Why America is hated

One hears a good deal of whining in Washington about how the United States has no real friends in the developing world. I don’t know why people here are surprised about this. The United States doesn’t deserve any friends in the developing world.
Recently, it was reported that senior American officers actually ordered soldiers to look the other way when Afghan commanders sexually abused and even murdered young boys. One US Army captain who confronted an Afghan commander for having a boy chained to his bed was relieved of his command and sent home.
This was no secret and no surprise. US officers and officials have spent the past decade looking the other way in Afghanistan. They looked the other way while the drug trade flourished, with a sizable part of the proceeds going to the Taliban and much of that toward killing Pakistani soldiers and civilians.
According to UN experts, the Taliban’s take from the drug trade amounted to roughly as much as Afghanistan’s entire defence budget in some years. Since Washington’s puppets in Kabul were against poppy crop eradication, because corrupt ministers were cashing in on the trade themselves, Washington aggressively fought calls for it as well. Of course, a significant portion of the drugs ended up in Pakistan.
They also looked the other way at corruption. A US Marines major working with Afghan police forces said that it took around $5,000 in bribes to become a police lieutenant. Anyone with any common sense knows that no one is going to pay that much because he is eager, for a tiny salary, to help his country. They paid $5,000 in bribes because they knew they will be able to make it back, and a great deal more, by shaking down villagers. This included detaining people on trumped-up charges so that their relatives would pay to have them released. Profit could also be made by raking off money that was supposed to fund operations at their patrol bases.
American officers knew that the police leadership was full of people with a financial incentive to rob the people of Afghanistan and endanger the lives of their own men by stealing money that had been intended for the weapons, ammunition, protective equipment, fuel and other supplies that they needed to do their jobs. Yet, they did nothing about it. When it became clear that drug use among the Afghan police was rampant, they turned a blind eye to that as well.
Not surprisingly, all of these problems resulted in loss of support for the government and a resurgence of the Taliban. This caused no reassessment of American policy, however. After all, why bother behaving ethically in Afghanistan when you can be wholly unscrupulous and then blame Pakistan for all the problems there?
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the Baghdad government reneged on the power-sharing agreements it had made with the Sunni minority, and imprisoned thousands of them. There were also Shia murder squads roaming the streets looking for Sunni leaders. At least one Sunni member of parliament was taken away by government forces and never seen again. The US neither lifted a finger nor said a word. Then, when Sunnis flocked to Isis, Washington just couldn’t understand why. Iraq imploded. Of course, Washington accepts no responsibility for this.
The US government cares almost nothing for the people of any developing country it deals with. If you are willing to be compliant, you can rob, sexually assault, imprison or even murder civilians and Washington will back you to the hilt. Knowing that the US is behind them tends to make corrupt or despotic officials more brazen. The result is far more robbery, sexual assault, false imprisonment or murder than there otherwise would have been.
The US isn’t just ignoring these corrosive problems, it is causing them. Of course, when a country ends up in anarchy as a result of all of this, Washington will never accept any blame. The US refuses either to behave morally or to take responsibility for the problems its immoral behaviour practically guarantees. This is why the US is hated as it is.
American behaviour has been similar in Pakistan. The United States has enabled undemocratic or corrupt behaviour by governments willing to dance to Washington’s tune. As a result of this behaviour, and the indecent liberties those governments allowed the US to take against Pakistani sovereignty, outrage against both the US and those governments was widespread.
Pakistan has not been destroyed though. I credit this mostly to a firm commitment to democracy on the part of the Pakistani people, the courts and the army. The judiciary and the people won’t stand for cancelled or rigged elections anymore and the army won’t back any government that tries it.
Thus, every government now knows going in that it must answer to the people at the polls, and that no amount of American support can keep a government in power if the Pakistani people don’t want it there. That knowledge provides a strong incentive for the government to resist the temptations that come with American support. May the people, the judiciary and the army remain strong in defence of their country.
I need to add a word on another crisis for which US government callousness is largely to blame. There are a number of aid organisations providing aid to Syrian refugees, whose plight is now absolutely desperate. Please consider a donation.
The writer is an associate at the Center for Security and Science. He has served in the New Hampshire legislature and as an election monitor in Pakistan.
Email: TGHatCSS@gmail.com