The website of the United States Central Command recently reported that Pakistan suffered a USD 10 billion loss (almost one-third of total external debt) because of its support for the US wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. Within hours of the posting, the information was removed from the website and was played down by the mainstream media in Pakistan. That such information should be suppressed as quickly as possible is hardly surprising. After all the Pakistani military establishment and its puppet political elite have made their living since 11 September on a healthy dose of blatant lies, drawing their cue from the most sophisticated fabricator of all.
The fact is that Pakistan's economy went into virtual freefall because of the US 'war on terror', and no amount of reference to the sparkling macroeconomic figures that the International Monetary Fund quotes ad nauseum can hide this fact. Nevertheless, General Musharraf, finance minister Shaukat Aziz and the rest of the gang that runs the country have tried very hard to propagate a lie about progress and stability. Of course, this is possible because the disenfranchised majority of Pakistanis are taking the fall, and their political voice is muted. Meanwhile those trying hard to stay in the good books of the global financial elite are all too happy to pretend that everything is better than ever.
The lie industry is now very well established. It has a long tradition backed up by a handy infrastructure that exists solely to serve the interests of the elite. The weapons of mass destruction fraud that dominated media networks before the war on Iraq has been completely exposed, but the lie industry has already relegated this fraud to the category of relic news items. And now the United Nations has acquiesced quite easily to the US and UK Iraq reconstruction drama. Meanwhile in Pakistan, Musharraf's complete unwillingness to retreat from his position on the Legal Framework Order is also based on a compilation of lies that makes everyone else but the army responsible for the crisis that Pakistan faces.
Okara frontline
But the most significant lies, the ones that are based on the carefully constructed social fabric that is the Pakistani state ideology, the ones that expose the sordid brutality of our state, and the ones that have broken the backs of people's resistance till now, are coming undone. And it is this process that will hasten the evolution of an organic political movement for change, perhaps the only long-term resistance to the US imperial advance in periphery countries such as Pakistan.