Has the
U.S. Invasion of Pakistan Begun?
By Tom Engelhardt
17/09/08 ---- "Tomgram"
--- As Andrew Bacevich
tells us in the latest issue of the Atlantic,
there's now a vigorous debate going on in the military about
the nature of the "next" American wars and how to prepare
for them. However, while military officers argue, that "next
war" may already be creeping up on us.
Having, with much hoopla,
launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, each disastrous in
its own way, the Bush administration in its waning months
seems intent on a slo-mo launching of a third war in the
border regions of Pakistan. Almost every day now news
trickles out of intensified American
strikes -- by Hellfire-missile armed Predator drones, or
even
commando raids from helicopters -- in the Pakistani
tribal areas along the Afghan border; and there is a
drumbeat of
threats of more to come. All of this, in turn, is
reportedly only "phase one" of a three-phase Bush
administration plan in which the American military "gloves"
would "come off." Think of this as the
green-lighting of a new version of that old
Vietnam-era tactic of "hot pursuit" across national
borders, or think of it simply as the
latest war.
Already Pakistan's
sovereignty has functionally been
declared of no significance by our President, and so,
without a word from Congress, the American war that already
stretches from Iraq to Afghanistan is threatening to widen
in ways that are potentially incendiary in the extreme.
While Pakistani sources report that
no significant Taliban or al-Qaeda figures have been
killed in the recent series of attacks, anger in Pakistan
over the abrogation of national sovereignty and,
as in Afghanistan, over civilian casualties is growing.
In Iraq, 146,000 American
soldiers seem not to be going anywhere anytime soon, while
in Afghanistan another 33,000 embattled American troops (and
tens of thousands of NATO troops), suffering their highest
casualties since the Taliban fell in 2001, are fighting a
spreading insurgency backed by growing anger over foreign
occupation. The disintegration seems to be proceeding apace
in that country as the Taliban begins to
throttle the supply routes leading into the Afghan
capital of Kabul, while the governor of a province
just died
in an IED blast. "President" Hamid Karzai was long ago
nicknamed "the mayor of Kabul." Today, that tag seems ever
more appropriate as the influence of his corrupt government
steadily weakens.
In the meantime, in
Pakistan, a new war, no less unpredictable and unpalatable
than the last two, develops, as American strikes
fan the flames of Pakistani nationalism. Already the
Pakistani military may have fired its
first warning shots at American troops. Part of the
horror here is that much of the present nightmare in
Afghanistan and Pakistan can be traced to the sorry U.S.
relationship with Pakistan's military and its intelligence
services back in the early 1980s. At that time, in its
anti-Soviet jihad, the Reagan administration was, in
conjunction with the Pakistanis, actively nurturing the
forces that the Bush administration is now so intent on
fighting. No one knows this story, this record, better than
the Pakistani-born journalist and writer Tariq Ali.
As we head into our "next
war," most Americans know almost nothing about Pakistan, the
sixth most populous country on the planet with 200 million
people, and the only Islamic state with nuclear weapons. As
the Bush administration commits to playing with fire in that
desperately poor land, it's time to learn. Ali, who posts
below on the next U.S. war, has just written a new book,
The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power
-- published today -- that traces the U.S.-Pakistani
relationship from the 1950s to late last night. I can tell
you that it's both riveting and needed. Check it out. And
while you're at it, check Ali out in
a
two-part video, released by TomDispatch, in which he
discusses the history of the tangled U.S.-Pakistani
relationship and Barack Obama's Afghan and Pakistani plans.
Tom
The
American War Moves to Pakistan
Bush's War Widens Dangerously
By Tariq Ali
The decision to make public
a presidential order of last July authorizing American
strikes inside Pakistan without seeking the approval of
the Pakistani government ends a long debate within, and on
the periphery of, the Bush administration. Senator Barack
Obama, aware of this ongoing debate during his own long
battle with Hillary Clinton, tried to outflank her by
supporting a policy of U.S. strikes into Pakistan. Senator
John McCain and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin have
now echoed this view and so it has become, by consensus,
official U.S. policy.
Its effects on Pakistan
could be catastrophic, creating a severe crisis within the
army and in the country at large. The overwhelming majority
of Pakistanis are opposed to the U.S. presence in the
region, viewing it as the most serious threat to peace.
Why, then, has the U.S.
decided to destabilize a crucial ally? Within Pakistan, some
analysts argue that this is a carefully coordinated move to
weaken the Pakistani state yet further by creating a crisis
that extends way beyond the badlands on the frontier with
Afghanistan. Its ultimate aim, they claim, would be the
extraction of the Pakistani military's nuclear fangs. If
this were the case, it would imply that Washington was
indeed determined to break up the Pakistani state, since the
country would very simply not survive a disaster on that
scale.
In my view, however, the
expansion of the war relates far more to the Bush
administration's disastrous occupation in Afghanistan. It is
hardly a secret that the regime of President Hamid Karzai is
becoming more isolated with each passing day, as
Taliban guerrillas move ever closer to Kabul.
When in doubt, escalate the
war is an old imperial motto. The strikes against Pakistan
represent -- like the decisions of President Richard Nixon
and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to bomb
and then invade Cambodia (acts that, in the end, empowered
Pol Pot and his monsters) -- a desperate bid to salvage a
war that was never good, but has now gone badly wrong.
It is true that those
resisting the NATO occupation cross the Pakistan-Afghan
border with ease. However, the U.S. has often engaged in
quiet negotiations with them. Several feelers have been put
out to the Taliban in Pakistan, while U.S. intelligence
experts regularly check into the Serena Hotel in Swat to
discuss possibilities with Mullah Fazlullah, a local
pro-Taliban leader. The same is true inside Afghanistan.
After the U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001, a whole layer of the Taliban's
middle-level leadership crossed the border into Pakistan to
regroup and plan for what lay ahead. By 2003, their
guerrilla factions were starting to harass the occupying
forces in Afghanistan and, during 2004, they began to be
joined by a new generation of local recruits, by no means
all jihadists, who were being radicalized by the
occupation itself.
Though, in the world of the
Western media, the Taliban has been entirely conflated with
al-Qaeda, most of their supporters are, in fact, driven by
quite local concerns. If NATO and the U.S. were to leave
Afghanistan, their political evolution would most likely
parallel that of Pakistan's domesticated Islamists.
The neo-Taliban now control
at least twenty Afghan districts in Kandahar, Helmand, and
Uruzgan provinces. It is hardly a secret that many officials
in these zones are closet supporters of the guerrilla
fighters. Though often characterized as a rural jacquerie
they have won significant support in southern towns and they
even led a Tet-style offensive in Kandahar in 2006.
Elsewhere, mullahs who had initially supported President
Karzai's allies are now railing against the foreigners and
the government in Kabul. For the first time, calls for jihad
against the occupation are even being heard in the non-Pashtun
northeast border provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan.
The neo-Taliban have said
that they will not join any government until "the
foreigners" have left their country, which raises the
question of the strategic aims of the United States. Is it
the case, as NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer
suggested to an audience at the Brookings Institution
earlier this year, that the war in Afghanistan has little to
do with spreading good governance in Afghanistan or even
destroying the remnants of al-Qaeda? Is it part of a master
plan, as
outlined by a strategist in NATO Review in the
Winter of 2005, to expand the focus of NATO from the
Euro-Atlantic zone, because "in the 21st century NATO must
become an alliance… designed to project systemic stability
beyond its borders"?
As that strategist went on
to write:
"The centre of gravity of
power on this planet is moving inexorably eastward. As
it does, the nature of power itself is changing. The
Asia-Pacific region brings much that is dynamic and
positive to this world, but as yet the rapid change
therein is neither stable nor embedded in stable
institutions. Until this is achieved, it is the
strategic responsibility of Europeans and North
Americans, and the institutions they have built, to lead
the way… [S]ecurity effectiveness in such a world is
impossible without both legitimacy and capability."
Such a strategy implies a
permanent military presence on the borders of both China and
Iran. Given that this is unacceptable to most Pakistanis and
Afghans, it will only create a state of permanent mayhem in
the region, resulting in ever more violence and terror, as
well as heightened support for jihadi extremism,
which, in turn, will but further stretch an already
over-extended empire.
Globalizers often speak as
though U.S. hegemony and the spread of capitalism were the
same thing. This was certainly the case during the Cold War,
but the twin aims of yesteryear now stand in something
closer to an inverse relationship. For, in certain ways, it
is the very spread of capitalism that is gradually eroding
U.S. hegemony in the world. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin's triumph in Georgia was a dramatic signal of this
fact. The American push into the Greater Middle East in
recent years, designed to demonstrate Washington's primacy
over the Eurasian powers, has descended into remarkable
chaos, necessitating support from the very powers it was
meant to put on notice.
Pakistan's new, indirectly
elected President, Asif Zardari, the husband of the
assassinated Benazir Bhutto and a
Pakistani "godfather" of the first order, indicated his
support for U.S. strategy by inviting Afghanistan's Hamid
Karzai to attend his inauguration, the only foreign leader
to do so. Twinning himself with a discredited satrap in
Kabul may have impressed some in Washington, but it only
further decreased support for the widower Bhutto in his own
country.
The key in Pakistan, as
always, is the army. If the already heightened U.S. raids
inside the country continue to escalate, the much-vaunted
unity of the military High Command might come under real
strain. At a meeting of corps commanders in Rawalpindi on
September 12th, Pakistani Chief of Staff General Ashfaq
Kayani received unanimous support for his relatively mild
public denunciation of the recent U.S. strikes inside
Pakistan in which he
said the country's borders and sovereignty would be
defended "at all cost."
Saying, however, that the
Army will safeguard the country's sovereignty is different
from doing so in practice. This is the heart of the
contradiction. Perhaps the attacks will cease on November
4th. Perhaps pigs (with or without lipstick) will fly. What
is really required in the region is an American/NATO exit
strategy from Afghanistan, which should entail a regional
solution involving Pakistan, Iran, India, and Russia. These
four states could guarantee a national government and
massive social reconstruction in that country. No matter
what, NATO and the Americans have failed abysmally.
Tariq Ali, writer,
journalist, filmmaker, contributes regularly to a range of
publications including the Guardian, the Nation, and the
London Review of Books. His most recent book, just
published, is
The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power
(Scribner, 2008). In
a
two-part video, released by TomDispatch.com, he offers
critical commentary on Barack Obama's plans for Afghanistan
and Pakistan, as well as on the tangled U.S.-Pakistani
relationship.
