Crawling to the Cross

Pakistan’s prime minister puts on a staged speech for the Western world.

Following the apparent assassination of Osama bin Laden, the Pakistani government wants to bury the hatchet with the United States as quickly as it can. In a speech delivered to parliament Monday evening, Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani sent a clear message to Washington, but it was one that failed to meet the Pakistani people’s expectations. The fact that Gilani delivered the speech in English instead of Urdu — both legally official languages in Pakistan, but Urdu is the common national language — showed that his remarks were primarily aimed at Western nations.

While it had been previously promised that the prime minister would explain to the people what took place during the U.S. military attack of the previous week and why the Pakistani forces failed to react, he actually said very little on those subjects. He claimed the Pakistani forces had responded “as was expected of them.” Aircraft and ground troops had been quickly dispatched but unfortunately too late to get involved. Almost as an aside, Gilani admitted that the technical capability of U.S. aircraft to escape detection by Pakistani radar was undeniable.

All opposition political parties in Pakistan, as well as broad segments of the population, consider the unobstructed actions of killer commando teams on Pakistani soil to be a demonstration of the ease with which the United States could attack and neutralize its nuclear arsenal. That’s why the military high command ordered a top-to-bottom review of how the United States could have conducted an hour-long military attack that went unnoticed. The Pakistani prime minister neglected to address that particular point, limiting his explanation to the fact that the United States had requested only an investigation into how bin Laden could have lived unnoticed in Abbottabad for years.

Gilani claimed that concerns over current relations between his country and the United States were unfounded, saying, “Pakistan attaches high importance to its relations with the U.S. We have a strategic partnership that we believe is in our mutual interest” and is based on “mutual respect and mutual trust.”

He went on to say that Pakistan and the U.S. were in strategic agreement and that the discord being trumpeted in the media concerned only operational and tactical details. He said it was not unusual that there were different views concerning the methods employed to achieve common goals.

The fact that Gilani criticized the Abbottabad attack only once by calling it a breach of Pakistani sovereignty was seen as an unnecessary compulsory response. Opposition leader Chaudry Nisar of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz Wing ultimately said the prime minister’s speech did not reflect the feeling of insecurity prevalent in the country and that he should have sent a clear message to the world that any future attacks would be met with serious retaliatory measures. He added that Pakistan had to bring this matter before the United Nations Security Council so that all aspects of the matter could be investigated by an independent commission. Nisar further demanded that American unmanned drones that regularly attack targets in northwest Pakistan be shot down in the future.