(Tony Cartalucci -
New Eastern Outlook
Attempts to paint Pakistan as a dangerous enemy of the West and a
prime candidate for military intervention has been made once again by
those in the Western media. ABC News, in an article titled, “‘Double dealing’: How Pakistan hid Osama Bin Laden from the U.S. and fueled the war in Afghanistan,” claims that:
What if the United States has been waging the wrong war against the wrong enemy for the last 13 years in Afghanistan?
Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall, who spent more than a decade covering Afghanistan since 2001, concludes just that in her new book, “The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014.”
Gall told “On the Radar” that Pakistan – not Afghanistan – has been the United States’ real enemy.
And while Gall’s “book”
might be easily dismissed as irrelevant warmongering, it echoes a
narrative that was crafted by some of the most notorious policy makers
in the US and promoted widely in 2011 across the Western media. This
included the BBC’s documentary, “Secret Pakistan,” from which it appears
Gall is deriving her premise.
Unraveling the Propaganda
The documentary “Secret Pakistan”
can be summed up with two very telling quotes. The first is from Sherard
Cowper-Coles, a British diplomat who served as the Foreign Secretary’s
Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2009-2010,
before that as ambassador to Israel and Saudi Arabia, and now the international business development director of British defense contractor BAE Systems. He claims during the BBC documentary that (44:00):
“…the real military threat is the Taliban – a serious insurgency that’s got nothing to do with Bin Laden. Bin Laden, in operational terms, is utterly spectacularly irrelevant.”
Quite clearly this contradicts the “war on terror” narrative peddled to
Western audiences for over a decade and instead suggests that current
US, British and NATO operation in Afghanistan has more to do with
Western interests in the region than fighting the alleged perpetrators
of the September 11, 2001 attack on Washington and New York City.
