by Rick Rozoff
An October 13 feature in The Nation stated that "the ongoing war on terror in Afghanistan is aimed to take the operations into Pakistani territory....The real target is Pakistan's nuclear potential; they [the U.S. and NATO] have no plausible security threat from the ill-equipped Taliban or ragtag extremists."
Commenting on the New York Post feature cited earlier, Pakistani commentator A R Jerral further claimed that what "Herman suggests in his write-up is in fact a policy direction to the US administration. He implies that the policy of sending drones and attacking militant hideouts in the Pakistan territory has not worked....[T]he thrust is Pakistan's nukes. It is a tacit way to tell the policymakers in Washington to keep the pressure on our country, which will weaken the Pakistani government's standing, causing instability. That will provide the reason for the US troops to move in."
He added: "We know about the drone attacks as these are reported in the media, but what we do not know and our media does not report is the fact that US-led NATO forces are launching crossborder raids into Pakistan....For this, CIA is operating Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams in Afghanistan."These teams are regularly mounting ground raids into Pakistani territory."
"In this way, things are getting hot as far as the war on terror is concerned. Pakistan is moving to become centre stage in this war. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA and NSC [National Security Council] official, has advised Mr. Obama to shift the focus of war 'from Afghanistan to Pakistan'; this is what we are witnessing in the shape of heightened war effort into the Pakistan territory." [9]
Obama is falling into the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam trap, of escalating a predecessor's halfhearted war into a major quagmire. What does Obama's first military operation tell us about his administration's priorities?
A Pakistani commentary of the preceding day stated: "[W]e have...been dragged into giving the US access to Balochistan from where it has been attempting to destabilise the Iranian regime through support for the terrorist group Jundullah....Even more threatening, unless we change course now, we will have lost the battle to retain our nuclear assets because that is where the NATO-US trail is eventually leading to."
"The free-wheeling access to US covert military and intelligence operatives, both officials and private contractors, is another destabilising factor that we seem to be unable or unwilling to check. And now there are the NATO incursions into our territory and targeting of even our military personnel, which shows how servile a state we are living in at present. [10]
As the war in Afghanistan, the largest and longest in the world, proceeds with record casualties among civilians and combatants alike on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, plans are afoot to further expand the war into Pakistan and to threaten Iran as well.
Comparisons to Washington's war in Indochina have been mentioned. [11] But Pakistan with its 180 million people and nuclear weapons is not Cambodia and Iran with its population of over 70 million is not Laos.
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Source: OpEdNews Title Image: Wired Image in the middle: The Cagle Post
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