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The US toppled Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. The right to interventionism that the US claims is well established worldwide.
In the above episode of Judging Freedom, Andrew (Judge) Napolitano talks with renowned Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs1 about the current situation in major flashpoints in the Middle East and Asia. The EU is offering Ukraine an additional support package of €50 billion for the period 2024-2027. The ruling by the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, does not appear to have dampened the Netanyahu government’s behaviour. In Pakistan, political opponents are imprisoned for ten years on trumped-up charges. President Biden and his Secretary of State are facing demonstrations from angry citizens, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says that if he becomes president, he will stop the war in Ukraine, but not the carnage in Gaza.
Europe has entered a recession because of the sanctions on Russia. It is adopting policies that are extremely unpopular with the people of Europe. The approval ratings of people like Chancellor Scholz of Germany are in the low 20s, and that’s generally true across Europe. Victor Orban of Hungary is not alone now, because the government of Slovakia is now also saying that the war in Ukraine needs to end at the negotiating table. The politics in the European Union are absolutely against this war, but the leaders have been falling into line with the US. All along they’ve not said a word about negotiations. They are blind to the fact that Ukraine is being demographically destroyed step by step. It loses territory and millions of citizens have fled to Russia or the EU, or are displaced internally.
Victor Orban of Hungary is not alone now, because the government of Slovakia is now also saying that the war in Ukraine needs to end at the negotiating table.
Another topic was the overthrow of Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. This fits within American foreign policy: the US wants to decide who governs any other country if that country is challenging the US. Sachs wrote a fascinating piece in Common Dreams, arguing that the US was complicit in the trumped-up charges against Imran Khan, the former cricket star who was the very popular elected prime minister until he has been sentenced to 14 years on two absurd charges of crimes that he couldn ’t possibly have committed. Did the United States engineer the removal of prime minister Khan and his banishment to a Pakistan prison? Does the US still do things like that? It seems this is the point of Sachs’ article which the New York Times refused to publish.
In Sachs’ view, to understand American foreign policy one should understand the concept of covert regime change. The US doesn’t think about how to have diplomacy with another government, but about how to replace it. This has been a string of complete disasters stretching back more than 70 years, when in 1947 the CIA was established. It had two different tasks: (1) intelligence, i.e. analysis, understanding the world, and (2) covert operations. Basically, the CIA has been a lawless extension of the White House, the Pentagon and the security establishment generally. By a realist account, there have been 80 or more covert regime change operations by the US. They are illegal, fundamentally contrary to the UN Charter and the principle of non-intervention.
The US doesn’t think about how to have diplomacy with another government, but about how to replace it.
The right to interventionism that the US claims is so well established worldwide that Belgian opinion maker David Criekemans unceremoneously proclaimed that the American decision to remove2 all forces from Afghanistan was “the biggest strategic blunder of this century”. Criekemans was afraid of a Taliban takeover, which happened after all. “The West must drain the Taliban economically and financially, and find out the source of all their weapons. To this end, the Pakistani government in particular must be put under pressure,” says Criekemans, a lecturer in international politics at the University of Antwerp and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Egmont Institute, the mouthpiece of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Below is the article by professor Sachs that forms the basis of his interview with Napolitano and the above paragraphs.
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The US Toppling of Imran Khan
By JEFFREY D. SACHS Feb 01, 2024 Common Dreams (Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
Covert regime change strikes again. This time in Pakistan.
A principal instrument of U.S. foreign policy is covert regime change, meaning a secret action by the U.S. government to bring down the government of another country. There are strong reasons to believe that U.S. actions led to the removal from power of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan in April 2022, followed by his arrest on trumped-up charges of corruption and espionage, and sentencing this week to 10 years imprisonment on the espionage charge. The political objective is to block Pakistan’s most popular politician from returning to power in the elections on February 8.
The key to covert operations of course is that they are secret and hence deniable by the U.S. government. Even when the evidence comes to light through whistleblowers or leaks, as it very often does, the U.S. government rejects the authenticity of the evidence and the mainstream media generally ignore the story because it contradicts the official narrative. Because editors at these mainstream outlets don’t want to peddle in “conspiracy theories,” or are simply happy to be the mouthpieces for officialdom, they give the U.S. government a very wide berth for actual regime-change conspiracies.
Covert regime change by the U.S. is shockingly routine. One authoritative study by Boston University professor Lindsay O’Rourke counts 64 covert regime change operations by the U.S. during the Cold War (1947 and 1989), and in fact the number was far larger because she chose to count repeated attempts within one country as a single extended episode. Since then, U.S. regime change operations have remained frequent, such as when President Barrack Obama tasked the CIA (Operation Timber Sycamore) with overthrowing Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. That covert operation remained secret until several years after the operation, and even then, was hardly covered by the mainstream media.
From the U.S. perspective, “neutral” is a fighting word.
All of this brings us to Pakistan, another case where evidence points strongly to U.S.-led regime change. In this case, the U.S. desired to bring down the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan, the charismatic, talented, and hugely popular leader in Pakistan, renowned both for his world-leading cricket mastery and for his common touch with the people. His popularity, independence, and enormous talents make him a prime target of the U.S., which frets about popular leaders who don’t fall into line with U.S. policy.
Imran Khan’s “sin” was to be too cooperative with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, while also seeking normal relations with the United States. The great mantra of U.S. foreign policy, and the activating principle of the CIA, is that a foreign leader is “either with us or against us.” Leaders who try to be neutral amongst the great powers are at dire risk of losing their positions, or even their lives, at U.S. instigation, since the U.S. does not accept neutrality. Leaders seeking neutrality dating back to Patrice Lumumba (Zaire), Norodom Sihanouk (Cambodia), Viktor Yanukovych (Ukraine), and many others, have been toppled with the not-so-hidden-hand of the U.S. government.
Like many leaders in the developing world, Khan does not want to break relations with either the U.S. or Russia over the Ukraine War. By sheer coincidence of prior scheduling, Khan happened to be in Moscow to meet Putin on the day that Russia launched the special military operation (February 24, 2022). From the start, Khan advocated that the conflict in Ukraine should be settled at the negotiating table rather than on the battlefield. The U.S. and E.U. arm-twisted foreign leaders including Khan to fall into line against Putin and to support Western sanctions against Russia, yet Khan resisted.
Khan probably sealed his fate on March 6 when he held a large rally in northern Pakistan. At the rally, he berated the West, and especially 22 EU ambassadors, for pressuring him to condemn Russia at a vote in the United Nations. He also excoriated NATO’s war against terror in next-door Afghanistan as having been utterly devastating to Pakistan, with no acknowledgment, respect, or appreciation for Pakistan’s suffering.
[Khan’s] popularity, independence, and enormous talents make him a prime target of the U.S., which frets about popular leaders who don’t fall into line with U.S. policy.
Khan told the cheering crowds, “EU ambassadors wrote a letter to us asking us to condemn and vote against Russia… What do you think of us? Are we your slaves … that whatever you say, we will do?” He added, “We are friends with Russia, and we are also friends with America; we are friends with China and with Europe; we are not in any camp. Pakistan would remain neutral and work with those trying to end the war in Ukraine.”
From the U.S. perspective, “neutral” is a fighting word. The grim follow-up for Khan was revealed in August 2023 by investigative reporters at The Intercept. Just one day after Khan’s rally, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu met in Washington with Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S., Asad Majeed Khan. Following the meeting, Ambassador Khan sent a secret cable (a “cypher”) back to Islamabad, which was then leaked to The Intercept by a Pakistani military official.
The cable recounts how Assistant Secretary Lu berated Prime Minister Khan for his neutral stance. The cable quotes Lu as saying that “people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine), if such a position is even possible. It does not seem such a neutral stand to us.”
Lu then conveyed the bottom line to Ambassador Khan. “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.”
Five weeks later on April 10, with the U.S. blunt threat hanging over the powerful Pakistani military, and with the military’s hold over the Pakistani parliament, the Parliament ousted Khan in a no-confidence vote. Within weeks, the new government followed with brazenly manufactured charges of corruption against Khan, to put him under arrest and prevent his return to power. In utterly Orwellian turn, when Khan made known the existence of the diplomatic cable that revealed America’s role in his ouster, the new government charged Khan with espionage. He has now been convicted on these charges to an unconscionable 10 years, with the U.S. government remaining silent on this outrage.
When asked about Khan’s conviction, the State Department had the following to say: “It’s a matter for the Pakistani courts.” Such an answer is a vivid example of how U.S.-led regime change works. The State Department supports Khan’s imprisonment over Khan’s public revelation of U.S. actions.
Pakistan will therefore hold elections on February 8 with its most popular democratic leader in prison and with Khan’s party the subject of relentless attacks, political murders, media blackouts, and other heavy-handed repression. In all of this, the U.S. government is utterly complicit. So much for America’s “democratic” values. The U.S. government has gotten its way for now—and has deeply destabilized a nuclear-armed nation of 240 million people. Only Khan’s release from prison and his participation in the upcoming election could restore stability.
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1 Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
2 The NATO invasion of Afghanistan was illegal. There was no UN mandate. The UN resolutions did not expressly allow an aggressive approach. NATO did too little to reach a diplomatic solution. The claim of self-defense is deeply contentious.
Geopolitiek in context 