I was doing some website maintenance and revisited my article Shitty Pakistan.
Long story short, I took a run at the Pakistani Government for jailing Dr. Shakil Afridi. Afridi's crime? He helped the American Government find Osama bin Laden.
I am not a Pakistani Historian.
I am not tuned into Pakistani Culture.
I barely know anything about Pakistan outside of their location on a map.
So I assumed that Pakistan released Dr. Shakil Afridi years ago, because the Pakistani government originally charged him with treason.
But here's the problem with the treason charge, he never subverted anyone associated with the Pakistani Government.
Say someone in Pakistan wanted to kill me. Easiest thing in the world, come to America, then just like the Terminator found Sarah Connor, look me up in the phone book.
Was Osama bin Laden in the Abbottabad phone book? Of course he wasn't. Again back to the Killing Fred Analogy, if agents of the Pakistani Army came to America and killed me, any American Citizens that helped plan my murder wouldn't be tried for treason.
You would argue that an American Citizen would be charged with being an Accessory to Murder. I'm not arguing that wouldn't happen, I'm saying that the American Government's primary beef would be with the Pakistani Government, specifically the Pakistani Military.
Which leads us back to Dr. Afridi. Because the Pakistani Government can't do shit to the American Government, or else they'd risk losing billions of dollars in foreign aid, Dr. Afridi was a convenient scapegoat for America violating Pakistan's borders.
Afridi has now been in a Pakistani Prison for over a decade. The Pakistanis' reasons for jailing Afridi have evolved over time, but make no mistake, Afridi is a scapegoat.
Why doesn't anyone in Pakistan take up Afridi's cause? Because Pakistan is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists.
Why doesn't CNN take up Afridi's cause? Because that would create an optics nightmare that Barack Obama left him behind and Joe Biden doesn't care.
Why doesn't FoxNews take up Afridi's cause? Because they had no reason to hold Donald Trump's feet to the fire when the question came up at the 31:32 mark of this C-Span video in 2019:
One of Trump's campaign promises was to free Dr. Afridi.
As a matter of fact, I couldn't find any major news outlets championing Afridi's cause....
Wait a minute, I stand corrected.
Lauren Coontz at Coffee or Die Magazine wrote a nice update and summation of Dr. Afridi's plight earlier this year, but my Google Search didn't come up with a lot of articles from the last year or two. So I tried Bing and Freespoke and found a better breadth of articles, but not a long list of anything new, and nothing from "corporate media" sources. All search engines had the Brookings' Institutes piece from a decade ago:
That article was 7.7 billion dollars ago.