“Absolutely not” is apparently a harmless remark made by the former PM Imran Khan. He was responding to a question from a reporter who asked if Pakistan would provide its airspace and military bases to the US for waging operations against the Al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban. Why did this remark jilt the US so much? There is a history to the US treatment of the Third World leaders.
Almost all these leaders were at first cultivated and recruited to serve the US interests in their respective countries. After they had lost their utility to their paymasters, these leaders were terminated in different ways.
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During the Iran-Iraq War, the US provided arms to both the belligerents
This was done to weaken the regional governments and pave the way for Israel to become the dominant power in the Middle East. During the War, US and its allies found the real fissure in the Muslim world and started exploiting it to their advantage. It is the Shia- Sunni divide. This explains why US is sometimes on the side of the Shias and sometimes abets the Sunnis. America stumbled on the fissure while dealing with the Iran- Contra Affair. During the Iran –Iraq war America was indirectly helping Saddam Hussain through the conservative Arab regimes.
On the other hand, it secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, the subject of an arms embargo. Some U.S. officials hoped that the arms sales would secure the release of several hostages and allow U.S. intelligence agencies to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. It was planned that Israel would ship weapons to Iran, and then the United States would resupply Israel. Iranian recipients promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of U.S. hostages.
After the Iran- Iraq War, Saddam Hussain was trapped into invading Kuwait when April Glaspie, the then US ambassador to Iraq, during a meeting Saddam, gave him the impression that the US would remain neutral if Iraq invaded Kuwait. As expected by the US, Saddam invaded Kuwait. Thus started the US-led Coalition War in which the Coalition forces bombed Iraq into oblivion. Saddam was captured by the US forces after the follow up war to Operation Desert Storm. He was tried, sentenced to death, and hanged.
Manuel Noriega was a Panamanian dictator, politician and military officer who ruled Panama from 1983 to 1989. Noriega was recruited by the CIA during the 1950s. He served as a conduit for illicit weapons, military equipment, and cash destined for U.S.-backed forces throughout Latin America.
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After Noriega lost his utility to the US in the late 1980s, the US courts started investigating him for his involvement in drug trafficking. In 1988, Noriega was indicted by federal grand juries in Miami and Tampa on charges of racketeering, drug smuggling, and money laundering. The U.S. launched an invasion of Panama following failed negotiations seeking his resignation, and Noriega’s annulment of the 1989 Panamanian general election. Noriega was captured and flown to the U.S., where he was tried on the Miami indictment, convicted on most of the charges, and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in March 2017, Noriega suffered complications during surgery and died two months later in a Panamanian hospital.
Greater sophistication has come to the US and European methods for keeping the developing countries under their thumb. Instead of military interventions, these countries are throttled with the US-controlled financial institutions like the IMF, World Bank, Asian Bank, and FATF. Corruption by the Third World leaders is encouraged and they are channelized into squirreling away their ill-gotten wealth in the US and European banks.
Thereafter they are blackmailed into submission
Mir Aimal Kasai, a Balochi youth on the payroll of the CIA, and had been performing various intelligence gathering and other covert tasks in Pakistan at the behest of the agency. Like Osama bin Laden, he fell afoul of his US taskmasters and decided to pay them back for abandoning him after he had outlived his utility for the CIA.
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On January 25, 1993, Kasai killed two CIA employees in their cars as they were waiting at a traffic signal and wounded three others outside the CIA headquarters campus in Langley, Virginia. Thereafter, he fled the US and was placed on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, sparking a four-year international manhunt.
He was eventually captured in a joint raid on his hideout in the Shalimar Hotel. Kasai was handed over to the US to stand trial. He admitted to shooting the victims, was found guilty of capital and first-degree murder, and was executed by lethal injection in 2002. Kasai’s apprehension and eventual execution was made possible when, in 1997, Nawaz Sharif, then PM of Pakistan, authorized a joint FBI- CIA/ISI operation in Pakistan. Was Nawaz Sharif being blackmailed by the US?
Saleem Akhtar Malik is a Pakistan Army veteran who writes on national and international affairs, defense, military history, and military technology. He Tweets at @saleemakhtar53. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Global Village Space.