Imran Khan: 'America is destroying Pakistan...'

[alp227]

Source: The Guardian

When Barack Obama announced in May that American commandos had killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Imran Khan was furious. "The whole of Pakistan felt this way. Wherever I went I felt this humiliation and anger in people. It was humiliating because an American president announces it, not our president. And because it was the American military, not our military, which this country has given great sacrifices to nurture, that killed him."

Khan stirs his cappuccino angrily. "Most humiliating of all was that the CIA chief Panetta says that the Pakistan government was either incompetent or complicit. Complicit!" But surely Leon Panetta had a point, didn't he? The world's most wanted man was living a mile from Pakistan's military academy, not in some obscure cave. "They're talking about a country in which 35,000 people have died during a war that had nothing to do with us. Ours is perhaps the only country in history that keeps getting bombed, through drone attacks, by our ally."

Khan's rage is directed not chiefly at Obama's administration but at successive Pakistani governments for entrapping his homeland in a dismal cycle of immiseration and mass deaths for the past eight years by supporting the war on terror in return for billions of dollars of financial aid. The manner of Bin Laden's killing and the national shame of its aftermath typify for Khan how Pakistan has never properly learned to stand on its own two feet. He calls it an era of neocolonialism in which Pakistan's people seem destined to suffer as much as, if not more than, they did during British colonial rule.

"According to the government economic survey in Pakistan, $70bn has been lost to the economy because of this war. Total aid has been barely $20bn. Aid has gone to the ruling elite, while the people have lost $70bn. We have lost 35,000 lives and as many maimed – and then to be said to be complicit. The shame of it!"

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/sep/18/imran-khan-america-destroying-pakistan

[Mr Deltoid]

1. The truth hurts

Um, he was living amongst your ELITE. Do the math.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

2. yes, america is but so is saudi and so is india

pakistan has problems galore and primary one being the power of the military and the military's support of islamic right wing bullshit

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Ikonoklast]

4. If Pakistan is being destroyed, it is being done by Pakistanis.

If Khan actually thinks that the war being fought in Afghanistan with Pakistanis in the tribal areas sympthetic to Al Qaeda giving them aid and refuge has 'nothing to do with us', he must think the rest of the world is stupid.

[The Northerner]

5. It's all part of the "War on Terror" and 2011 is no different n/t

[truebrit71]

6. I think he should have stuck with playing cricket...

...at least he was good at that...

[JCMach1]

7. ISI's candidate for the Pakistan's presidency

Is just as big an idiot as the current office holder.