs had deposited $1.4 trillion in the Western banks between 2002 to 2014, and the Russian oligarchs were the runner-ups with $800 billion of deposits.

Moreover, in order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil where 28,000 US troops have currently been stationed in their numerous leased military bases and aircraft-carriers, here are a few rough stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven petroleum reserves of 266 billion barrels and its daily crude oil production exceeds 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq each has 150 billion barrels reserves and have the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day each; while UAE and Kuwait each has 100 billion barrels reserves and they produce 3 million barrels per day each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf together hold more than half of world’s 1500 billion barrels of proven petroleum reserves.

Finally, regarding the Western defence production industry’s sales of arms to the Gulf Arab States, a report [3] authored by William Hartung of the US-based Centre for International Policy found that the Obama administration had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during its eight years tenure. Similarly, during its first international visit to Saudi Arabia in May last year, the Trump administration signed arms deals worth $110 billion, and over 10 years, total sales could reach $350 billion.

Was Jinnah an imperialist collaborator?

There are only two illustrious South Asian leaders who never went to jail during their otherwise stellar political careers. One was the founder of Pakistan, Jinnah, and the other a crusader against corruption who has been given the sobriquet ‘Pakistan Khan’ by his cultist followers. Perceptive readers are already well aware of the reason why nobody can dare to arrest the latter, even if he lays a four-month-long siege to the paramount institutions of state and stops the state machinery from functioning.

Regarding the allegation levelled against Jinnah by Orientalist historians that he was an imperialist collaborator, it is so preposterous that it would be a waste of time trying to dispel the ludicrous accusation. Instead, I would implore the readers to allow me the liberty to scribble a tongue-in-cheek rant here.

It’s an incontestable fact that Jinnah, Iqbal and Sir Syed were imperialist collaborators who fell prey to the divide-and-rule policy of the British Raj. There were only two progressive Muslim leaders who joined forces with Mahatma Gandhi’s socialist and anti-imperialist Congress against the tyranny of the Raj. One was Sheikh Abdullah of Kashmir and the other was Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Bacha Khan) of Pashtunistan.

After the partition of British India, Sheikh Abdullah worked hand in glove with Pundit Nehru to make Muslim-majority Kashmir a part of secular Indian utopia. The Muslims of Kashmir trusted the charismatic messiah with their lives and the latter met their expectations by conniving with the Congress’ pundits. Today Kashmir is thriving and prospering under the suzerainty of India and the dynamic leadership of Sheikh Abdullah’s descendants, Farooq Abdullah and Omar Abdullah, the true representatives of Kashmiri Muslims.

Had it been up to the visionary and tactful Bacha Khan, he too would have made sure to make Pashtunistan a colony of India. However, a plebiscite was held on the eve of independence in the erstwhile North West Frontier Province; and regrettably, the gullible Pashtuns of the doomed province overwhelmingly voted to become part of an Islamist and reactionary Pakistan.

Let me clarify here that I am not against Bacha Khan and his Red Shirts, ‘Khudai Khidmatgar,’ movement, as such. It was a laudable achievement that he politically mobilised the Pashtuns for independence and enfranchisement. But I have doubts about his political acumen. From his bearing, he appeared like a simpleton who was given to whims and personal attachments. But the people that he was dealing with, Gandhi, Nehru and Patel, were shrewd politicians.

The astute leadership of Congress wheedled and coaxed Bacha Khan and Sheikh Abdullah to form a political alliance with the thinly veiled Hindu nationalist Congress against the interests of Pashtun and Kashmiri Muslims, whom the aforementioned leaders respectively represented. And the way I see it, it had less to do with any political convergence of ideas; rather, it was more about their personal bonding with the shrewd leadership of Congress.

Jinnah was a brash and forthright statesman who used to treat his party workers and associates as subordinates. And Pashtuns, as we all know, are given to ‘Pashtunwali’ (honour), courtesy and other such trappings of symbolic respect. Gandhi and Nehru struck a chord there with feigned cordiality and ensnared two leading Muslim luminaries of freedom struggle, hence striking a political marriage of convenience between the Congress and the Pashtun and Kashmiri nationalists.

In the end, Sheikh Abdullah legitimised the Indian occupation of Kashmir by becoming its first chief minister, though he was later imprisoned by none other than his good old friend, Pundit Nehru. But when Pakistan and, more importantly, the Kashmiri Muslims needed his leadership and guidance the most, he backstabbed them simply because of his personal friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru.

More to the point, in the British Indian context, the divide-and-rule policy originally meant that imperialists used this strategy to sow the seeds of dissension and communal hatred to prolong their tyrannical rule in India. However, some Indian historians later came up with the fancy notion that the colonial powers lent their support to the idea of creation of Pakistan in order to use the latter as a bulwark against communist influence in the region; this latter conspiracy theory is farthest from truth.

Firstly, the British imperialists took immense pride in creating a unified and cohesive British Indian army, and it’s a historical fact that the latter organisation was vehemently opposed to the division of the British Indian armed forces. It simply defies common sense that if the colonial power was apprehensive of the expanding influence of Soviet Union in the region; in that case, it would have preferred to leave behind a unified and strong India army, rather than two divided armies at loggerheads with each other.

Secondly, although Pakistan joined the Washington-led and anti-communist SEATO and CENTO alliances in the 1950s and it also fought America’s Jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s, but we must bear in mind that there were actually two power-centres of communism during the Cold War, i.e. the Soviet Bolshevism and the Chinese Maoism.

If the intention of the colonial powers was to use Pakistan as a bulwark against communist influence in the region, then how come Pakistan established such cordial relations with the communist China during the 1960s that it voted in favour of China’s membership into the United Nations in 1971, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto played a pivotal role in arranging Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

Fact of the matter is that both India and Pakistan had good relations with the Western powers during the Cold War. However, India had friendly ties with Soviet Union and adversarial relations with China, while Pakistan had adversarial relations with Soviet Union and friendly ties with China. The relations of India and Pakistan with the communist powers were based more on their national interests than on ideological lines.

The relatively modern Indian historians who came up with this fancy conspiracy theory have actually retrospectively applied the theory to the historical chain of events: that is, they conceived the theory after Pakistan joined the anti-communist alliances and after it played the role of Washington’s client state during the Soviet-Afghan Jihad. At the time of independence movement in 1940s, neither the Hindus nor the Muslims knew anything about the aftermath of their respective freedom struggles.

Was Russian spy poisoned to avert Brexit?

Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia.

In July 2003, Dr. David Kelly, a British weapons inspector who disclosed to the media that Tony Blair’s government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was “sexed up,” was found dead in a public park a mile away from his home.

The inquiry into his death concluded Kelly had committed suicide by slitting his left wrist but the mystery surrounding his death has remained unresolved to date, though the obvious beneficiary of his propitious “suicide” was the British intelligence itself.

More recently, Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent working for the British foreign intelligence service, and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench outside a shopping center in Salisbury on March 4. Eight days later, another Russian exile Nikolai Glushkov was found dead in his London home and the cause of his death has not been ascertained yet.

In the case of Skripal, Theresa May promptly accused Kremlin of attempted assassination. There are a couple of caveats, however. Firstly, though Skripal was a double agent working for MI6, he was released in a spy swap deal in 2010. Had he been a person of importance, Kremlin would not have released him and let him settle in the UK in the first place.

Secondly, British government has concluded that Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a Moscow-made, military-grade nerve agent, novichok. A question naturally arises why would Kremlin leave a smoking gun evidence behind that would lead prosecutors straight to Moscow when their assassins could have used a gun or a knife to accomplish the task?

Leaving mainstream media’s conspiracy theories aside, these assassination attempts should be viewed in the wider backdrop of the Brexit debate. Both NATO and European Union were conceived during the Cold War to offset the influence of former Soviet Union in Europe. It is not a coincidence that the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991 and the Maastricht Treaty that consolidated the European Community and laid the foundations of the European Union was signed in February 1992.

The basic purpose of the EU has been nothing more than to lure the formerly communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe into the folds of the Western capitalist bloc by offering incentives and inducements, particularly in the form of agreements to abolish internal border checks between the EU member states, thus allowing the free movement of labor from the impoverished Eastern Europe to the prosperous countries of the Western Europe.

Reportedly, 79,000 US troops have currently been deployed in Europe out of 275,000 total US troops stationed all over the world, including 47,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy and 8,000 in the UK. By comparison, the number of US troops stationed in Afghanistan is only 15,000 which is regarded as an occupied country. Thus, Europe is nothing more than a client of corporate America.

No wonder then the Western political establishments, and particularly the deep states of the US and EU, are as freaked out about the outcome of Brexit as they were during the Ukrainian Crisis in November 2013 when Viktor Yanukovych suspended the preparations for the implementation of an association agreement with the European Union and tried to take Ukraine back into the folds of the Russian sphere of influence by accepting billions of dollars of loan package offered by Vladimir Putin.

In this regard, the founding of the EU has been similar to the case of Japan and South Korea in the Far East where 45,000 and 28,500 US troops have currently been deployed, respectively. After the Second World War, when Japan was about to fall in the hands of geographically-adjacent Soviet Union, the Truman administration authorized the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to subjugate Japan and also to send a signal to the leaders of the Soviet Union, which had not developed their nuclear program at the time, to desist from encroaching upon Japan in the east and West Germany in Europe.

Then, during the Cold War, American entrepreneurs invested heavily in the economies of Japan and South Korea and made them model industrialized nations to forestall the expansion of communism in the Far East. Similarly, after the Second World War, Washington embarked on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe with an economic assistance of $13 billion, equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars in the current dollar value. Since then, Washington has maintained its military and economic dominance over Western Europe.

There is an essential stipulation in the European Union’s charter of union, according to which the developing economies of Europe that joined the EU allowed free movement of goods (free trade) only on the reciprocal condition that the developed countries would allow free movement of labor. What’s obvious in this stipulation is the fact that the free movement of goods, services and capital only benefits the countries that have a strong manufacturing base, and the free movement of people only favors the developing economies where labor is cheap.

Now, when the international financial institutions, like the IMF and WTO, promote free trade by exhorting the developing countries all over the world to reduce tariffs and subsidies without the reciprocal free movement of labor, whose interests do such institutions try to protect? Obviously, they try to protect the interests of their biggest donors by shares, the developed economies.

Regardless, while joining the EU, Britain compromised on the rights of its working class in order to protect the interests of its bankers and industrialists, because free trade with the rest of the EU countries spurred British exports. The British working classes overwhelmingly voted in the favor of Brexit because after Britain’s entry into the EU and when the agreements on abolishing internal border checks between the EU member states became effective, the cheaper labor force from the Eastern and Central Europe flooded the markets of Western Europe, and consequently the wages of native British workers dropped and it also became difficult for them to find jobs, because foreigners were willing to do the same job for lesser pays, hence raising the level of unemployment among the British workers and consequent discontentment with the EU.

The subsequent lifting of restrictions on the Romanians and Bulgarians to work in the European Union in January 2014 further exacerbated the problem, and consequently the majority of the British electorate voted in a June 2016 referendum to opt out of the EU. The biggest incentive for the British working class to vote for Brexit is that the East European workers will have to leave Britain after its exit from the EU, and the jobs will once again become available with better wages to the native British workforce.

The developed economies of the Western Europe would never have acceded to the condition of free movement of labor that goes against their economic interests; but the political establishment of the US, which is the hub of corporate power and wields enormous influence in the Western capitalist bloc, persuaded the unwilling states of the Western Europe to yield to the condition against their national interests in order to wean away the formerly communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe from the Russian influence.

Thus, all the grandstanding and moral posturing of unity and equality aside, the hopelessly neoliberal institution, the EU, in effect, is nothing more than the civilian counterpart of the Western military alliance against the erstwhile Soviet Union, the NATO, that employs a much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare to win over political allies and to isolate the adversaries that dare to sidestep from the global trade and economic policy as laid down by the Western capitalist bloc.

It would be pertinent to mention that though Theresa May’s Conservatives-led government is in favor of Brexit, the neoliberal British deep state and European establishments led by France and Germany are fiercely opposed to Britain’s exit from the EU. They could have hired any rogue agent for the attempted assassinations on the Russian exiles that draws suspicions toward Kremlin.

Since the referendum, the British deep state and European establishments have created numerous hurdles in the way of Brexit. The First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon is demanding more autonomy and control over Scotland’s vast oil and gas reserves and a debate is raging on over a “soft border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland which will remain in EU post-Brexit. Instead of a smooth transition to an independent state, Britain is more likely to disintegrate in its effort to leave the EU.

Finally, a New Cold War has begun. 25 out of 28 EU member states have recently signed an enhanced security cooperation agreement known as the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) whose aim is to structurally integrate the armed forces of EU members. Britain along with Denmark and Malta are being left out. The main objective of the recent assassination attempts on the Russian exiles is to intimidate the Conservatives-led government that Britain will be left to fend for itself post-Brexit.