PEOPLE

SURRENDER IN DOHA

Zalmay Khalilzad: A ROOTLESS WORSHIPPER OF MATERIALISM

By: Nasser Yousaf 

There is not a creature that moves on earth whose provision is not His concern. He knows where it lives and its (final) resting place: it is all (there) in a clear record.

Chapter 11 (Hud) Verse 6

After a very warm spell stretching for over a week, weather in Abbottabad has suddenly turned very pleasant. It's like it used to be when this place was a beautiful hill station. Light thunder and winds preceded rain which keeps pattering for the last about three hours.

While the rain played its music on our tin roof, I took my lunch on very tender chickpeas in thick liquidy juice with home-made tamarind sauce and plenty of finely chopped green salads. I had cherry-flavoured yogurt and very sweet melon cubes for my dessert.

Just minutes after I was through with these bounties, there was a knock at our door. It was Bilal, an Afghan lad of about 17, carrying a watermelon 🍉 which I had ordered a little while ago at the shop where he works with an elderly Afghan.I compelled Bilal into sitting on the wooden bench in our little foyer only to bring him a platter of the same food that I had had and some mint-flavoured juice.

We had never thought that the food we were preparing will be shared with us by Bilal. But God in His infinite wisdom had ordained that to be so.

Man will continue to err and strut around on earth as if he himself had made or created it.

One really feels sad for a great country like India to be ruled by a jingoistic philistine. Indians claim to have made tremendous gains in every field of life. But India has lost everything in the shape of Modi who keeps threatening Pakistan with stopping Pakistan's share of its water.

Honestly, these threats have never bothered me even a wee bit. Pakistan has great reserves of water in the form of glaciers in the North that God had ensured to provide for our needs as He so promisingly and unequivocally says in Sura Hud.

Pakistan has the best succulent fruits, and vegetables and food grains that people in countries like the US and Europe can relish only in dreams. I find fruits in America and Europe uneatable.

Quite unnecessarily, Pakistanis give too much weight to what ephemeral beings say about us. Our English-language press gives prominent coverage to people who are not known even to the Americans. And our  privileged clerks in the Foreign Office consider it their foremost duty to issue a statement or rebuttal each time Zalmay Khalilzad or any other American cadaver blurts out something or the other about the state of affairs in our country. 

America cannot stop us eat and drink what God has ordained to be our share. Americans can only deny visas to our rulers and their minions which alone appears to worry them when they react to what hocus pocus the gaunt, haggard and conceited American officials have to say about us.

Zalmay Khalilzad was born in Mazar-i-Sharif in the Balkh province of Afghanistan.His parents are, or were, from Laghman. He got his education in Kabul where he appears to have learned English-language in the charmless American accent. This dubious qualification got him his US citizenship and his European-origin wife. These credentials have gone to his crazy head and he keeps commenting on Pakistan as if the latter was his fiefdom.

Zalmay's fame (sic) is owing to his having served to protect the US interests in Afghanistan, not the interests of what could have been his motherland called Afghanistan. What the Afghans had gained during the twenty years absence of Taliban, Zalmay Khalilzad squadered all that away in Doha as the representative of the self-proclaimed powerful country of the world. The blood of that 18-years-old soccer player who fell from the plane while trying to flee Afghanistan is to be found on the hands of Zalmay Khalilzad.

If the the Taliban were Afghans and Pashtuns and hence unbeatable on their surface, so is Zalmay Khalilzad. Why did he surrender to the militants rather than fight them like a true Afghan as our warrior-poet Khushal Khan Khattak had versified more than 350 years ago:

Da Afghan pa nang me wutharala thura

Nangyaley da zamane Khushal Khattak yam

( I have drawn my sword to vindicate the honour of the Afghan, a spirited soul of the era am I Khushal Khattak)

Abbottabad is a very small place. During our growing up years, we could never have imagined that one day this place will have such a substantial presence of the Afghans among us. And before I am misunderstood, I want to make it clear that I do not at all mind the Afghans living among us. Unlike the glib-tongued Khalilzad, these Afghans are all very hardworking and cheerful folks. They have served us unreservedly for years at the bare minimum wages.

But then there are hundreds of Afghan kids who loiter all day long in the garbage dumps to fend for their piece of bread 🥪. A large number of these kids are from Laghman to which the parents of the dishonourable Zalmay Khalilzad belong. He is dishonourable because he has never cared to find about these kids but he keeps himself worrying to death about whether Pakistan was behaving itself or not.

Pakistan should have known Khalilzad long ago, and declared him a persona non grata. But since our rulers trust more in America than in the Divine power to provide us our bread and butter, Zalmay Khalilzad is having a field day playing with our self-esteem.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the devil's hireling, has played the same role for the imperialist powers that Bacha Saqqa played in that luckless country in the 1920s on the instigation of the infamous Lawrence of Arabia.

Zalmay is neither an Afghan, nor an American; he is a non Afghan Afghan and a non American American. He has sold his soul to the devil to quench his materialistic thirst. He has an ungentlemanly demeanour as he keeps talking of Pakistan in disparaging terms. Pakistan cannot be blamed for whatever has happened to Afghanistan. America, western Europe and the Arab countries together with the likes of Zalmay Khalilzad must be held accountable for all that is wrong with Afghanistan. Afghans must know who their real foe is!