WHILE the leading politicians from the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) were busy with plans of impeaching President Pervez Musharraf back in July, the president of the United States was crafting his own master plan, one that has begun to shake the foundations of Pakistan’s national sovereignty.

As commander in chief, George W. Bush issued secret orders to his officers in Afghanistan to hit suspected Pakistani havens of Taleban (who are fighting the US forces in Afghanistan) whenever the opportunity presented itself. Of course, these assaults were to be carried out without the knowledge and approval of the government of Pakistan.

Now the Pakistani ambassador to the US, Hussein Haqqani, states that the White House personally told him that this story that The New York Times broke is not true and no new orders for such attacks were in the works, but the State Department officials have neither confirmed nor denied such unlawful and illegal intrusions by American forces into Pakistan.

AND given a series of denials and distortions of truth by Bush and his administration on so many fronts, I chose to believe the newspaper rather than Bush and his band of warmongering neocons. Once the news made the front-page headlines, Gordon Brown of the UK was quickly towed in by the US president for prop support.

Dutifully, the British prime minister said he would press Pakistan to allow the US and NATO troops in Afghanistan to do whatever was necessary in the war against Taleban. He was joined in chorus by another devotee of Bush’s, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.

NATO on the other hand has categorically and emphatically stated that they will not support US intrusion into Pakistan. The battle against the Taleban stops at the border, according to NATO, and they will not take part in a proposed US strategy of conducting raids into Pakistan from Afghanistan against Taleban and Al-Qaeda militants, said NATO spokesman James Appathurai in a regular news briefing on Thursday.

“The NATO policy, that is our mandate, ends at the border. There are no ground or air incursions by NATO forces into Pakistani territory.” The NATO states would discuss the issue, Appathurai said, but he added: “Let me stress, it is not NATO that will be sending its forces across the border.”

Pakistan Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani rightly said on Wednesday that Pakistan would not allow foreign troops to conduct operations on its soil. “The sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country will be defended at all cost and no external force is allowed to conduct operations... inside Pakistan,” and “reckless actions” that kill civilians “only help the militants and further fuel the militancy in the area,” he added, echoing what many Pakistanis have been saying all along.

Now what about those US strikes on Pakistan? What did they achieve? From eyewitnesses and frontier-based media personnel, the principal victims happened to be innocent women and children, once again explained away as “collateral damage” by a regime known for its insensitivity to human suffering.

It is bad enough when Bush defies all international conventions and invades sovereign countries such as Iraq in his distorted war on terror. But it is worse when other nations give in to the US president’s outrageous demands.

Pakistan must not be allowed to become the next Iraq or Afghanistan. The people of Pakistan should defend their sovereignty and territorial integrity to the man and deny their airspace to any unauthorized US military activity that has more often than not resulted in the unwarranted deaths of innocent civilians. The people of Pakistan must ensure that their elected government understands that Pakistan is not for sale to Bush or his ideology. It is time for all Pakistanis to step out of the box and make that stand.