Tag: Nurul Amin

Pakistan could be in U.S. doghouse

Mustafa Malik June 27, 2021

PAKISTAN’S REFUSAL TO allow a CIA base in its territory has pissed off the Biden administration. The Americans also resent Pakistan’s close ties to China, their global adversary.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that, given Pakistani Muslims’ bitterness toward the United States, allowing Americans a base for hostile operations in Muslim Afghanistan would be “suicidal” for his administration.

Islamabad fears a downturn in its relations with Washington, which has almost always been the case after Pakistan failed to comply with a U.S. military or security demand. The worst case, some Pakistanis say, occurred when Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaqat Ali Khan, decided to get rid of a U.S. military base in Pakistan to avoid antagonizing what used to be the Soviet Union. These Pakistanis link Liaqat’s decision to his assassination in 1951, referred to in declassified U.S. documents. Others, who included former Pakistani prime minister and my mentor Nurul Amin, accused the United States of orchestrating disruptions of Pakistan’s democratic process through its military and bureaucratic elements.

Amin told me in 1969 that the United States had got Pakistan’s second prime minister, Khwaja Nazimuddin, fired by the bureaucrat-turned Governor-General Ghulam Mohammad. Nazimuddin, Amin’s close friend, had refused to join the U.S.-sponsored Baghdad Pact unless the pact had a clause stipulating that America would defend Pakistan against “external threats” (India). My mentor said Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan, then commander-in-chief of the Pakistan army, had carried the Pentagon’s instruction to Ghulam Mohammad and was sipping tea in Mohammad’s portico when the governor-general fired the prime minister. The governor-general, a titular head of state, didn’t have the constitutional authority to dismiss the prime minister and would not let Nazimuddin convene the parliament (Constituent Assembly) to demonstrate the support of a parliamentary majority behind him. But Gen. Ayub and the military brass signaled to the deposed prime minister that they supported the governor-general’s action.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto wrote in her autobiography that the United States was behind the overthrow and execution of her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, because Z.A. Bhutto had defied Henry Kissinger’s brutal pressure to abandon Pakistan’s nuclear program.

President Biden’s announcement that all U.S. troops would be pulled out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 has been followed by a dramatic Taliban offensive against the forces of the Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, an American protégé. The George W. Bush administration had invaded and occupied Afghanistan 20 years ago in response to Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which the United States had dislodged from power in Iraq and Syria, have also increased their activities in in Afghanistan. Intelligence officials have told Biden that even though the United States and its allies have “diminished” the militant forces in Afghanistan, they could threaten the U.S. homeland again in about two years. The Biden administration is looking desperately for CIA bases to keep them in check.

Pakistan’s rejection of the CIA base proposal follows a long and devastating “war on terror” in that country, sponsored by Washington. Mostly Muslim Pakistanis have always opposed their country being dragged into a U.S. war against Muslim forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Still, Pakistan had to agree to participate in that war after Richard Armitage, then U.S. deputy secretary of state, threatened the head of Pakistan’s intelligence services that America would “bomb [Pakistan] back to the Stone Age” if it did not join the U.S. fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. More than 70,000 Pakistanis perished in that war, which was ratcheted up by President Barack Obama (after he had won the Nobel Peace Prize!), infuriating further Pakistanis of all political stripes.

Most Pakistanis, too, feel bitter about U.S. support for each of their four military dictators and America’s hostility to the democratic governments who failed to fulfill U.S. demands. Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Pakistani prime minister, had angered the Harry Truman administration, not only by asking America to pull out its base outside the Pakistani city of Peshawar. Liaqat was friends with then Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and had turned down an American plea to pressure Mosaddeq to drop his plans to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (predecessor of the BP). In 1953, four months after the Pakistani Prime Minister Nazimuddin had been overthrown, the CIA station chief in Tehran, Kermit Roosevelt, and the U.S. ambassador there, Loy Henderson, openly incited and bribed Iranian army officers and bureaucrats into staging a military coup against the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, whom the Eisenhower administration replaced with the tyrannical dictator Mohammad Riza Pahlavi.

The United States has often had direct links to Pakistani army generals independently of the country’s civilian authorities, but Imran Khan doesn’t seem to be in the danger of being overthrown by a U.S.-sponsored military coup. Khan has been coopted by the Pakistani army generals and is running the country, especially its foreign relations, at the generals’ behest. The Pakistani decision not to have a CIA base was basically made by those generals, who know that a U.S. base could trigger civil unrest in the country.

The Pakistani economy is in shambles, and Islamabad fears that the Americans could deny it the needed economic support and punish it diplomatically and otherwise for rejecting their base request and also for maintaining Pakistan’s historically close relations with China. The Biden administration apparently believes that having had Pakistan’s giant neighbor, India, in its corner in an anti-Chinese alliance (Japan and Australia being the other partners), it can afford to sideline Pakistan. Washington seems indifferent to the possibility of Pakistan joining a growing number of unfriendly Asian countries including China, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

~ Mustafa Malik worked as press secretary and speechwriter for the late Nurul Amin, Pakistani prime minister and vice president.

Mustafa Malik worked as press secretary and speechwriter for Nurul Amin, a former Pakistani prime minister and vice president. He hosts the blog ‘Muslims and Liberals.’

Mahmud Ali: Generals wrecked Pakistan

Mustafa Malik September 3, 2019

MAHMUD ALI’S BIRTH centenary on September 1 reminded me of a comment Jawaharlal Nehru made during his meeting with George Bernard Shaw in London.

Independent India’s first prime minister, a driven Fabian socialist, had been invited to attend the June 2, 1953, coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey. That was “a formal occasion,” he told Shaw when the celebrated Irish playwright arrived to see Nehru at the Indian prime minister’s personal invitation, sent from Delhi nearly a month before.

‘Mahmud Ali (right), then minister of social work in Pakistan, is greeted by then Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in Beijing in 1972.’

The more important event for him, Nehru added, was “meeting you,” the best-known ideologue of Fabian socialism. Shaw said he had been “deeply gratified” by his host’s compliment. But he asked why Nehru had said that.

“Because what I am is because of what you have written,” replied Nehru.

I’m no Jawaharlal Nehru. But I am what I am largely because of what I learned from Mahmud Ali – and Nurul Amin – during my years as a student, journalist and political activist in what used to be East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh.

I was 17 and about to graduate from high school when I first met Ali, then revenue minister of East Pakistan, at an election rally in his native Sunamganj subdivision, which is now a district (administrative regions). He was one of four visiting government ministers, and the shortest and youngest of them. They spoke at a public meeting in a rice paddy field, blanketed with crumbling stalks of harvested crops. Ali’s speech drew the most enthusiastic and sustained applause from the crowd. Their acclaim for the other speakers was lukewarm.

During his speech the revenue minister denounced the “exploitation” of peasants and workers by land owners and industrialists. And he told the audience, twice, that if he should fail to push through certain legislative initiatives to mitigate their plight, “I will leave the government and come back and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you” to continue his struggle for their “lentil and rice,” staple food for poor Bengalees.

I was impressed by Ali’s expressions of empathy for the poor, and the passion with which he made them. Faking as a restaurant worker carrying food to the ministers, I slid through a police cordon around a government bungalow in Guwainghat town in which the dignitarieswere resting after the meeting. I asked Ali a couple of questions about the anti-poverty initiatives he had talked about. He flattered me as “an intelligent young man” and asked about my family and plans for further education.

My admiration for Ali soared a few months later when I, now a college freshman, heard over the radio that he had resigned from the East Pakistan government. Mahmud Ali was the only government minister ever to resign voluntarily in the 24-year history of East Pakistan. (In 1971 that Pakistani province would emerge as independent Bangladesh.) A couple of days after Ali’s resignation I buttonholed one of his close associates in Sylhet town, from where I was attending Murarichand College.

“Do you know why Mr. Mahmud Ali has resigned,” I asked Motassir Ali.

“He was not getting anything done” that he wanted done, replied kala (black) Motassir, as he was popularly known.

I realized that Mahmud Ali was delivering on his pledge to the people of Sunamganj.

His unswerving struggle for the rights of peasants and industrial workers earned him the label of “Communist” from his right-wing political adversaries. In the 1960s, as a student of Dhaka University, I became close to him, while also moonlighting as the press aide to Amin, the leader of the opposition in the Pakistan National Assembly and a former chief minister of East Pakistan. The political circle in Sylhet came to know about my being a close associate of Ali’s. To that circle belonged my former host at a lodge from where I had attended college.

Abdullah Chowdhury asked me one day why I had become a “henchman of that Sunamganji politician.”

What was wrong with that? I inquired.

“You are the son of an alem, you should stay away from him,” replied the social conservative belonging to Sylhet’s landed aristocracy. “Mahmud Ali is always fighting rich people, people richer than his family. Do you hear him talk about Islam?”

I replied that Ali was “fighting for economic and social justice,” which was a core Islamic value but was being opposed by Muslim aristocracy.

Ali is better known, however, as a trailblazer in the struggle to restore democracy in Pakistan, abolished by the military dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan. He founded and led the Ganatantri Dal (Democratic Party) and was a top leader of the National Awami Party, National Democratic Front, Pakistan Democratic Movement and Pakistan Democratic Party all of which he helped organize to achieve his seminal goal of wresting democracy back from the clutches of Pakistani generals.

He faced the most crucial decision of his turbulent political career in the wake of the movement for East Pakistan’s secession from Pakistan and reincarnation as independent Bangladesh.He just couldn’t reconcile with the idea of dismembering the country he had struggled long and onerously to help create and build.

Ali knew too well about West Pakistani political and bureaucratic elites’ neglect of economic development in East Pakistan and abolishment of democracy by the West Pakistan-based military brass – the two issues that fueled the Bangladesh movement. But he believed,and argued over and over, that the answer to those abuses of power lay in the democratization of Pakistan. East Pakistanis, 98 percent of whom are Bengalees, made up the majority of the Pakistani population, and he believed that full-fledged democracy would empower East Pakistanis and get them to end the injustices done to them. Ali, Amin, and a host of other Bengalee leaders who were in the vanguard of the Pakistan movement also feared that Bangladesh would become a satellite of India, which would border three sides of the impoverished and defenseless country.

I shared Ali’s and Amin’s political prognoses and defended and promoted them through my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan. In the late 1960s Bangladeshi activists harassed and denounced Ali, kidnapped and persecuted him and bombed his house in Dhaka. (I, too, faced harassment and death threats for my writings against the breakup of old Pakistan.)

But despite those adversities and dangers, Ali never budged from his staunch support for the “unity of democratization” of Pakistan. On the eve of the birth of Bangladesh he and Amin, facing security threats in East Pakistan, moved to West Pakistan with their families. Nurul Amin served as Pakistan’s last Bangalee Prime Minister and Vice President, and Mahmud Ali as a federal minister .

Toward the end of his life Ali anguished over the “continued suppression” of Pakistani masses by the political-military-feudal elites. During my continual telephone conversations with him from the United States, he would lament the “economic plight” of everyday Pakistanis and maintain that “freedom and justice for which we have Pakistan” remained to be realized.

“Why?” I inquired of my mentor.

“Because of the power structure,” he replied.

Was it not “the same power structure,” I asked, that had disrupted democracy and sustained economic disparity between East and West Pakistan, driving that province into breaking away from Pakistan?

“You have a point,” he said, “but some politicians on both sides [East and West Pakistan] were busy exploiting the problems [instead of finding] their solutions.”

He believed to his dying day that unfettered democracy, restored in time, “would have saved [old] Pakistan.” He explained that the Ayub Khan regime should have re-established democracy in the early 1960s when the people of the two parts of Pakistan had “deep brotherly relations.” The military dictatorship of Gen. Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan held Pakistan’s first national elections in 1970, when many East Pakistanis had been “fed up with economic disparity and military rule.” That led to the “victory of the secessionists” in East Pakistan and its “rupture” with the western wing. “Military dictatorships killed Pakistan,” he added.

Ali, Amin and most other leaders of the democratic struggle in Pakistan blamed the United States for “abetting the killing of our democracy.” American administrations, Republican and Democratic, coddled each of Pakistan’s military dictators, who overthrew democratically elected governments and abrogated democratic constitutions. From the Cold War to the “war on terror, the United States has always used Pakistan to fight its strategic enemies. Never did an America administration put pressure on a Pakistani dictatorship to restore democracy.

I returned to the truncated Pakistan after the independence of Bangladesh and came away with a different take, however. I interviewed dozens of Pakistani politicians, military officers, journalists and civic society leaders about their thoughts on economic disparity between East and West Pakistan, dismissal of Bengalee-led central governments (of Prime Ministers Khwaja Nazimuddin and Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy), the Bengalee demand for East Pakistan’s autonomy, and West Pakistani elites’ support for military dictatorships, all of which had poisoned relations between the two wings of old Pakistan. The mentality and priorities betrayed by those leading lights of Pakistani society showed that very few of them had the kind of commitment to Pakistan that Amin and Ali did. I figured that the Pakistani military and civilian leadership, centered in Punjab, wouldn’t have conceded real power to the Bengalees or allowed the establishment of real democracy, which would have done so.

As I was flying back to London from Islamabad, my mind was flashing with memories of my political activities and thinking during the pre-Bangladesh years, including what appeared now to be mymisinterpretation of events and mistaken judgments. In came rolling the last episode of Victor Hugo’s breathtaking novel Les Misérables.

Monsieur Gillenormand, the aristocratic grandfather of Marius, had bitterly opposed for years Marius’ marriage to Cosette, Jean Valjean’s adopted daughter. Valjean was a lower-class man who had served a prison term for stealing pieces of bread to feed his starving family. When Gillenormand finally realized that his aristocratic pride was destroying what would be his grandson’s lifelong pleasure and happiness, he consented to the marriage. As he was taking leave of Valjean after a glamorous wedding ceremony, Gillenormand apologized for his mistake of not approving the marriage earlier.

“Don’t most of us make mistakes most of our lives?” responded Valjean. It was better to learn of a mistake, he added, than never realize and come to grips with it.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

India’s empty threat to Pakistan

Mustafa Malik August 21, 2019

Pakistan was protesting, vociferously, India’s decision to wipe out the “special status” of the part of the Jammu and Kashmir state under its occupation. Rajnath Singh, the Indian defense minister, told Islamabad to hush up. He said New Delhi may be changing its “no-first-use” policy on firing nukes.

India adopted the policy of not using its nuclear weapons against an adversary unless that adversary had attacked it with nukes first.

Singh warned Pakistan, in effect, that the Indians were now prepared to rain their nuclear bombs on Pakistan without waiting to be targeted by a Pakistani nuke.

The Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir principality was never part of the Indian mainland, even though Indian emperors occasionally had invaded and occupied it. In 1948, after “British India” had been split into independent India and Pakistan, Pakistani tribes overran a third of the Muslim-majority kingdom, while India grabbed the other two-thirds. The dispute went to the United Nations, where then Indian prime minister, Kashmiri pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, promised to hold a plebiscite to let the Kashmiri people decide whether to join India or Pakistan or to remain independent. India eventually reneged on its plebiscite commitment and, instead, allowed Kashmir a “special status” with wide autonomy. Two weeks ago India’s Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Kashmir’s special status, triggering a new round of row between India and Pakistan, which had fought two wars over the fate of Kashmir.

As I read Singh’s comment online, my mind raced to the dreary, darkish afternoon of Jan. 21, 1972. My friend Asrar Ahmed had dropped in to see me in the Pakistani vice presidential compound on Peshawar Road in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. I worked as press secretary to Vice President Nurul Amin. My boss was in the living quarters and I was drafting a speech he would be delivering he next day at a student gathering in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

“Bhutto stirred up the Qiyamah in me,” said Ahmed, seating himself on a coach next to my desk. Ahmed and I had become friends a couple of years before when he was elected president of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists of which I was an active member.

“Qiyamah in you?” I said, staring into my friend’s eyes.

In Islamic scripture Qiyamah means the Day of Judgment when terrified throngs of resurrected humans would be streaming to the field of Arafat in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, (by some accounts, somewhere in greater Syria) to be dispatched to hell or heaven, depending on their sins or virtuous deeds in their lives.

Ahmed asked for tea, which I ordered.

He said the day before he had “sneaked into” a meeting of leading Pakistani physicists, nuclear scientists and engineers in the city of Multan. He had got a tip, saying the new Pakistani president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had called the meeting to talk about a “new security strategy” for the country, which had lost its eastern half to an invading Indian army just six weeks earlier.

India had invaded East Pakistan, facilitating its secession from West Pakistan and emergence as independent Bangladesh. The Pakistani army’s Dec. 16, 1971, surrender to Indian forces in Dhaka, the East Pakistani capital, had led the Indians to drag 93,000 Pakistani troops and civilians into Indian detention centers as prisoners of war. Some Pakistanis I had talked to asked whether India would now be using its overwhelming military might to pulverize the rest of Pakistan.

Ahmed said that on his way to the Multan meeting he had wondered if Bhutto, a widely known boozer, had been “drinking too much” as he was trying to get “people who only know to peep into microscopes and telescopes” to help him hash out a national security strategy

Bhutto warned the gathering that what had been left of their country after the secession of Bangladesh existed “on borrowed time.” India could chop up the rump of Pakistan, too, but was giving the world the time to “digest its tearing up a sovereign country.” A time could come, the president warned, when New Delhi could decide to turn Pakistan into another “Muslim Spain.” In the fifteenth century Catholic armies and militias had reconquered all Muslim domains in Spain and Portugal, obliterating the flourishing Islamic civilization there.

The president told the scientists that Pakistan’s only defense against India lay in acquiring the nuclear bomb. He kept asking them: “Are you going to give me the bomb”? Pakistan’s Nobel laureate physicist Abdus Salam was among the first to assure him that he would get his wish. Bhutto then wanted a time frame. One scientist said it would take five years to build a nuke from a scratch. “Five years!” the president howled. “Can’t you do it in three? Come on, three years!” Siddique Butt, a younger physicist, jumped to his feet and punched the air with his fist. “Yes sir,” he declared. “three years. You will get it in three years, Mr. President.”

Ahmed told me that he didn’t “really know how long it will take” Pakistan to get the bomb, but that he, too, believed now that “Pakistan can’t survive without the bomb.”

Forty-seven years later Rajnath Singh’s threat to nuke Pakistan vindicated to me the panic that had driven Bhutto into his no-holds-barred, whirlwind drive to get Pakistan its own nukes.

Getting Pakistan the bomb became Bhutto’s all-consuming mission in life. He probably gave his life for it. On a visit to Pakistan in August 1976 Henry Kissinger, then U.S. secretary of state, twisted Bhutto’s arms brutally to get him to abandon his nuclear program. When Bhutto refused, Kissinger warned the Pakistani statesman – in presence of Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir; and then deputy chief of the US mission in Islamabad, Gerald Feuerstein – that in that case “we will make a horrible example of you” of resistance to U.S. will. Zulfikar and Benazir Bhutto believed through their dying days that Kissinger and the CIA had got Gen. Ziaul Haq to overthrow the father of the Pakistani bomb in a military coup and then hang him on trumped-up murder charges.

Singh’s bluster reminded me that the populist Pakistani leader’s mission had been crowned with success. New Delhi’s threat to launch a nuclear strike on Pakistan was actually empty. Hindu nationalist Indians are of course going bonkers with their animosity toward Pakistan. But I doubt that they’re total loonies. They know that Pakistan, with its stockpile of more than 150 nuclear warheads, can turn such an act into a suicide mission for India. That makes such a misadventure highly unlikely.

To get Pakistan to this point, Bhutto had once declared, “We will eat grass, even go hungry. But we will have our own [nuclear bomb]. We have no choice.” With their near-melting economy, Pakistanis are eating grass, so to speak; but thanks to their hard-drinking, “Islamic socialist” leader, they’re unlikely to be herded into Indian detention camps again.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts this blog.

Gaza, Pakistan and ignoble US legacy

Mustafa Malik August 20, 2014

The anti-government protests now raging in Pakistan and the travails of Hamas in Palestine remind me of Nurul Amin, my mentor. He served, at different times, as prime minister of Pakistan and Bangladesh, which was then East Pakistan.

In February 1972, in Rawalpindi, Amin was telling me about the political intrigues that had led to several military-bureaucratic coups against democratic governments in Pakistan. “Did you notice,” he asked, “that all of those who threw out democratic governments kept promising to give us ‘true democracy’?”

Nevertheless, the elder statesman was hopeful of the eventual triumph of democracy in Pakistan and elsewhere. Like the proverbial cat, he said, “democracy has nine lives.” Pakistanis would take time to cultivate “the art of democracy and guard it” against usurpers, as did most Western countries. Until then “you will see our generals and politicians giving lip service to democracy,” while scrambling to “grab power by any means.”

In Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League party won the 2013 parliamentary elections, which it probably rigged. Opposition leaders Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri, instead of working to insure that the next elections are free and fair, have paralyzed parts of Islamabad, the capital, with crowds agitating for Sharif’s resignation as prime minister. I wonder if they’re playing into the hands of Pakistan’s notoriously power-hungry army generals. In the past, Pakistani generals have used most of the country’s major political crises as excuses for military coups against civilian governments. I’m especially disappointed by Imran Khan’s role in this anti-democratic drama. I admire his progressive social and political agenda.

Egypt is another stark example of the betrayal of democracy. In 2012 Egyptians had their first-ever free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections. Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood won and formed the government. But the Egyptian military and “liberal” groups didn’t like it. They called in the army and got President Mohammed Mursi’s democratic government overthrown, returning to the military-led pseudo-dictatorship with which they’re more familiar.

More ironic is the assaults on Palestinian democracy by the world’s most eloquent advocate of democracy and human rights: the United States. In 2006 the Palestinians, prodded by Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials, held their first-ever free and fair elections. Hamas won the parliamentary vote by a landslide and formed the government. The Americans and Israelis didn’t like it. Instead of congratulating the Palestinians for ushering in democracy in hostile environment, they instigated the losers in those elections, the Fatah, to stage a coup against the Hamas-led government. President Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, held on to power in the West Bank, now in the ninth year into his four-year term! Hamas continued to rule the Gaza Strip, as it carried on its armed struggle to liberate Palestinians from the Israeli colonial rule.

That wasn’t the end of the punishment Hamas has suffered for winning the Palestinian elections. With American blessings, Israel collaborated with pro-Israeli Egyptian dictatorships to place the 1.8 million people of Gaza under a most gruesome economic blockade. Americans and Israelis had hoped that the extreme hardships caused by the blockade would turn Gazans against their Hamas regime. They haven’t.

Israel remains undaunted by these setbacks. Early last month the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led Israel into its third war against Hamas, vowing to disarm it and other Islamist groups in Gaza. The war ended with Hamas and the Islamic Jihad standing and valiantly fighting the invading forces. In a charade of truce talks held in Cairo, Israel and Egypt pressured the Islamists relentlessly to achieve what the powerful Israeli armed forces couldn’t: Disarm Hamas. They couldn’t. Hamas and Jihad have resumed their armed struggle for freedom, while Israel rains its U.S.-supplied bombs on the already devastated Gaza.

Sadly, America has set the precedents for the assaults on democracy in non-Western societies. Successive U.S. administrations coddled all five Pakistani dictatorships that had supplanted democratic governments. Besides, America used the CIA to overthrow nearly a dozen democratic governments in South and Central America, the Middle East and Asia, and replaced them with repressive pro-American dictatorships.

All the same, I see the masses in Pakistan and around the world pulsating with democratic fervor. I remember Nurul Amin’s prediction about the eventual success of democratic movements. Britain went through seven turbulent centuries – marked by regicide, religious pogroms, and bloody ethnic and trans-national warfare – to mature as a full-blown democracy.

America needed two centuries to settle down as a real democracy. American women didn’t win their voting rights until 1920 and African Americans didn’t achieve theirs until 1965. As I wrote elsewhere, developing countries should be able to build enduring democratic institutions much faster than did Westerners. Among other things, the dramatic spread of education and modernization will help them to do so.

As an American citizen, however, I’m troubled by the United States’ legacy in man’s epic march toward freedom and fulfillment. When future historians would be recounting democratic movements in non-Western societies, they wouldn’t, I’m afraid, condone America’s continual hostility to those the edifying and heroic human endeavors.

The United States can’t expect to regain its moral stature in the world until it realigns itself with forces of freedom and democracy. A good place to start would be Palestine. The Obama administration should dissociate America from the scandalous anachronism of Israeli colonialism. It should stop shielding Israel against charges of war crimes in Gaza, brought by the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Nothing could have been more shameful for Americans than seeing their government casting the solitary vote against opening the U.N. investigation.

This Gaza war is a watershed in Palestinians’ 66-year struggle for freedom and independence from Israeli subjugation. It has shown that Israel, the superpower in the Middle East, could slaughter more than 2,000 Gazans and destroy their homes, economy and infrastructure, but couldn’t dent their resolve to rid themselves of Israeli suppression and oppression. It has shown, too, that the world, with the deplorable exception of the United States, has little patience for Israeli colonialism.

I know that Palestine will jettison, sooner than later, Israel’s colonial tutelage. I don’t know how long it will take America to jettison its ignoble role as the lone defender of the world’s lone colonial power.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs columnist in Washington, hosts the blog ‘Beyond Freedom,’ https://beyond-freedom.com.

Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog ‘After the Clash,’ worked for more than three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist for American, British and Pakistani newspapers and as a researcher for two American think tanks. He also conducted fieldwork in Western Europe, the Middle East and South Asia on U.S. foreign policy options, the “crisis of liberalism” and Islamic movements. He wrote continually for major U.S. and overseas newspapers and journals.