Don't Push Pakistan Too Far

[Padishah]

Don't Push Pakistan Too Far
by Eric Margolis


US Vice President ceeb Cheney’s visit last week to South Asia was not what one could call a rousing success.

Cheney, the real power behind the Bush Administration, arrived at Bagram air base, formerly the nerve center for the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Today, it plays the same role for the US occupation. A suicide bomber attacked the base’s main gate, killing a score of soldiers and civilians and hugely embarrassing Cheney. Worse, the 60 km “secure” highway between Bagram and Kabul has become so dangerous that Cheney could not travel by road through this region, which is deemed highly secure by US and NATO forces, to meet with the American-installed figurehead leader, Hamid Karzai, who is constantly surrounded by up to 200 US bodyguards.

Anti-western forces are quickly gaining ground in Afghanistan. What Washington and its NATO allies keep claiming is an “anti-terrorist operation” against a handful of al-Qaida fighters and Taliban has, in fact, turned into fast-growing Afghan national resistance to foreign occupation. Were it not for the US Air Force’s might and ubiquitous presence, US, Canadian, and British troops would soon be driven from southern Afghanistan. The respected Senlis Council, which closely monitors Afghanistan, reports that half the nation is now under Taliban control or influence.

The fast-deteriorating situation there is provoking furious finger-pointing. Washington and NATO are angrily blaming Pakistan for sheltering and abetting Taliban and its allies. Pakistan blames the feeble Karzai regime, which can’t control its own territory. Now, US intelligence reports that al-Qaida has reconstituted itself in spite of President George Bush’s $690 billion “war on terror.”

Cheney went on to Pakistan to threaten President Pervez Musharraf with a cutoff of US aid – and perhaps much worse – if he didn’t crack down further on Pashtun tribesmen in the frontier provinces who are aiding Taliban and other Pashtun and nationalist resistance groups. The western powers are following India’s lead over Kashmir by accusing Pakistan of “cross-border terrorism.”

This is untrue. The 40 million Pashtun, the world’s largest tribe, have never recognized the British-drawn 1893 border between Pakistan and Afghanistan that cuts their traditional territory in two. They cross it at will and maintain close links with relatives and clansmen on the other side of the border who strongly support Taliban and its allies.

In the 1980’s and 90’s, I explored and became fascinated by the wild, lawless, then little-known frontier tribal agencies of north and south Waziristan, Khyber, Mohmand, Orakzai, and Malakand. Their warlike, fiercely independent tribes joined Pakistan in 1947 under constitutional guarantee of total autonomy that excluded government soldiers from the tribal agencies.

Intense US pressure forced Musharraf to violate Pakistan’s constitution by sending troops into the tribal territories. The army shamefully launched heavy attacks, killing more than 3,000 civilians. Outrage across Pakistan forced Musharraf to back down and withdraw some troops. “Fight India, not your own people,” cried the press. It was one of the darkest days for Pakistan’s Army.

Many Pakistanis oppose the US occupation of Afghanistan, support their old anti-communist ally, Taliban, and think better of Osama bin Laden than George Bush. Many senior and junior officers in Pakistan’s military and powerful intelligence service, ISI, feel similarly and are bitter at Musharraf for abandoning Taliban and resistance groups fighting to oust Indian rule in divided Kashmir.

Musharraf is thus caught between Washington’s growing demands and his own people, who increasingly accuse him of being an American tool. Washington simply does not understand it has pushed the isolated, unpopular Musharraf too far already. If he is blown up or overthrown, Pakistan and its 40–60 nuclear weapons, could turn into an even bigger and more dangerous hotbed of anti-western activity. The next army corps commander who takes over may not be as amenable to Washington’s demands as Pervez Musharraf.

Meanwhile, Washington is increasingly blaming its Afghanistan fiasco on whipping boy Pakistan, just as the Vietnam defeat was blamed on infiltration from Cambodia and Laos. Recently, a remarkably ill-informed Canadian defense minister foolishly proposed sending Canadian troops into Pakistan’s tribal agencies to “fight terrorists.”

Picking a fight with old, loyal ally Pakistan is both morally wrong and fraught with untold dangers. The US has forgotten how it forced another compliant military ruler, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, into policies his people hated. He was assassinated, to national joy.

Negotiating a deal with Taliban and other Afghan resistance forces is the only way out of the current morass, not undermining Pakistan or expanding a war that is already lost.

[Padishah]

The Other War; Afghanistan – worse than Iraq
Justin Raimondo

The Democrats have a plan – finally! – to get us out of Iraq, and it involves – as usual with the Dems – a complicated process of measuring "benchmarks" that, if not met, will supposedly trigger a U.S. withdrawal (in 180 days). Two dates are given – July 1 and Oct. 1, 2007 – by which time the "benchmarks" must be met. Oh, yes, and they add $4 billion to Bush's "Defense" Dept. budget request, making it just short of $100 billion. See, those Dems aren't anti-military, by any means: who says shelling out more than the next 14 top spenders on military items is enough?

One news account describes this as the Democrats "drawing their line in the sand" – and a pretty wobbly and indistinct line it is. After all, how will Congress disprove the administration's assertion that those "benchmarks" have been met – or, rather, how eager will they be to challenge the White House's rosy scenario? In any case, this Christian Science Monitor piece goes on to report:

"House Democratic leaders are trying to ratchet up pressure on the White House to change its Iraq strategy while trying to persuade Americans that there is another way forward on the war on terror. That direction, they say, involves intensifying the fight in Afghanistan while winding down involvement in Iraq."

The real war, the Democrats argue, is not in Iraq – which never had anything to do with Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, or 9/11 – but in Afghanistan. This is their big critique of the Iraq war: not that it's wrong, immoral, a murderous disaster that surely indicts us in the eyes of the whole world – only that it is diverting resources away from another military occupation that shows no signs of winding down.

Yet the war in Afghanistan is being played exactly as the occupation of Iraq is being played – as if we are trying to establish a semi-permanent presence. In both countries we have held elections, and used our military to prop up a government that has very little actual power. In Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, our nation-building efforts are doomed to fail.

As Michael Scheuer points out, the Afghans have been badly underestimated by the US-NATO coalition, and they are even now in the process of repeating history and driving out the invaders, just as they drove out the Soviets, the Brits, and the legions of Alexander the Great.

The Taliban and their allies are returning to Afghanistan, having received additional training and an influx of aid from around the Muslim world: Scheuer estimates their numbers are at least equal to the coalition forces. And these aren't just new recruits, although there are more than enough of those, but seasoned veterans of the Afghan wars who are eager to get on with the fight.

The position of the jihadis is made stronger by the errors committed by the NATO allies. Instead of launching a punitive expedition of the sort that has had some success in Afghan history, the Westerners merely repeated the Soviet experience of the 1980s – and, not surprisingly, are reaping similar results. "President" Karzai is in charge of a very small area, reduced, in reality, to the status of Kabul's mayor. The rest of the country is divided into tribal-clan fiefdoms, with local warlords and drug traffickers divvying up their share of the spoils. What impact the West has had has been largely resented, because efforts to "liberate" women, increase the educational level, and introduce Western-style "democracy" have run up against age-old traditions. The Afghans, while not really xenophobic in the sense that, say, the Koreans, or the Japanese are, have been fighting off would-be occupiers for thousands of years, and they aren't about to give in to the current crop.

The problem with our Afghan front is that we have substituted nation-building for what ought to be our real task – taking out our enemies and then high-tailing it out of there. Yes, al Qaeda is in Afghanistan, and nearby Pakistan, but we aren't going to defeat them by going in there and constructing a viable state. That region of the world has seen very little in the way of stable nation-states during the past thousand years or so, and we aren't going to inaugurate a new era on account of our negligible presence. Nor is building an Afghan state necessary to our task.

Our goal in Afghanistan, our only legitimate objective, ought to be to the utter destruction of our enemies, i.e. forces allied with Osama bin Laden who pose a real threat to our security. Whether or not "President" Karzai, or his virtually powerless "parliament," survive another day is not really relevant to that task. Indeed, one could easily make the argument that they are detrimental to our central purpose. Defending Karzai's Kabul, and pouring resources into building the Afghan central government, diverts us from what ought to be our sole concern: eradicating the enemy.

Afghanistan is, today, a narco-state, one that has been handed over to the "Northern Alliance," i.e., former pro-Soviet puppets, and a "parliament" consisting mostly of Islamist (albeit "pro-American") fundamentalists with a few pro-Western intellectuals in business suits thrown in for purely decorative purposes. If that is "liberation," then no wonder the Taliban has growing appeal.

There has been no real Afghan state for as long as the history of that country has been written, and there is little chance that we will succeed where others have failed. What we need to do is to learn from those failures – and our own – and limit our mission to getting bin Laden. Then we get out.

Naturally, such simplicity is not going to appeal to American politicians, who are intent on "reconstructing" Afghanistan (as if there was much of anything there to begin with) and pouring in all kinds of "aid" that is bound to have, at best, mixed results in terms of its actual effects. After six years of occupation, the Afghan people are getting sick and tired of seeing innocent civilians bombed by the American-NATO "liberators," and they pine for the law and order that the Taliban, whatever their ideological idiosyncrasies, did a good job of imposing.

Afghanistan is never going to be a Jeffersonian republic where the rights of women are upheld and everyone is free to practice the religion of their choice, and no amount of wishful thinking – or sheer military power – is going to change that. The Afghans are a patient and battle-hardened people: they have seen would-be "conquerors" come, and go, and we, too, will go some day. They will wait us out, sniping at us all the way, hoping that our exit is sooner rather than later, but ready, as always, for anything.

Ultimately, the Americans and their NATO allies will realize that Afghanistan is just as much a quagmire as Iraq, and just as hopeless. Before then, however, many will die – both Westerners and Afghans – in pursuit of a futile crusade to make Afghanistan into a Central Asian version of Kansas. Once that project fails, and we are left facing a global jihadist enemy more numerous and emboldened, we will find ourselves in much the same position we are in Mesopotamia – in which case the Democrats in Congress will have to come up with yet another brilliant "plan." To them, I say: Thanks, but no thanks.

[Libah86]

fuk off u paki

[Gamadid.]

Padishah, you read counterpunch.org?

[michael_ital]

I read that column of Margolis' last week in the Toronto Sunday Sun. Love that guy's work.

[Padishah]

I do read Counterpunch.org

I also read:

aangirfan.blogspot.com
adelaideinstitute.org
angryarab.blogspot.com
antiwar.com
australiafreepress.org
austrolabe.com
commutefaster.com/Energy2
cytations.blogspot.com
joannafrancis.wordpress.com
judicial-inc.biz
lataan.blogspot.com
ministryoftruth.org.uk
signs-of-the-times.org
thx1138.wordpress.com
watchingamerica.com
whatreallyhappened.com
xymphora.blogspot.com


WARNING: some of the above sites are out there, but I read them rather than sit in a stupor in front of the TV.

[Unclebin-]

These articles are incoherent. He talks about cheneys power and later emphasises bush mistakes while talking in a bias tone that a skinny eelaay boy could smell from a mile.

[Padishah]

Two different and unrelated articles, binnie.

[Unclebin-]

Well the first one sucks and the guy needs to polish up his writing skills. WTF WAS THAT SH.IT?

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

Margolis is a leftwing nitwit who just refuses to understand that Islamic militants do not have a live and let live concept of politics nor do they understand that nothing we can do will ever appease them. They are driven by the notion that there is an absolute truth and that the entire world must submit to Islamic rule and that they will attack any and all elements in the globe that might undermine that goal. The war against them has to be fought, forever.

[DawladSade]

So madmac along with a soldier, engineer, architect, sociologist, anthropologist, you're also a political analyst miyaa?

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

I am not an engineer, I am not an architect, I am not a sociologist.....I have some limited knowledge concerning anthropology and have a degree in political science. As an intelligence officer who has spent considerable time hunting and killing Islamists, I have a good idea about how they think.

[DawladSade]

[quote="MAD MAC"]I am not an engineer, I am not an architect, I am not a sociologist.....I have some limited knowledge concerning anthropology and have a degree in political science. As an intelligence officer who has spent considerable time hunting and killing Islamists, I have a good idea about how they think.[/quote]


Horta habarta kintirkeedu intee la'egyahay??

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

Hey Kunte Kinte, can you speak English here...

[DawladSade]

[quote="MAD MAC"]Hey Kunte Kinte, can you speak English here...[/quote]


I thought you were a Somaliologist...