Ad hoc morality


A friend of mine here in America was jobless

I arranged for him to start a job at a local motel

He quit the job on the first day

When I asked him the reason, he said that he saw men renting the rooms where they brought prostitutes and that it was not halal

I asked him if he knew for a fact that the girls accompanying the men were really prostitutes and not the wives

He said that he could tell that they were not wives

He didn’t have a convincing argument despite being right

Then he started working as an Uber driver

He hauled people from one point to the next

One day he told me a story of giving a ride to an intoxicated prostitute

I asked him when he was going to quit working as an Uber driver since now the prostitutes were in the back seat of his car

He said he was not supposed to judge people and that he should assume positively

Once again, he didn’t have a convincing argument despite being right

This story reminded me of what is happening between Pakistan, the United States, Israel and India

Pakistan harbours the sentiment that Israel must not be recognised as a legitimate state because it occupies the Palestinian land and kills innocent Palestinians, which it absolutely does

Given that gold standard of morality, when is Pakistan going to deny recognising India as a legitimate state because India also occupies a land that does not belong to it and against the wishes of the indigenous people? Kashmir, not Palestine, is the world’s most densely militarised zone

There are close to a million Indian soldiers in that valley

The entire Pakistani army numbers around a little over half of that

Furthermore, Pakistan refuses to recognise Israel because Israel kills innocent people on a land it does not own

The Biden administration broke the news to the US lawmakers that he was nearing a formalised agreement with Pakistan where the US armed drones would use Pakistani airspace to make attacks on the soil of Afghanistan

As per the US-Taliban deal, the Taliban wouldn’t allow their soil to be used by foreign terror groups to execute attacks against the United States but the latter can use Pakistani airspace to target Afghan soil

Pakistan objects to Israel attacking a foreign soil and innocent and helpless Palestinian people but it would happily facilitate attacks on another foreign land where innocent and helpless people would be killed

Pakistan saw decades of violent terrorism on its soil and saw thousands of its innocent citizens killed, all due to an unnecessary participation in a US-led aggression in 2001

Imran Khan and Donald Trump were able to do something unprecedented in the histories of their respective countries

Every post World War II American president has waged a war

Trump did not wage a single war

He rather ended the longest war his country was fighting

Khan ushered his country into a partnership with America where his country was brokering peace rather than war

With this potential agreement where the language mentions the use of Pakistani airspace by US drones, it doesn’t take much dot connecting to figure out that Pakistan’s land would be used to park and fly the drone from America, and Pakistan would reset back to their old traditional ways where America hunts and Pakistan helps

It would also bring back the old terror days because participating in aggression is guaranteed to create an ugly blowback

Musharraf allowed the CIA drones to target people on Pakistani soil

In return, the US facilitated his undemocratic regime

When his ouster became inevitable, the US supported Benazir and her propaganda term ‘reconciliation’ as if it was always on the side of democracy inside Pakistan

The years ahead would be a deja vu all over again

Innocent people will die and someone will rise against this deal

And the US would lend its support

Curtain down

  Published in The Express Tribune, October 6th, 2022

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces



Date:07-Oct-2022 Reference:View Original Link