Islamabad, Sept. 18 : Pakistan’s desire to have a colonial like influence over neighboring Afghanistan is showing no signs of diminishing, believes a columnist for the magazine, Vanity Fair.

According to Christopher Hitchens, important circles in Pakistan have never given up the aspiration to run Afghanistan as a client or dependent or proxy state, and this colonial mindset is especially entrenched among senior army officers and in the Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

“We were all warned of this many years ago. When the Clinton administration sent cruise missiles into Afghanistan in reprisal for the attacks on US embassies in East Africa, the missiles missed Osama bin Laden but did manage, if you remember, to kill two officers of the ISI. In those years, as in earlier ones, almost no tough questions were asked of Pakistan,” writes Hitchens.

The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem.

“It is not a real country or nation but an acronym devised in the 1930s by a Muslim propagandist for partition named Choudhry Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir and Indus-Sind. The -stan suffix merely means land,” he further says.

“In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym means land of the pure. It can be easily seen that this name expresses expansionist tendencies and also conceals discriminatory ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. The Afghans are Muslim but not part of Pakistan. Most of Punjab is also in India,” he adds.

The P comes first only because Pakistan is essentially the property of the Punjabi military caste,” says Hitchen.

He believes that on Pakistani soil and under the noses of its army and the ISI, the city of Quetta and the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas are becoming the incubating ground of a reorganised and protected al-Qa''ida. (ANI)