Soon after this, a video began circulating on social media with claims that these showed the destruction at the Noor Khan (Chaklala) airbase. The airbase is located in the Rawalpindi area, around 10 kilometres from Islamabad.

X user Karma Yogi (@karma2moksha) shared the video and wrote, “Pakistan’s Noor Khan Airbase. As per the shared video, the damage is huge.” (Archive)

Several other X handles, including @munish_pat1980, @amjaviya and @Yashwant_Saroha also shared the video with the same claim.

Fact Check

On looking at the viral video closely, Alt News noticed that there were only passenger planes and nothing resembling a fighter jet on the tarmac. At the 00:52-minute mark in the video, the word ‘Sudan’ can be seen on the tail of one of the planes.

We performed a reverse image search using a few frames of the viral clip and found the same video uploaded on Instagram by a user named ‘@africanaviators_official’ on March 31, 2025. The caption of the post said these were tragic scenes from Khartoum International Airport in Sudan that show a large number of aircraft being destroyed during clashes between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in May 2023. It also says that the Sudanese army took back control of the Khartoum International Airport from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

A longer version of this video was shared by X handle @smutoro on March 31. The post said that the Khartoum Airport was destroyed by RSF fighters. At the 04:31-minute mark in the video, the words ‘Blue Bird Aviation Company Limited’ can be seen on the damaged plane as well as on the signboard of an aircraft workshop. Blue Bird Aviation is a private airline company from Sudan established in 1989. Thus there is ample evidence that the video is from Sudan and not Pakistan.

According to a report published by Al Jazeera on March 26, the Sudanese army recaptured Khartoum International Airport from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in March 2025, two years after the war.

To sum up, this viral video shows an airport destroyed in a clash during the civil uprising in Sudan, not Pakistan. Social media users wrongly shared it as scenes from Pakistan’s Noor Khan airbase after it was destroyed by the Indian armed forces.

The post Video from Sudan shared as visuals of Pakistan’s Noor Khan airbase after Indian attack appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Pawan Kumar.

The amendments to the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) were previously approved by the National Assembly and now await the president’s signature to become law. 

“The Pakistan Senate’s passage of amendments to the country’s cybercrime laws is deeply concerning. While on its face, the law seeks to tamp down the spread of false news, if signed into law, it will disproportionately curtail freedom of speech in Pakistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “President Asif Ali Zardari must veto the bill, which threatens the fundamental rights of Pakistani citizens and journalists while granting the government and security agencies sweeping powers to impose complete control over internet freedom in the country.”

The proposed amendments to PECA include the establishment of four new government bodies to help regulate online content and broadening the definitions of online harms. CPJ’s texts to Pakistan’s Federal Information Minister Attaullah Tarar did not receive a response.

The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists announced nationwide protests against the amendments, calling them unconstitutional and an infringement on citizens’ rights.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“The tragic killing of Janan Hussain underscores the alarming risks faced by journalists in Pakistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “This horrific attack is a stark reminder of the deteriorating climate for press freedom in the country. The Pakistani government must urgently act to protect journalists and ensure their safety as they carry out their essential work.”

Hussain, who had 11,000 followers on Facebook, regularly reported on local issues in Parachinar, the capital of Kurram. CPJ was unable to confirm further details about Hussain’s killing.

CPJ’s text messages to Information Minister Attaullah Tarar requesting comment did not receive a response.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Intercepted.

CHISINAU -- Moldova has paused a recruitment effort to funnel construction workers to Israel, alleging that Israelis have put Moldovans in "high-risk conflict zones," withheld passports, and committed other abuses while plugging gaps in their workforce brought on by the current war in the Gaza Strip.

The Labor Ministry confirmed to RFE/RL's Moldovan Service this week that Chisinau had "temporarily postponed" the latest round of recruitment under the bilateral agreement following the accusations by Moldovan citizens, but said it could resume once Israel confirmed the practices were stopped and "security and respect" for Moldovan nationals were ensured.

Israel has faced an acute labor squeeze since hundreds of thousands of reservists and other Israelis were called up to fight and thousands of Palestinians were denied access to jobs in Israel after gunmen from the EU- and U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas carried out a massive cross-border attack that killed just over 1,100 people, most of them Israeli civilians, on October 7.

"As a result of the deterioration of the security situation in the state of Israel, workers from the Republic of Moldova were employed to work in high-risk conflict zones, some citizens had their passports withheld by employers, complaints were registered about the confiscation of workers' luggage, as well as Israeli authorities carried out activities of direct recruitment of Moldovan workers, on the territory of the Republic of Moldova, which is contrary to the provisions of the agreement," the ministry said in a January 17 response to an RFE/RL access-to-information request.

The ministry did not accuse the Israeli state of perpetrating the abuses. It said Moldovan officials have reported the "violations" to Israel and asked it to put a stop to them and "ensure the security and respect of the rights of workers coming from the Republic of Moldova," one of Europe's poorest countries with a population of some 3.4 million.

The Moldovan Embassy in Tel Aviv said some 13,000 Moldovans were in Israel before the current war broke out. Many work at construction sites or provide care for the elderly, inside or outside the auspices of the recruitment agreement.

Israeli authorities did not immediately respond to RFE/RL's request for comment on the Labor Ministry's accusations.

Since the war erupted in early October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has sought to extend worker visas and attract more foreign labor from around the world, including by raising its quota on foreign construction workers by roughly half, to 65,000 individuals.

It appealed publicly for 1,200 new Moldovan workers for the construction sector, including blacksmiths, painters, and carpenters.

Speaking in Israel's parliament, the Knesset, the director of the Foreign Workers Administration, Inbal Mashash, named Moldova, along with Thailand and Sri Lanka, as countries where Israeli hopes were highest for more guest workers.

The bilateral Moldovan-Israeli agreement on temporary employment in "certain sectors" including construction in Israel was signed in 2012 and has been amended on multiple occasions, including in December.

In addition to setting up training and procedures to regulate and steer labor flows, it imposes restrictions that include a ban on Israeli companies recruiting on Moldovan territory.

In its decade-long existence, some 17,000 Moldovans have worked in Israel under the auspices of the agreement through 28 rounds of recruitment. At the last available official count, in 2022, there were about 4,000 participating Moldovans.

"The [29th] recruitment round will resume once the above-mentioned irregularities are eliminated and we receive confirmation from the Israeli side of the necessary measures being taken to ensure security and respect for the rights of employed [Moldovan] citizens on the territory of the state of Israel," the Moldovan Labor Ministry said.

From the early days of the current war, Moldovans have spoken out about family concerns and the pressures to pack up and leave Israel, but most appear to have stayed.

As rumors spread of pressure on Moldovan construction workers to stay in Israel after a January 5 pause announcement, Labor Minister Alexei Buzu confirmed there were problems but focused on the accusation that Israeli firms were improperly recruiting Moldovans outside the program or for repeat stints.

A failure to comply with some provisions brings "a risk that other commitments will be ignored [or] will not be delivered at the time or according to the expectations described in the agreement," he said.

Buzu stopped short of leveling some of the most serious accusations involving Moldovan workers being sent to work in 'high-risk conflict zones" or having their passports or belongings taken from them.

Reuters has reported that the worker shortage is costing Israel's construction sector around $37 million per day.

Moldova's National Employment Agency (ANOFM) is responsible for implementing the Israeli-Moldovan recruitment agreement. The Labor Ministry said the agency had already lined up construction recruits and scheduled professional exams for the end of December before the postponement.

The ministry said a similar agreement on the home-caregiver sector between Moldova and Israel -- the subject of negotiations in December -- had “not yet been signed."

The Hamas-led surprise attack on October 7 sparked a massive response from Israel including devastating aerial bombardments and a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, which was home to 2.3 million Palestinians before the latest fighting displaced most of them.

The Hamas-run health authorities in Gaza say 24,700 people have been killed in the subsequent fighting and 62,000 more injured.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

UFA, Russia -- A court in Ufa, the capital of Russia's Republic of Bashkortostan, has sentenced eight men to up to 14 days in jail for taking part in an unprecedented rally earlier this week to support the former leader of the banned Bashqort movement, Fail Alsynov, who has criticized Russia's full-scale aggression against Ukraine.

The Kirov district court on January 18 sentenced activists Salavat Idelbayev and Rustam Yuldashev to 14 and 13 days in jail, respectively, after finding them guilty of taking part in "an unsanctioned rally that led to the disruption of infrastructure activities and obstructed the work of a court" on January 15.

A day earlier, the same court sentenced Ilnar Galin to 13 days in jail, and Denis Skvortsov, Fanzil Akhmetshin, Yulai Aralbayev, Radmir Mukhametshin, and Dmitry Petrov to 10 days in jail each on the same charges.

The sentences were related to a January 15 rally of around 5,000 people in front of a court in the town of Baimak, where the verdict and sentencing of Alsynov, who was charged with inciting ethnic hatred, were expected to be announced. But the court postponed the announcement to January 17 to allow security forces to prepare for any reaction to the verdict in the controversial trial.

On January 17, thousands of supporters gathered in front of the court again, and after Alsynov was sentenced to four years in prison, clashes broke out as police using batons, tear gas, and stun grenades forced the protesters to leave the site. Several protesters were injured and at least two were hospitalized.

Dozens of protesters were detained and the Investigative Committee said those in custody from the January 17 unrest will face criminal charges -- organizing and participating in mass disorder and using violence against law enforcement.

Separately on January 18, police detained two young men in Baimak on unspecified charges. Friends of the men said the detentions were most likely linked to the rallies to support Alsynov.

The head of Bashkortostan, Radiy Khabirov, made his first statement on January 18 about the largest protest rally in Russia since Moscow launched its ongoing invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, saying he "will not tolerate extremism and attempts to shake up the situation," and promising to find the "real organizers" of the rallies.

It was Khabirov who initiated the investigation of Alsynov, accusing him of inciting ethnic hatred as well as calling for anti-government rallies and extremist activities and discrediting Russia's armed forces.

In the end, Alsynov was charged only with inciting hatred, which stemmed from a speech he gave at a rally in late April 2023 in the village of Ishmurzino in which he criticized local government plans to start mining gold near the village, as it would bring in migrant laborers.

Investigators said Alsynov's speech "negatively assessed people in the Caucasus and Central Asia, humiliating their human dignity." Alsynov and his supporters have rejected the charge as politically motivated.

Bashkortostan's Supreme Court banned Alsynov's Bashqort group, which for years promoted Bashkir language, culture, and equal rights for ethnic Bashkirs, in May 2020, declaring it extremist.

Bashqort was banned after staging several rallies and other events challenging the policies of both local and federal authorities, including Moscow's move to abolish mandatory indigenous-language classes in the regions with large populations of indigenous ethnic groups.

With reporting by RusNews

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Oleksandr Prokudin said a rocket attack on January 5 on the agricultural enterprise in Kherson killed a 35-year-old man and injured a 60-year-old resident.

Prokudin said "four targeted strikes" also destroyed buildings and equipment.

Russian troops regularly shell the de-occupied part of the Kherson region. Despite evidence and testimony to the contrary, Moscow denies targeting civilians.

In a rare admission of its military operations in Crimea, Ukraine has admitted it carried out attacks on a Russian military command post and a military unit in separate strikes on the Russia-occupied peninsula, saying it had inflicted "serious damage" to Russia's defense system.

Live Briefing: Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

RFE/RL's Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia's full-scale invasion, Kyiv's counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL's coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.

Nataliya Humenyuk, the spokeswoman of the Defense Forces of Southern Ukraine, said on January 5 that "really powerful combat" operations took place earlier this week, hitting Russia's military operations in Crimea especially hard.

"Not only one command post was affected," she said in a rare detailing of Ukrainian operations to repel the full-scale invasion Russia launched in February 2022.

"Now they have the same hysteria with movement again. They are trying to maneuver and position both the defense systems themselves and the objects they protect in other places," she added in an interview on the show Social Resistance.

It was not possible to verify Humenyuk's claims.

The attacks on Crimea come after an intensification of Russian missile and drone strikes on Ukraine.

Russian hypersonic and other missile attacks combined with drone strikes blanketed Ukraine on December 29 and again on January 2, killing more than 40 people and injuring dozens more. Ukraine hit back with attacks in southern Russia on December 30. Authorities in the Belgorod region said 25 people were killed.

The risk of air attacks continued on January 5 as sirens rang out three times across the Crimean city of Sevastopol on January 5, though there were no reports of explosions or impacts from drones or missiles.

In the early hours of January 5, the Russian city of Belgorod also was targeted by another round of Ukrainian shelling, officials said, hours after schools in the region were ordered to extend their holiday closures due to the risk of further attacks.

Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov also gave residents an opportunity to evacuate to safer areas. Residents will be helped to move to temporary accommodations in the other cities.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhaylo Podolyak on January 5 joined the United States in saying that Russia has hit Ukraine with missiles supplied by North Korea for the first time since launching its full-scale invasion.

Podolyak's statement came after the governor of the northeastern region of Kharkiv said that it had been struck by missiles fired by Russia that were not Russian-made.

"There is no longer any disguise. The #Moscow regime is no longer concealing its intentions, nor is it trying to pass off a large-scale war of aggression as mythical 'denazification,'" Podolyak said on X, formerly Twitter.

Russia "is attacking Ukrainians with missiles received from a state where citizens are tortured in concentration camps for having an unregistered radio, talking to a tourist, watching TV shows," he added.

He did not provide evidence for the missiles being North Korean, but his statements come a day after U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at the White House on January 4 that recently declassified intelligence found that North Korea has provided Russia with ballistic-missile launchers and several ballistic missiles.

Russian forces fired at least one of those missiles into Ukraine on December 30, and it landed in an open field in the Zaporizhzhya region, Kirby said. Russia also launched multiple North Korean ballistic missiles on January 2 as part of an overnight attack, he added.

Kirby also said Russia is seeking close-range ballistic missiles from Iran. A deal has not been completed, but the United States is concerned that negotiations "are actively advancing.”

With reporting by Reuters

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Murtaza Hussain.

For the past few weeks, former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has been at the center of an unprecedented political crisis. In the lead-up to new elections, Khan was arrested and released on corruption charges intended to keep him out of his office. Meanwhile, his supporters have been facing off against the military, as the armed forces crack down on his political party in a campaign aimed at excluding them from political life. The conflict drives at the heart of the most important issue in Pakistani politics: the reality of military rule. This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain are joined by Omar Waraich — a journalist, human rights advocate, and former head of South Asia for Amnesty International. Waraich provides the historical context, explains the Pakistani military’s role in the country, and where U.S. relations with Pakistan stand.

Transcript coming soon.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Intercepted.

On November 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 the 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 a 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 November 29, weeks following the assassination plot on November 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 October 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 November 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 October 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 February 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 February 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 cited in CounterPunch, 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.

Image credit: MinuteMirror.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nauman Sadiq.

That headline’s phrase “long march” refers to Imran Khan’s promise to lead a million-plus-person “long march” to the capital city, which is Islamabad, to bring the downfall of the U.S.-led recently-installed coup-regime, which had installed Shebaz Sharif. “Rana Sanaullah,” in that headline, refers to the coup-imposed Federal Minister of the Interior, under Shebaz Sharif. Sanaullah was in a position to be able — with the rest of Shebaz Sharif’s Government (backed by the U.S.) — to carry out that threat.

Also on October 14th, Geo TV bannered “Rana Sanaullah will be arrested if he enters Punjab: Cheema,” and reported that, “Advisor to Chief Minister Punjab on Interior Omar Sarfraz Cheema said that Federal Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah Khan will be arrested if he enters Punjab.” Both the dictators (the aristocrats and theocrats), and the democrats (Imran Khan’s group), are “gunning” against each other; and, right now, the dictators — with the crucial help of America — have the upper hand. For this reason, Imran Khan has not yet announced a date on which his proposed march will take place. He is instead travelling the country to campaign for it.

Imran Khan refers to himself as being a “party of one,” because he is up against the entire existing corrupt Government of Pakistan, and so he founded and leads his own Party, PTI. A joint web-search for “Imran Khan” “PTI” and “wikipedia” brings up no “PTI” but instead shows just “Imran Khan,” and that article says “He is the founder and chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), one of the largest political parties in the country.” However, though PTI is “one of the largest,” all of the others are opposed to it, because PTI is opposed to both the aristocracy and the theocracy. They are, and have been, united with the U.S. Government, in order to oust Imran Khan from power. (Today’s U.S. Government always supports aristocrats and theocrats against democrats, in order to be able to extract its cut, for the benefit of America’s billionaires, via the IMF etc. — various money-laundering institutions of this global-gangland operation, America’s “rules-based international order.”) The way they did this was by Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruling for a no-confidence vote against Imran Khan in the parliament to oust him as the Prime Minister; and the parliament then appointed Nawaz Sharif’s brother to replace Imran Khan. They would have liked to appoint Nawaz, except that, as Reuters had headlined on 24 December 2018, “Ousted Pakistani PM Sharif gets seven years’ jail for graft,” and, like any other pretend-‘democracy’, the aristocrats and theocrats who controlled Pakistan’s Government needed a public-electoral fig-leaf in order to give any permanency to their joint dictatorship over the country; so, they chose Nawaz’s younger brother instead.

Omar Sarfraz Cheema, in that headline “Rana Sanaullah will be arrested if he enters Punjab: Cheema,” is a member of Imran Khan’s PTI Party, which is the dominant Party in the Punjab region of Pakistan. When Rana Sanaulah threatened to get Imran Khan “hung upside down,” that was a threat which came not only from Pakistan’s aristocracy, and not only from Pakistan’s clergy, but also from the U.S. White House and Congress, which constitute the imperial center that has been enabling Pakistan’s aristocrats and clergy to control Pakistan. In the 15 October 2021 video “Imran Khan: The extended interview with MEE” (MEE being Middle East Eye, a news-source that isn’t under the U.S. regime’s thumb), at 5:40 in the interview, Khan, when he was asked what U.S. President Biden had said to him about Pakistan’s situation, Khan reluctantly admitted that Biden had refused to be in contact with him. (That interview is archived here, in case it might become removed from the internet.)  At that time, a year back, Khan was still hoping that the U.S. regime wouldn’t overthrow him (as it did).

Another, and even more telling, interview with Imran Khan had occurred on the night of 19 June 2012, when Julian Assange interviewed him by remote from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and its youtube version started being copied over six hundred times to the main Web archive, web dot archive dot org, but then all of those hundreds became mysteriously destroyed so that even at that archive, which is headquartered in the U.S., none of those copies any longer functions. However, the show can still be seen at RT, https://assange.rt.com/khan-episode-nine.html, from which it has been archived twice, such as here, and copies elsewhere also remain online, such as here and here and here and here and here, and the transcript of it is here; so, the U.S.-and-allied regimes might not be able to eliminate all copies of it from online. Anyway, this interview shows not only why Assange is being destroyed by the U.S./UK regime, but that they also are doing all they can to destroy Imran Khan.

19 June 2012 happened to be Assange’s first night being protected from the UK/U.S. regime inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, which was when the democrat, Rafael Correa, was leading that country. Correa himself became replaced by the secret U.S. agent Lenin Moreno as Correa’s successor, who on 2 April 2019 allowed UK to drag Assange out to supermax solitary confinement in London’s Belmarsh Prison awaiting ultimate extradition to the U.S. (Assange isn’t a citizen of either country, but of Australia, which has done nothing to protect him or his rights as an Australian citizen, and is therefore obviously a slave-regime to the UK/U.S. regime — and yet Australians aren’t revolting against that slavery by their Government.) Ever since, Assange has been effectively blocked to communicate to or with the public, so that he presumably will die either in that prison or else in one in the United States, basically a dead man, ever since 2 April 2019, who has never been tried in any court on any criminal charge (other than jumping bail on a cooked-up rape charge that was then dropped). It’s interesting that in the 19 June 2012 — the 9th — installment of “The Julian Assange Show,” interview with Imran Khan, both men were stoic about their likely becoming ultimately crushed by the global U.S./UK regime. Religions have their martyrs, but, so, too, do democrats. Aristocrats have only their greed, and their pretenses; but that is backed up by their enormous power — against which to revolt is the extreme form of courage and heroism.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

Around the world, 2022 has been a year of climate catastrophes, including droughts, floods, mega-fires, typhoons, and more. Among the hardest-hit countries is Pakistan. With torrential monsoon rainfall almost 190% above its 30-year average, extraordinary flooding has submerged one-third of the country and killed 1,400 people so far. But make no mistake: this is not only a “natural disaster”; rather, it is also the result of malfeasance for which high-income countries must bear major financial responsibility.

Pakistan’s floods can be clearly linked to human-induced climate change. Because warmer air holds more moisture, higher temperatures generally mean heavier monsoons. While monsoons have a natural year-to-year variation (being strong in some years and weak in others), the probability distribution is shifting toward heavier rainfall. The melting of Himalayan glaciers due to rising temperatures may also be contributing to increased flooding, and the same is likely true of land-use changes, including deforestation and poorly designed infrastructure.

The costs of the Pakistan floods will be enormous. Early estimates put the damage at more than $30 billion, and the coming months will bring increased hunger, disease, poverty, and massive rebuilding costs, now that more than one million homes have been damaged or destroyed.

Scientists will likely come up with careful estimates of attribution for Pakistan’s floods in the months ahead (examples of previous attribution studies can be found at worldweatherattribution.org). Suppose, hypothetically, that half of Pakistan’s losses are ultimately attributed to long-term climate change, and the other half to random year-to-year variation and local land-use practices. That would mean that around $15 billion of the estimated losses resulted from climate change.

The question then would turn to allocating responsibility for these climate-attributable costs. Under current global arrangements, the financial responsibility falls almost totally on Pakistan. To be sure, the United States has pledged around $50 million in relief, Canada has committed $5 million, and other countries are likely to join in. But even if total relief to Pakistan reached $150 million, that would cover 1% of the attributable losses in this scenario.

Now, consider an alternative way of assigning responsibility, based on countries’ respective contributions to climate change. This is how liability in the US and other countries generally works. If your neighbor damages your property through reckless behavior, you can sue for damages (compensation); and if a nearby factory pollutes an entire community, that community can sue as a group (through a class-action lawsuit, in the case of the US).

The world’s rich countries are like that polluting factory. They have deprived Pakistan of the long-term climatic conditions on which it has built its economy, homes, farms, and infrastructure. If there was a global climate court, Pakistan’s government would have a strong case against the US and other high-income countries for failing to limit climate-changing greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGs). But since there is no global climate court (yet), governments should act like one and allocate the attributable climate losses and damages to those countries that are historically responsible for them. Pakistan (and its neighbors in the Himalayas) would of course have the core responsibility for sustainable management of the land, including reforestation and climate-safe infrastructure.

Rich countries should bear their fair share of the attributable costs of climate adaptation, emergency response, and recovery in countries that played little to no role in causing today’s calamities.

The biggest single source of human-induced climate change is the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). Because some CO2 molecules emitted into the atmosphere remain there for centuries, focusing on cumulative emissions over long periods of time is crucial.

Between 1850 and 2020, the burning of fossil fuels resulted in cumulative emissions of 1.69 trillion tons of CO2. Of that total, the US accounts for roughly 24.6%—417 billion tons—which is much greater than its share of the 2021 world population: roughly 4.2%. Similarly, high-income countries combined (including the US, Europe, Japan, and a few others) account for around 58.7% of cumulative CO2 emissions, but only 15% of today’s world population.

By contrast, Pakistan contributed roughly 5.2 billion tons of CO2 between 1850 and 2020—roughly what the US emits each year. Its share of historical responsibility is therefore around 0.3%—far below its share of the global population (2.9%) and its burden of climate-related damage. While the US and other high-income countries are “net exporters of climate damages,” Pakistan and most other low-income and lower-middle-income countries are unwilling net importers.

True, there is some debate over what dates to use when assessing historical responsibilities. According to one view, cumulative emissions should be counted from around 1850, because that is when worldwide fossil-fuel use surged with early US and European industrialization. But another camp would start the clock much later, such as in 1992, when the world’s governments adopted the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and committed to stabilizing atmospheric GHG concentrations “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human induced) interference with the climate system.”

But this debate hardly affects the apportionment of responsibility. Even if we measure cumulative emissions just from the 1992-2020 period, the US share is 19.6%, the high-income group’s share is 46.9%, and Pakistan’s share is 0.4%.

Either way, rich countries should bear their fair share of the attributable costs of climate adaptation, emergency response, and recovery in countries that played little to no role in causing today’s calamities. As climate damages increase, so, too, does the need for large-scale, costly investments (including massive reforestation, flood control infrastructure, freshwater storage, and others) to protect societies against floods, droughts, wildfires, high-intensity typhoons, and other climate-related disasters. Climate-related tragedies such as Pakistan’s flooding are occurring with increasing frequency and intensity worldwide, in rich and poor countries alike. The current disasters are just a preview of what awaits us in the coming years and decades.

Too often, rich and powerful countries deny their historical responsibilities—whether for colonialism, slavery, or climate damage. All countries are responsible for decarbonizing their energy systems and managing their land and ecosystems responsibly and sustainably. Yet the developing world will not forget the leading role that rich countries have played in creating today’s worldwide climate disasters. As climate-related losses rapidly mount, global demands for climate justice will only grow.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jeffrey D. Sachs.

We speak to the Pakistani British historian and writer Tariq Ali about new anti-terrorism charges brought against former Prime Minister Imran Khan after he spoke out against the country’s police and a judge who presided over the arrest of one of his aides. His rivals have pressed for severe charges against Khan to keep him out of the next elections as his popularity grows across the country, says Ali. Ali also discusses devastating floods in Pakistan, which have killed nearly 800 people over the past two months, and have never happened “on this scale.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Since I am originally from Pakistan and have been teaching interdisciplinary studies (including political science) at City College of San Francisco, I have been following the developments there with great interest and concern, both from professional and personal points of view. For brevity and clarity, I am itemizing my impressions as follows:

1. From the reports available so far, it seems likely that the U.S. government colluded with anti-Imran Khan Pakistani politicians to have him removed from power. According to Khan, members of the U.S. Consular staff met several times with the opposition leaders and with only the dissident members of Khan’s party. That choice of meeting only with anti-Khan people points an accusing finger at the U.S. There are many other details that support the likelihood of possible U.S. interference in Pakistan’s internal matters. On becoming the U.S. President, Joe Biden called almost every world leader, but he did not call Imran Khan. In a Congressional hearing, the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, accused Pakistan of ties with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Most people do not know that of the total number of the Pashtun people (most Taliban are Pashtun), nearly 40 percent are Pakistani citizens; the rest live in Afghanistan. Like a good leader, he has to look after the interests of the citizens of his country who have close ties with their brethren in Afghanistan. At the same time, for regional solidarity and security, a good Pakistani leader would certainly want to have cordial ties with a neighboring country that has been the victim of the world’s two super powers’ brutal invasions since 1979. Khan believes in diplomatic solutions to political problems and warned the U.S. that there was no military solution to their war in Afghanistan. He was right. It took the U.S. government an expense of trillions of dollars and sacrifice of innumerable lives to replace the Taliban with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

2. I coined the term “indirect colonialism” in my teaching about the U.S. regime-change strategy that it employs consistently.  In this kind of colonialism, the colonizing power uses local brown-skinned self-seeking, nation-betraying leaders to sacrifice national interest for the sake of self-advancement. The colonizer does not have to spend its resources on launching a formal invasion to occupy a country. Local corrupt politicians prostitute national interest to do the colonizer’s bidding.

3. Just a few examples of indirect colonialism will suffice. In 1953, the U.S. government colluded with the British government to overthrow the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, and replace him with the dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, who did whatever he was asked to do by the United States. Like Imran Khan, Dr. Mosaddegh was putting his national interest above the greed of foreign, imperial powers that tried to force him to accept an insultingly low royalty from its own oil. In Imran Khan’s case, he refused U.S. military bases in Pakistan and refused to let his country be used as a “hired gun” to fight for the U.S. the so-called “war on terror.” A more accurate phrasing will be to call it the “war OF terror.”

4. On July 5, 1977, the U.S. government used the then Pakistan’s army chief Gen. Zia-ul-Haq to overthrow the democratic government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, whom he arranged to be hanged on murky, unconvincing charges. This blatant intrusion into Pakistan’s internal affairs was hatched inside the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan on July 4, 1977. In that case, U.S. just carried out Henry Kissinger’s threat to Bhutto: “We will make an example of you” if you do not stop pursuing the bomb. After India detonated its nuclear device, Bhutto was trying to assemble a similar bomb to maintain the balance of power.

5. It should be noted that the same fate befell the democratically elected Egyptian President, Dr. Mohamed Morsi. He was allowed to stay in power for just one year. Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi removed him in a coup d’etat in 2013. Morsi died in jail under mysterious circumstances. Representing the will of the Egyptian people and acting on their mandate, Morsi was demanding that Israel end its brutal occupation of Palestine. At one point, the Israeli ambassador had to be rescued from Egypt. Egyptians asked their President to close down the Israeli embassy and consulates in Egypt until the Zionist country complies with the United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 and other Resolutions. It is the same demand that Pakistan’s Imran Khan made in his speech at the United Nations when he unequivocally declared that Pakistan would not recognize Israel until the Palestinian rights were met. Both Morsi and Khan stood for justice and rule of law, which was too much for Israel and its patron U.S. to allow. Hence their removal from power.

6. Yet another example of U.S. interference is the 9-11-73 U.S.-engineered coup in which the democratically elected Chilean President, Dr. Salvador Allende, was overthrown and replaced with the dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. All of the above regime changes resulted in massive violence, unrest, and loss of lives. Since the Second World War, the U.S. has interfered negatively and disastrously in the internal affairs of more than 70 countries in its regime-change misadventures.

7. The people who brought the no-confidence motion against Imran Khan have been proven to be ill-educated, incompetent, corrupt, and always putting personal interest above the national interest. The Panama Papers revealed that the Nawaz Sharif family has laundered billions of dollars out of Pakistan and put it in foreign banks. As for the other clan, the Zardaris, their leader was known as Mr. 10 percent because for every government contract during his Presidency, his share was automatic 10 percent. He is suspected of having Benazir Bhutto’s brother Murtaza Bhutto assassinated when he ran against Zardari’s wife Benazir to become Pakistan’s PM. Murtaza’s daughter, the famous journalist and author Fatima Bhutto, has spoken out about her father’s assassination.

8. By comparison, Imran Khan is highly educated and the only unselfish Pakistani political leader I have seen in the past half century. When he became Prime Minister, Pakistan was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Through personal efforts and charisma, he arranged to get close to $ 6 billion from Saudi Arabia and United Arab Amirates to pay off the IMF so that the country could be saved from defaulting on the loan. Despite COVID-19, global skyrocketing inflation, and zero cooperation from the opposition parties, whose only focus was to make him fail, he was able to reduce the national deficit from Rs. 22 billion during Nawaz Sharif’s administration in 2018 to Rs. 1 billion in 2022 at the time of his ouster. These figures are from a broadcast on Pakistan television. In three years, he created close to 6 million jobs. He introduced health cards for the poor to provide them free healthcare. His “No one will sleep hungry” program in the country’s most vulnerable populations looked after the very poor. He encouraged exchanges between students from private and public schools to promote national integration. A major achievement of Imran Khan is that he rid the country of terrorism. Pakistanis and foreign visitors could walk the streets without fear of being kidnapped for ransom. That freedom had never been possible during the Zardari and Nawaz Sharif eras when terrorism was rampant and no one felt safe. Many such accomplishments go to his credit. It was not in his power to control the world-wide phenomenon of inflation.

9. For the first time since Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan occupied a respectable position in the comity of nations. At the United Nations, Khan brought to world attention the Israel-perpetrated ethnic cleansing and other atrocities on Palestinians living under the Zionists’ illegal occupation. The world knows that Israel’s defiance and violations of numerous UN Security Council Resolutions could never happen without the patronage and military, financial, and diplomatic support of the United States. He stated clearly that Pakistan would not recognize Israel until Palestinians are given their rights. Similarly, he placed on the world stage the India-perpetrated human rights disaster in Kashmir.

10. Khan cultivated close ties with the neighboring China (much to the dislike of the U.S.) and adopted a friendly stance toward another neighboring country, Russia (another of his peace-motivated moves that the U.S. did not like). The U.S. government has been following this dangerous Bush doctrine: “You are either with us or against us,” leaving no room for neutrality. However, the U.S. does not threaten big countries like India for their neutrality. The kinds of threat that a U.S. Assistant Secretary of State is reported to have used in the case of Imran Khan are reserved for those countries like Pakistan that have found that 100 percent subservience to the United States has not been beneficial to them. It seems impossible for the U.S. to understand this simple logic: The interests of the United States are not necessarily those of other countries.

11. Khan’s meeting with Putin had been scheduled long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Instead of cancelling his long-scheduled visit, he went to meet with Putin but never made any statement about Ukraine. His cultivation of close ties with Russia and adopting a neutral position like India was another irritant for the U.S. government that fails to see the positive side of neutrality: Pakistan could play an important role in bringing the U.S. and Russia together, as it did in arranging the first secret meeting between the two estranged powers, U.S. and China. According to the Dawn report, “Former US secretary of state Dr. Henry Kissinger recognised Pakistan’s ‘key’ role in arranging his secret visit from Islamabad to Beijing in 1971 for making breakthrough in China-US relations.” https://www.dawn.com/news/1613819

12. In cultivating good relations with China and Russia, Khan was just doing the right thing for his country’s progress. With the spineless and incompetent interim government that has replaced Imran Khan, the country is poised to slip back into U.S. vassalage, to the grave detriment of Pakistan’s sovereignty. Before Khan, the preceding governments sacrificed close to 30,000 Pakistani lives to fight America’s war of terror, incurring also financial loss of billions of dollars. Before Khan, the U.S. drone attacks on Pakistan, with tacit approval of the then Pakistani governments, killed thousands of innocent Pakistanis. The Obama Administration had adopted this insane policy that anyone over the age of 12 should be treated as a potential terrorist, subject to elimination. It was atrocities like these that made Pakistan’s author Mohsin Hamid write in his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist: “No other country inflicts death so rapidly upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people so far away, as America.” Acting as a sovereign leader, Khan ordered all those drone attacks to be stopped.

13. Imran Khan is not perfect. No one is. He made some mistakes. Everyone does. But given the overwhelming odds against him, he did accomplish a great deal.

14. I have yet to see anyone in U.S. media mention the important fact that Imran Khan served as the Chancellor of University of Bradford in England for nine years (2005-2014). He left that prestigious and honorable position to pursue his political career in Pakistan.

15. From the massive demonstrations inside and outside Pakistan in support of Imran Khan, he seems certain to return to power in due course of time.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Abdul Jabbar.

Justice department assistant attorney Joshua Rothstein asked a judge not to release Arian Taherzadeh and Haider Ali, the men arrested on April 6 for posing as Department of Homeland Security investigators for two years before the arrest, the Guardian reported on April 8.

The men also stand accused of providing lucrative favors to members of the Secret Service, including one agent on the security detail of the first lady, Jill Biden. Prosecutors said in court filings they seized a cache of weapons from multiple DC apartments tied to the defendants.

Federal prosecutor Rothstein alleged one of the suspects, Haider Ali, “made claims to witnesses that he had connections to the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence service.” The Department of Justice (DoJ) is treating the case as a criminal matter and not a national security issue. But the Secret Service suspended four agents over their involvement with the suspects.

“All personnel involved in this matter are on administrative leave and are restricted from accessing Secret Service facilities, equipment, and systems,” the Secret Service said in a statement.

Clearly, planning and preparations were underway to declare Pakistan a rogue actor sponsoring acts of subversion against the United States. Soon after the US-led “regime change” in Pakistan and the formation of government by imperialist stooges, however, the tone of the judge and prosecutors changed. The defendants were released on bail and placed in home detention, though they will not be allowed to go to airports or foreign embassies or to talk to any of the federal agents they allegedly duped.

During his hour-long ruling, Magistrate Judge Michael Harvey lambasted the Justice Department’s claims that the men were dangerous, were trying to compromise agents and were tied to a foreign government, the CNN reported on April 13.

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.”

During Imran Khan’s historic two-day official visit to Moscow on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, besides signing several bilateral contracts in agricultural and energy sectors, President Putin reportedly offered Imran Khan the S-300 air defense system, Sukhoi aircraft as replacement for the Pakistan Air Force’s dependence on American F-16s and an array of advanced Russian military equipment on the condition that Pakistan abandons its traditional alliance with Washington and forge defense ties with Russia, according to two government officials who accompanied Imran Khan on the Moscow visit.

Alongside China, India and Iran, Pakistan under the leadership of Imran Khan was one of the few countries that adopted a non-aligned stance and refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite diplomatic pressure from Washington.

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

Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley squeamishly described the Kabul takeover in his historic Congressional testimony that several hundred Pashtun cowboys riding on 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 illustrious 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 the United States confronted equal military powers such as Russia and China. The much-touted myth of American military supremacy is clearly more psychological than real.

Imran Khan is an educated and charismatic leader. Being an Oxford graduate, he is much better informed than most Pakistani politicians. And he is a liberal at heart. Most readers might disagree with the assertion due to his fierce anti-imperialism and West-bashing demagoguery, but allow me to explain.

It’s not just Imran Khan’s celebrity lifestyle that makes him a progressive. He also derives his intellectual inspiration from the Western tradition. The ideal role model in his mind is the Scandinavian social democratic model which he has mentioned on numerous occasions, especially in his speech at Karachi before a massive rally of singing and cheering crowd in December 2012.

His relentless anti-imperialism as a political stance should be viewed in the backdrop of Western military interventions in the Islamic countries. The conflagration that neocolonial powers have caused in the Middle East evokes strong feelings of resentment among Muslims all over the world. Moreover, Imran Khan also uses anti-America rhetoric as an electoral strategy to attract conservative masses, particularly the impressionable youth.

It’s also noteworthy that Imran Khan’s political party draws most of its electoral support from women, youth voters and Pakistani expats residing in the Gulf and Western countries. All these segments of society, especially the women, are drawn more toward egalitarian liberalism than patriarchal conservatism, because liberalism promotes women’s rights and its biggest plus point is its emphasis on equality, emancipation and empowerment of women who constitute over half of population in every society.

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 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.

Karl Marx famously said: “History repeats itself, first as a tragedy and then as a farce.” In addition to a longstanding CIA program aimed at cultivating an anti-Russian insurgency in Ukraine by training, arming and international legitimizing neo-Nazi militias in Donbas, Canada’s Department of National Defense revealed on January 26, two days following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that the Canadian Armed Forces had trained “nearly 33,000 Ukrainian military and security personnel in a range of tactical and advanced military skills.” While the United Kingdom, via Operation Orbital, had trained 22,000 Ukrainian fighters.

A “prophetic” RAND Corporation report titled “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia” published in 2019 declares the stated goal of American policymakers is “to undermine Russia just as the US subversively destabilized the former Soviet Union during the Cold War,” and predicts to the letter the crisis unfolding in Ukraine as a consequence of the eight-year proxy war mounted by NATO in Russian-majority Donbas region in east Ukraine on Russia’s vulnerable western flank since the 2014 Maidan coup, toppling Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and consequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia.

Nonetheless, 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 the same 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 CounterPunch 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 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.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Nauman Sadiq.

Photograph Source: U.S. Department of State – Public Domain

This Sunday, cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan was removed from his prime ministerial post in a no-confidence vote in the Pakistani parliament by a slim margin of 174 votes out of the 342-member legislative body.

The vote came after a dramatic week in which the Supreme Court of Pakistan deemed unconstitutional a move by the deputy speaker, a member of Khan’s party, to block the no-confidence motion.

While Khan is the first Prime Minister to be removed by the parliament in such a way, his removal continues the tradition of holders of the post not finishing their terms, with the list coming to nineteen and counting.

While opposition supporters and other sections of the international media are framing Khan’s dismissal as a victory for democracy and rule of law, the reality is that this action is likely to have deleterious effects on Pakistan’s fragile democracy that will be more apparent in the months and years to come.

Who is Khan?

Imran Khan was already a national celebrity in Pakistan before entering politics in 1996, having a glamorous twenty-year career in cricket which ended with him as captain of Pakistan’s first World Cup-winning cricket team.

Khan spent the next 15 years on the margins of Pakistan’s political scene, before emerging as a potent third political force in 2011. His party, the Tehreek-e-Insaaf, became a viable electoral entity in competition with the two major parties, the PPP and PMLN, both ruled in a dynastic fashion and dominated by feudal constituents.

Khan is known for his brand of populist street politics, anti-corruption rhetoric and Islamic-themed public messaging. He was a trenchant critic of Pakistan’s involvement in the US War on Terror and occupation of Afghanistan, and regularly held rallies condemning the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan as a violation of sovereignty and human rights.

In 2018, Khan assumed the post of Prime Minister after his party formed a coalition government in an election contested by the opposition of having been rigged. The reality is that no civilian government can assume power in the country without the active hand of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment, the most powerful institution in the country.

Mission Improbable

Upon assuming power, Khan faced an unprecedented de-legitimization campaign in the Western press, accusing him of being a loose cannon and a pawn for the military.

Claiming he would usher in a progressive era of ‘New Pakistan’, Khan was confronted with an unprecedented series of challenges in his three and a half years. His own inexperience, a weak coalition government, strident opposition and entrenched systemic corruption meant his odds of delivering on his lofty campaign promises were slim from the outset.

The most immediate issue was the currency crisis, with Pakistan’s foreign reserves having been so depleted that Khan was forced to appeal to ally states and the IMF for resources to stabilize Pakistan’s economy.

Policy-wise, his tenure was a mixed bag. Khan’s government introduced much-needed programs on social welfare and the environment, and his measured pandemic response earned international praise. He was criticized for crackdowns on press freedom and for certain cabinet selections, as well as his silence on China’s persecution of the Uighurs.

The inability to curb the rapid inflation and rising prices on food and essentials, a global phenomenon but particularly acute in Pakistan, is what the coalition of opposition parties seized upon late last year when they launched their bid to remove Khan.

US Regime Change?

The specter of the US relations looms large on Pakistan politics. As the vote neared end of March, Khan announced at a public rally that a foreign hand is behind the drive by the opposition. He claimed that the Biden administration was directly threatening Pakistan with dire consequences if the no-confidence vote was not passed.

He pointed to an ambassadorial meeting with Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Donald Lu, in which this threat was communicated through official channels to his government. His party supporters also point to a flurry of meetings at the US embassy of defecting members of his party close in the announcement of the no-confidence vote as further evidence of conspiracy, which the Biden administration denies and the opposition rubbishes.

Despite fraternal relations of Khan with the Trump administration, Biden’s office has yet to be so accommodating, having not even shared a phone call with the premier. This cold shoulder treatment continued even during the US’ withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Khan made an ill-timed visit to Russia to meet with Putin at the eve of the launch of their Ukrainian invasion. According to Khan, this visit and the previous efforts of his administration to initiate an independent foreign policy outside of the US orbit, so incensed the Biden administration that they were leveraging their diplomatic pressure to ensure the no-confidence vote passed. In the background, the military establishment appears to have cooled their own relations with Khan and are trying to salvage the strategic relationship with the US.

Trying to prove such an active conspiracy is difficult yet the possibility of foreign interference cannot be discounted. The US has a long history of involvement in Pakistan’s internal affairs, from steady support to its military generals to drone strikes inside its tribal areas to the Abbottabad operation. Most notably, the US is widely believed to have actively supported the opposition movement to the popular Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, leading to his removal by the military in 1977 and eventual judicial murder.

Uncertainty Ahead

Though Khan is no longer prime minister, his narrative of a foreign conspiracy appears to have resonated with a wide section of the public and support base is growing. The opposition, now in charge, faces the unenviable task of steadying Pakistan’s economic ship while simultaneously being accused of being an ‘imported government’ by Khan.

What would have been more beneficial for Pakistan’s democracy rather than this destabilizing status quo would have been for Khan to finish his prime ministerial term by the stated date of October 2023 and then have the public determine his fate in a general election. Basic trust in continuity in the democratic process would have at least been established.

His removal based on the flimsy pretext of poor economic performance is a new low and ensures future leaders will always be on slippery ground, at the mercy of being displaced by a constellation of forces, inside and outside the country, as has been the case in Pakistan’s history. What more, the fragmented dynamics of Pakistan’s political party representation means that it is unlikely for any party in the future, either Khan’s party or its rivals,  to be able to form a strong clear parliamentary majority in the center  unless without heavy rigging, leading to rickety coalitions headed by leaders at constant risk of being dismissed.

Political backrooms deals have replaced the choices of voters and reduced elections to further insignificance. The no-confidence motion, far from being a check on non-performing leaders in charge, only weakens Pakistan’s democratic setup that badly needs stability and trust on the ballot.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Saqib Sheikh.