Your Nightly Dose of Reality: Pakistan's Army

Tarek Fatah, an award-winning Canadian writer of Pakistani origin and founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, compares Pakistan's army to Al-Qaeda in the video below. He says, "Pakistan is like a carcass being looted by these vultures."

But Fatah's disdain for the top brass of Pakistan's army is not shared by the Pakistani people. Back in December 2011, Aakar Patel wrote in his article called, "Why Pakistan’s army is more popular than its politicians":

A Pew poll reported by Reuters a few months ago said the army was “overwhelmingly popular” in Pakistan. It said 79 percent of Pakistanis thought their army “had a good influence on the country.” The poll was taken after Osama bin Laden’s killing to see if the army had suffered in popularity. It hadn’t.

This devotion to their army is obvious to those who follow Pakistan’s media. The Urdu media especially, but also much of the English media.

The army is more popular in Pakistan than the country’s political parties and its elected leaders.

The question is why. Why is an army that imposed dictatorship on Pakistanis four times (1958, 1969, 1978 and 1999), displaced governments Pakistanis elected another three times (1990, 1993, 1996) and hanged a prime minister still popular? Why do Pakistanis love the ISI, an institution whose chief Lt Gen Asad Durrani says on oath that it meddles in elections, and spent US$ 1.6 million to see the PPP defeated?

The military in every country is almost always beloved by the people, for obvious reasons. People respect sacrifice and admire soldiers. The popularity and authority of the American military ranks well above Congress and media.

So, who is right about the nature of the Pakistani army - expatriates like Tarek Fatah, or the Pakistan people? The answer is probably somewhere in between.

Is Pakistan's army solely to blame for the mess in Afghanistan? No. The U.S., NATO, and Israel are also guilty of empowering Islamic extremists, supporting terrorism, and keeping Afghanistan down. The false flag September 11 events allowed the U.S. to invade Afghanistan and plunder its resources.

Most mainstream analysts naturally assume that the U.S. government's record regarding Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Afghanistan as a whole is not as bad as Pakistan's, but they are being dishonest and delusional. As an example, here is an excerpt from a Boston Globe editorial about Pakistan's army from June 2010 entitled, "Get tough with Pakistan’s army":

THE UNITED States and NATO cannot endure an open-ended military commitment in Afghanistan. But they know — or should know — that there can be no hope of ending the war unless Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency stops arming, funding, and training Afghan insurgent groups.

Washington's plan is to place all the blame for its massive security failure in Afghanistan on Pakistan and scapegoat its army. I'm not in any way defending Pakistan's army, it is obviously a disaster, but it is not right when one side is scapegoated in order to erase the sins of another. Washington is even more responsible for the influence and power of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The CIA clearly fathered Al-Qaeda and continues to fund its operations in countries like Libya and Syria, and yet it hardly ever crosses the minds of mainstream analysts that the problem of terrorism has been deliberately manufactured by Washington's policy makers.

In another video, Fatah says that either Pakistan's army survives or Pakistan does. He recommends that the army be dismantled. "You either keep Pakistan army or Pakistan. This is a difficult scenario," Fatah said.