Pakistan snubbed US democracy summit to please China --- Prime Minister Khan criticizes America’s ‘Cold War approach’ while Beijing hails Islamabad as a ‘real iron brother’

PESHAWAR – Pakistan gave the US-sponsored virtual “Summit for Democracy” a miss after remaining ambivalent for days about joining the event in official fear of annoying its all-weather strategic ally China and thereby potentially jeopardizing over US$60 billion worth of Chinese investment in the country.

Pakistan’s foreign office did not explicitly announce that Prime Minister Imran Khan’s elected government turned down the US invitation but media reports indicate that’s what happened, likely under Beijing’s pressure.

China reportedly contacted Pakistani authorities in the two weeks before the summit to lobby them against participating. Days after Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi had a late-night telephone conversation with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, Pakistan officially decided to skip the summit.

As Pakistan’s Foreign Office announced the decision, official circles in Islamabad were reportedly worried that Washington would be irked by the snub, though no official US statement was made on Pakistan’s non-participation.

“We remain deeply committed to further deepening democracy, fighting corruption, and protecting and promoting the human rights of all citizens. We value our partnership with the US, which we wish to expand both bilaterally as well as in terms of regional and international cooperation. We remain in contact with the US on a range of issues and believe that we can engage on this subject at an opportune time in the future. Pakistan will, meanwhile, continue to support all efforts aimed towards strengthening dialogue, constructive engagement, and international cooperation for the advancement of our shared goals.”

and more:

He said the Biden administration’s attitude towards Pakistan has been either cold or hostile and often demeaning, including when US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited India in October but snubbed visiting Islamabad. Mushahid noted the US has not put forward any forward-looking proposals for bilateral relations, opting instead to blame Pakistan for its failures in Afghanistan.

“In my view, there were reasons for skipping the summit…Instead of thanking Pakistan for evacuating its citizens and assets out of Afghanistan – the CIA chief visited personally to Islamabad for that purpose – the US continued to scapegoat Pakistan, taking scant regard to its policy failures on Afghanistan,” Mushahid added.

That is always true. But there isn’t a moral equivalency there with respect to how a vassal or subjugated state is going to be treated and many third world countries don’t get that at all.

For example, we might give US loans to a country like Pakistan to help them build a large infrastructure project, but in general, if the loans are defaulted on, late, or inadequate, the US has generally not taken over that infrastructure.

In the Communist Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, that is the entire point of those huge third world projects. The entire point.

And China is one of the most racist countries in the world, so it is targeted, as many countries in Africa or other places are finding out.

One of the interesting exercises I use to frame the reality of a situation is to reverse things, put the shoe on the other foot.

For example, the Waukesha Racist Massacre and how it is portrayed in the Media as a tragedy, as if instead of a black man deliberately mowing down white people in a parade, it is treated as if a meteor had descended from the heavens and plowed through the street. If you reverse that, and say a known racist white man had deliberately driven his car through crowds of black people killing and maiming them, would it be treated in the media the same way? Of course not.

Likewise, imagine for a minute if muslim terrorists had destroyed the Shanghai Tower and Communist China had ended up in Iraq instead of the USA...how would things have been different? Think the Chinese would have dealt with them with a heavier or lighter hand than we did? How about oil? Would Communist China let them (with Chinese help) get their oil production back online so the Iraqis could sell oil to the world and fill their coffers, or would the Communists take total control of the oil fields and pump every barrel they could and unashamedly ship it back to China or sell for hard currency that would end up in China?

(By the way, I thought we should have done that in a conquered Iraq. They would have gotten their oil fields back eventually, but I thought we should have used their oil to defray costs. But we don’t operate that way. Morally, I can deal with that, but it does make us look like patsies, no doubt.)

Strong Horse, Weak Horse.

Pakistan just witnessed us getting owned like a sex slave in Afghanistan, and even played all kinds of provocation games themselves during the process with no repercussions.

And China has been elbow-deep in rounding up all the Muslims in its western provinces, concentration camping them, and mass organ harvesting them. Then forcing the remaining females in that AO into marriages with properly Han males to finish breeding out that entire culture.

If you were part of a culture that could only respect that which you fear, and all respect was fear-based, which would you respect?

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