DUPLICITOUS ALLY’S RADICAL OFFICER CORPS THE PROBLEM . . . Obama must focus on Pakistan, not Afghanistan!

Sri Lanka Island Newspaper, March 16, 2009

DUPLICITOUS ALLY’S RADICAL OFFICER CORPS THE PROBLEM . . . Obama must focus on Pakistan, not Afghanistan!

by Selvam Canagaratna

"The author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death." - Thomas Paine, The American Crisis (1783)

Hard on the heels of the brazen March 3rd terrorist attack on the bus carrying Sri Lanka’s cricket team in the eastern Pakistan city of Lahore, Christopher Dell, the top US diplomat in Kabul warned that Pakistan posed a bigger security problem for the rest of the world than Afghanistan - a point already made, and made very effectively too, in a February 12 contribution to CounterPunch magazine by Peter Lee, a businessman who has spent thirty years observing, analyzing, and writing on Asian affairs.

The American diplomat claimed to have ‘discovered’ what most political observers have known for quite awhile – that "Pakistan has certainly made radical Islam a part of its political life, and it now seems to be a deeply ingrained element of its political culture." [‘Discovering’ what they have themselves secretly ‘fathered’ is, by the way, an American forte.]

"Maybe it’s time to admit we don’t have an Afghanistan problem. We have a Pakistan problem, and Afghanistan is simply aggravating it," was how Peter Lee began his article on February 12, hitting the proverbial nail on its nut.

The war against the Taliban is a counterinsurgency operation across the entire Pashtun ethnic area, noted Lee, and was on both sides of the Durand Line that arbitrarily splits the Pashtun homeland into Afghan and Pakistani jurisdictions; the Taliban soon discovered that their key bulwark against NATO and US operations was, unsurprisingly, the Pakistan side.

Wrote Lee: "US attempts to deny the Pakistan havens to the Taliban have simply encouraged the Taliban to focus on the weakest element in the counter-insurgency equation, the Pakistan government, entrench themselves not only in the semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) but also in key districts of the North West Frontier Province such as the Swat valley, and make it clear that the cost of any US success against them and in Afghanistan will be borne by Pakistan. In other words, Afghanistan is the sideshow and Pakistan is the main event."

As befitting a playwright, essayist and humorist, Wajahat Ali, a Muslim American of Pakistani descent, writing also in CounterPunch a few days after the terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team, penned a beguiling comparison to kick off his article: "The tempestuous relationship between the United States and Pakistan is akin to a sordid soap opera featuring a fickle, selfish lover and her unpredictable mistress prone to volatile tantrums. The ensuing violence and instability paralyzing Central Asia is their inevitable progeny." [DNA tests are clearly superfluous here!]

Surprisingly, President Obama, considering his total rejection throughout his presidential campaign of Bush’s hawkish approach to foreign policy, donned the belligerent mantle of his predecessor without a murmur but, having himself authorized two [or more] controversial CIA predator drone attacks in Pakistan’s mountainous region bordering Afghanistan up to end-February, recently conceded: "We’ve been thinking very militarily, but we haven’t been as effective in thinking diplomatically – we haven’t been thinking effectively around the development side of the equation." [While successfully ‘eliminating’ between 11 and 20 high-profile Taliban militants, the drones also notched up unacceptable ‘collateral damage’ in killing hundreds of innocent Pakistani civilian men, women and children.]

What has inflamed Pakistani public opinion was that the Predator drones raining death and destruction on blameless citizens are, in fact, flown from US military bases in Pakistan itself – a fact recently revealed by California Senator Dianne Feinstein. Wajahat Ali, himself also an Attorney-at-law, quotes a professional colleague telling him that the prevailing attitude among Pakistanis was that their government was either a complete ghulam (servant) of the US or a toothless, complicit partner, since "the road to Islamabad leads to the White House".

That ‘road’ was constructed jointly by the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s which, in terms of American money and materiel, was a boon for the Pakistani army, especially the ISI.

"America funded and supported the dictatorship of General Zia ul Haq, whose ‘Islamisation’ period nurtured the proliferation of radical Islamic madrassas and trained the mujahideen soldiers – future Taliban and al-Qaida members – to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan," says Brian M. Downing, a veteran of the Vietnam War and author of several works of political and military history.

At the time of the 1979 Soviet invasion, the army was ruling Pakistan after overthrowing and eventually executing Ali Bhutto. The US and Saudi Arabia poured money into Pakistan to aid the various mujahadin groups fighting just to the north, most of whom could readily be considered Islamist. Notes Downing: "The supply effort was entrusted to a section of the military – the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). In order to inspire new recruits for the war in Afghanistan (and for the struggle over Kashmir and revanchism over the loss of East Pakistan) madrasas were funded. Along the way, the ISI became a state within a state, an army within an army, a praetorian guard within a praetorian guard."

The British colonial army of the subcontinent was drawn predominantly from the Punjab, a region that became part of Pakistan upon independence, explains Downing. From that point on, the Pakistani army was more unified and capable of concerted action than were the political parties. "Seeing itself as embodying the nation far more than they did, the army would push aside civilian governments and take the reins of power when it saw fit. There’s no edifying morality play here. Pakistan’s political parties are corrupt, oligarchic patronage networks."

Pakistan is of diminishing usefulness to US/NATO efforts in Afghanistan, in Downing’s opinion, and its army and ISI are no longer able to govern the country or even hold it together – and neither can the newly installed civilian government. A reasonable interpretation of recent events, he reckons, is that the military helped assassinate Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 in order to prevent the accession of a popular civilian government, and that it increased guerrilla operations in Kashmir last summer and aided in the Mumbai attacks of November 2008 in order to rally Islamist militants to the nationalist, anti-Indian cause.

"The Pakistani army’s encouragement of Islamism brought the militant faithful into the officer corps, as they were thought more dedicated to confronting India than those with more moderate religiosity. Islamist militants are all but dominant in the officer corps now, even in the ranks of those who will control the general staff in a few years. The generals have brought Pakistan to the edge of the abyss. The protégées they took in, nurtured, and promoted may be the ones to push the country in, making the Pakistani generals the most recent losers in the Great Game, which has never had a long-term winner."

William Pfaff, writing on the Truthdig website, demanded to know, "Exactly what do we think we are doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Is it that we actually want permanent bases in Afghanistan? Do we want a permanent American client-state there, such as Iran was for us before the 1979 revolution, or as Iraq was at the time of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein was our man in the Middle East? Do we seriously want to crush Taliban religious belief and liberalize Islam? To send American clergymen, social reformers and feminist scholars there for a series of seminars? To run a new Inquisition at gunpoint, American-style?"

America calls it Democracy at gunpoint, William.

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