The hubris of panjandrums crowding the US Congress, administration, think tanks and commentariat could only be maddening and blinding. What else could it be that even when fleecing someone with a long sharp butcher's knife, they pose doing an act of tremendous generosity? The case in point is the linking of provision of funds from the Coalition Support Fund (CSF) to Pakistan by the Congressmen with an overwhelming majority with the reopening of suspended ground routes to NATO supplies. But this release of money from the CSF is no dole, charity or alms. It is just the reimbursement of what a recipient has spent from his own pocket on fighting America's spurious war on terror. And Pakistan, for one, has over the years been deceitfully short-changed and even cheated on this reimbursement by the American bursars. Even now they are sitting on approved bills worth more than $ 3.2 billion, pending with them for payment to Pakistan for nearly two years.And yet the Congressmen had had the audacity to pretend that they would be doing a great favour to Pakistan by releasing this withheld money if it succumbed to their arm-twisting and reopened the land routes to NATO supplies. Indeed, one panjandrum, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, wanted to "cut off every cent" to Pakistan "because it's being used for evil purposes", although this eminence has been openly holding hearings and moving resolutions in the Congress for Pakistan's dismemberment and secession of its Balochistan province. Does the jester think that working for an internationally-recognised sovereign state's breakup is no evil work but a noble task?Indeed, the American panjandrums must be thankful to an Islamabad establishment, for whose ineptitude and lackadaisicalness they are getting away with such deceits and frauds unscathed and unchallenged. Otherwise, the US-led adventurism has cost Pakistan hurtfully multifariously. In money terms, it has inflicted on Pakistan economic losses to the staggering tune of a whopping $70 billion. The much-hyped US economic aid totaling $7.5 billion over a five-year period at the rate of $1.5 billion per annum under the Kerry-Lugar-Berman enactment doesn't make even a respectable fraction of the colossal economic losses Pakistan has suffered. Even this puny aid is not much in coming. The grandees in the Islamabad establishment who must be telling the truth are, though, loyal to their American benefactors and treacherous to their own people. But while they remain stone silent, Senator Lugar, a co-author of this enactment, has been rather more forthcoming and truthful. Barely $500 million could flow into Pakistan in aid under the enactment over three years, he divulged not long ago, whereas some $4.5 billion should have poured in on this account over the period.But then Pakistan has throughout been taken for a ride by its American buddies. While they and their coalition allies put a puny force, hardly 18,000-strong, on the ground after ousting the Taliban to pacify as difficult a country as Afghanistan, obviously for fear of accumulating body bags of their soldiers, Pakistan had deployed nearly 140,000 troops along the border to take on the sneaking rumps of Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies as well as their sympathisers on this side of the border. Over the period, while more than 5,000 Pakistani officers and soldiers have lost their precious lives and many more thousands their limbs to live disabled lives, in fighting the militants, the casualties that the US-led invaders have suffered do not make up even half of the Pakistani colossal loss. And some 40,000 Pakistani civilians have been snuffed out and many more gored in militants' terrorist attacks as well as US drone incursions in Pakistan's territory. And that toll, too, is far bigger than what the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attack had exacted on the American lives. And yet the American panjandrums have the gall to posture as if their and their allies' armies have fought the war on terror but Pakistan has not. Nowhere in Afghanistan's southern and eastern parts and now in its certain western regions can their soldiers walk alone even in daylight. And they still feign as if all is okay in Afghanistan and the problem is only Pakistan's tribal border areas. But then deceits, lies and pretences have throughout been their favourite weapons. Nevertheless, this contrivance of theirs has begun coming apart, not because of an inert Islamabad establishment, but because of their own whistle-blowers. Indeed, one such iconoclast, Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a serving American military officer who has done duty tours in Afghanistan, has been lobbying the Congressmen hard to hold a hearing of American generals to know the real truth of the Afghan war. He has prepared a classified dossier and circulated to the Congressmen, revealing how the American generals are telling lies about the Afghan war and misleading their civilian and military bosses on it. But he is finding no listeners on the Congress corridors. Would grandees like Rohrabacher give him a chance to know the truth? Or, are they compulsively given to hearing lies and peddling lies?