Not in his name

The US has deployed 25,000 troops in Afghanistan and is spending $1 billion every month to maintain them. The Pakistani troops operating in the tribal region are four times this number. The expenditure on our troops has not been made public but it is not difficult to make a guess. Can a poor country like Pakistan afford the unthinkable luxury of economic drain on its resources for a war that is not hers and that has made her bankrupt? In the past nine years, not a single new hospital or university worth the name was built. No industrial complex, motorway, railway line or any other public work of note was done. A famine is staring us in the face because no new dam was built to store water for agriculture. Industrial production is in catastrophic declines due to lack of power, reason there being no new dam.

Our economy is in absolute tatters but our political and military leaders want to follow the same ruinous course. They want to fight America's war on terror. What concerns the man in the street is that he has a job to go to, a roof over his head, and food on the table for his family. Oh he wants some basic services too and a system that protects his rights but that comes thereafter. Fighting another country's war, though, is nowhere on his list of priorities, top to bottom. That should tell something to the people who rule in his name and at his cost. -K. HUSSAN ZIA, Lahore, via e-mail, October 25.