Capitol Riots to Lawfare: How Deep State Forestalled Trump’s Electoral Bid

A visibly anxious and panicked Biden tweeted on March 11, 2022: “I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO. But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.”

The string of rambling tweets betrayed the apprehensive mental state of a raving executive who was under tremendous pressure from certain quarters to significantly escalate the conflict with the arch-foe and wanted to console himself and the listeners that by not committing American ground and air forces to Ukraine, specifically for enforcing the no-fly zone, he was making the right decision.

Despite Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal, several Pentagon officials, full of hubris and evidently suffering from misplaced superiority complex, have recently made their misconceived institutional logic public that they no longer regard Russia as an equal military power, instead they contemptuously dubbed it “a second-rate regional power,” and if given an opportunity, they wouldn’t hesitate to take Russia head-on, even if the risk is as perilous as the conflict spiraling into a catastrophic nuclear war.

It’s noteworthy the national security and defense policies of the United States are formulated by the all-powerful civil-military bureaucracy, dubbed the deep state, whereas the president, elected through heavily manipulated electoral process with disproportionate influence of corporate interests, political lobbyists and billionaire donors, is only a figurehead meant to legitimize militarist stranglehold of the deep state, not only over the domestic politics of the United States but also over the neocolonial world order dictated by the self-styled global hegemon.

All the militaries of the NATO member states operate under the integrated military command led by the Pentagon. Before being elected president, General Dwight Eisenhower was the first commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).

The commander of Allied Command Operations has been given the title Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), and is always a US four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as the Commander US European Command, and is answerable to the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In Europe, 400,000 US forces were deployed at the height of the Cold War in the sixties, though the number has since been brought down to almost 100,000 after European powers developed their own military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War. The number of American troops deployed in Europe now stands at 50,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy and 10,000 in the United Kingdom.

Since the beginning of Ukraine war in 2022, the United States has substantially ramped up US military footprint in the Eastern Europe by deploying thousands of additional NATO troops, strategic armaments, nuclear-capable missiles and air force squadrons aimed at Russia, and NATO forces alongside regional clients have been provocatively exercising so-called “freedom of navigation” right in the Black Sea and conducting joint military exercises and naval drills.

The storming of the Capitol by a frenzied mob on January 6, 2021, was clearly a conspiracy orchestrated by the US deep state in connivance with the political establishment to undermine Trump’s leadership of the Republican Party and forestall his re-election bid in 2024, particularly after the beginning of the Ukraine war in 2022, as he was deemed a “national security risk” and derisively sneered at as a “toddler-in-chief” by the Pentagon’s top brass.

Following the riots and deaths of four unarmed Trump supporters, notably Ashli Babbitt who was shot, he was petrified to the extent that, for once, he appeared to concede defeat and pledged “the transition would be smooth,” though he later recanted and went back to the characteristic defiant attitude.

Trump’s obvious intention in motivating the mob was that demonstrators would stage a protest in front of the Capitol to exert moral pressure on Veep Pence and the electors to refuse to certify Biden’s confirmation. But the Capitol’s security was overwhelmed by the size and fervid passion of the crowd. The chief of the Capitol Police acknowledged on the record that his repeated requests to send reinforcements were denied, not by the White house but by certain “other quarters” that I would identify later in the article.

Reuters reported following the riots: “’We are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,’ President Donald Trump exhorted his screaming supporters before they marched on the US Capitol last week, saying he’d go with them.

“Trump had wanted to join the thousands of hardcore followers who assembled at Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. He told aides in the days leading up to the rally that he planned to accompany them to demonstrate his ire at Congress as it moved to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s November election victory.

“But the Secret Service kept warning him that agents could not guarantee his safety if he went ahead, according to two people familiar with the matter. Trump relented and instead hunkered down at the White House to watch television images of the mob rioting he is accused of triggering.”

Clearly, Trump’s intention wasn’t to storm the Capitol. He simply wanted his followers to go to the Pennsylvania Avenue and register their protest outside the Capitol. Furthermore, Trump wanted to accompany the demonstrators, but was advised against it by the intelligence agencies. Had Trump accompanied the protestors, they would’ve remained peaceful. But in the absence of leadership, the frenzied mob became rudderless and stormed the building.

The obvious beneficiaries of the ensuing melee clearly were Trump’s political adversaries, because the Republican Party has been divided following the storming of the Capitol. Ten Republican representatives lent their voice favoring the House resolution for Trump’s second failed impeachment bid and he is finding it hard to maintain his hold over the leadership of the GOP.

According to another informative report by the Washington Post following the protests, the Pentagon top brass restricted the authority of the commander of the D.C. National Guard to send reinforcements ahead of the Capitol riots that could have prevented the ensuing violence and bloodshed.

The report notes: “The commander of the D.C. National Guard said the Pentagon restricted his authority ahead of the riot at the U.S. Capitol, requiring higher-level sign-off to respond that cost time as the events that day spiraled out of control.

“Local commanders typically have the power to take military action on their own to save lives or prevent significant property damage in an urgent situation when there isn’t enough time to obtain approval from headquarters.

“But Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, said the Pentagon essentially took that power and other authorities away from him ahead of the short-lived insurrection on Jan. 6. That meant he couldn’t immediately roll out troops when he received a panicked phone call from the Capitol Police chief warning that rioters were about to enter the U.S. Capitol.”

Notwithstanding, with all the political and corporate lobbying, super-PACs and smear campaigns in the media, the US presidential contests are never smooth-sailing affairs. But the presidential contest in November 2020 was far more unpredictable and tumultuous even by the American standards.

From the bombshell New York Times report in May 2019 detailing leading Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s murky dealings in Ukraine to the impeachment proceedings against Trump lasting from September 2019 through February 2020, and then an unprecedented second impeachment trial in January last year after Trump had already left the office.

Clearly, both the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump were nothing more than show trials. The Democrats initiated the impeachment inquiry against Trump in September 2019 as a diversionary tactic to cover up the sleazy dealings of Hunter Biden with Burisma Holdings of Ukraine, and consequent discrediting of leading Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden.

Although the Democrats had a thin majority in the House of Representatives to impeach Donald Trump, the Senate was controlled by the Republicans. Besides, convicting a president of impeachment requires two-third majority in the Senate that the Democrats never had. Then what was the purpose of initiating the proceedings if not to distract public attention away from the media trial of Hunter Biden, which was bringing damning press coverage not only to Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden but to the Democratic Party in its entirety?

The Capitol riots and impeachment hoaxes weren’t the only instance when the deep state flagrantly interfered in the US politics to discredit and, at times, even brazenly assassinate American presidents who dared to refuse to toe the national security policy formulated by the high-command of the world’s most powerful military force.

It’s worth recalling that at the height of the Cold War in the sixties when the US domestic politics was infested with the McCarthyite paranoia and communists were persecuted all over the country, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy, was picked up as a scapegoat because he had visited Russia and Cuba before the hit-job in order to put the blame for the high-profile political assassination on the communists.

Not surprisingly, he was silenced by Jack Ruby before he could open his mouth and prove innocence in the courts of law. The cold-blooded murder of a pacifist and non-interventionist American president was obviously perpetrated by a professional sniper on the payroll of the deep state.

It was not a coincidence that Kennedy was killed in November 1963, and months later, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorized Lyndon B. Johnson to directly engage in the Vietnam conflict in August 1964 on the basis of a false flag naval engagement.

It’s obvious that the American national security establishment was the only beneficiary of the assassination of Kennedy. Most likely, the deep state turned against Kennedy after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s pacifist rhetoric and conciliatory approach toward Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union, in the backdrop of the Cold War.

Besides the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, another reason the Kennedy administration fell from the grace of the deep state was the botched Bay of Pigs invasion by the CIA operatives and the Cuban exiles in April 1961 to topple the government of Fidel Castro that JFK approved but later severely castigated the CIA for the fiasco and sacked CIA director Allen Dulles and several employees. The Pentagon wanted Kennedy to immediately invade Cuba following the foiled plot but he “vacillated” and let a golden opportunity to dismantle a security threat close to the US soil slip by.   

Similarly, JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy was a leading Democratic candidate for the presidential office when he was shot dead by a Palestinian Christian Sirhan Sirhan in June 1968. Being a pacifist himself, Bobby Kennedy opposed the US involvement in the Vietnam War and wrote a book on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 in which he credited his brother, JFK, for showing restraint and amicably resolving the crisis.

As the former attorney general of JFK, Bobby probably had good leads on the masterminds of the JFK assassination, and wanted to avenge his brother’s shocking murder by exposing the assassins after being elected president. This was the only reason he, too, was silenced before he could be elected president.

Though serving a life sentence at a California penitentiary, Bobby Kennedy’s murderer Sirhan, now 79 years old, is a suspicious and deranged character, who frequently backtracked on his testimonies and confession during and after the trial, had no recollection of the murder and subsequent events, and his defense team had pleaded for a retrial several times but the request was summarily denied. He was due to be released on parole in August 2021 but California Governor Gavin Newsom decided against setting him free in January 2022.

Likewise, the US security agencies turned against Richard Nixon after the deep state helped him get elected in the 1968 elections by eliminating his formidable Democratic opponent Robert F. Kennedy and felt betrayed after Nixon decided to end the Vietnam War.

The Watergate scandal was clearly orchestrated by the deep state, as Nixon was responsible for the Fall of Saigon and the humiliating defeat of the US in Vietnam at the hands of communists. Despite the allegation of illegal wiretapping, nothing was actually recorded at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Headquarters.

An additional charge was brought against Nixon that he had installed voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office, which is a customary practice for all the presidents before and after him, as all the offices in the White House and the Capitol are known to be bugged, though only a handful security officials have access to recorded conversations.

Not surprisingly, the perpetrators of clumsy wiretapping attempt at the DNC headquarters turned out to be former FBI and CIA agents. All 48 Republican campaign officials who threw Nixon under the bus by becoming approvers and testifying against him were found guilty, but were handed down light sentences, ranging from fines and several months in prison, excluding Gordon Liddy who served four and a half years in the penitentiary and later became a celebrity anchor.

To his credit, despite being a reviled politician in the American political discourse, Nixon ended the US involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973. He also ended the military draft the same year. Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972, the first ever by an American president, eventually led to the establishing of diplomatic relations between the two nations. Buttressing his pacifist credentials further, he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union the same year.  

On October 10, 1972, the “October Surprise” on the eve of elections on Nov. 3, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, relying on an anonymous source “Deep Throat” (likely a Freudian slip implicating the deep state or could be a double entendre even more sinister), subsequently revealed to be an FBI director, reported that the FBI had determined that the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the Nixon re-election committee.

Although venerated as credible “investigative journalists” by mainstream audience, both Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were formerly rogue reporters for the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post before becoming best-selling author, and are known to be unapologetic deep state shills.

In 2019, the Trump administration awarded the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud computing contract JEDI to Microsoft over its rival Amazon’s bid. Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos contested the decision in federal court, which ordered the Pentagon to reconsider certain aspects of the contract. The contract was subsequently scrapped by the Pentagon last July due to the controversy.

It’s worth recalling the reason the corporate media took morbid interest in the gory details of the grisly assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 was that Khashoggi was a columnist for the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man with $200 billion net worth and the owner of Amazon.

Bezos had a score to settle with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Mohammad bin Salman hacked Bezos’ phone in May 2018 and sent the details of Bezos’ extramarital affair to the National Enquirer in January 2019, leading to Bezos’ wife MacKenzie Scott divorcing him and taking a significant portion, $35.6 billion, of Bezos’ obscene wealth as alimony.

Nevertheless, the Washington Post, with its vast network of NATSEC shills having access to insider accounts of the deep state sources, has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA, as Bezos won a $600 million contract in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service.

Ukraine War and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) Doctrine

Originally posted in Feb. 2022, right after Russia's intervention in Ukraine:

In a three-pronged blitz from the north, east and south, Russian ground forces, backed by close air support and volleys of cruise missiles launched from ships, have overrun Ukraine and laid siege to the capital, Kyiv, whose impending fall is days away, reminiscent of precipitous fall of Kabul last August with Chinook helicopters hovering over US embassy evacuating diplomatic staff to the airport.

Chairman Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley squeamishly described the Kabul takeover in his historic Congressional testimony that couple of hundred Pashtun cowboys riding motorbikes and brandishing Kalashnikovs overran Kabul without a shot being fired, and the world’s most lethal military force fled with tail neatly folded between legs, hastily evacuating diplomatic staff from sprawling 36-acre US embassy in Chinook helicopters to airport secured by the insurgents.

Apart from indiscriminate B-52 bombing raids mounted by Americans, Afghan security forces didn’t put up serious resistance anywhere in Afghanistan and simply surrendered territory to the Taliban. The fate of Afghanistan was sealed as soon as the US forces evacuated Bagram airbase in the dead of the night on July 1, six weeks before the inevitable fall of Kabul on August 15.

The sprawling Bagram airbase was the nerve center from where all the operations across Afghanistan were directed, specifically the vital air support to the US-backed Afghan security forces without which they were simply irregular militias waiting to be devoured by the wolves.

In southern Afghanistan, the traditional stronghold of the Pashtun ethnic group from which the Taliban draws most of its support, the Taliban military offensive was spearheaded by Mullah Yaqoob, the son of the Taliban’s late founder Mullah Omar and the newly appointed defense minister of the Taliban government, as district after district in southwest Afghanistan, including the birthplace of the Taliban movement Kandahar and Helmand, fell in quick succession.

What has stunned military strategists and longtime observers of the Afghan war, though, was the Taliban’s northern blitz, occupying almost the whole of northern Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, as northern Afghanistan was the bastion of the Northern Alliance comprising the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups. In recent years, however, the Taliban has made inroads into the heartland of the Northern Alliance, too.

The ignominious fall of Kabul clearly demonstrates the days of American hegemony over the world are numbered. If ragtag Taliban militants could liberate their homeland from imperialist clutches without a fight, imagine what would happen if it confronted equal military powers such as Russia and China. The much-touted myth of American military supremacy is clearly more psychological than real.

Although cutting a dashing figure sporting military fatigues and urging compatriots to rise up in arms against “Russian invaders” in a sentimental address while at the same time pandering to NATO patrons to provide military assistance and impose harshest sanctions on the Kremlin, the fate of Ukraine’s comedian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, would be no different from deposed president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, who fled to neighboring Tajikistan on the eve of the Taliban invasion with suitcases stashed with $69 million stolen cash and is now comfortably sojourning in the UAE.

In contrast, in a televised address to the nation following the Ukraine intervention, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin uttered a chilling warning to adversaries: “Whoever tries to impede us, let alone create threats for our country and its people, must know that the Russian response will be immediate and lead to the consequences you have never seen in history.”

Warships are transiting the Mediterranean Sea and nearby waters in numbers rarely seen [1] in recent decades, adding another dimension to the ongoing tensions between NATO and Russia. The USS Harry S. Truman carrier strike group arrived in mid-December as part of a long-planned deployment. Another four destroyers began operating in the European theater in mid-January and early February.

Although the US rarely announces submarine deployments, it also is common for carrier groups to have undersea support. The scale of US ships deployed to 6th Fleet is impressive — including about 12 destroyers and at least one cruiser.

The Truman sailed with the French Charles de Gaulle and the Italian Cavour carrier strike groups. The three carrier strike groups sailing together in the Mediterranean not only was unusual but also a significant show of NATO power.

The Russian Defense Ministry announced earlier this month it soon would send warships — some with Kalibr and hypersonic Oniks cruise missile capabilities — from its Caspian Sea flotilla to the Mediterranean and Black seas.

That’s in addition to at least six Russian amphibious assault ships from the Baltic and Northern fleets that recently sailed through the Mediterranean before entering the Black Sea for military exercises. A Russian Kilo-class submarine armed with Kalibr cruise missiles and a patrol ship also entered the Black Sea.

NATO said earlier this month that their Russian counterparts had conducted themselves professionally at sea. But CNN reported that a Navy P-8 maritime patrol plane had a “very close” encounter with multiple Russian jets, which US officials described as unsafe.

With the sheer scale of naval deployments by the both sides, it’s obvious that any inadvertent skirmish could trigger an apocalypse that would not only be perilous for the belligerents but also for the wider world.

At the height of the Cold War in the sixties, Russia exploded the world’s largest 50-megaton thermonuclear Tsar Bomba in October, 1961. A Tupolev Tu-95V aircraft took off with the bomb weighing 27 tons. The bomb was attached to a large parachute, which gave the release and observer planes time to fly about 45 km away from ground zero, giving them a 50 percent chance of survival.

The bomb was released from a height of 10,500 meters on a test target at Sukhoy Nos cape in the Barents Sea. The bomb detonated at the height of 4,200 meters above ground. Still, the shock wave caught up with the Tu-95V at a distance of 115 km and the Tu-16 at 205 km. The Tu-95V dropped 1 kilometer in the air because of the shock wave but was able to recover and land safely.

The 8-km-wide fireball reached nearly as high as the altitude of the release plane and was visible at almost 1,000 km away. The mushroom cloud was about 67 km high. A seismic wave in the earth’s crust, generated by the shock wave of the explosion, circled the globe three times. Glass shattered in windows 780 km from the explosion in a village on Dikson Island.

All buildings in the village of Severny, both wooden and brick, located 55 km from ground zero within the Sukhoy Nos test range, were destroyed. In districts hundreds of kilometers from ground zero, wooden houses were destroyed, stone ones lost their roofs, windows, and doors. Atmospheric focusing caused blast damage at even greater distances, breaking windows in Norway and Finland.

According to an Oct. 2017 Turkish parliament report [2], there were around 15,000 nuclear warheads at 107 sites in 14 countries, and 93 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons belonged to Russia and the US. Russia had 7,000 nuclear weapons, the US 6,800, France 300, China 260, Britain 215, Pakistan 130, India 120, Israel 80 and North Korea had 10 nuclear weapons.

It added that some 4,150 of the weapons in arsenals were ready to be used at any minute, while 1,800 were in “high alarm” status, which meant they could be prepared for use in a short period of time.

The report also noted that nuclear weapons belonging to the US were deployed in five NATO member states that did not themselves have developed nuclear programs. “There are nearly 150 US nuclear weapons in six air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey,” it added.

During the Cold War, the US placed nuclear weapons in NATO countries, including Turkey, as part of the organization’s nuclear sharing program. Some of the nuclear weapons placed in the 1960s are still deployed in Turkey.

The safety of fifty American B-61 hydrogen bombs deployed at Incirlik airbase in Turkey became a matter of real concern during the foiled July 2016 coup plot against the Erdogan government after the commander of the Incirlik airbase, General Bekir Ercan Van, along with nine other officers were arrested for supporting the coup; movement in and out of the base was denied, power supply was cut off and the security threat level was raised to the highest state of alert, according to a report [3] by Eric Schlosser for the New Yorker.

Following the Second World War, the covert Operation Paperclip was launched in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, including Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were kidnapped from Germany and shuttled to the United States. The V-2 rocket program was later adapted to send Apollo missions to the moon. Thus, the US nuclear and ballistic missile programs were actually stolen from the Nazi Germany.

Notwithstanding, the mainstream reporting nowadays seems prosaic screeds extolling the virtues of patriotism and loyalty to the “Western democracy” and striving desperately hard to expose imaginary plots hatched by “vile dictators,” notably Russian President Vladimir Putin, to take undue advantage of “gullible patsies” in the alternative news media unwittingly playing the role of Putin’s “useful idiots.”

After sufficiently proving their loyalty to the “American democracy” and the US-led “benevolent imperialism” that has ended “the age of darkness” in the post-colonial world and ushered it into “the age of enlightenment” under Washington’s neocolonial tutelage, the spin-doctors go on to draw the attention of the readers to the misleading notion that since the catastrophic Second World War, the Ukraine intervention is the first ever war in Europe in the living memory.

It’s worth recalling that the devastating Yugoslav Wars in the nineties in the aftermath of the break-up of the former Soviet Union and then the former Yugoslavia claimed thousands of fatalities, created a humanitarian crisis and unleashed a flood of refugees for which nobody is to blame but Washington’s militarist policy of subjugating and forcibly integrating East European states into the Western capitalist bloc.

Incidentally, one of the leading reasons Putin defensively intervened in Ukraine is to save himself from the fate that befell his predecessors, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who presided over the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and are judged harshly by Russian masses as well as the Leftists around the world.

Biden approved on Thursday, Feb. 24, an additional 7,000 US troops [4] to be deployed to Germany, bringing the total number of American forces sent to Europe to 12,000 this month, including troops previously deployed to Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. Besides Ukraine, all these states on Russia’s western flank were its staunch allies and the whole Eastern Europe used to be in the Russian sphere of influence, not too long ago, before the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But today, the perfidious East European states are hosting thousands of NATO troops, strategic armaments, nuclear-capable missiles and air force squadrons aimed at Russia, and the NATO forces alongside the regional clients are provocatively exercising so-called “freedom of navigation” right in the Black Sea and conducting joint military exercises and naval drills meant to intimidate Russia into submission.

Who’s the aggressor here? Before attempting to answer the rhetorical question, bear in mind that Ukraine is Russia’s backyard whereas the distance between New York and Kyiv is over 7,500 kilometers. Wouldn’t it be a cause of immense consternation for the US military strategists and policy-makers if Russia or China deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear-capable strategic bombers and provocatively exercised “freedom of navigation” right by deploying nuclear submarines in the Gulf of Mexico straddling the US borders?

Putin’s Scuttled Peace Initiative and NATO’s Brinkmanship in Ukraine

Russia’s invasion had damaged or destroyed up to 30% of Ukraine's infrastructure at a cost of $100 billion, a Ukrainian minister alleged in April 2022, adding reconstruction could be achieved in two years using “frozen Russian assets to help finance it.”

Oblivious to the concerns of Ukraine’s politicians regarding rebuilding damaged infrastructure of the embattled country during the war, the New York Times reported the infrastructure sustained damage due to the myopic policy of scorched-earth tactics deployed by Ukrainians in order to hamper Russia’s blitz north of the capital in the early days of the war.

“The scorched-earth policy played an important role in Ukraine’s success in holding off Russian forces in the north and preventing them from capturing Kyiv, the capital,” military experts confided to NY Times. During the war, “over 300 bridges had been destroyed across Ukraine” by Ukrainians themselves, the country’s minister of infrastructure, Oleksandr Kubrakov, bragged. Elsewhere in Ukraine, the military had, without hesitation, blown up bridges, bombed roads and disabled railway lines and airports.

Demydiv, a town on the outskirts of Kyiv, was flooded when troops blew up a nearby dam and sent water surging into the countryside. Ukrainian forces flooded the area on Feb. 25, 2022, the second day of the war. The move was particularly effective, Ukrainian officials and soldiers said, creating a sprawling, shallow lake in front of the Russian armored columns.

The flooding that blocked the northern rim of Kyiv on the west bank of the Dnipro River played a pivotal role in the fighting in early March 2022, as Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attempts to surround Kyiv. The waters created an effective barrier to tanks and funneled the assault force into ambushes and cramped, urban settings in a string of outlying towns — Hostomel, Bucha and Irpin.

Even two months later, despite the withdrawal of Russian forces north of the capital in late March 2022, residents of Demydiv still paddled about in a rubber boat. Despite unequivocally acknowledging the dam was blown up by Ukrainians themselves but attempting in vain to implicate Russians, too, in the wanton act of vandalism, the NY Times report risibly claimed “later, Russian shelling further damaged the dam, complicating efforts now to drain the area.”

Dubious Ukrainian claims of having repelled Russia’s assault on the capital by mounting guerrilla warfare and deploying scorched-earth tactics to the contrary, it’s an incontestable fact that the “40-mile-long” military convoy of battle tanks, armored vehicles and heavy artillery that descended from Belarus in the north and reached the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war without encountering much resistance en route the capital was simply a decoy astutely designed as a diversionary tactic by Russia’s military strategists in order to deter Ukraine from sending reinforcements to Donbas in east Ukraine where real battles for territory were actually fought and scramble to defend the embattled country’s capital instead.

In the early days of Russia’s military campaign in north Ukraine, the Washington Post reported in March 2022 the main threat to Kyiv appeared to be a massive Russian convoy, about 40 miles long, approaching Kyiv from the northwest and believed to be about 20 miles from the capital and stuck near a cargo airport.

Despite the wanton destruction of “over 300 bridges, blowing up dams to flood the countryside and disabling roads, railway lines and airports” in the state of panic by Ukraine’s security forces as contended by NY Times, the virtually nonexistent “resistance” and subversive scorched-earth tactics had no effect, whatsoever, on the lightning quick blitz of Russian forces north of the capital.

All the towns from the Belarus border to the northern approaches of the capital fell in quick succession. Russian forces continued advancing from the northwest of Kyiv, capturing Bucha, Hostomel and Vorzel on the outskirts of the capital by March 5, and Irpin by March 9, 2022.

Quite astonishingly, however, instead of mounting a long-awaited assault on the capital, it was reported on March 11, 2022, that the convoy had largely dispersed, taking up positions in forests around the capital, before withdrawing back to Belarus after the announcement of scaling back Russia’s military campaign in north Ukraine at Istanbul peace initiative on March 29, 2022.

Clearly, commanders of the military convoy had explicit instructions to spare the city of four million people. The indiscriminate bombardment of the densely populated Ukrainian capital and the ensuing urban warfare against heavily armed Ukrainian militant groups nurtured by NATO patrons would inevitably have caused thousands of needless civilian casualties. Therefore, the Russian military’s top brass decided to spare the rest of the embattled country and restricted Russian military offensive on liberating Russian-majority Donbas region in east Ukraine.

While the Russian military convoy was knocking on Kyiv’s doors, Ukrainian politicians were so alarmed that a senior Ukrainian government official announced in the state of panic that Ukraine must hold off Russia’s attack for the next seven to ten days to deny Moscow claiming any sort of victory.

Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, said in March 2022: “They need at least some victory before they are forced into the final negotiations,” Denysenko wrote on Facebook. “Therefore our task is to stand for the next 7-10 days.” Forget about repelling the assault on the capital, it was considered a “stellar victory” by Ukraine’s “valiant political and military leadership” to delay Russia’s inevitable takeover of Kyiv by a week.

Publicly acknowledging the impending fall of Kyiv in the face of Russian blitz and contending that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky would soon form a government-in-exile, which would lead a guerrilla warfare campaign from safe havens in Poland, the Washington Post reported in March 2022:

“The possible Russian takeover of Kyiv has prompted a flurry of planning at the State Department, Pentagon and other U.S. agencies in the event that the Zelensky government has to flee the capital or the country itself. ‘We’re doing contingency planning now for every possibility,’ including a scenario in which Zelensky establishes a government-in-exile in Poland, said a U.S. administration official.

“Zelensky, who has called himself Russia’s target No. 1, remains in Kyiv and has assured his citizens he’s not leaving. He has had discussions with U.S. officials about whether he should move west to a safer position in the city of Lviv, closer to the Polish border. Zelensky’s security detail has plans ready to swiftly relocate him and members of his cabinet, a senior Ukrainian official said. ‘So far, he has refused to go.’”

“This is a special military operation. If Russia were fighting a full-scale war, it would have been over long ago. This would have happened if we used the United States customary carpet bombings and scorched land tactics, repeatedly employed by ‘the world’s most democratic Air Force’ in Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq and Syria,” Russia’s State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel in April 2022.

Russian President Vladimir Putin explained during a joint press conference with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko in April 2022 that the time frame of the military offensive in Ukraine was determined by the intensity of hostilities and Russia would act according to its plan.

“I often get these questions, can’t we hurry it up?’ We can. But it depends on the intensity of hostilities and, any way you put it, the intensity of hostilities is directly related to casualties,” said the Russian president. “Our task is to achieve the set goals while minimizing these losses. We will act rhythmically, calmly, and according to the plan that was initially proposed by the General Staff.”

Putin reiterated that Russia’s actions in several regions of Ukraine, implying diversionary tactics deployed by Russian forces in Kyiv and Chernihiv in the north, were intended only “to tie down enemy forces” and carry out missile strikes with the purpose of “destroying the Ukrainian military’s infrastructure,” so as to “create conditions for more active operations on the territory of Donbas.”

In a bombshell NBC scoop published in April 2022, the authors of the report alleged that US spy agencies used deliberate and selective intelligence leaks to mainstream news outlets to mount a disinformation campaign against Russia during the latter’s month-long military offensive in Ukraine lasting from late February to late March, despite being aware the intelligence wasn't credible, and sometimes even publicizing downright fabrications.

The US intelligence assessment that Russia was preparing to use chemical weapons in the Ukraine War, that was widely reported in the corporate media and confirmed by President Biden himself, was an unsubstantiated claim leaked to the press as a tit-for-tat response to the damning Russian allegation that Ukraine was pursuing an active biological weapons program, in collaboration with Washington, in scores of bio-labs discovered by Russian forces in Ukraine in early days of the military campaign.

The NBC report noted: “It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: US officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine. President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three US officials told NBC News this week there was no evidence Russia had brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the US released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.

“Multiple US officials acknowledged that the US had used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it had used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the US was just ‘trying to get inside Putin’s head.’”

The crux of the NBC report, however, isn’t what’s being disclosed but rather what’s still being withheld by the US intelligence community that the mainstream news outlets are not at liberty to report on, as is obvious from the misleading NY Times report that mounting fierce guerrilla warfare campaign and deploying scorched-earth tactics by Ukraine’s largely conscript military and allied neo-Nazi militant groups repelled Russia’s assault on the capital and the Russian withdrawal wasn’t a consequence of a calculated military strategy.

Despite being aware of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s major unilateral concession to Kyiv, halting Russian offensive north of the capital and focusing on liberating Russian-majority Donbas in east Ukraine, practically spelling an end to Russia’s month-long offensive in Ukraine, US security officials, as quoted by the corporate media, are still deceptively asserting that Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv “wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment” that signals a “significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine,” one that US officials believe could be a “protracted and bloody fight.”

Regarding the nefarious disinformation campaign mounted by the mainstream media on behalf of NATO powers, the report notes: “The idea is to pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign, undermine Moscow’s propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world, said a Western government official familiar with the strategy.”

By mid-March 2022, after the “40-mile-long” military convoy of armored vehicles that created panic in the rank and file of Ukraine’s security forces and their international backers and that didn’t move an inch further after reaching the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war, it became obvious even to lay observers of the Ukraine War that it was evidently a diversionary tactic. But US security agencies insidiously kept feeding false information of impending fall of the Ukrainian capital to the mainstream media throughout Russia’s month-long military campaign in Ukraine.

Only two conclusions could be drawn from this scaremongering tactic: either it was a massive intelligence failure and Western security agencies weren’t aware the “40-mile-long” convoy approaching the capital was a ruse; or the NATO’s spy agencies had credible intelligence since the beginning of Russia’s military campaign that real battles for territory would be fought in Donbas in east Ukraine and the feigned assault on the capital was simply a diversionary tactic but they exaggerated the threat in order to vilify Russia’s calculated military offensive in Ukraine, and win the war of narratives that “how the war is perceived across the world.”

Even in the weeks after the unilateral Russian peace initiative announced on March 29, 2022, offering scaling back its blitz north of the capital and focusing instead on liberating Russian-majority Donbas region in east Ukraine, a task that has already been accomplished in large measure, Western intelligence community and the mainstream media kept warning the gullible audience Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv “wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment” and that Russian forces had withdrawn back into Belarus and Russia simply to “regroup, refit and resupply.”

Compared to 150-190,000 Russian troops deployed in Ukraine before the withdrawal process began in late March 2022, the total number of battalion tactical groups in the country stood at 78 in April 2022, all of them in the south and the east in the Donbas region. That would translate to about 55,000 to 62,000 troops, based on what the Pentagon said at the start of the war was the typical unit strength of 700 to 800 soldiers. In other words, two-third of Russian troops deployed in Ukraine were withdrawn back to Russia and Belarus by April 2022 while only one-third remained in east Ukraine battling neo-Nazi militant groups trained and equipped by the CIA.

Will Trump be Disqualified before Elections?

Although liberal detractors would refuse to acknowledge, Trump is a charismatic demagogue revered by conservative Americans and has remained a persistent thorn in the side of political adversaries. Despite losing the re-election bid, he won over 74 million popular votes, likely the largest number of votes won in the US history by a losing candidate, and could stage a comeback anytime.

The storming of the Capitol by a frenzied mob on January 6, 2021, was clearly a conspiracy orchestrated by the US deep state in connivance with the political establishment to undermine Trump’s leadership of the Republican Party and forestall his re-election bid in 2024, as he was deemed a “national security risk” and derisively sneered at as a “toddler-in-chief” by the Pentagon’s top brass.

Following the riots and deaths of four unarmed Trump supporters, notably Ashli Babbitt who was shot, he was petrified to the extent that, for once, he appeared to concede defeat and pledged “the transition would be smooth,” though he later recanted and went back to the characteristic defiant attitude.

It’s not too hard to imagine that the deep state must have inserted moles inside the Trump campaign who were feeding false information to Trump. In all likelihood, they misled Trump that the outcome of the election was still far from settled and then-Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to certify the electors’ confirmation of Biden’s electoral victory.

Trump’s obvious intention in motivating the mob was that demonstrators would stage a protest in front of the Capitol to exert moral pressure on Veep Pence and the electors to refuse to certify Biden’s confirmation. But the Capitol’s security was overwhelmed by the size and fervid passion of the crowd. The chief of the Capitol Police acknowledged on the record that his repeated requests to send reinforcements were denied, not by the White house but by certain “other quarters” that I would identify later in the article.

Reuters reported following the riots [1]: “’We are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,’ President Donald Trump exhorted his screaming supporters before they marched on the US Capitol last week, saying he’d go with them.

“Trump had wanted to join the thousands of hardcore followers who assembled at Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. He told aides in the days leading up to the rally that he planned to accompany them to demonstrate his ire at Congress as it moved to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s November election victory.

“But the Secret Service kept warning him that agents could not guarantee his safety if he went ahead, according to two people familiar with the matter. Trump relented and instead hunkered down at the White House to watch television images of the mob rioting he is accused of triggering.”

Clearly, Trump’s intention wasn’t to storm the Capitol. He simply wanted his followers to go to the Pennsylvania Avenue and register their protest outside the Capitol. Furthermore, Trump wanted to accompany the demonstrators, but was advised against it by the intelligence agencies. Had Trump accompanied the protestors, they would’ve remained peaceful. But in the absence of leadership, the frenzied mob became rudderless and stormed the building.

The obvious beneficiaries of the ensuing melee clearly were Trump’s political adversaries, because the Republican Party has been divided following the storming of the Capitol. Ten Republican representatives lent their voice favoring the House resolution for Trump’s second failed impeachment bid and he is finding it hard to maintain his hold over the leadership of the GOP.

According to another informative report [2] by the Washington Post following the protests, the Pentagon top brass restricted the authority of the commander of the D.C. National Guard to send reinforcements ahead of the Capitol riots that could have prevented the ensuing violence and bloodshed.

The report notes: “The commander of the D.C. National Guard said the Pentagon restricted his authority ahead of the riot at the U.S. Capitol, requiring higher-level sign-off to respond that cost time as the events that day spiraled out of control.

“Local commanders typically have the power to take military action on their own to save lives or prevent significant property damage in an urgent situation when there isn’t enough time to obtain approval from headquarters.

“But Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, said the Pentagon essentially took that power and other authorities away from him ahead of the short-lived insurrection on Jan. 6. That meant he couldn’t immediately roll out troops when he received a panicked phone call from the Capitol Police chief warning that rioters were about to enter the U.S. Capitol.”

Notwithstanding, with all the political and corporate lobbying, super-PACs and smear campaigns in the media, the US presidential contests are never smooth-sailing affairs. But the presidential contest in November 2020 was far more unpredictable and tumultuous even by the American standards.

From the bombshell New York Times report [3] in May 2019 detailing leading Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s murky dealings in Ukraine to the impeachment proceedings against Trump lasting from September 2019 through February 2020, and then an unprecedented second impeachment trial in January last year after Trump had already left the office.

Clearly, both the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump were nothing more than show trials. The Democrats initiated the impeachment inquiry against Trump in September 2019 as a diversionary tactic to cover up the sleazy dealings of Hunter Biden with Burisma Holdings of Ukraine, and consequent discrediting of leading Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden.

Although the Democrats had a thin majority in the House of Representatives to impeach Donald Trump, the Senate was controlled by the Republicans. Besides, convicting a president of impeachment requires two-third majority in the Senate that the Democrats never had. Then what was the purpose of initiating the proceedings if not to distract public attention away from the media trial of Hunter Biden, which was bringing damning press coverage not only to Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden but to the Democratic Party in its entirety?

The Capitol riots and impeachment hoaxes weren’t the only instance when the deep state flagrantly interfered in the US politics to discredit and, at times, even brazenly assassinate American presidents who dared to refuse to toe the national security policy formulated by the high-command of the world’s most powerful military force.

It’s worth recalling that at the height of the Cold War in the sixties when the US domestic politics was infested with the McCarthyite paranoia and communists were persecuted all over the country, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy, was picked up as a scapegoat because he had visited Russia and Cuba before the hit-job in order to put the blame for the high-profile political assassination on the communists.

Not surprisingly, he was silenced by Jack Ruby before he could open his mouth and prove innocence in the courts of law. The cold-blooded murder of a pacifist and non-interventionist American president was obviously perpetrated by a professional sniper on the payroll of the deep state.

It was not a coincidence that Kennedy was killed in November 1963, and months later, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorized Lyndon B. Johnson to directly engage in the Vietnam conflict in August 1964 on the basis of a false flag naval engagement.

It’s obvious that the American national security establishment was the only beneficiary of the assassination of Kennedy. Most likely, the deep state turned against Kennedy after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s pacifist rhetoric and conciliatory approach toward Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union, in the backdrop of the Cold War.

Besides the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, another reason the Kennedy administration fell from the grace of the deep state was the botched Bay of Pigs invasion by the CIA operatives and the Cuban exiles in April 1961 to topple the government of Fidel Castro that JFK approved but later severely castigated the CIA for the fiasco and sacked CIA director Allen Dulles and several employees. The Pentagon wanted Kennedy to immediately invade Cuba following the foiled plot but he “vacillated” and let a golden opportunity to dismantle a security threat close to the US soil slip by.   

Similarly, JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy was a leading Democratic candidate for the presidential office when he was shot dead by a Palestinian Christian Sirhan Sirhan in June 1968. Being a pacifist himself, Bobby Kennedy opposed the US involvement in the Vietnam War and wrote a book on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 in which he credited his brother, JFK, for showing restraint and amicably resolving the crisis.

As the former attorney general of JFK, Bobby probably had good leads on the masterminds of the JFK assassination, and wanted to avenge his brother’s shocking murder by exposing the assassins after being elected president. This was the only reason he, too, was silenced before he could be elected president.

Though serving a life sentence at a California penitentiary, Bobby Kennedy’s murderer Sirhan, now 77 years old, is a suspicious and deranged character, who frequently backtracked on his testimonies and confession during and after the trial, had no recollection of the murder and subsequent events, and his defense team had pleaded for a retrial several times but the request was summarily denied. He was due to be released on parole in August but California Governor Gavin Newsom decided against setting him free in January.

Shortly before the murder of Bobby Kennedy, Sirhan joined the occult organization Ancient Mystical Order of the Rose Cross, commonly known as the Rosicrucians in 1966. In fact, Sirhan’s esoteric faith closely resembles a medieval cult “Hashishin,” from which the English word “assassin” has derived.

The Order of the Assassins was a Nizari Ismaili sect which lived in the mountains of Persia and Syria between 1090 A.D. and 1275. During that time, they founded a clandestine organization that orchestrated the assassinations of leading figures in the Middle East that were considered enemies of their medieval “deep state.”

The Nizari Ismaili State was ruled by Hassan as-Sabbah from 1090 A.D. until his death in 1124. The Western world was introduced to the assassins by the works of Marco Polo who understood the name as deriving from the eponymous narcotic hashish, which indeed was used to put the assassins under a spell for political assassinations.

The more recent examples of such murderous cults are the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a cultist political organization founded by the Rajavis of Iran that relocated first to Iraq and then to Albania, or the Fidayeen or suicide bombers of Islamic jihadist organizations who are promised paradise in return for mounting terrorist attacks against adversaries.

Why Pakistan’s Deep State Tried to Assassinate Imran Khan?

On Nov. 3, a spine-chilling assassination attempt was mounted on Pakistan’s most charismatic and popular political leader, Imran Khan, while he was addressing a political rally in Wazirabad, a small town near the capital of Pakistan’s Punjab province, Lahore.

As corroborated by eye witness accounts, there were two shooters. One of them was an amateur religious zealot armed with a pistol and meant as a diversion who was caught by the supporters of PTI, Imran Khan’s political party. The other was a professionally trained sniper who shot a burst of bullets at Imran Khan’s container with a sub-machine gun and escaped the crime scene unharmed.

It’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t an assassination attempt but a shot across the bow meant to send a loud and clear warning to the leadership of Imran Khan’s PTI. The sharp shooter aimed the gun at Imran Khan’s legs and emptied an entire magazine of the sub-machine gun, and hit the bull’s eye.

Clearly, the assassin had explicit instructions only to target lower limbs of victims and avoid hitting vital organs in upper body that could’ve caused deaths and needless public furor. Injuries suffered by the rest of PTI leadership, mainly in the legs, and bystanders was collateral damage. One bystander, named Moazzam, was killed on the spot, but circumstantial evidence points that he was likely shot dead from the bullets shot by the guards protecting the container who mistakenly assumed that he was the shooter.

Multiple bullets and fragments of lead from two to three feet high metal plate around the container pierced Imran Khan’s both legs. After taking a close look at Imran Khan’s x-rays, as shown by his personal physician, Dr. Faisal, one bullet fractured Imran Khan’s right shin bone. A tiny piece of shrapnel landed near patella on the knee-cap. Another lead fragment almost pierced femoral artery that could’ve caused profuse bleeding and even death if left untreated for long.

The amateur zealot, identified as Naveed s/o Bashir, was armed with a locally made pistol he had bought for Rs.20,000 ($100). Most pistols found in Pakistan are semi-automatic and are utterly unreliable. They seldom fire an entire magazine without misfiring a couple of bullets. That’s what happened with the shooter, too. A bullet got stuck in the chamber and a valiant PTI supporter, Ibtisam Hassan, leapt on him and snatched the pistol from his hands.

Russian-made Kalashnikovs, on the other hand, are weapons of choice for sharp shooters. And since the times of Soviet-Afghan war in the eighties, Kalashnikovs are so easily available in Pakistan that one could conveniently get an AK-47 from any arms dealer. In all likelihood, the sniper was armed with an AK-47, as the classic rattling sound of Kalashnikov burst could be clearly heard in the video of the incident, and he likely escaped the crime scene in the narrow alleys of the town on a motor-bike with an accomplice.

The confessional statement of Naveed s/o Bashir was an eyewash, as he was a decoy. The whole assassination attempt appeared astutely choreographed. The purported assassin was not only caught red-handed but was also filmed shooting bullets in the air with a pistol while the actual hitman who professionally executed the assassination attempt remains as elusive as the masterminds of the cowardly plot.

Subsequently, Imran Khan implicated incumbent Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah and DG-C of ISI Major Gen. Faisal Naseer in the plot to assassinate him. But the police refused to register the first information report due to fear of repercussions from the deep state for naming a serving military officer in the police report.

In any case, the director of intelligence couldn’t have ordered mounting an assassination attempt on a popular political leader and the country’s former prime minister all by himself without a nod of approval from Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, then the army chief of Pakistan’s military, who retired from service on Nov. 29, weeks following the assassination plot on Nov. 3.

In Pakistan’s context, the national security establishment originally meant civil-military bureaucracy. Though over the years, civil bureaucracy has taken a backseat and now “the establishment” is defined as military’s top brass that has dictated Pakistan’s security and defense policy since its inception.

Paradoxically, security establishments do not have ideologies, they simply have interests. For instance, the General Ayub-led administration in the sixties was regarded as a liberal establishment. Then, the General Zia-led administration during the eighties was manifestly a religious conservative establishment. And lastly, the General Musharraf-led administration from 1999 to 2008 was once again deemed a liberal establishment.

The deep state does not judge on the basis of ideology, it simply looks for weakness. If a liberal political party is unassailable in a political system, it will join forces with conservatives; and if conservatives cannot be beaten in a system, it will form an alliance with liberals to perpetuate the stranglehold of “the deep state” on policymaking organs of state.

The biggest threat to nascent democracies all over the world does not come from external enemies but from their internal enemies, the national security establishments, because military generals always have a chauvinistic mindset and an undemocratic temperament. An additional aggravating factor that increases the likelihood of military coups in developing democracies is that they lack firm traditions of democracy, rule of law and constitutionalism which act as bars against martial laws.

All political parties in Pakistan at some point in time in history were groomed by the security establishment. The founder of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was groomed by General Ayub’s establishment as a counterweight to Sheikh Mujib’s Awami League, the founder of Bangladesh, during the sixties.

Nawaz Sharif was nurtured by General Zia’s administration during the eighties to offset the influence of Bhutto’s People’s Party. But he was cast aside after he capitulated to the pressure of the Clinton administration during the Kargil conflict of 1999 in disputed Kashmir region and ceded Pakistan’s military positions to arch-rival India, leading to Gen. Musharraf’s coup against Nawaz Sharif’s government in Oct. 1999.

Imran Khan’s PTI draws popular support from Pakistani masses, particularly from younger generations and women that are full of political enthusiasm. PTI won the general elections of 2018 and formed a coalition government, and Imran Khan was elected prime minister. But a rift emerged between Imran Khan’s elected government and the top brass of Pakistan’s military in Nov. 2021 over the appointment of the director general of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s powerful military intelligence service.

Eventually, Imran Khan succumbed to pressure and appointed the spymaster nominated by the top brass. But by then, the military had decided that Imran Khan had become too powerful a political leader and was encroaching on the military’s traditional domains, defense and national security policy. Therefore, deploying the astute divide-and-conquer strategy, the deep state lent its weight behind the opposition political alliance. Imran Khan’s political allies abandoned the PTI government and the coalition government fell apart in April.

Due to the British imperial legacy and subsequent close working relationship between the security agencies of Pakistan and the US during the Soviet-Afghan war of the eighties, Pakistan’s security establishment works hand in glove with the deep state of the United States, like the Turkish security establishment which is a NATO member.

Before his ouster as prime minister in a no-trust motion in the parliament on April 10, Imran Khan claimed that Pakistan’s Ambassador to US, Asad Majeed, was warned by Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu that Khan’s continuation in office would have repercussions for bilateral ties between the two nations.

Shireen Mazari, a Pakistani politician who served as the Federal Minister for Human Rights under the Imran Khan government, quoted Donald Lu as saying: “If Prime Minister Imran Khan remained in office, then Pakistan will be isolated from the United States and we will take the issue head on; but if the vote of no-confidence succeeds, all will be forgiven.”

Imran Khan fell from the grace of the Biden administration, whose record-breaking popularity ratings plummeted after the precipitous fall of Kabul in August 2021, reminiscent of the Fall of Saigon in April 1975, with Chinook helicopters hovering over US embassy evacuating diplomatic staff to the airport, and Washington accused Pakistan for the debacle.

After the United States “nation-building project” failed in Afghanistan during its two-decade occupation of the embattled country from Oct. 2001 to August 2021, it accused regional powers of lending covert support to Afghan insurgents battling the occupation forces.

The occupation and Washington’s customary blame game accusing “malign regional forces” of insidiously destabilizing Afghanistan and undermining US-led “benevolent imperialism” instead of accepting responsibility for its botched invasion and occupation of Afghanistan brought Pakistan and Russia closer against a common adversary in their backyard, and the two countries even managed to forge defense ties, particularly during the three and a half years of Imran Khan’s government from July 2018 to April 2022.

Since the announcement of a peace deal with the Taliban by the Trump administration in Feb. 2020, regional powers, China and Russia in particular, hosted international conferences and invited the representatives of the US-backed Afghanistan government and the Taliban for peace negotiations.

After the departure of US forces from “the graveyard of the empires,” although Washington is trying to starve the hapless Afghan masses to death in retribution for inflicting a humiliating defeat on the global hegemon by imposing economic sanctions on the Taliban government and browbeating international community to desist from lending formal diplomatic recognition or having trade relations with Afghanistan, China and Russia have provided generous humanitarian and developmental assistance to Afghanistan.

Imran Khan’s ouster from power for daring to stand up to the United States harks back to the toppling and subsequent assassination of Pakistan’s first elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in April 1979 by the martial law regime of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq.

The United States not only turned a blind eye but tacitly approved the elimination of Bhutto from Pakistan’s political scene because, being a socialist, Bhutto not only nurtured cordial ties with communist China but was also courting Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union played the role of a mediator at the signing of the Tashkent Agreement for the cessation of hostilities following the 1965 India-Pakistan War over the disputed Kashmir region, in which Bhutto represented Pakistan as the foreign minister of the Gen. Ayub Khan-led government.

Like Imran Khan, the United States “deep state” regarded Bhutto as a political liability and an obstacle in the way of mounting the Operation Cyclone to provoke the former Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan and the subsequent waging of a decade-long war of attrition, using Afghan jihadists as cannon fodder who were generously funded, trained and armed by the CIA and Pakistan’s security agencies in the Af-Pak border regions, in order to “bleed the Soviet forces” and destabilize and weaken the rival global power.

Regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, then American envoy to Kabul, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was assassinated on the Valentine’s Day, on 14 Feb 1979, the same day that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran.

The former Soviet Union was wary that its forty-million Muslims were susceptible to radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamist insurgencies spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.

According to documents declassified by the White House, CIA and State Department in January 2019, as reported by Tim Weiner for The Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December that year.

The revelation doesn’t come as a surprise, though, because more than two decades before the declassification of the State Department documents, in the 1998 interview to The Counter Punch Magazine, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in December 1979.

Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview. The interviewer puts the question: “And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?” Brzezinski replies: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least he had the courage to speak the unembellished truth. It’s worth noting, however, that the aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western policymaker can now dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.

Regardless, that the CIA was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been proven by the State Department’s declassified documents; fact of the matter, however, is that the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan’s security agencies and the Gulf Arab States to train and arm the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was forged years before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Pakistan joined the American-led, anticommunist SEATO and CENTO regional alliances in the 1950s and played the role of Washington’s client state since its inception in 1947. So much so that when a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory, Pakistan’s then President Ayub Khan openly acknowledged the reconnaissance aircraft flew from an American airbase in Peshawar, a city in northwest Pakistan.

Then during the 1970s, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government began aiding the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud’s government, who had toppled his first cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of Afghanistan.

Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan’s security agencies were alarmed by his irredentist claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated in 1978 as a consequence of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that although the Bhutto government did provide political and diplomatic support on a limited scale to Islamists in their struggle for power against Pashtun nationalists in Afghanistan, being a secular and progressive politician, he would never have permitted opening the floodgates for flushing the Af-Pak region with weapons, petrodollars and radical jihadist ideology as his successor, Zia-ul-Haq, an Islamist military general, did by becoming a willing tool of religious extremism and militarism in the hands of neocolonial powers.

PTI’s Foreign Funding Case and Need for Electoral Reforms

The Election Commission of Pakistan’s politically motivated verdict against Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), accusing Pakistan’s most popular political party of receiving funds from foreign nationals and entities, raises two vital questions: are Pakistani political parties permitted to mount fundraising campaigns to meet electoral campaign-related expenses, and are Pakistani expats, even if they have renounced Pakistani citizenship, allowed to contribute money to such funds?

Rather than an indictment on PTI’s illicit financial transactions, the election commission’s verdict, in fact, was the vindication of PTI’s stance that the party’s financial transactions and record-keeping are completely transparent and accounted for.

Had Pakistani expats contributed their hard-earned money to electoral funds of PML-N or PPP, it would certainly have ended up in the benami bank accounts of Maqsood Chaprasi and Gullu Butt. But even the election commission’s verdict implicitly acknowledges that the purported “prohibited funds” were actually deposited in the party’s bank accounts and were used on running electoral campaigns of PTI’s candidates.

In Pakistan’s political system, there are three major structural faults. A representative and democratic political system weeds out corrupt and inept rulers in the long run. But Pakistan’s democracy was derailed by three decade-long martial laws and every time it got back to square one and had to start anew.

Democracy works like the trial-and-error method: politicians who fail to perform are cast aside and those who deliver are retained through election process. A martial law, especially if it is decade-long, gives a new lease of life to the already tried, tested and failed politicians.

The second major fault in Pakistan’s political system is the refusal of the party chiefs of the two national-level political parties, Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), to hold genuine intra-party elections. How can one champion democracy on a national level when one refuses to ensure representation within political parties? Because of this reason, both these political parties have become personality cults and family fiefdoms rather than representative political parties, as such.

The only mainstream political party which has consistently held intra-party elections since the 2013 parliamentary elections is the new entrant in the Pakistani political landscape: Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Those intra-party elections are far from perfect, but it is a step in the right direction.

Isn’t it ironic, however, that apart from PTI, the only two political parties in Pakistan that regularly hold intra-party elections and that have created a public fund for the election campaign-related expenses are Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and Jamaat-e-Islami (JI)? No wonder then, the Urdu-speaking Mohajir nationalists and the hardline Islamists vote in droves for these political parties, respectively, because they represent the middle class of a section of Pakistani society.

Had it not been for the racism and militancy of MQM and the hardline Islamist ideology of JI, both these parties would have easily swept the elections, in the same way that PTI won an overwhelming mandate in the provincial elections of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) in 2013 and the general elections of 2018.

The third principal fault in democracy, not just in Pakistan but as it is practiced all over the world, is the election campaign funding part, because individuals and corporations that finance election campaigns always have ulterior motives: they treat political funding as investments from which they expect to make profits by influencing executive policy and legislation.

Nevertheless, in the developed Western societies, a distinction is generally drawn between power and money. If we take a cursory look at some of the well-known Western politicians, excluding a few billionaires like Trump, others like Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Francois Hollande, all of them were successful lawyers from the middle class backgrounds before they were elected as executives of their respective countries.

The Republican, Democratic, Conservative and Labor parties, all of them accept political contributions which are then spent on the election campaigns of their nominees, which generally are the members of the middle class. Nowhere in the developed and politically mature Western countries it is it allowed for individual candidates to spend money from their own pockets on their election campaigns, because instead of a political contest, it would then become a contest between the bank accounts of respective candidates.

Although money does influence politics even in the Western countries, it only happens through indirect means like the election campaign financing of political parties, congressional lobbying and advocacy groups etc. In the developing democracies, like India and Pakistan, for instance, only the so-called “electable” feudals, industrialists and billionaire businessmen can aspire for political offices due to election campaign-related expenses, and the middle class and the masses are completely excluded from the whole electoral exercise.

This makes a sheer mockery of democratic process, because how can we expect from the ultra-rich elite to protect the interests of the middle and lower classes? They would obviously enact laws and formulate public policy which would favor their financial interests without any regard for the larger public interest.

In Pakistan, politics has become the exclusive monopoly of the feudal Bhutto fiefdom and the industrialist Sharif dynasty; while in India, the elitist Nehru dynasty has practically been kicked out of politics by the Hindu nationalist BJP due to the former’s neoliberal policies and hereditary leadership.

Fact of the matter is that in Pakistan and India, we have never had a genuinely representative democracy that would cater to the needs and interests of the masses. What we have had thus far is quasi-democracy or more appropriately, an “elitocracy,” that protects the interests of moneyed elites of the subcontinent.

Nevertheless, democracy evolves over time. Instead of losing faith in political system, one must remain engaged in repetitive electoral process, which delivers in the long run through scientifically proven trial-and-error method.