Prominent American linguist Noam Chomsky, in his book “Hegemony or Survival,” says that there are two major superpowers in the world: the United States and the global public opinion. Global public opinion sees the U.S. as the major threat to world peace, while the U.S. sees public opinion as nothing more than a nuisance in its quest to pursue national interests. Both are always at work quite aggressively; one in the dark and the other in the limelight. Siding with either one leads to supercharged problems. That is what Pakistan is facing nowadays.
The year 2011 was quite a busy and important year regarding the relations between the U.S. and Pakistan’s establishment. The year started with the Raymond Davis affair. The summer season that year kicked off with the Osama bin Laden raid. Midway into the fall came the Salala incident and the juicy Memogate scandal. All this while the Blackwater operations were full throttle manifesting a daunting existence in everyday Pakistani lives, actually deaths. While the year doubtlessly was quite bumpy when it came to the relations between the U.S. and Pakistan's establishment, the fact remained that the Pakistani public opinion moved toward more sympathy and respect for the Pakistan Army. Needless to say, the public opinion regarding the U.S. was filled with hatred and anger. Needless to say also that the U.S. didn’t care.
I remember how endless articles and books critical of the Pakistan Army dominated the literature about Pakistan at the time. Pakistan being a hard country, the most dangerous country and how the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was such a destructive and manipulative intelligence agency was the narrative from the mainstream publishing and broadcast industries. Authors such as Steve Coll, Daniel Markey, John Schmidt, Christina Lamb, C. Christine Fair, and others who raised the accusing finger at Pakistan for a living were high in demand. Pakistan bashing had become a habit and there literally was nobody on the scene who could provide a counter-narrative. It was therapeutic to see the Pakistan Army standing up to that global habit of treating Pakistan as a punching bag. That may have changed.
Today, despite public denials by the United States of playing any role in the regime change in Pakistan, the superpower country is once again finding itself in a strong conflict with the Pakistani public opinion. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to state that the current public opinion inside Pakistan would find the U.S. as a bigger enemy than India. The Pakistani establishment is viewed by many as not resisting the alleged U.S. regime change in Pakistan. The veracity of that could be argued but the enraged public opinion as a result of that belief cannot be.
What is different this time in the enraged public opinion against the U.S. role in Pakistan is that the people do not see the establishment as this institution standing up against the mighty America. That could be a threat for the country but more so for the establishment in itself because whenever the U.S. decides to flip the switch, which it would when the time comes, it would use this public opinion against the establishment to its advantage. With a perfect sleight of hand, the U.S. may just have achieved not only a regime change but also a public mood turned against the very institution that usually resisted the aggressive U.S. moves. The U.S. doesn’t care about and is not much impacted by any negative public opinion anywhere in the world but a national army that otherwise is loved and respected cannot afford to turn its own people against itself.
A step back to look at the bigger picture may just reveal that there perhaps could have been a larger goal here. The U.S. goal had been in conflict with what the people in Pakistan wanted and former Prime Minister Imran Khan got in the way of that U.S. urge. Joining the wrong superpower has never served Pakistan. The present is no exception.
