There has been much furore over the resumption of Nato supplies. There are some opinion makers, including journalists, who believe that Pakistan should not have opened the Nato route as it is a blemish on the nation’s honour. Don’t we know that baggers are not choosers? The US is our biggest aid-provider and the master-slave dialectic between Pakistan and the US prevails over decades. In modern times, the honour of a nation is directly proportional to its economic condition. A country like ours, where people do not have access to clear drinking water and where even in big cities there is power shutdown for more than 15 hours a day, stands on too weak a ground to make such claims. Establishment-backed politicians, retired generals, and clerics think that they can wage a holy war against the US while they themselves have been the beneficiaries of US aid in the past.
And now there is this game of semantics: whether the US should have used the word’ apology’ or ‘sorry’. The painful reality is that regardless of their choice of words to apologise to us, our status will remain ancillary. Unless as a nation we adopt the path of knowledge and promote a culture of research and intellectual inquiry, we cannot rise in the world.
Rizwan Akhtar,
UK, July 11.