Pakistan

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

USA: It’s time to run away from Afghanistan after the “cold-blooded assassination” of Osama Bin Laden

USA’s President Barack Obama said that it will talk to the Taliban. USA is trying to run away from Afghanistan after the killing of unarmed al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

The senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Richard Lugar said, “With al-Qaeda largely displaced from the country, but franchised in other locations, Afghanistan does not carry a strategic value that justifies 100,000 American troops and a $100 billion per year cost, especially given current fiscal restraints”.

On the other hand the killing of unarmed al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has been criticized all around the world. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said, “I think the killing of an unarmed man [Osama Bin Laden] is always going to leave a very uncomfortable feeling because it doesn't look as if justice is seen to be done.”

A prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, Benjamin Ferencz said, “killing a captive who poses no immediate threat is a crime under military law as well as all other laws … the difficulty is that we have releases from the Government which are changed daily. I can understand the need for secrecy but the issue here is whether what was done was an act of legitimate self-defense or whether it was not.”

Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson told the BBC World Service that to call the killing of Osama Bin Laden justice is “a total misuse of language”.

“America resembles the land of the munchkins, as it celebrates the death of the Wicked Witch of the East. The joy is understandable, but it endorses what looks increasingly like a cold-blooded assassination ordered by a president who, as a former law professor, knows the absurdity of his statement that ‘justice was done’ ”, Robertson said in his article in The Independent.

Americans were using al-Qaeda as an excuse to attack Afghanistan. However the objective was to encircle China and to access the oil and gas deposits in the Central Asia. This dream has converted into a nightmare. The American defeat in Afghanistan has shown the limits of the power. This defeat has also shown the people who are willing to sacrifice cannot be colonized.