"What is happening? Both Hagenbeck, who boasts to the media about the high quality of his intelligence, and Khalilzad, who is unquestionably in a position to know, have stated that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are being nurtured, not in some inaccessible terrain along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border but in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Balochistan province where the Pakistan Army and the ISI have a major presence. Yet President Bush and his neo-conservative henchmen have remained strangely quiet, allowing Pakistan to strengthen the Taliban in Quetta, and, as a consequence, re-energize al-Qaeda -- the killers of thousands of Americans in the fall of 2001." -- Ramtanu Maitra, 2003
There are actually many news reports and published analyses from the early part of the Afghan War that now produce an eerie effect because they pointed so clearly to the very situation that exists today. But Ramtanu Maitra's analysis might be the eeriest of all because in light of where the Afghan War stands today it greatly challenges the widely-held assumption that the Bush administration simply dropped the ball in Afghanistan because it was distracted by the Iraq invasion and subsequent insurgency in the country. Perhaps that's true or partly true, but then there is the Maitra writing, clanking its chains, as it were, in the manner of Dickens's Ghost of Christmas Past --
Why the US needs the Taliban
By Ramtanu Maitra
July 30, 2003
Asia Times Online
Since Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf made his much-acclaimed visit to Camp David and met US President George W Bush on June 24, new elements have begun to emerge in the Afghan theater. US troops in Afghanistan are now encountering more enemy attacks than ever before, and clashes between Pakistani and Afghan troops along the tribal borders have been reported regularly.
On July 16, speaking to the [Electronic] Telegraph of the United Kingdom, US troop commander General Frank "Buster" Hagenbeck, based at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, reported increased attacks over recent weeks on US and Afghan forces by the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other anti-US groups that have joined hands. He also revealed some other very interesting information: the Taliban and its allies have regrouped in Pakistan and are recruiting fighters from religious schools in Quetta in a campaign funded by drug trafficking. Hagenbeck also said that these enemies of US and Afghan forces have been joined by Al-Qaeda commanders who are establishing new cells and sponsoring the attempted capture of American troops. One other piece of news of import from Hagenbeck is that the Taliban have seized whole swathes of the country.
Reliable intelligence
Hagenbeck's statements were virtually ignored in Washington. Also ignored were a number of similar statements issued from Kabul by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his cabinet colleagues. On July 17, presidential spokesman Jawed Ludin spoke to the Pakistani newspaper The News of the Afghan government's concern over the volatile situation on its border with Pakistan. Ludin urged Pakistan to "take steps" to prevent the Taliban fighters from crossing over to launch terrorist attacks against Kabul. "We will take it seriously to confront it," he warned. "So our expectation is for all those involved in the war against terror to take serious steps," Ludin added, clearly addressing the Bush administration.
A week later, on July 24, in an article for The Nation, a Pakistani news daily, Ahmed Rashid, the well known expert on the Taliban and Afghanistan, quoted President Hamid Karzai, during an interview at Kabul, as saying: "As much as we want good relations with Pakistan and other neighbors, we also oppose extremism, terrorism and fundamentalism coming into Afghanistan from outside. We have one page where there is a tremendous desire for friendship and the need for each other. But there is the other page, of the consequences if intervention continues, cross-border terrorism continues, violence and extremism continue. Afghans will have no choice but to stand up and stop it."
Among Americans, only the special envoy of the US president to Afghanistan and a good friend of President Karzai, Zalmay Khalilzad, has shown any concern about the recent developments. Khalilzad has little choice but to keep up a bold front to the Afghans, telling them how his bosses in Washington are doing their best to rebuild Afghanistan, and attributes the present crisis to the security situation. Like everyone else, Khalilzad has little in reality to offer and, given the opportunity, falls back on what "must be done" and "should be done". At a July 15 press conference at Kabul, Khalilzad said every effort has to be made by Pakistan not to allow its territory to be used by the Taliban elements. This "should not be allowed", he said. "We need 100 percent assurances [from Pakistan] on this, not 50 percent assurances, and we know the Taliban are planning in Quetta."
What is happening? Both Hagenbeck, who boasts to the media about the high quality of his intelligence, and Khalilzad, who is unquestionably in a position to know, have stated that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are being nurtured, not in some inaccessible terrain along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border but in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Balochistan province where the Pakistan Army and the ISI have a major presence. Yet, President Bush and his neo-conservative henchmen have remained strangely quiet, allowing Pakistan to strengthen the Taliban in Quetta, and, as a consequence, re-energize al-Qaeda - the killers of thousands of Americans in the fall of 2001.
Recall for a moment: Following the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, no other terrorist was portrayed by the United States as more dangerous than al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and no other Islamic fundamentalist group was presented to the American people as more despicable than the Taliban. Within a month the United States invaded Afghanistan to "take out" the Taliban, al-Qaeda and bin Laden, while the world lined up behind the new anti-terrorist messiahs from Washington, providing it the necessary moral and vocal support. Why, then, is Washington now weakening President Karzai and allowing the strengthening and re-emergence of the Taliban?
Karzai shared with Ahmed Rashid his belief, like that of the average Afghan today, that the answer to that question lies in an understanding reached between the United States and Pakistan during Musharraf's visit to Camp David, that Afghanistan could be, in effect, "sub-contracted" to Pakistan. Karzai also told Rashid that Musharraf's critical remarks about the Karzai regime during his visit to the United States reminded him of the pre-September 11 days when Pakistan was fully backing the Taliban and exercising ever-more-strident control over Afghanistan. Musharraf had said, among other things, that the Afghan president does not have much control over Afghanistan beyond Kabul. But, Karzai added in the interview with Rashid, no matter what the outsiders are planning or plotting, as of now, "I want nobody to be under any illusion that Afghanistan will allow any other country to control it." Is Karzai overreacting? Most likely, he is not. He has seen the writing on the wall. It is arguable whether the Taliban's return to power is inevitable, but there is little doubt that under the circumstances it is very convenient for the US.
Bowing to realities
To begin with, it was clear from the outset that the United States never really wanted to be in Afghanistan. It was basically a jumping-off point for the "big enchilada", the re-shaping of the Middle East's politics and regimes. The Afghan reconstruction talk was mostly wishful thinking. For anyone familiar with present-day Afghanistan - its security situation, the drug production and trafficking, its destroyed infrastructure, its rampant illiteracy and poverty - its reconstruction by foreigners is either a dream or a string of motivated lies.
Now, after a half-hearted effort that lasted for almost 18 months, the Bush administration has come to realize that it is impossible to keep Pakistan as a friend and simultaneously keep the Northern Alliance-backed government in power in Kabul. The "puppet" Pashtun leader in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, does not have the approval of Pakistan and the majority of the rest of the Pashtun community straddling both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. So, either one has Pakistan as a friend with an Islamabad-backed Pashtun group in power in Kabul, or one gets Pakistan as an enemy. There should be no doubt in anyone's mind how the Bush administration would act when confronted with such a choice.
Secondly, look at the Northern Alliance (NA) allies. The best ally of the NA is Russia, the Bush administration's key contestant for supremacy in Central Asia. In the 1980s, the United States spent billions of dollars to get Afghanistan out of the Russian orbit. It is ridiculous to believe that the Bush administration would act differently now to protect the NA and Karzai. Much better is to have Afghanistan sub-contracted to Pakistan and keep the Russians at bay, than to yield ground to Moscow, who is hardly friendly to Pakistan.
Thirdly, the NA, and particularly the Shi'ites of the Hazara region of Afghanistan, are close to Iran. Iran is building a road which will connect the Iranian port of Chahbahar to the city of Herat in central Afghanistan and link up with Kandahar in the southeast. While this is going on, some neo-conservatives in Washington are screaming for Iranian blood. Even if the Bush administration is not quite willing right now to spill that blood, it is nonetheless a certainty that Washington will be more than eager to see the Iranian influence in Afghanistan curbed. If the NA-backed Karzai government stays in power for long, Iran would most definitely enhance its influence. The Taliban do not want that and they have sent a message recently by slaughtering the Shi'ites in Quetta with the full knowledge of the Pakistani authorities. Besides being anti-Russia, the Taliban are also anti-Shi'ite, or anti-Iran. This added "virtue" of the Taliban has not gone unnoticed in the corridors of intrigue-makers in Washington.
Finally, there is the India factor. A minor factor, it does, however, come into play in calculating the pluses and minuses of the resurgent Taliban option. The Bush administration wants closer relations with India - not on New Delhi's terms, but on Washington's terms. Indian activity in Afghanistan has increased multifold since the Karzai government came to power in the winter of 2001. These developments are being eyed suspiciously by Islamabad. While Washington would not make a federal case out of it, it surely does not like to see India forming a strategic alliance with Russia and Iran in Afghanistan. Washington would rather like to break such an alliance quickly, particularly if its ally, in this case Pakistan, wants such an alliance broken. Significantly, a well-connected relative of Musharraf, Brigadier Feroz Hassan Khan, formerly at the Wilson Center and now a fellow at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, addressed these issues directly in a recent publication.
Not just whistling in the dark
In the January issue of Strategic Insight, a publication for the Center for Contemporary Conflict, Khan observed: "In Iran, President Khatami is moving in tandem and cooperation with Pakistan in supporting the Karzai government as manifest in the recent visit to Pakistan. However there are hardliners in Iran who would want to continue with the old game of supporting warlords and factions and consider Pakistan as rival vis-a-vis Afghanistan, and who are still suspicious of the Saudi role. Iran is pitching its bid, by constructing a road from Chahbahar Port in the Persian Gulf through Iran's Balochistan area to link up eventually with Kandahar in the hope of 'breaking the monopoly of Pakistan'. Afghanistan is currently sustained primarily through the Karachi-Quetta/Peshawar routes - Bolan and Khyber passes respectively - which has provided Afghanistan with trade and transit with the outside world for centuries."
Furthermore, Khan pointed out, "Russia remains involved with the major warlords [of Afghanistan]. One such warlord, Rashid Dostum, was recently on a shopping spree for arms and equipment from Moscow. Russia believes it has its own experience and expertise in Afghanistan and must reestablish its interests. Given the history, Pakistan is very uncomfortable with this development."
Of course, the Khan's treatise would not have been complete without pointing to the devious role of the Indians in Afghanistan. He said: "India is a major proactive player now. It is providing well-coordinated military supplies to the Northern Alliance thorough the air base in Tajikistan. This includes weapons, equipment and spare parts aimed at strengthening those elements that had become the sworn enemies of Pakistan during the Taliban's rule. Fear in Pakistan is that despite Afghanistan's changed policies, some elements still hold a grudge against Pakistan and would be willing to do India's bidding. This would bring the India-Pakistan rivalry into the Afghan imbroglio."
It is safe to assume that Khan, who has an extensive background in arms control, disarmament and international treaties, and who formulated Pakistan's security policy on nuclear war, arms control and strategic stability in South Asia, is not merely whistling in the dark.
The terms of convenience
Now the question remains: what might Pakistan be expected to deliver in return for the Bush administration granting it control over Afghanistan once more? In the real world, Pakistan can help the United States significantly. It has already agreed not to provide nuclear technology to Islamic nations. Musharraf may have to give the United States control of its nuclear research facility, among other things. More important will be to hand over Osama bin Laden to the United States and send two brigades of Pakistani troops to Iraq to help out the beleaguered US troops there. The arrest of Osama would surely justify the US mission to Afghanistan, and could set the stage for America's eventual withdrawal from that country. Another likely item on the agenda is Pakistani recognition of Israel.
Would this new arrangement of "sub-contracting" (to use Karzai's apt term) Afghanistan to the Pakistan-Taliban combination complicate the already complex situation any further? Probably not. It was evident in October 2001, when the United States went pell-mell into Afghanistan with the help of the Northern Alliance, that America's hastily-organized arrangement there was unsustainable. It was clear that no matter what Islamabad says, or how much pressure is brought to bear on it, Pakistan has absolutely no reason whatsoever to agree to such an arrangement.
Washington came to appreciate the non-sustainability of this arrangement when Musharraf, in a sleight of hand, brought the Muttahida Majlis-e Amal - the MMA, also known as "Musharraf, Mullahs and the Army" - to power in the two provinces bordering Afghanistan. At that point, Karzai's tenure as president of Afghanistan shrank abruptly, and Washington deemed it time to give up the "Marshall Plan for Afghanistan" and settle for next best - Taliban rule in Afghanistan under Pakistani control, once again.
******
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.)
Tuesday, January 24
A few choice words about poetic justice and the Washington Consensus
I'm adding David Bosco's April 6, 2011 report for Foreign Policy, Is the Washington Consensus dying? to my MENA's New Left post, in which I mentioned in passing that Mackell's complaints about the Washington Consensus weren't entirely unjustified. The 'money' quotes in Bosco's report(which he took from the Bretton Woods Project):
The cookie-cutter application of neoliberal shock therapy to developing countries(which includes the sudden privatization of state-run industries) has unleashed havoc in one country after another, created entire classes of super-oligarchs, given capitalism a bad name, driven large numbers of people toward (or back toward) communist ideas, caused them to cling ever more tightly to Keynes's economic nostrums and caused them to thorougly despite not only the United States but the entire 'West.' And -- and -- transformed a small insurgency in Iraq that initially had no chance of getting off the ground into a monster that took thousands of lives.
So it's poetic justice that the developing country of China, which managed to resist the worst of neoliberal shock therapy, is now in a position to lecture the World Bank and IMF -- and the United States -- about overzealous application of the Washington Consensus. Hah!
World Bank chief economist Justin Lin continues to stir the waters by pushing for increased global investment to boost growth and by suggesting that developing country governments need more interventionist industrial policies.I don't have anything against the basic tenets that make up the Washington Consensus (aka neoliberalism) any more than I have something against capitalism. But as long-time readers of this blog know I've had plenty against the indiscriminate, state-imposed application of neoliberal tenets in countries that have had neither the deep democratic political and judicial infrastructures nor the social safety nets of Margaret Thatcher's England or Ronald Reagan's America.
Lin, a Chinese national, speaking to the G24 group of developing countries in mid-March, called for "a global push for investment along the line of Keynesian stimulus [which] is the key for a sustained global recovery."
He argued that current policies of richer countries risked locking in a period of low growth, but "a push for investment will increase the demand for capital goods and reduce manufacturing sectors' underutilisation of capacity in high-income countries, which in turn will increase "employment, consumption, demand for housing, opportunity for private investment, and growth."
This runs contrary to the austerity measures being pursued by many countries at the behest of the IMF.
The cookie-cutter application of neoliberal shock therapy to developing countries(which includes the sudden privatization of state-run industries) has unleashed havoc in one country after another, created entire classes of super-oligarchs, given capitalism a bad name, driven large numbers of people toward (or back toward) communist ideas, caused them to cling ever more tightly to Keynes's economic nostrums and caused them to thorougly despite not only the United States but the entire 'West.' And -- and -- transformed a small insurgency in Iraq that initially had no chance of getting off the ground into a monster that took thousands of lives.
So it's poetic justice that the developing country of China, which managed to resist the worst of neoliberal shock therapy, is now in a position to lecture the World Bank and IMF -- and the United States -- about overzealous application of the Washington Consensus. Hah!
Man cannot live by sausage and vodka alone
From Russia's middle class - a growing problem for Putin by Gleb Bryanski (Reuters, December 9, 2011):
The report makes it clear that Putin is just one of the players in the unfolding political drama in Russia. Ironically Putin's greatest detractors among American political conservatives would find more in commmon with his views of the urban liberal intellectual elite -- what he calls "the goatee beards" -- than they might want to admit. That is, if they bothered to get informed on what's really happening in Russian politics. They have created out of Putin, and indeed out of all of Russia, a two-dimensional cartoon that has no basis in reality.
"There are two things (lacking in Russian politics). The first one is a mass liberal party. Or, to put it more precisely, a party of irritated urban communities," the Kremlin's chief domestic policy adviser, Vladislav Surkov, said this week in an interview with a prominent Russian journalist.Gleb Bryanski has been filing reports on Russia for Reuters since 2009. His knowledge of the country and its politics shines throughout his December 9 report (with great editing by Reuters correspondent Timothy Heritage (another Russia Hand).
"They should be given parliamentary representation," Surkov, the Kremlin's "grey cardinal" who created Russia's tightly controlled political system, said in the interview, which appeared on journalist Sergei Minayev's blog.
But the Kremlin's plans to promote a middle-class party before last Sunday's election to the State Duma, the lower House of parliament, broke down when its leader, metals tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov, departed from the script.
After apparently backing his rise to the leadership of the small pro-business party Right Cause, the Kremlin pulled the rug from under him in September, with Surkov orchestrating the removal of Prokhorov and his supporters.
Prokhorov likened Surkov to a puppet master and said the Kremlin had "privatised" the political system.
"Surkov does not understand that all of a sudden, thanks to the high oil price, there is middle class in Russia," said Oleg Tinkov, owner of retail bank Tinkov Credit Systems.
"We are no longer happy with the pact 'Sausage in exchange for democracy'. We spend one or two months a year abroad, we speak three languages and we think," he said.
Late Russian general and politician Alexander Lebed once said most Russians did not care who they were ruled by as long as they could buy six kinds of sausage and cheap vodka. Those days, it seems, are over.
[...]
The report makes it clear that Putin is just one of the players in the unfolding political drama in Russia. Ironically Putin's greatest detractors among American political conservatives would find more in commmon with his views of the urban liberal intellectual elite -- what he calls "the goatee beards" -- than they might want to admit. That is, if they bothered to get informed on what's really happening in Russian politics. They have created out of Putin, and indeed out of all of Russia, a two-dimensional cartoon that has no basis in reality.
Monday, January 23
MENA's New Left (Updated)
Update 3:30 PM ET
Added a link to my discussion about a report on the Washington Consensus
**********
I offer this op-ed by Austin G. Mackell as a companion piece to the article I linked to in the previous post (Europe's New Right -- published in Foreign Policy at the height of the August 2011 riots in England). The op-ed, published at an ABC TV (Australia) blog on September 14, 2011, is titled, Believe the hype: Cairo is bigger than Berlin. By "Berlin," Mackell a self-described political 'progressive,' means the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events that led up to the historic occasion. To cut to the chase:
I doubt Mackell is aware that the Tahrir Square revolution was a stage show but he does try to preempt criticism of the protest movement by acknowledging that it was deeply flawed. So this is a variation on the Whistle Down the Wind thesis. I think that was the title of the movie in which some children mistook a criminal on the lam for Jesus, and yet good things came of their misplaced trust because of their great faith. Anyhow, that's basically the author's argument: that the spirit fueling the Tahrir Square protests has reinvigorated the global social justice movement and that no number of flaws in the Tahrir Square revolt would overturn this development.
The flaw in this line of reasoning was evident within days of the Tahrir Square protests launch, when a group of Egyptians rode into the square on horses and camels and attacked the protesters. CNN portrayed the attackers as government-hired goons and even after a spokesman for the government demanded that he be allowed to explain what happened, the CNN anchor who interviewed him made faces and in other ways conveyed to the audience that he was sure the spokesman was lying.
He wasn't lying. The attackers were tour guides at the pyramids. The protests had destroyed their business and so their families were facing starvation.
By this year countless other Egyptian working stiffs had turned against the ongoing Tahrir Square protests and the protest organizers -- and to such extent that many refuse to believe even video evidence that the military has continued to torture protesters. And many now believe the military's claim that the organizers are working for foreign interests -- a claim that has a little truth to it, if you recall the Associated Press report I quoted at length in the Headless Horseman essay.
My Still Waiting for Pasha essay, published at Pundita in 2005, infuriated Iranian democracy activists who read it because it poked fun at them. But they weren't willing to do their homework to bring about a real revolution. They weren't getting out in the villages and into the poorest sections of the major cities and working to win the understanding of the people outside the universities and intellectual circles. They were outwitted by Ahmadinejad, who went into the villages and the slums and played the Man of the People role to perfection.
So while it's true that good things can come from a flawed premise -- good things can come even from believing big lies -- it's also true that there is no shortcut to freedom.
The author observes that the Egyptian "revolution did not come out of nowhere in a flash of Facebook magic" and that it came from the groundwork done by labor activists. It's true that the most experienced organizers came out of the labor union movement and also true that labor strikes during the Tahrir Square protests helped cripple the country even more, leading to a general sense of chaos that was portrayed as revolutionary. However, much of Egypt's work force does not belong to a labor union! This to include Egyptians who collect a paycheck from the military.
None of the above is any reason not to read the Berlin essay. I think it's an important writing because it aptly summarizes what many people around the world believe today. (By the way some of the author's digs at the Washington Consensus are justified. See my January 24, 2012 post.)
The catch is that if the beliefs are based in a yearning for the sense of order reflected in the rule of kings they wouldn't be open to rational argument. What to do, in such case? Gosh, that question was asked in ancient Athens. If I recall the answer was, 'When Zeus is uncrowned the whirlwind rules.'
Added a link to my discussion about a report on the Washington Consensus
**********
I offer this op-ed by Austin G. Mackell as a companion piece to the article I linked to in the previous post (Europe's New Right -- published in Foreign Policy at the height of the August 2011 riots in England). The op-ed, published at an ABC TV (Australia) blog on September 14, 2011, is titled, Believe the hype: Cairo is bigger than Berlin. By "Berlin," Mackell a self-described political 'progressive,' means the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events that led up to the historic occasion. To cut to the chase:
[...] In 2011, the spirit of Tahrir has been echoed not just around the Middle East (including in Israel) but in Greece, Spain, Portugal, the UK, the US, Chile, Burkina Faso and more. And as the workers in Wisconsin receive letters of solidarity from their comrades in Mahalla, and the internet kicks into gear as both a tool for organising and challenge to the dominance of the media giants, these local uprisings are beginning to add up to a whole greater than the sum of its parts.So is this bigger than Berlin? He's correct about the global social justice movement taking a severe blow in the wake of 9/11, although I don't know whether it could be characterized as the fastest-growing movement in history. But I sat on the Berlin essay for so many months because I was still waiting for someone else to play the fool and explain in graphic detail that the Tahrir Square uprising was a textbook example of media manipulation. I'm still waiting but I'm getting tired of seeing the essay gather dust.
The Global Justice Movement, which was -- before the racist and divisive War on Terror era -- the fastest-growing political movement in history, is ready for its second wave. Believe the hype, and then some. Something big is happening here.
I doubt Mackell is aware that the Tahrir Square revolution was a stage show but he does try to preempt criticism of the protest movement by acknowledging that it was deeply flawed. So this is a variation on the Whistle Down the Wind thesis. I think that was the title of the movie in which some children mistook a criminal on the lam for Jesus, and yet good things came of their misplaced trust because of their great faith. Anyhow, that's basically the author's argument: that the spirit fueling the Tahrir Square protests has reinvigorated the global social justice movement and that no number of flaws in the Tahrir Square revolt would overturn this development.
The flaw in this line of reasoning was evident within days of the Tahrir Square protests launch, when a group of Egyptians rode into the square on horses and camels and attacked the protesters. CNN portrayed the attackers as government-hired goons and even after a spokesman for the government demanded that he be allowed to explain what happened, the CNN anchor who interviewed him made faces and in other ways conveyed to the audience that he was sure the spokesman was lying.
He wasn't lying. The attackers were tour guides at the pyramids. The protests had destroyed their business and so their families were facing starvation.
By this year countless other Egyptian working stiffs had turned against the ongoing Tahrir Square protests and the protest organizers -- and to such extent that many refuse to believe even video evidence that the military has continued to torture protesters. And many now believe the military's claim that the organizers are working for foreign interests -- a claim that has a little truth to it, if you recall the Associated Press report I quoted at length in the Headless Horseman essay.
My Still Waiting for Pasha essay, published at Pundita in 2005, infuriated Iranian democracy activists who read it because it poked fun at them. But they weren't willing to do their homework to bring about a real revolution. They weren't getting out in the villages and into the poorest sections of the major cities and working to win the understanding of the people outside the universities and intellectual circles. They were outwitted by Ahmadinejad, who went into the villages and the slums and played the Man of the People role to perfection.
So while it's true that good things can come from a flawed premise -- good things can come even from believing big lies -- it's also true that there is no shortcut to freedom.
The author observes that the Egyptian "revolution did not come out of nowhere in a flash of Facebook magic" and that it came from the groundwork done by labor activists. It's true that the most experienced organizers came out of the labor union movement and also true that labor strikes during the Tahrir Square protests helped cripple the country even more, leading to a general sense of chaos that was portrayed as revolutionary. However, much of Egypt's work force does not belong to a labor union! This to include Egyptians who collect a paycheck from the military.
None of the above is any reason not to read the Berlin essay. I think it's an important writing because it aptly summarizes what many people around the world believe today. (By the way some of the author's digs at the Washington Consensus are justified. See my January 24, 2012 post.)
The catch is that if the beliefs are based in a yearning for the sense of order reflected in the rule of kings they wouldn't be open to rational argument. What to do, in such case? Gosh, that question was asked in ancient Athens. If I recall the answer was, 'When Zeus is uncrowned the whirlwind rules.'
Europe's New Right
It seems that for publication the Foreign Policy editor changed the title in the article's url ("Europe's New Right") to Europe's Facebook Fascists -- just in case, I suppose, anyone doesn't know where the Foreign Policy editorial board stands on the political spectrum. Snark. But the article, published August 11, 2011, is about an important topic that gets precious little attention in the American mainstream media.
Sunday, January 22
Note
Starting with the "Moo Shu Pakistan" essay I've published seven posts since around 4:30 ET on Friday morning; I've been driven by a sense of foreboding about the situation in Afghanistan. But I have to stop now. And the way my schedule is stacking up for next week I might not even have time to check my emails at the Pundita address until Tuesday night. So if you post a comment don't look for it to be published before then because I have to moderate all comments.
In the meantime I suggest you carefully read this post at Long War Journal about NATO's lack of frankness about the number of NATO troops that have been killed by Afghan soldiers since 2009, and Sarkozy's threat to pull all French troops out of Afghanistan in the wake of the murder of French military trainers by an Afghan soldier on Friday.
The latest news (from today) is that Sarkozy is arguing with the U.S. command about whether he has the right to withdraw French troops. He is not playing. He is furious.
Maybe his famous temper will be a help in this instance if he manages to light a fire under Obama, who is refusing to confront the reality that his announcement of a set date for troop withdrawal from A'stan and attempts to negotiate with 'Taliban' have given Pakistan's regime and the various terrorist factions operating in Afghanistan a huge advantage, which they are using to the hilt.
All right; signing off, and probably until Tuesday night.
Best regards to all,
Pundita
In the meantime I suggest you carefully read this post at Long War Journal about NATO's lack of frankness about the number of NATO troops that have been killed by Afghan soldiers since 2009, and Sarkozy's threat to pull all French troops out of Afghanistan in the wake of the murder of French military trainers by an Afghan soldier on Friday.
The latest news (from today) is that Sarkozy is arguing with the U.S. command about whether he has the right to withdraw French troops. He is not playing. He is furious.
Maybe his famous temper will be a help in this instance if he manages to light a fire under Obama, who is refusing to confront the reality that his announcement of a set date for troop withdrawal from A'stan and attempts to negotiate with 'Taliban' have given Pakistan's regime and the various terrorist factions operating in Afghanistan a huge advantage, which they are using to the hilt.
All right; signing off, and probably until Tuesday night.
Best regards to all,
Pundita
"Beneath the surface in Abbottabad" is the Pakistani regime's routine use of terrorism as a policy tool
Peaceful City? Scratching Beneath the Surface in AbbottabadThe problem with Pakistan deploying this technique, Mr Durrani, is that Pakistan has not actually declared war on anyone. A secondary problem, you freakin' ghoul, is that no legitimate government considers it policy to conduct terrorist operations against non-combatants. A third problem is that only the pasha mentality finds nothing wrong with raising up an army of suicide bombers.
By Walter Mayr
May 18, 2011
Der Spiegel
Translated from the German by Josh Ward
[...]
This drama concerning Pakistan's identity and its duplicity vis-Ã -vis Islamist violence offers an opportunity for catharsis. But no one, it would seem, wants to take advantage of it. The country has fought alongside the Americans in the "war on terror" for almost a full decade -- even as some among Pakistan's elite tolerated the activities of radicals.
Asad Durrani, a former head of the ISI and Pakistani ambassador to Germany, went on record recently as saying that the strategy is legitimate. Terrorism, he wrote, "is a technique of war, and therefore an instrument of policy."
[...]
That last is a way of saying that Durrani would not consider strapping his children into suicide vests; such a policy tool is to be used on Pakistan's underclasses -- the low castes, the Afghan refugees, the mentally and physically afflicted; i.e., the disposables -- which aren't seen as fully human by Pakistanis steeped in the pasha mentality.
The following excerpts from a Long War Journal report relate to a wing of the ISI that sponsors terrorism, but of course Bill Roggio and everyone else who closely follows the Afghan War knows that the policy outlined by Durrani is not ISI policy of the policy of any one wing of the intelligence service; it's the policy of the entire regime, both military and civilian. Period.
Pakistani ISI's Wing' aids terror groups in South and Central Asia
By Bill Roggio
May 28, 2011
Long War Journal
One interesting byproduct of the ongoing trial of Tahawwur Rana is the additional information that is emerging about the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan's military intelligence service known as the ISI. Rana is the Canadian citizen who is on trial in the US for his role in the 2008 terror assault on Mumbai, India. His accomplice, David Coleman Headley, has decided to testify against Rana and in so doing has exposed the ISI's role in spreading terror throughout the world.
This report from The Times of India, republished here in full, provides excellent details of the ISI's "S Wing," the division of the notorious intelligence service that liaises and directs terror organizations on the subcontinent. The existence of the ISI's S Wing has been known for some time (see these reports from The Guardian and The New York Times back in the summer of 2009). [...]
Note to Mrs Clinton: Pakistan stopped having a legitimate interest in Afghanistan on the day it first unleashed terrorism against Afghans
From a May 2011 post about U.S.-Pakistan cooperation in the fight against terrorism at B. Raman's Strategic Analysis blog
Mrs Clinton's statement offering that Pakistan has legitimate interests in Pakistan can't be considered diplomacy in light of the regime's proxy war against NATO forces in Afghanistan; it was handing the Pakistani regime an advantage it didn't deserve. Worse, it was signaling to the regime that Washington was willing to go on playing ostrich.
The upshot has been written in the blood of NATO and Afghan soldiers and civilians.
[...] 26.In return for the promised counter-terrorism cooperation, Mrs Clinton offered “respect for and addressing” Pakistan’s concerns about the political settlement in Afghanistan. She did not elaborate, but said she was convinced that Pakistan had “legitimate” interests in the settlement of the Afghan conflict and its role was indispensable for the success of the reconciliation process. According to [Pakistani English-language newspaper] "Dawn", Mrs Clinton was particularly critical of the growing anti-Americanism in Pakistan. Although she didn’t explicitly say so, it was evident from her remarks that she thought a segment of the establishment was responsible for promoting it. She said: "In solving its problems Pakistan should understand that anti-Americanism and conspiracy theories will not make its problems disappear.” According to "Dawn", her Pakistani interlocutors complained to her that statements by US officials, leaks to media and unilateral actions were reducing the space for cooperation.Those leaks to the media gave the American public its first clear view of Pakistan's actions against U.S. and other NATO troops in Afghanistan.
Mrs Clinton's statement offering that Pakistan has legitimate interests in Pakistan can't be considered diplomacy in light of the regime's proxy war against NATO forces in Afghanistan; it was handing the Pakistani regime an advantage it didn't deserve. Worse, it was signaling to the regime that Washington was willing to go on playing ostrich.
The upshot has been written in the blood of NATO and Afghan soldiers and civilians.
Further to the education of Rick Santorum about Pakistan and a few words about an ISI-al Qaeda connection
It was somewhat unfair of me to single out Senator Rick Santorum, which is why for months I sat on the transcript of the November GOP presidential hopeful debate, but I finally published his comments about Pakistan (see this post from earlier today) because they were such a good summary of the prevailing view in Washington about how best to deal with Pakistan. The view, boiled down, is that no matter how much Pakistan's military/ISI has worked against the U.S. effort in Afghanistan, we have to be their close ally, they have to be ours, because we have to continue working closely with them to resolve the 'situation' in Afghanistan.
In the same post (the updated version, added at 1:15 PM ET today) I featured quotes from Admiral Mullen, at that time JOC Chairman, and the present ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter; together their widely publicized remarks underscore that the Haqqani Network is in league with Pakistan's military/ISI. My point in bringing this up was that Santorum and/or his advisors should have known this, given that all of official Washington knew by the time of the debate.
Of course defense issues are not Santorum's strong suit although I've seen similar remarks about Pakistan from American defense experts and vaunted South Asia experts; again, Santorum was simply reflecting a prevailing view in Washington. But just to keep the record straight, it's not only the Haqqanis who have continued to work closely with Pakistan's military/ISI; it's also many 'Taliban' factions, as this October 26, 2011 report from IBI Times. The topic has been done to death in press reports since 2010 but I saved this particular one because it mentions a (U.K.) Telegraph report on a suspected connection between top al Qaeda commander Ayman al Zawahiri and the ISI that is not well-known, I don't think, even in Washington. So, for Mr Santorum's benefit -- and yours, if you haven't been paying close attention to Pakistan.
But before I turn to the IBI report, and by way of pounding home to Santorum that the Haqqanis are working with Pakistan's regime, not against it, here are quotes from a Bloomberg report, U.S. says Kabul embassy hit by group tied to Pakistan’s army and which was published September 15, 2011 -- almost two months before the GOP debate in which Mr Santorum held forth on Pakistan and the Haqqanis. (The only problem with the report is that it terms the Haqqanis a Taliban 'faction;' they are allied with various Taliban factions and give lip service to Mullah Omar's religious leadership but particularly since the Haqqanis morphed into a full-fledged transnational criminal organization (see AFP report, Afghan 'Sopranos' could thwart peace they can't be considered Taliban:
In the same post (the updated version, added at 1:15 PM ET today) I featured quotes from Admiral Mullen, at that time JOC Chairman, and the present ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter; together their widely publicized remarks underscore that the Haqqani Network is in league with Pakistan's military/ISI. My point in bringing this up was that Santorum and/or his advisors should have known this, given that all of official Washington knew by the time of the debate.
Of course defense issues are not Santorum's strong suit although I've seen similar remarks about Pakistan from American defense experts and vaunted South Asia experts; again, Santorum was simply reflecting a prevailing view in Washington. But just to keep the record straight, it's not only the Haqqanis who have continued to work closely with Pakistan's military/ISI; it's also many 'Taliban' factions, as this October 26, 2011 report from IBI Times. The topic has been done to death in press reports since 2010 but I saved this particular one because it mentions a (U.K.) Telegraph report on a suspected connection between top al Qaeda commander Ayman al Zawahiri and the ISI that is not well-known, I don't think, even in Washington. So, for Mr Santorum's benefit -- and yours, if you haven't been paying close attention to Pakistan.
But before I turn to the IBI report, and by way of pounding home to Santorum that the Haqqanis are working with Pakistan's regime, not against it, here are quotes from a Bloomberg report, U.S. says Kabul embassy hit by group tied to Pakistan’s army and which was published September 15, 2011 -- almost two months before the GOP debate in which Mr Santorum held forth on Pakistan and the Haqqanis. (The only problem with the report is that it terms the Haqqanis a Taliban 'faction;' they are allied with various Taliban factions and give lip service to Mullah Omar's religious leadership but particularly since the Haqqanis morphed into a full-fledged transnational criminal organization (see AFP report, Afghan 'Sopranos' could thwart peace they can't be considered Taliban:
[...] Haqqani’s faction is backing Pakistan in a sharpening “struggle with the U.S. over which country will play a more central role in brokering an eventual peace deal” in Afghanistan, said Waliullah Rahmani, director of the independent Kabul Center for Strategic Studies. The attack on the U.S. Embassy, which began Sept. 13, is likely to be part of that struggle, he said in a phone interview yesterday.Now on to the IBI Times report:
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in April he was troubled by continued relations between the Haqqani group and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI.
[...]
The Haqqani group, based in eastern Afghanistan and the Pakistani region of Waziristan, has claimed responsibility or been blamed by the Afghan, U.S. and Indian governments for attacks on Kabul in the past three years against the Indian Embassy, government ministries and hotels where foreign diplomats or aid workers were living.
Southern Offensive
Pakistan’s ISI has directly backed at least some of those attacks, including a July 2008 bombing of the Indian Embassy that killed 54 people, former Afghan intelligence director Amrullah Saleh told the American PBS television network in January.
Officers in Pakistan’s ISI have scuttled CIA efforts to kill or capture Haqqani network leaders by leaking details of the planned raids, according to former CIA counter-terrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro and other agency retirees.
[...]
Commanders of the Taliban told the BBC that they and thousands of other members of their groups were trained and armed by Pakistan’s military intelligence and security service.
They also said that Pakistan security services provided weapons to Taliban insurgents who are battling U.S., Afghan and western troops in Afghanistan.
The explosive charges are made in a BBC documentary that will undoubtedly raise the ire of the U.S. and NATO who have long suspected that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) intelligence agency has had a working relationship with the militant groups they are supposed to be fighting.
One of the Taliban chiefs, Mullah Qaseem, reportedly told the BBC: “Pakistan plays a significant role. First they support us by providing a place to hide which is really important. Secondly they provide us with weapons."
Other Taliban officials described how Pakistan provided training in a network of military camps in the country.
One such commander, Mullah Azizullah, said these camps are run by the ISI or are closely linked to it.
“They are all the ISI’s men,” he said. “They are the ones who run the training. First they train us about [sic] bombs; then they give us practical guidance. Their generals are everywhere. They are present during the training."
He added: "The Taliban movement was created with the help of the ISI. It is like when a tree grows – one has to plant it and water it."
Yet another Taliban warrior, known as Commander Najib, said these camps also included al-Qaida fighters.
“I was in the camp for a month … They were giving us practical training in whatever weapons we specialized in… Suicide bombers were taken to a different section and were kept apart from us. Those who were taught to be suicide bombers were there,” he said.
In addition, Amrullah Saleh, a former chief of Afghan intelligence told BBC that his government provided information to then-Pakistan president, Pervez Musharraf about the whereabouts of al-Qaida chieftain Osama bin Laden in northern Pakistan – very near the location where he was eventually killed in May of this year.
However, he claims that Musharraf did nothing about this intelligence.
In fact, Saleh said he and Afghan President Hamid Karzai took the information to the Pakistani President, who reacted bizarrely.
“He [Musharraf] banged the table and looked at President Karzai and said, ‘Am I president of a banana republic? If not, then how can you tell me bin Laden is hiding in a settled area of Pakistan?' I said ‘Well, this is the information so you can go and check it,'” said Saleh.”
These revelations will likely come as no surprise to senior U.S. officials like Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who openly accused the ISI of working in league with terrorist groups who have waged attacks on western targets in Afghanistan, including the U.S. embassy on Kabul.
Pakistan has strongly denied the BBC’s report.
General Athar Abbas, director-general of the Inter Services public relations and official spokesman for the Pakistan military, told the BBC: “To say that these militant groups were being supported by the state with the organized camps in these areas… I think nothing could be further from the truth.”
However, more evidence seems to be piling up against Pakistan.
The British newspaper Daily Telegraph reported that Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, who served with U.S. Defense Intelligence between 1995 and 2006, said that ISI helped Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaida, to escape a battle with Pakistani troops in Wana in South Waziristan in 2004.
"We found out ... that 24 hours before going in… Zawahiri was given fair warning, 'You're about to be attacked, you'd better skedaddle,'" he said.
"And the reason being because the ISI was able to give tip off information to the al-Qaida and Taliban folks in the safe haven and allow them to escape ahead of the attack."
Similarly, Col. Richard Kemp, who worked at the UK Cabinet Office as chief of intelligence on international terrorism between 2001 and 2006, said the ISI could have helped to prevent the July 7 terrorist attacks in London in 2005.
"The ISI of course must take responsibility for the fact that some of these camps were still up and running including perhaps the camp that, that was responsible for training the 7/7 attackers," he said.
The Telegraph also said that Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer, told President Barack Obama that Pakistan is “double-dealing us and that the Pakistanis had been double-dealing the United States and its allies for years and years, and they were probably going to continue to do so."
A word about the Saudis, for Rick Santorum's benefit
In the November 2011 Republican presidential debate I quoted from in the previous post Rick Santorum said:
So if Santorum wasn't so poorly informed or studiously dense it would indicate a kind of madness to wish that Pakistan became a friend to America in the way the Saudis are friends to the USA. But just for the record the Saudis are not America's friend.
So we can't be indecisive about whether Pakistan is our friend. They must be our friend. And we must engage them as friends, get over the difficulties we have, as we did with Saudi Arabia with respect to the events of 9/11. The terrorists came from Saudi Arabia. And we said, 'You know what? It's important for us to maintain that relationship, in spite of those difficulties.'From a (U.K) Telegraph report dated December 5, 2010 (note the year) headlined, Wikileaks: Saudis chief funders of al Qaeda
[...] "It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority," read a cable from Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, dated Dec 30, 2009.It would be splitting hairs to term the donors private citizens, given that the Saudi clan is the country's ruler.
"Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide," added the document.[...]
So if Santorum wasn't so poorly informed or studiously dense it would indicate a kind of madness to wish that Pakistan became a friend to America in the way the Saudis are friends to the USA. But just for the record the Saudis are not America's friend.
Nothing has changed in Washington's approach to Pakistan; nothing can change. (UPDATED)
Update
Added widely publicized quote from Ambassador Cameron Munter about ISI connection with Haqqani Network as further evidence that Rick Santorum's advisors should have known that the Haqqanis are in league with Pakistan's military and always have been, since the days they were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.
***************************
If you think Rick Santorum's comments about Pakistan in a November 2011 Republican presidential hopeful debate were on the moon, you should read Michele Bachmann's comments in the same debate. They're so off the mark they'd leave anyone who is knowledgeable about Pakistan and the Haqqani Network stupified.
Were they lying or do their advisors get their information on Pakistan from the back of a cereal box? It doesn't matter; they were voicing the prevailing view in Washington among Republicans and Democracts alike. The view hasn't changed since the debate and can't change. Why? Because at the bottom of all the explanations is the fact that water seeks its own level.
Added widely publicized quote from Ambassador Cameron Munter about ISI connection with Haqqani Network as further evidence that Rick Santorum's advisors should have known that the Haqqanis are in league with Pakistan's military and always have been, since the days they were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.
***************************
If you think Rick Santorum's comments about Pakistan in a November 2011 Republican presidential hopeful debate were on the moon, you should read Michele Bachmann's comments in the same debate. They're so off the mark they'd leave anyone who is knowledgeable about Pakistan and the Haqqani Network stupified.
Were they lying or do their advisors get their information on Pakistan from the back of a cereal box? It doesn't matter; they were voicing the prevailing view in Washington among Republicans and Democracts alike. The view hasn't changed since the debate and can't change. Why? Because at the bottom of all the explanations is the fact that water seeks its own level.
Pp.6-7 Transcript, CBS-hosted Republican presidential primary candidates debate November 13, 2011 [quoting without making spelling corrections]Note what everyone who knows anything about Pakistan already knows about the Haqqani Network, from this column from the Washington Post, which everyone in official Washington or their advisors reads [emphasis mine]:
[...]
Scott Pelley (CBS): Senator Santorum -- if a Pakistani nuclear weapon goes missing, what do you do?
(Senator) Rick Santorum: Well, let me just step back and-- and-- and say I disagree with a lot of what was said up here [about Pakistan]. Pakistan must be a friend of the United States for the reason that Michele outlined. Pakistan is a nuclear power. And there are people in this-- in that country that if they gain control of that country will create a situation equal to the situation that is now percolating in Iran.
So we can't be indecisive about whether Pakistan is our friend. They must be our friend. And we much mut-- we must engaged them as friends, get over the difficulties we have, as we did with Saudi Arabia, with -- with respect to the events of 9/11. We-- they-- the terrorists came from Saudi Arabia. And we said, "What-- you know what? It's important for us to maintain that relationship, in spite of those difficulties."
And it's important for us, with a nuclear power, with a very vast number of people in Pakistan, who are radicalizing, that we keep a solid and stable relationship and work through our difficulties. It is that important, and we must maintain that relationship.
Scott Pelley: But the Pakistanis back a terrorist network, the Hikani Network, that laid siege to the NATO headquarters and the U.S. embassy in Kabul for 20 hours, a few weeks ago.
Rick Santorum: And the Pakistanis--
Scott Pelley: How do you make friends out of Pakistan?
Rick Santorum: A lot of the Pakistanis and most of the government would say they don't back the Hikani Network and the Hikani Network causes as much trouble in Pakistan as it has caused us in-- in Afghanistan. We need to work with the elements of Pakistan, and there are elements in the government of Pakistan and the military.
We need to continue those joint exercises. We need to continue the -- the aid relationship. And of course, we all know the aid relationship, when it comes to military aid, is all spent in the United States. So it's not giving money away, it's-- it's-- it's sending military hardware, which creates jobs in this country, to those countries, creating nexus and relationships and dependency on our weapon systems that's important for those future relationships.
What’s behind the U.S.-Pakistan riftWhen it got to the point that Admiral Mullen was coming straight out about the connection between the Haqqanis and Pakistani's military (or ISI), the news was all over official Washington. There was also the strong comment from the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, and which was widely publicized in Washington. But the public statements by Mullen and Munter were only making official what everyone in Washington already knew. From AFP report September 17, 2011 headlined:
By David Ignatius
September 29, 2011
The Washington Post
Beyond the recent verbal confrontation between U.S. and Pakistani officials about the Haqqani network lies a delicate political-military effort to draw the Haqqanis into an end-game strategy for the war in Afghanistan.
Adm. Mike Mullen, the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rebuked the Pakistani spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, for using the Haqqani network as its “veritable arm” in Afghanistan. But U.S. officials know the ISI also facilitated a secret meeting during the last several months between the United States and a representative of the Haqqani clan. This is the double game that’s always operating in U.S.-Pakistani relations.
Some U.S. officials believe that the recent wave of attacks by the Haqqanis on U.S. targets in Afghanistan may, in fact, reflect the determination of hard-line members of the clan to derail any move toward negotiation. The United States wants the Pakistani military’s help in isolating and destroying these “unreconcilable” elements of the network.
The sparring with Pakistan illustrates the wider dilemma of the Afghan war. How does the United States bring pressure on the Haqqanis and other Taliban factions, even as it withdraws troops with a 2014 deadline for completing its mission? As Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, has said: “The more the U.S. says it wants to leave Afghanistan, the harder it will be to leave.”
What angered Mullen and other U.S. officials was Pakistan’s failure to act on intelligence reports about planned Haqqani attacks. A timeline helps untangle the threads of the dispute:
● On Sept. 8, Gen. John Allen, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, is said to have warned Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistani army chief, that two truck bombs had been assembled in Miran Shah, the Haqqanis’ base in North Waziristan, and were headed for Afghanistan. Kayani is said to have pledged he would take action.
● On Sept. 10, one of those truck bombs struck a NATO base in Wardak, just east of Kabul, wounding 77 U.S. soldiers. That was a trigger for Mullen’s anger: Some senior officials concede that Pakistan may not have had enough time, or precise “actionable” intelligence, to stop the bomb-laden truck.
● On Sept. 13, insurgents from the Haqqani network attacked the U.S. Embassy compound in Kabul. Though Mullen mentioned this attack in his denunciation of ISI-Haqqani links, U.S. officials don’t see clear evidence of a Pakistani role in planning or executing the operation, a message the CIA privately communicated to Islamabad. But in the days after the bombing, U.S. officials presented Pakistan with a series of “what ifs,” to convey the danger of the situation: What if the 77 soldiers at Wardak had been killed? What if the U.S. ambassador in Kabul had died? What then?
●On Sept. 18, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with the Pakistani foreign minister and delivered the first of a series of U.S. rebukes, asking how Pakistan could promote the Haqqanis as a prospective negotiating partner and yet sit by idly while they attacked Americans. On Sept. 22, Mullen delivered his blunt testimony. On Sept. 25 and 26, two longtime congressional supporters of Pakistan, Sens. Lindsey O. Graham and Mark Kirk, warned of a halt in military aid.
But scheduled military discussions continue, with Gen. James Mattis, the head of U.S. Central Command, visiting Islamabad last weekend and warning that Pakistan had to choose sides.
The message seems to have gotten through to Pakistani military leaders, who reportedly concluded at a secret commanders’ conference on Monday that they don’t want a confrontation with the United States. [Pundita note: the confrontation came less than a month later, in the wake of NATO killing of Pakistani troops] But surely, this is a sick relationship when the partners have to go to the brink of open confrontation to get the other side to listen. If they were a married couple, you would send them to a counselor, or, failing that, a divorce lawyer.
With all the noise about the Haqqanis, it’s important to remember that the real issue here is the larger war in Afghanistan. President Obama’s goal remains a political settlement with “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban, and secret contacts have been continuing around the world. The message to the Haqqanis is that they can best protect political power in their ancestral homeland in Paktika, Paktia and Khost provinces by coming to the table now.
But does the Taliban — or the Pakistani government, for that matter — take the U.S. strategy seriously? How can the United States gain enough leverage to tip the process toward negotiation? That’s what this war of words was really about.
[...] US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has expressed frustration that Islamabad has so far failed to crack down on Haqqani network militants that Washington suspects attacked the US embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul on September 13-14.
The raid was launched by militants firing rocket-propelled grenades at the heavily fortified embassy. At least a half dozen rocket-propelled grenades landed inside the compound, killing 15 people.
US ambassador to Islamabad Cameron Munter said Saturday that there was evidence linking the Pakistani government with the Taliban-allied Haqqani network of militants blamed for the attack.
"There is evidence linking the Haqqani network to the Pakistan government. This is something that must stop," Munter told state-run Radio Pakistan.
Citing unnamed Afghan officials, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that mobile phones found on the slain attackers after the raid indicate they were in contact with people from "outside Afghanistan."
[...]
Saturday, January 21
Pakistan didn't punk America, Mr Goodman; Americans punked themselves
In 1986, CIA deputy director Robert Gates ordered the CIA’s directorate of intelligence to provide no intelligence on Pakistani nuclear activities to the Senate and House intelligence committees.
In his June 14, 2011 editorial for Consortium News How Pakistan Punked America retired U.S. intelligence analyst Melvin A. Goodman with 42 years of work experience (CIA, State, DoD, Army) does a good job of outlining some of the more outrageous situations in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship; that is, if you don't count his constant misapplication of the term "need" when referring to U.S. wants. But his outline points up the glaring flaw in his conclusion that Pakistan punked the United States.
> Because the American government "needed" to take down the Soviet regime (which supported itself by selling oil and gas to Western European NATO countries throughout the Cold War) it was willing across successive U.S. presidential regimes to connive with a terror-sponsoring regime that was creating a nuclear weapons bazaar.
> Because the present and former U.S. presidential regimes have "needed" to take down al Qaeda, Americans have aided the same terror-sponsoring regime's murder and maiming of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
And the worthy Mr Goodman believes that this shows how Pakistan punked America? Somebody give that man a pair of glasses.
In his June 14, 2011 editorial for Consortium News How Pakistan Punked America retired U.S. intelligence analyst Melvin A. Goodman with 42 years of work experience (CIA, State, DoD, Army) does a good job of outlining some of the more outrageous situations in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship; that is, if you don't count his constant misapplication of the term "need" when referring to U.S. wants. But his outline points up the glaring flaw in his conclusion that Pakistan punked the United States.
[...] Since the start of the Cold War, the United States has needed support from the Islamabad government and, as a result, has ignored Pakistani perfidy.So what have in a few short paragraphs is a storyline for a black comedy that would rival Terry Southern's script for Dr Strangelove:
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States needed secret bases in Pakistan for U-2 reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union and, therefore, disregarded Pakistani military dictatorships.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States needed logistical support for its secret opening to China and overlooked human rights violations in Pakistan.
In the 1980s, Pakistan served as a conduit for U.S. assistance to the anti-Soviet mujahedeen forces and, therefore, ignored Pakistan’s secret development of nuclear weapons.
For the past ten years, the United States has needed Pakistan as a conduit for supplies to U.S. military forces in Afghanistan as well as a base for CIA drone aircraft that are used against al-Qaeda elements in Pakistan. As a result, the Bush and Obama administrations have ignored Pakistan’s support for state terrorism.
U.S. unwillingness to challenge Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions allowed the proliferation of nuclear technology in the third world.
The CIA learned as early as 1979 that Pakistan was operating a clandestine uranium facility. President Jimmy Carter did not react to this intelligence and President Ronald Reagan asserted that “nuclear proliferation was none of our business.”
This foreshadowed a closer military relationship with Pakistan even when Pakistan’s military dictator, Gen. Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, ordered the hanging of the civilian president he had expelled from office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and canceled elections.
From 1981 to the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the United States relied on Pakistan to bleed the Soviet occupation force in Afghanistan. During this period, the CIA continued to collect intelligence on Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, but the White House looked the other way.
In 1986, CIA deputy director Robert Gates ordered the CIA’s directorate of intelligence to provide no intelligence on Pakistani nuclear activities to the Senate and House intelligence committees. [For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s Reagan’s Bargain, Charlie Wilson’s War.]
Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush issued exemptions to Pakistan in order to circumvent the Pressler Amendment that required an end to military assistance for Pakistan’s crossing of the nuclear threshold.
A waiver from President Bush in 1989 permitted the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan although it was known that A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, was supplying nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
In the past decade, there has been no country that has sponsored more state terrorism than Pakistan.
Radical Islamists in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate have been training and funding Islamic terrorist organizations for the past three decades, including the Lashkar-e-Taiba that conducted the December 2008 attack in Mumbai, India, as well as the Afghan Taliban, which seized the Afghan capital in 1994. The attack on a Pakistani naval base in Karachi late last month indicates that terrorist organizations have infiltrated the Pakistani military as well.
The full story of Osama bin Laden’s secret hideout in a military community close to the Pakistani capital may never be known, but it certainly begs serious questions about Pakistani cooperation with even al-Qaeda.
[...]
Pakistan continues to be one of the major recipients of U.S. largesse, receiving more than $20 billion in U.S. aid since the 9/11 attacks. Very little of that aid has gone to economic development that Pakistan so sorely needs; nor has it gone to battling terrorism and Islamic forces on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.
Instead most of this money has gone to a Pakistani military force that is an obstacle to U.S. success in Afghanistan. We cannot end military support to Pakistan as long as we need its support in identifying the terrorists who have sanctuary there.
[...]
> Because the American government "needed" to take down the Soviet regime (which supported itself by selling oil and gas to Western European NATO countries throughout the Cold War) it was willing across successive U.S. presidential regimes to connive with a terror-sponsoring regime that was creating a nuclear weapons bazaar.
> Because the present and former U.S. presidential regimes have "needed" to take down al Qaeda, Americans have aided the same terror-sponsoring regime's murder and maiming of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
And the worthy Mr Goodman believes that this shows how Pakistan punked America? Somebody give that man a pair of glasses.
Friday, January 20
Moo Shu Pakistan and Washington's Baluchistan Problem: Calling Samantha Power! Hello? Samantha? Hello? Hello?
I was so depressed last night after I listened to 15 minutes of the latest Republican presidential hopeful debate that I went to jump out the nearest window, so it's a lucky thing I decided to visit the Glittering Eye first or I might be nursing a sprained toe right now. Dave Schuler's comments about Fareed Zakaria caused me to burst into surprised laughter. I thought I was the only one who'd noticed that Zakaria had turned out to be a complete ass. Refreshed and restored I braced myself for yet another night of wading through news on Pakistan and the Afghan War.
Two items caught my eye: Aziz Haniffa's January 20 summary for Rediff of a panel discussion at a Hudson Institute-hosted conference, Pakistan: The Crisis State.
Haniffa dutifully wastes his time and yours by quoting "noted South Asia expert" Stephen P. Cohen (NOT to be confused with my idol, Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen), who hangs out at Brookings Institution, and who wants the world to know that Pakistan is too nuclear to fail "implying that this is why it has got to [be] continually propped up by the likes of the United States."
So now we're deep in Thinktankistan territory, gas mask on and battery-powered gibberish decoder spitting out coordinates. The funniest quote is from Marvin Weinbaum, Scholar-in-Residence at The Middle East Institute:
The panel included Lisa Curtis, "former Central Intelligence Agency official and currently Senior Research Fellow for South Asian Affairs at the Heritage Foundation -- the conservative DC think tank." Curtis made an observation that I consider ominous:
Lisa Curtis popped up again in the other report I noted, which is a January 19, 2012 Heritage Foundation background paper she co-authored with Derek Scissors titled The limits of the Pakistan-China alliance.
The gist of the paper will come as no surprise to Pundita readers but the authors provide considerable detail to shore their argument that the relationship between China and Pakistan is not as extensive or close as many in Washington believe; for that reason the paper is important. Or rather the paper would be important if not for the fact that Pakistan's water carriers in Washington will simply conjure another argument for the U.S. to maintain a "strategic" relationship with Pakistan if it's demonstrated that Washington's concerns about China's relationship with Pakistan are overblown.
The paper omits discussion of Beijing's increasing worries about Pakistan's designs on Afghanistan. And although Curtis and Scissors mention the glitch with the Gwadar Port deal in Baluchistan province, there is no discussion of what has become an extremely difficult problem for China's relationship with Pakistan -- That is the problem called 'The Pakistani military's atrocities in Baluchistan.'
To show you how popular any such discussion is in Washington, recently a former U.S. foreign service officer named M. Chris Mason had to go to a Canadian newspaper to get a media platform for his idea that the USA should consider supporting the Baluch independence movement. (Solve the Pakistan problem by redrawing the map; Globe and Mail, December 21, 2011.) But even Mason's tough-as-nails recommendation tactfully avoids mentioning the huge conundrum for Washington not to mention the 'international community' and the Human Rights crowd, to include Right to Protect hawks such as Samantha Power: Just how do you make an exception for the Pakistani military's atrocities in Baluchistan while you're yammering about the human rights violations of Assad's regime and when you advocated bombing Ghadafi's regime out of existence to protect the civil rights of freedom-seeking Libyans?
To put it all another way, how do all those human rights defenders keep covering for Pakistan's regime without appearing to be self-serving phonies? This is the great, unanswered question of the early 21st Century. And it's one of the many reasons I keep advising Washington to cut its relations with Islamabad to the bare bones of a purely transactional relationship.
When it comes to the point where even China's leaders, who have to fend off accusations about their own regime's human rights violations, worry that Pakistan's regime is becoming toxic in the international arena, this is a Sign. On the one hand Beijing doesn't want to encourage "splittist wolves" in Baluchistan because this would encourage China's own splittist wolves (the Tibetans, etc. who want independence). On the other hand China is trying to be the world's most admired power and for that type of social climbing one has to least put on a show of frowning at government-instigated mass murder.
And it's getting increasingly hard for Washington and the 'international community' and the press outlets that serve them to keep a lid on the Baluchistan Problem, as B. Raman's recent observations suggest:
Two items caught my eye: Aziz Haniffa's January 20 summary for Rediff of a panel discussion at a Hudson Institute-hosted conference, Pakistan: The Crisis State.
Haniffa dutifully wastes his time and yours by quoting "noted South Asia expert" Stephen P. Cohen (NOT to be confused with my idol, Russia expert Stephen F. Cohen), who hangs out at Brookings Institution, and who wants the world to know that Pakistan is too nuclear to fail "implying that this is why it has got to [be] continually propped up by the likes of the United States."
So now we're deep in Thinktankistan territory, gas mask on and battery-powered gibberish decoder spitting out coordinates. The funniest quote is from Marvin Weinbaum, Scholar-in-Residence at The Middle East Institute:
I've been looking at Pakistan some 40 years now and as a Pakistan observer, I really don't know that there's been any time in that period when I would have characterised Pakistan as a 'normal' state. I know when you use the term crisis and you have a crisis all the time, the term crisis loses its meaning. So, I am asking here, whether there's something deeper involved here -- deeper in the body politic, deeper in the political culture of Pakistan, of which this is the latest and perhaps in the order of things, only of the most dangerous."Please someone assure me it didn't take Weinbaum 40 years to arrive at that question.
The panel included Lisa Curtis, "former Central Intelligence Agency official and currently Senior Research Fellow for South Asian Affairs at the Heritage Foundation -- the conservative DC think tank." Curtis made an observation that I consider ominous:
If Pakistan feels that it needs to force the US to choose between India and Pakistan to have a strategic relationship, it's not going to happen. Yes, there has to be an understanding that yes, the United States would like a strategic partnership or relationship with Pakistan, but it's certainly not going to choose between India and Pakistan.Given even the recent history India's government should not take that assurance to the bank, but the idea that Washington still wants Pakistan as a "strategic" partner is very bad news for Americans -- not to mention Afghans and Indians.
Lisa Curtis popped up again in the other report I noted, which is a January 19, 2012 Heritage Foundation background paper she co-authored with Derek Scissors titled The limits of the Pakistan-China alliance.
The gist of the paper will come as no surprise to Pundita readers but the authors provide considerable detail to shore their argument that the relationship between China and Pakistan is not as extensive or close as many in Washington believe; for that reason the paper is important. Or rather the paper would be important if not for the fact that Pakistan's water carriers in Washington will simply conjure another argument for the U.S. to maintain a "strategic" relationship with Pakistan if it's demonstrated that Washington's concerns about China's relationship with Pakistan are overblown.
The paper omits discussion of Beijing's increasing worries about Pakistan's designs on Afghanistan. And although Curtis and Scissors mention the glitch with the Gwadar Port deal in Baluchistan province, there is no discussion of what has become an extremely difficult problem for China's relationship with Pakistan -- That is the problem called 'The Pakistani military's atrocities in Baluchistan.'
To show you how popular any such discussion is in Washington, recently a former U.S. foreign service officer named M. Chris Mason had to go to a Canadian newspaper to get a media platform for his idea that the USA should consider supporting the Baluch independence movement. (Solve the Pakistan problem by redrawing the map; Globe and Mail, December 21, 2011.) But even Mason's tough-as-nails recommendation tactfully avoids mentioning the huge conundrum for Washington not to mention the 'international community' and the Human Rights crowd, to include Right to Protect hawks such as Samantha Power: Just how do you make an exception for the Pakistani military's atrocities in Baluchistan while you're yammering about the human rights violations of Assad's regime and when you advocated bombing Ghadafi's regime out of existence to protect the civil rights of freedom-seeking Libyans?
To put it all another way, how do all those human rights defenders keep covering for Pakistan's regime without appearing to be self-serving phonies? This is the great, unanswered question of the early 21st Century. And it's one of the many reasons I keep advising Washington to cut its relations with Islamabad to the bare bones of a purely transactional relationship.
When it comes to the point where even China's leaders, who have to fend off accusations about their own regime's human rights violations, worry that Pakistan's regime is becoming toxic in the international arena, this is a Sign. On the one hand Beijing doesn't want to encourage "splittist wolves" in Baluchistan because this would encourage China's own splittist wolves (the Tibetans, etc. who want independence). On the other hand China is trying to be the world's most admired power and for that type of social climbing one has to least put on a show of frowning at government-instigated mass murder.
And it's getting increasingly hard for Washington and the 'international community' and the press outlets that serve them to keep a lid on the Baluchistan Problem, as B. Raman's recent observations suggest:
The Killing Fields of Balochistan have started shocking the conscience of the international community. Not only non-governmental human rights organisations, but even Governmental spokesmen of other countries---including a spokesperson of the US State Department in response to Tweets on the sufferings of the Balochs--- have started getting over their hesitation in expressing their concern over the steady flow of reports from Balochistan about the atrocities committed by the Pakistani security forces on the people of Balochistan.Raman does not limit his criticism to the Western world; his post is specifically to take India to task for not stepping up, but it's not New Delhi that's leading the Right to Protect movement; it's Washington and Brussels.
2. The atrocities have taken many forms. Brutal killing of the Baloch youth in false encounters for opposing State repression. Custodial deaths of Baloch youth rounded up by the security forces for interrogation on their suspected association with the on-going freedom struggle. Hundreds of missing Balochs, who were rounded up by the Security Forces for interrogation and who have since disappeared from public view and public conscience. Frequent recoveries of dead bodies of Baloch youth here, there, everywhere after they were allegedly tortured to death. Despite all this, the Baloch freedom struggle continues unabated.
3. Even the conscience of right-thinking sections of the Pakistani civil society have been shocked by the atrocities committed on the Balochs by the Pakistani security forces which bring to mind the atrocities committed on the Bengalis of the then East Pakistan before 1971.
[...]
7. Even though the Western world has started showing signs of being disturbed by reports suggesting a systematic genocide of the Balochs by the Pakistani Security Forces, they are unable to go beyond expressing lip sympathy for the bleeding Balochs.
[...]
Wednesday, January 18
Did U.S. Dept. of State try to prevent Members of Congress from meeting Northern Alliance leaders in Berlin?
That's the claim made by two of the congressionals in the delegation in their op-ed for the Big Government website -- and without going into detail they claim that State went to extraordinary lengths. They also pass along some very disturbing reports from Afghanistan. (See this for background on the Berlin meeting.)
As to whether there's any way to fix this situation, why yes there is: Relocate the White House to Riyadh, and State and Pentagon to Brussels (European Parliament and NATO headquarters, respectively). Once those institutions are in their rightful places, then we can get some real work done.
I'd also suggest that Tabatha Coffey and the group that bids for storage lockers on Storage Wars run defense and diplomacy for the United States even though Tabatha is an Aussie. Believe you me they could do better than the clowns Americans are now paying to do the jobs.
As to whether there's any way to fix this situation, why yes there is: Relocate the White House to Riyadh, and State and Pentagon to Brussels (European Parliament and NATO headquarters, respectively). Once those institutions are in their rightful places, then we can get some real work done.
I'd also suggest that Tabatha Coffey and the group that bids for storage lockers on Storage Wars run defense and diplomacy for the United States even though Tabatha is an Aussie. Believe you me they could do better than the clowns Americans are now paying to do the jobs.
Obama’s Afghan Policy Is Empowering the Taliban
by Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)
January 16, 2011
Big Government
In August 2011, after a conspiracy that lured in members of our Seal Team Six with other heroic Americans, the Taliban set up an ambush and murdered them.
Following those brutal attacks, President Obama’s strategy has been to hasten negotiations with the Taliban. Additionally, the Obama administration has now not only offered to release known Taliban terrorists from detention, but has already released some and additionally offered to legitimize our sworn enemy by furnishing them a princely office in Qatar.
In return, Obama’s agents defend that they are being tough on the Taliban by demanding that they not use the office to raise funds to support their terrorism. That is a bit reminiscent of the Clinton-Albright demand of North Korea that if we give them nuclear technology, they must promise to use it for electric generation and not weapons.
According to many Afghans, all of these and other Obama Administration actions give substantial credence to the Taliban claim, supported privately by some Pakistani leaders, that the U.S. has lost in Afghanistan and is now begging them for negotiations.
One Taliban leader who was released from detention by the Obama administration for medical and end of life purposes, is now back in command and recently demanded on Afghan TV that since the Americans have now lost and are begging for negotiations, Afghans disloyal to the Taliban must come ask forgiveness and for safety from the Taliban.
A Northern Alliance leader says that of the more than 800 Taliban detainees that have been released, he is now seeing many of them fighting, killing and terrorizing again. Yet, the Northern Alliance leaders are being effectively shut out of the plans for the way forward, while being demonized by the American government they helped.
The State Department even went to extraordinary lengths to attempt preventing the writers from meeting with the Northern Alliance leaders. We were able to meet, with some help from foreign friends, but clearly the Obama administration and its comrades mean for our allies to stay under the bus when they throw them there.
In late 2001-2002, the Taliban were defeated with less than 500 Americans embedded with the Northern Alliance, but now the Taliban is stronger while we have more than 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan. Though Vice-President Biden says the Taliban are not our enemies, American soldiers in Afghanistan say the Taliban are still creating IED’s, firing bullets, firing rockets and doing all they can to kill Americans, so it seemed to them that the Taliban certainly think they are our enemy. This points straight to the fact our military is not the problem; its their commander in chief who is the current weak link in our chain of command.
To date, the U.S. nation-building experiment in Afghanistan has produced instability, violence, skyrocketing drug production, widespread corruption, fraudulently rigged elections and the general disapproval of this new government by its own people. Under the U.S.-approved, Afghan Constitution, President Karzai appoints all governors for the provinces, all mayors, police chiefs, the slate for one third of the Senate candidates, and even a segment of the Class 1 teachers in the country. He even has power of the purse that the U.S. President does not have. Clearly this is a formula for heightened corruption, while isolating and ignoring many ethnic groups that make up the very essence of Afghan society.
Many with first-hand experience fighting the Taliban say they are dependent on Pakistan for their marching orders, strategy, and weaponry. In the meantime, President Karzai’s regime has dropped every pretense of appreciation for American sacrifice in blood and treasure as demonstrated by his recent threats to align with Pakistan, Iran and China even as we continue to prop up his government. From Karzai’s perspective, he may well see the Taliban and Pakistan as holding his fate in their hands once the U.S. pulls out.
At the same time, the U.S. is pouring billions of dollars into Afghanistan that comprises the largest portion of the Afghan government’s own budget. U.S.A.I.D. alone is pouring $3.6 billion a year into the country for aid and projects while the money often fails to get past corrupt government officials with 80 percent going to Taliban areas and a tiny fraction going to areas where our allies reside.
The Afghan leaders have become increasingly enriched as their contempt for us has continued to grow. At President Karzai’s encouragement, we have politically and militarily undermined the natural and historic barrier to the Taliban, which is the non-Pashtun peoples of the North, Central and Western parts of Afghanistan. As these non-Pashtun communities were weakened, their leaders were undermined by U.S. support for Karzai and his concentration of power.
The critical next step should be to insist on a new Constitutional Loya Jirga, or convention, that will draft a new constitution enshrining federalism as the new form of government. This would break the Taliban’s ability to dominate Afghanistan by strengthening those communities opposed to the return of the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies. It would give Afghans the kind of hope that our founders provided Americans 225 years ago with our Constitution.
We should insist on local elections of Afghan governors and mayors who may then select the police chiefs. Electing regional leaders would serve to eliminate the conduit of corruption built into the present system, while at the same time giving the governing authority back to the people who are now being disenfranchised.
This course would establish the basis for a political system that allows each of Afghanistan’s ethnic communities to retain their identity and protect them from the Taliban’s violent ethnic repression, brutality and regressive domination. The resulting political framework would also enable trust and goodwill to be built between Afghanistan’s diverse communities as each community would have a direct and important say in its own future.
Perhaps we should even consider support for a Balochistan carved out of Pakistan to diminish radical power there also. Surely, leaving Afghanistan to the same terrorist thugs who enabled the September 11th attacks is the very definition of insanity.The way forward should not include the current Obama plan of putting our future in Taliban hands that are covered with American blood.
Monday, January 16
The Perfect Son and the Afghan War (Updated 8:15 PM ET)
8:15 PM ET Update
I added a few links and expanded and elucidated some of my discussion since I first published this post. I did so with the sinking feeling that I might as well be talking from inside a glass booth, a feeling that often besets me when I advise on Pakistan and the Afghan War.
I am looking at things from such a vastly different viewpoint than Washington's (to include academia and think tanks) that I might as well be writing in a dead language; in a way I am, because as I noted in the updated version, considerations about human nature, which are much broader than found in any academic study of psychology or anthroplogy, etc., are completely absent from policy thinking in Washington, including war planning. Human nature has been relegated to the closet, with predictable results that manifested again and again during the U.S. prosecution of the Afghan and Iraqi wars.
But what use is it to say any of this to ears that can't hear?
************************************
I wrote the following for the comment section at Small Wars Journal; this was in response to a post there by the SWJ editors to announce the publication of a book titled An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010 by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, and also to specifically answer observations that Robert C. Jones inserted in the comment section about the book.
Jones also writes for SWJ and is, I discovered from reading his bio at SWJ, "a retired Army Special Forces Colonel who has recently been hired as the strategic advisor to the USSOCOM J5. [...]"
At the last moment, just as I was about to post my reply, which turned out to be essay length, I decided against lecturing Colonel Jones and the other brass (both retired and active-duty) who hang out at SWJ, about how to win the Afghan War including the best approach for Washington to Pakistan. So while regular visitors to this blog probably know the gist of my advice on both topics by heart, I've repeated it so many times, I'm going to publish my reply here.
The caveat is that I only quote a small part of Colonel Jones's comments, so you'd want to go to Small Wars Journal to read his entire commentary and those of other SWJ readers (including Doctor Madhu, a blogger in her own right who posts at Chicago Boyz) who responded to the book announcement.
Ready? Here goes:
Regarding Robert C. Jones's comment, "The Taliban and the populace they emerge from (that half of Afghan society and the aspect of the same that extend into Pakistan not represented by the Northern Alliance Friends and Family plan ...) have always been both the source and key to AQ sanctuary in the AFPAK region." --
The sanctuary is not so much a physical space as a tangle of strategies, fixed ideas and tacit agreements that have overgrown the history of Afghanistan since the USA got involved in ejecting Soviet Russia from the country -- a tangle that has little to do with Taliban or the history of the movement's relationship with al Qaeda. So van Linschoten and Kuehn are phoning in from the Moon, if they're arguing that because Taliban shouldn't be conflated with Qaeda it's possible for NATO and/or the Afghan government to negotiate a peace settlement with them.
Down here on Earth:
> The Haqqani Network has evolved into a transnational criminal syndicate that's a textbook example of Black Globalization, and which like all BG outfits cares nothing about having say in a government -- and which, despite pro forma nods to Mullah Omar's status as a religious leader, now cares nothing for the fate of Taliban.
> The great majority of Afghan Pashtuns have turned against Taliban -- 90 percent of them have turned, according to a Pakistani ex-intelligence official who spoke recently to Pakistan-based Los Angeles Times reporter Alex Rodriguez.
> The original Northern Alliance has morphed into a vastly expanded political network and its leaders recently read the riot act to some members of Congress in Berlin about the U.S. ploy to negotiate with Taliban.
> Caught now between the devil NATO and the deep blue sea of furious countrymen, Hamid Karzai has finally grown a spine and insisted that (1) he and not the USA will lead any peace talks with Taliban and (2) there will be no negotiations until Taliban stop fighting. He's made such noises before but this time he has the new, improved NA forcing him to walk out far out on the plank.
> By some miracle the British defense ministry has overridden the foreign office by recognizing that an India in the hand is better than two Pakistans in the bush. Maybe this change in thinking has something to do with the realization that today the vast majority of Pakistanis in the U.K. have no sympathy left for 'Islamist' terrorism, but who can fathom the ways of miracles?
> Germany, which reportedly now runs the European Union, has lost patience with Washington's preference for bailing water with a sieve in Afghanistan over getting tough with Rawalpindi and all because the 'Get Russia' crowd on both sides of the Pond fears that the Kremlin might someday make contact with a Klingon battleship. A fear that delayed for years the building of the NDN.
> More U.S. soldiers returning from Afghanistan are learning in graphic detail that their commanders in Afghanistan looked the other way while their civilian bosses in effect paid Pakistan's military to murder and maim Americans -- while the American military establishment yapped about counterinsurgency theories and the State Department yapped about 'fixing' Pakistan.
That's just the short list of how things stand these days on Earth, but it all amounts to a greatly changed world since Dick Cheney okayed the Airlift of Evil. I've mentioned the airlift several times over the years but just as a reminder: the airlift, which was so large it was actually an air bridge, evacuated
So. Vice President Cheney, who at the time had the Pakistan 'portfolio' at the White House, made an executive decision reportedly without President Bush's knowledge, which laid the groundwork for the very 'insurgency' that soon enough murdered and maimed so many Americans and other NATO troops -- and Afghan civilians and troops.
In my view Mr Cheney should have been brought up on a charge of treason for his decision but the incident starkly illustrates the way official Washington treated Pakistan's military at the time. By today, the American taxpayer has suffered enough because of that special relationship and so has the American enlisted man and woman; okay?
So the first task is to dispense with some of the tangle by looking at water and geological survey maps in Afghanistan; this, in order to grasp that no matter how many USAID projects are created to help Pakistani mango growers and to reduce illiteracy in Pakistan, this will not stop Pakistan's military from wanting to control Afghanistan.
And anyone in Washington naive enough to assume that bringing real democracy to Pakistan will change its military's designs on Afghanistan also probably believes that bringing real democracy to Iran will stop Iranians from insisting that there is no such thing as an Arab Gulf.
What, then, is the best the way for Washington to best relate to Pakistan? It's the same way that the USA can pull off a decisive victory in Afghanistan. So write this war plan on the back of your hand:
The next time Rawalpindi complains that the USA is building an Afghan army that will rival their own -- and they make this complaint every hour on the hour -- the response from Washington should be, 'Don't whine if you don't want us to also build them a nuclear weapons facility.'
That's pretty much the entire plan for those who have considerable life experience under their belt; for those who don't: The key idea is for Washington to stop playing Sahib in Pakistan. For Americans who don't understand the Sahib angle I'll put it another way: every time Washington does or says something that causes Pakistan's military to lose face, they have to do something awful in Afghanistan to prove they're not girly men or children.
> So don't praise the Pakistanis in public because that's patronizing them, in their view. Don't criticize them in public, because that's bossing them around, in their view. Don't offer to help fix Pakistan because that's making Pakistan's leaders look unable to look after their own people.
> Confine comments to "Tsk tsk" and "Gee that's a shame" when they complain about their problems. If they ask for more money, pay only what's fair for NATO transports through the country and work like mad to get the remaining 29 percent of NATO supplies now trucked through Pakistan transferred to the Northern Distribution Network.
> At the same time never outright refuse a request for financial aid; that's insulting in their view; simply reply, "Yes yes," which in that part of the world doesn't mean "Yes I will;" it means "Yes I heard you." If that concept is too hard to grasp, Washington should simply hear its phone ringing or mutter about bureaucratic red tape in response to requests for aid.
> The CIA and U.S. military should stay on the Afghan side of the Durand Line no matter how fuzzy the line. Stop all drone attacks in Pakistan, no matter how counterproductive that might seem at first.
> When Rawalpindi asks for the millionth time how long America is going to stay in Afghanistan, lie like a trooper and reply, "Forever."
> Above all, recognize that decades ago the United States inserted itself in a family feud -- and that only Indians can help the Pakistanis because Indians are the only family the Pakistanis have, and so they're the only people the Pakistanis really pay attention to. This isn't even getting into the caste system in Pakistan and India, which is not something Americans who're trying to win a war need to know about in any detail. In short, just assume there are some things Americans can't fix and shouldn't try to fix, and that Pakistan is one of them.
That's it; it would take a book, which I will never write, to explain all the reasoning behind every piece of the advice but I've simply compressed a great deal of hard-won experience into as few words as possible to get across the general idea. I add that much of my advice has more to do with considerations about the ways f human nature, which have been completely excluded from policy thinking in Washington, than with the 'culture' of any specific peoples.
As to how long the war plan would take to work -- longer than it would take the Iranian military to deal with the Haqqanis and Afghan Taliban, but it wouldn't take forever and there's a way to speed up the process. The way would be for Washington to break bones at a NATO confab.
But first Washington would have to set the example. If all other NATO members are persuaded that the USA has really turned over a new leaf, they would be more inclined to toughen their own approaches to Rawalpindi. A united front in this respect would do more than anything to persuade Pakistan's leaders that while they can deploy non-aggressive means to achieve a stake in the new Afghanistan, they can no longer hope to control it.
As to where all this leaves Taliban: the so-called "Afghan Taliban" are a Pakistani military invention -- and I don't want to hear the guff that it was the ISI that did it, as if the ISI is a separate entity from the military; it's separate only for purposes of deniability. The military will dismantle its Frankenstein once it's assured that NATO will no longer turn a studiously blind eye to Islamabad's use of terrorism as a foreign policy instrument.
The real problem is not Taliban or even the Haqqanis but the non-Taliban ultraconservative Afghans that Hamid Karzai pandered to, with NATO studiously looking the other way, in the attempt to offset the perception in Afghanistan that he was dancing to America's tune. The attempt fooled no one, but the pandering gave the ultraconservatives greater power in Afghanistan than they'd ever enjoyed.
The only reasonably fast antidote I can see would be to resurrect the monarchy in Afghanistan because if the king said a modern approach to something was okay, it was okay with the ultraconservatives. So it was all downhill for a modern Afghan state once the monarchy folded.
(Anyone who doubts that Afghanistan ever had anything approximating a modern state should study the photographs in Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan at Foreign Policy magazine. The modernity, however, was not supported by institutions and infrastructures that would have allowed it to withstand the first real test, so when the monarchy crumbled, Afghanistan's modern state also crumbled and with terrifying swiftness. Some measure of the totality of the collapse is the rarity of the photographs that an Afghan expat found and published at Foreign Policy. Yet the images in the photos are a silent rebuke to those who claim that Afghanistan never progressed beyond the 12th Century.)
But restoring the monarchy seems impossible at this juncture, and besides even if an acceptable heir to the throne was scared up, I think the way is forward not back, although I'd get an argument about this from monarchists.
In any case this problem is entirely up to the Afghans to solve even though we had a hand in bringing it to a head again. If it's any comfort to Americans, this is a problem that will continue recycling in Afghanistan, as it has in many other countries including Pakistan, until the Afghans somehow resolve the sense of a vacuum left by the absent monarch.
Maybe the Afghans will hit on the kind of compromise that exists in several European countries, whereby a "constitutional monarchy" is glommed onto democratic government. Certainly the Afghans will soon enough be rich enough to afford such a compromise, in the way North Sea oil has allowed Norwegians and the British to go on compromising -- until the oil runs out -- but any such discussion is, I hope, outside the scope of the Afghan War.
To wrap it up, in the Afghan War Americans need to learn to play to their strengths instead of their weaknesses. Leave it to the Europeans to try and 'understand' the Afghans because quite frankly Europe's monarchist past (and present) makes them better suited than Americans to understand. Americans should just hew as closely as possible to the classic American archetype: Strong. Taciturn. Steady as a rock. Dependable as the sunrise.
The archetype happens to be pretty much the same as the most universally loved archetype and the most powerful one, that of the Perfect Son -- the man every man would be proud to call a son. When you fit the role of the Perfect Son, you won't need words to give the Afghans assurances that you won't leave them in the lurch again. They'll look at you and know, and with that knowledge they'll face their very uncertain future with great courage. That's how powerful the Perfect Son is -- far more powerful than a mountain of foreign aid and bribes.
I added a few links and expanded and elucidated some of my discussion since I first published this post. I did so with the sinking feeling that I might as well be talking from inside a glass booth, a feeling that often besets me when I advise on Pakistan and the Afghan War.
I am looking at things from such a vastly different viewpoint than Washington's (to include academia and think tanks) that I might as well be writing in a dead language; in a way I am, because as I noted in the updated version, considerations about human nature, which are much broader than found in any academic study of psychology or anthroplogy, etc., are completely absent from policy thinking in Washington, including war planning. Human nature has been relegated to the closet, with predictable results that manifested again and again during the U.S. prosecution of the Afghan and Iraqi wars.
But what use is it to say any of this to ears that can't hear?
************************************
I wrote the following for the comment section at Small Wars Journal; this was in response to a post there by the SWJ editors to announce the publication of a book titled An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010 by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, and also to specifically answer observations that Robert C. Jones inserted in the comment section about the book.
Jones also writes for SWJ and is, I discovered from reading his bio at SWJ, "a retired Army Special Forces Colonel who has recently been hired as the strategic advisor to the USSOCOM J5. [...]"
At the last moment, just as I was about to post my reply, which turned out to be essay length, I decided against lecturing Colonel Jones and the other brass (both retired and active-duty) who hang out at SWJ, about how to win the Afghan War including the best approach for Washington to Pakistan. So while regular visitors to this blog probably know the gist of my advice on both topics by heart, I've repeated it so many times, I'm going to publish my reply here.
The caveat is that I only quote a small part of Colonel Jones's comments, so you'd want to go to Small Wars Journal to read his entire commentary and those of other SWJ readers (including Doctor Madhu, a blogger in her own right who posts at Chicago Boyz) who responded to the book announcement.
Ready? Here goes:
Regarding Robert C. Jones's comment, "The Taliban and the populace they emerge from (that half of Afghan society and the aspect of the same that extend into Pakistan not represented by the Northern Alliance Friends and Family plan ...) have always been both the source and key to AQ sanctuary in the AFPAK region." --
The sanctuary is not so much a physical space as a tangle of strategies, fixed ideas and tacit agreements that have overgrown the history of Afghanistan since the USA got involved in ejecting Soviet Russia from the country -- a tangle that has little to do with Taliban or the history of the movement's relationship with al Qaeda. So van Linschoten and Kuehn are phoning in from the Moon, if they're arguing that because Taliban shouldn't be conflated with Qaeda it's possible for NATO and/or the Afghan government to negotiate a peace settlement with them.
Down here on Earth:
> The Haqqani Network has evolved into a transnational criminal syndicate that's a textbook example of Black Globalization, and which like all BG outfits cares nothing about having say in a government -- and which, despite pro forma nods to Mullah Omar's status as a religious leader, now cares nothing for the fate of Taliban.
> The great majority of Afghan Pashtuns have turned against Taliban -- 90 percent of them have turned, according to a Pakistani ex-intelligence official who spoke recently to Pakistan-based Los Angeles Times reporter Alex Rodriguez.
> The original Northern Alliance has morphed into a vastly expanded political network and its leaders recently read the riot act to some members of Congress in Berlin about the U.S. ploy to negotiate with Taliban.
> Caught now between the devil NATO and the deep blue sea of furious countrymen, Hamid Karzai has finally grown a spine and insisted that (1) he and not the USA will lead any peace talks with Taliban and (2) there will be no negotiations until Taliban stop fighting. He's made such noises before but this time he has the new, improved NA forcing him to walk out far out on the plank.
> By some miracle the British defense ministry has overridden the foreign office by recognizing that an India in the hand is better than two Pakistans in the bush. Maybe this change in thinking has something to do with the realization that today the vast majority of Pakistanis in the U.K. have no sympathy left for 'Islamist' terrorism, but who can fathom the ways of miracles?
> Germany, which reportedly now runs the European Union, has lost patience with Washington's preference for bailing water with a sieve in Afghanistan over getting tough with Rawalpindi and all because the 'Get Russia' crowd on both sides of the Pond fears that the Kremlin might someday make contact with a Klingon battleship. A fear that delayed for years the building of the NDN.
> More U.S. soldiers returning from Afghanistan are learning in graphic detail that their commanders in Afghanistan looked the other way while their civilian bosses in effect paid Pakistan's military to murder and maim Americans -- while the American military establishment yapped about counterinsurgency theories and the State Department yapped about 'fixing' Pakistan.
That's just the short list of how things stand these days on Earth, but it all amounts to a greatly changed world since Dick Cheney okayed the Airlift of Evil. I've mentioned the airlift several times over the years but just as a reminder: the airlift, which was so large it was actually an air bridge, evacuated
... thousands of top commanders and members of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, their Pakistani advisors including Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agents and military personnel, and other Jihadi volunteers and sympathizers, from the city of Kunduz, Afghanistan, in November 2001 just before its capture by the forces of the U.S. and its allies the Northern Alliance during the War in Afghanistan. All these anti-U.S. combatants were safely evacuated from Kunduz and airlifted by Pakistan Army cargo aircraft to Pakistan Air Force air bases in Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan's Northern Areas. [...]See the Wikipedia article I linked to above for the source notes.
So. Vice President Cheney, who at the time had the Pakistan 'portfolio' at the White House, made an executive decision reportedly without President Bush's knowledge, which laid the groundwork for the very 'insurgency' that soon enough murdered and maimed so many Americans and other NATO troops -- and Afghan civilians and troops.
In my view Mr Cheney should have been brought up on a charge of treason for his decision but the incident starkly illustrates the way official Washington treated Pakistan's military at the time. By today, the American taxpayer has suffered enough because of that special relationship and so has the American enlisted man and woman; okay?
So the first task is to dispense with some of the tangle by looking at water and geological survey maps in Afghanistan; this, in order to grasp that no matter how many USAID projects are created to help Pakistani mango growers and to reduce illiteracy in Pakistan, this will not stop Pakistan's military from wanting to control Afghanistan.
And anyone in Washington naive enough to assume that bringing real democracy to Pakistan will change its military's designs on Afghanistan also probably believes that bringing real democracy to Iran will stop Iranians from insisting that there is no such thing as an Arab Gulf.
What, then, is the best the way for Washington to best relate to Pakistan? It's the same way that the USA can pull off a decisive victory in Afghanistan. So write this war plan on the back of your hand:
The next time Rawalpindi complains that the USA is building an Afghan army that will rival their own -- and they make this complaint every hour on the hour -- the response from Washington should be, 'Don't whine if you don't want us to also build them a nuclear weapons facility.'
That's pretty much the entire plan for those who have considerable life experience under their belt; for those who don't: The key idea is for Washington to stop playing Sahib in Pakistan. For Americans who don't understand the Sahib angle I'll put it another way: every time Washington does or says something that causes Pakistan's military to lose face, they have to do something awful in Afghanistan to prove they're not girly men or children.
> So don't praise the Pakistanis in public because that's patronizing them, in their view. Don't criticize them in public, because that's bossing them around, in their view. Don't offer to help fix Pakistan because that's making Pakistan's leaders look unable to look after their own people.
> Confine comments to "Tsk tsk" and "Gee that's a shame" when they complain about their problems. If they ask for more money, pay only what's fair for NATO transports through the country and work like mad to get the remaining 29 percent of NATO supplies now trucked through Pakistan transferred to the Northern Distribution Network.
> At the same time never outright refuse a request for financial aid; that's insulting in their view; simply reply, "Yes yes," which in that part of the world doesn't mean "Yes I will;" it means "Yes I heard you." If that concept is too hard to grasp, Washington should simply hear its phone ringing or mutter about bureaucratic red tape in response to requests for aid.
> The CIA and U.S. military should stay on the Afghan side of the Durand Line no matter how fuzzy the line. Stop all drone attacks in Pakistan, no matter how counterproductive that might seem at first.
> When Rawalpindi asks for the millionth time how long America is going to stay in Afghanistan, lie like a trooper and reply, "Forever."
> Above all, recognize that decades ago the United States inserted itself in a family feud -- and that only Indians can help the Pakistanis because Indians are the only family the Pakistanis have, and so they're the only people the Pakistanis really pay attention to. This isn't even getting into the caste system in Pakistan and India, which is not something Americans who're trying to win a war need to know about in any detail. In short, just assume there are some things Americans can't fix and shouldn't try to fix, and that Pakistan is one of them.
That's it; it would take a book, which I will never write, to explain all the reasoning behind every piece of the advice but I've simply compressed a great deal of hard-won experience into as few words as possible to get across the general idea. I add that much of my advice has more to do with considerations about the ways f human nature, which have been completely excluded from policy thinking in Washington, than with the 'culture' of any specific peoples.
As to how long the war plan would take to work -- longer than it would take the Iranian military to deal with the Haqqanis and Afghan Taliban, but it wouldn't take forever and there's a way to speed up the process. The way would be for Washington to break bones at a NATO confab.
But first Washington would have to set the example. If all other NATO members are persuaded that the USA has really turned over a new leaf, they would be more inclined to toughen their own approaches to Rawalpindi. A united front in this respect would do more than anything to persuade Pakistan's leaders that while they can deploy non-aggressive means to achieve a stake in the new Afghanistan, they can no longer hope to control it.
As to where all this leaves Taliban: the so-called "Afghan Taliban" are a Pakistani military invention -- and I don't want to hear the guff that it was the ISI that did it, as if the ISI is a separate entity from the military; it's separate only for purposes of deniability. The military will dismantle its Frankenstein once it's assured that NATO will no longer turn a studiously blind eye to Islamabad's use of terrorism as a foreign policy instrument.
The real problem is not Taliban or even the Haqqanis but the non-Taliban ultraconservative Afghans that Hamid Karzai pandered to, with NATO studiously looking the other way, in the attempt to offset the perception in Afghanistan that he was dancing to America's tune. The attempt fooled no one, but the pandering gave the ultraconservatives greater power in Afghanistan than they'd ever enjoyed.
The only reasonably fast antidote I can see would be to resurrect the monarchy in Afghanistan because if the king said a modern approach to something was okay, it was okay with the ultraconservatives. So it was all downhill for a modern Afghan state once the monarchy folded.
(Anyone who doubts that Afghanistan ever had anything approximating a modern state should study the photographs in Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan at Foreign Policy magazine. The modernity, however, was not supported by institutions and infrastructures that would have allowed it to withstand the first real test, so when the monarchy crumbled, Afghanistan's modern state also crumbled and with terrifying swiftness. Some measure of the totality of the collapse is the rarity of the photographs that an Afghan expat found and published at Foreign Policy. Yet the images in the photos are a silent rebuke to those who claim that Afghanistan never progressed beyond the 12th Century.)
But restoring the monarchy seems impossible at this juncture, and besides even if an acceptable heir to the throne was scared up, I think the way is forward not back, although I'd get an argument about this from monarchists.
In any case this problem is entirely up to the Afghans to solve even though we had a hand in bringing it to a head again. If it's any comfort to Americans, this is a problem that will continue recycling in Afghanistan, as it has in many other countries including Pakistan, until the Afghans somehow resolve the sense of a vacuum left by the absent monarch.
Maybe the Afghans will hit on the kind of compromise that exists in several European countries, whereby a "constitutional monarchy" is glommed onto democratic government. Certainly the Afghans will soon enough be rich enough to afford such a compromise, in the way North Sea oil has allowed Norwegians and the British to go on compromising -- until the oil runs out -- but any such discussion is, I hope, outside the scope of the Afghan War.
To wrap it up, in the Afghan War Americans need to learn to play to their strengths instead of their weaknesses. Leave it to the Europeans to try and 'understand' the Afghans because quite frankly Europe's monarchist past (and present) makes them better suited than Americans to understand. Americans should just hew as closely as possible to the classic American archetype: Strong. Taciturn. Steady as a rock. Dependable as the sunrise.
The archetype happens to be pretty much the same as the most universally loved archetype and the most powerful one, that of the Perfect Son -- the man every man would be proud to call a son. When you fit the role of the Perfect Son, you won't need words to give the Afghans assurances that you won't leave them in the lurch again. They'll look at you and know, and with that knowledge they'll face their very uncertain future with great courage. That's how powerful the Perfect Son is -- far more powerful than a mountain of foreign aid and bribes.
Sunday, January 15
Is Hakeemullah Mehsud dead again?
He's been killed so many times I think Long War Journal's Bill Roggio has lost count lolsnort don't laugh Pundita it's not funny and don't snort when you laugh it's not ladylike.
Well, if he really was killed in a U.S. drone strike on January 12, we can surmise that information from Pakistani intelligence on his likely whereabouts is the reason Rawalpindi suddenly relented and allowed the U.S. to resume drone strikes, and we can assume Rawalpindi will reopen the border crossings to NATO supply convoys within the next few hours or days, as their way of saying thank you for ridding them of a serious enemy. See the link at LWJ for details of the rumors about Hakeemullah's latest death.
As to whether a dead Hakeemullah would solve anything for Pakistan's military or for the United States -- no, and the next version of Hakeemullah could be even worse. Hakeemullah and the Pakistanis he led (or leads) have very serious and legitimate issues with the brutality of Pakistan's military but no legal recourse to protest.
But three guesses the first two don't count who would take the most blame for another Hakeemullah. That would be Uncle Sam. So what part of "Stay out the Bazaar" does Washington's defense establishment not understand?
Well, if he really was killed in a U.S. drone strike on January 12, we can surmise that information from Pakistani intelligence on his likely whereabouts is the reason Rawalpindi suddenly relented and allowed the U.S. to resume drone strikes, and we can assume Rawalpindi will reopen the border crossings to NATO supply convoys within the next few hours or days, as their way of saying thank you for ridding them of a serious enemy. See the link at LWJ for details of the rumors about Hakeemullah's latest death.
As to whether a dead Hakeemullah would solve anything for Pakistan's military or for the United States -- no, and the next version of Hakeemullah could be even worse. Hakeemullah and the Pakistanis he led (or leads) have very serious and legitimate issues with the brutality of Pakistan's military but no legal recourse to protest.
But three guesses the first two don't count who would take the most blame for another Hakeemullah. That would be Uncle Sam. So what part of "Stay out the Bazaar" does Washington's defense establishment not understand?
Saturday, January 14
"It is a bold challenge to the United States and Pakistan to live up to their pious homilies."
"This is the first time that the leadership of the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities has come to a common line of thinking to oppose the US's peace strategy and to present an alternate blueprint of pan-Afghan settlement. In essence, the Northern Alliance is being resuscitated as a political entity."
"What may have incensed the Northern Alliance groups partly at least is that, despite the chill in US-Pakistan relations, Washington has kept the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the loop on the Qatar talks, while blithely ignoring them as protagonists."
"Karzai has sprung a surprise by insisting that peace talks should be "Afghan-led" - meaning, he expects a "hands-on" role for himself. He has said this before, but this time he means it. He knows that regional opinion strongly disfavors a US-led peace process, and he also anticipates the danger of being left behind as road kill unless he is in the driver's seat."
". . . On Monday, Karzai raised the stakes much higher by demanding that the Taliban must agree to a ceasefire before formal peace negotiations could begin."
- M.K. Bhadrakumar, January 12
On October 1 and again on December 29 I observed that Afghan President Hamid Karzai was being forced to stiffen his spine in his relations with Washington; Indian former Career Diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar makes the same observation and then some in his January 12 column for Asia Times Online, There's more to peace than Taliban . The column makes up for a lot of hot air he's blown from his perch at AToL; this time, he absolutely nails a situation. (Unless one also wants to see a discussion about which nations the U.S. regime is carrying water for in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but that topic would be outside the scope of writing, as it is for every news outlet that exists.)
Before I turn to Bhadrakumar's discussion I'll note a development that probably occurred after the column was put to bed; in any case his discussion of a meeting in Berlin between Afghan opposition leaders and U.S. members of Congress didn't mention that on January 11 the Afghan Foreign Ministry issued a statement "condemning" the meeting as a breach of Afghanistan's constitution and as interference with Afghan's internal affairs and national unity.
I am still waiting for the Foreign Ministry to issue a statement condeming NATO and specifically the United States of America for trying to sell Afghanistan to Pakistan but I'll let Amb. Bhadrakumar do the talking for me this time because he says it all quite wonderfully:
"What may have incensed the Northern Alliance groups partly at least is that, despite the chill in US-Pakistan relations, Washington has kept the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the loop on the Qatar talks, while blithely ignoring them as protagonists."
"Karzai has sprung a surprise by insisting that peace talks should be "Afghan-led" - meaning, he expects a "hands-on" role for himself. He has said this before, but this time he means it. He knows that regional opinion strongly disfavors a US-led peace process, and he also anticipates the danger of being left behind as road kill unless he is in the driver's seat."
". . . On Monday, Karzai raised the stakes much higher by demanding that the Taliban must agree to a ceasefire before formal peace negotiations could begin."
- M.K. Bhadrakumar, January 12
On October 1 and again on December 29 I observed that Afghan President Hamid Karzai was being forced to stiffen his spine in his relations with Washington; Indian former Career Diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar makes the same observation and then some in his January 12 column for Asia Times Online, There's more to peace than Taliban . The column makes up for a lot of hot air he's blown from his perch at AToL; this time, he absolutely nails a situation. (Unless one also wants to see a discussion about which nations the U.S. regime is carrying water for in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but that topic would be outside the scope of writing, as it is for every news outlet that exists.)
Before I turn to Bhadrakumar's discussion I'll note a development that probably occurred after the column was put to bed; in any case his discussion of a meeting in Berlin between Afghan opposition leaders and U.S. members of Congress didn't mention that on January 11 the Afghan Foreign Ministry issued a statement "condemning" the meeting as a breach of Afghanistan's constitution and as interference with Afghan's internal affairs and national unity.
I am still waiting for the Foreign Ministry to issue a statement condeming NATO and specifically the United States of America for trying to sell Afghanistan to Pakistan but I'll let Amb. Bhadrakumar do the talking for me this time because he says it all quite wonderfully:
There's more to peace than Taliban
by M K Bhadrakumar
January 12, 2012
Asia Times Online
The hype over "secret discussions" between the United States and Taliban officials has subsided; the hot topic is vanishing from public view once again.
Nevertheless, Iranian media insist that three high-ranking Taliban leaders have been released - Mullah Khairkhawa, former interior minister; Mullah Noorullah Noori, a former governor; and Mullah Fazl Akhund, the Taliban's chief of army staff - in exchange for an American soldier held by the Taliban.
United States diplomats might have put the cart before the horse in their hurry to get a peace process going before North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) leaders gather for their summit in Chicago in May. They may have made two cardinal mistakes. One, they underestimated Afghan President Hamid Karzai's political compulsions. Two, the US took it for granted that the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance groups would fall in line since many of them have been co-opted through the 10-year period of the war and their capacity to unite is in doubt.
Karzai has sprung a surprise by insisting that peace talks should be "Afghan-led" - meaning, he expects a "hands-on" role for himself. He has said this before, but this time he means it. He knows that regional opinion strongly disfavors a US-led peace process, and he also anticipates the danger of being left behind as road kill unless he is in driver's seat.
Besides, Karzai is demanding that the US should transfer any Taliban prisoners from the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to his custody rather than to Qatar (as apparently sought by the Taliban). He is also raking up a related issue questioning US control of Bagram airbase near Kabul as a detention center.
On Monday, Karzai raised the stakes much higher by demanding that the Taliban must agree to a ceasefire before formal peace negotiations could begin. His spokesman, Emal Faizi, said, "When the talks start, there should be a ceasefire and the violence against the Afghan people should stop." Faizi also said it was too soon to send a delegation from Kabul to Qatar for talks. "The government has no immediate plans for such a trip."
The hardening of Karzai's stance also needs to be understood against the backdrop of growing restiveness on the part of the erstwhile Northern Alliance groups.
On Monday, the alliance stalwarts came out against the Barack Obama administration's secret discussions with the Taliban. These leaders - Ahmed Zia Massoud, brother of late Ahmad Shah Massoud and formerly vice president under Karzai; General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek leader who leads the Jumbish in northern Afghanistan; Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq, the Hazara Shi'ite leader from Mazar-i-Sharif who heads the Hezb-e-Wahdat; Amrullah Saleh, former head of Afghan intelligence - held talks with a group of four US congress members - Dana Rohrabacher, Loretta Sanchez, Louie Gohmert and Steve King (all except Sanchez are Republicans) - in Berlin over the weekend and issued a joint statement on Monday.
This is the first time that the leadership of the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities has come to a common line of thinking to oppose the US's peace strategy and to present an alternate blueprint of pan-Afghan settlement. In essence, the Northern Alliance is being resuscitated as a political entity.
Their statement attacked the power structure headed by Karzai as dysfunctional, far too centralized and rampantly corrupt and demanded that in the first instance what Afghanistan needed was an inclusive parliamentary form of government "instead of a personality-oriented presidential system", which could optimally represent all ethnic and regional interests.
They also sought a thorough revamping of the country's electoral system from the present single non-transferrable voting system to a "national-accepted variant of the proportional representative system" and the direct election of governors and provincial council leaderships with delegation of powers to create budgets, collect revenue and oversee local policing and administer social sectors.
But, most important, they frontally questioned the US's locus standi to initiate peace talks with the Taliban. Their statement said:We firmly believe that any negotiation with the Taliban can be acceptable, and therefore effective, [only] if all parties to the conflict are involved in the process. The present form of discussions with the Taliban is flawed, as it excludes anti-Taliban Afghans. It must be recalled that the Taliban extremists and their al-Qaeda supporters were defeated [in 2011] by Afghans resisting extremism with minimal human-embedded support from the United States and international community. The present negotiations with the Taliban fail to take into account the risks, sacrifices and legitimate interests of the Afghans who ended the brutal oppression of all Afghans.A challenge to Obama
In order to speed the withdrawal of international forces, the participants believe it is essential to strengthen regional and national institutions that are inclusive and represent the concerns of all the communities of Afghanistan. [Emphasis added.]
The Northern Alliance statement challenges the US's monopoly of conflict resolution and Washington's unilateralist estimation that the Taliban are the only group that matters as protagonists on the Afghan chessboard in a peace process.
Its entire approach is to take the "Afghan settlement" from the narrow path of a secretive US-Taliban-Pakistan compromise formula to a transparent, inclusive, broadly-participatory inclusive approach that would not ignore any Afghan interest group, which has genuine mass support, from participation, with strong, elected local leaderships that enjoy delegated powers of local governance.
In sum, it offers a vision for returning Afghanistan to its historical character of a federated system of government that allows a plural society to thrive, but with a representative form of government as a modern-day democracy. Indeed, the Northern Alliance statement implies readiness to reconcile politically with the Taliban, provided they "seize" power through the ballot box rather than the guns supplied from the Pakistani military inventory, among other places.
It is a bold challenge to the United States and Pakistan to live up to their pious homilies.
The alliance's strategy puts enormous pressure on Karzai. He is caught between two contending constituencies. The Northern Alliance leaders are critical of Karzai, but he finds no acceptability with the Taliban, too. Karzai's position becomes precarious if he antagonizes the Northern Alliance groups and turns them hostile. He won't want to put all his eggs in the American basket, either, since the US may find him expendable at some point. Karzai needs time to maneuver and create a new coalition that strengthens his standing.
What may have incensed the Northern Alliance groups partly at least is that, despite the chill in US-Pakistan relations, Washington has kept the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the loop on the Qatar talks, while blithely ignoring them as protagonists. Nonetheless, interestingly, they made no critical reference to Pakistan.
Unsurprisingly, Islamabad is sitting tight. It refrains from taking open stance on the proposed talks with the Taliban in Qatar. At the same time, the ISI is on the ball and its chief, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, even paid an overnight visit to Qatar.
Pakistan would draw satisfaction that Washington finally dropped its pre-conditions for talks with the Taliban. Equally, Pakistan would welcome any release of top Taliban figures from Guantanamo. And Pakistan didn't put roadblock when former mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (who lives in Peshawar in Pakistan) deputed envoys to Kabul to sound out the US and NATO officials whether he too could be provided a seat at the conference table in Qatar.
However, Pakistan won't proffer an opinion on the prospects of the talks, rather pretending it is all a matter between Taliban leader Mullah Omar who is quartered in Quetta in Pakistan and American officials.
All this is being played against the backdrop of the troubled US-Pakistani relationship. Besides, the Taliban comprise hopelessly fragmented factions and neither Mullah Omar nor the Haqqani clan has yet commented on the proposed talks in Qatar.
Pakistan can rest on its oars that the ISI would be the only party capable of shepherding the Taliban factions to come on a united platform for talks, and the US ultimately has no choice but to knock on its doorstep seeking help.
As the Northern Alliance groups see it, Pakistani strategy is to wait out the period between now and 2014 - the date set for the US troop withdrawal - and then regroup the Taliban and make a bid to capture power in Kabul. Their strong show of unity in Berlin suggests that they will not roll over and give way to an exclusive US-Taliban-Pakistan settlement being imposed on their nation.
Their challenge to Barack Obama is to concede for the Afghan people the very minimum privilege of an Arab Spring so that Islamism can reconcile with democracy - quintessentially, expecting the US to be on the "right side of history". It is not too much to ask for, really.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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