PAKISTAN'SROLEIN WAR AGAINST TERROR by ICIRR China
Visa-vis the United States, Pakistan's role in its fight against terrorism, is continuously being maligned by the mainstream media in the west. Their main charge; its "labor does not contribute". In other words "ITS NOT DOING ENOUGH", and should, therefore "DO MORE".
Theannouncement by the New York Timesthat one of the supposedly prominent Taliban with whom the Karzai government has been negotiating turns out to be an impostor is only the latest depressing indication that the whole Afghanistan boondoggle is shot through with flimflammery.
The US gave a man claiming to be Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur, Mullah Omar’s number two, “a lot of money” to engage in talks. He also was flown to Kabul to consult with President Hamid Karzai at the presidential palace (Karzai, terrified of looking like a laughingstock, denied the meeting).
The incident demonstrates that US and Afghanistan intelligence on the Taliban is very poor, since they don’t even know what the leaders look like. It means that they don’t have double agents high up in the organization with whom they could have checked on Mansur’s absences from his home base– while he was hobnobbing with Karzai and the Americans– so as to confirm his identity.
The incident set me thinking about all the impostures of that war, which are legion. Let us begin with the frankly dishonest discourse about it of both our twenty-first century presidents, who maintain that the US is fighting “al-Qaeda” in Afghanistan. But there is no al-Qaeda to speak of in that country, if by the term one means the mainly Arab Pan-Islamic International that sees Usama Bin Laden as its leader.
US forces in Afghanistan are fighting disgruntled Pashtuns, for the most part. Some are from Gulbuddin Hikmatyar’s Islamic Party. Others from the Haqqani family’s Haqqani Network. The Reagan administration and its Saudi allies once showered billions of dollars on Hikmatyar and Haqqani, so they aren’t exactly eternal adversaries of the US. Some insurgents are from the Old Taliban of Mullah Omar. Still others are not so much terrorist cartels as tribes and guerrilla groups who are just unhappy with poppy eradication campaigns, or with the foreign troop presence (they would say ‘occupation’), or with how Karzai has given out patronage unequally, favoring some tribes over others. The insurgency is almost exclusively drawn from the Pashtun ethnic group.
So the war is not about al-Qaeda.
My guess is that the war is mainly an example of mission creep. The US and other Western powers stood up the Karzai government in late 2001, and they would suffer a loss of face and a geostrategic reversal if he were hanged from a lamp post like Najeeb, one of his Soviet-installed predecessors. So then they have to do whatever they can to prop up the Kabul government, including crash training for 400,000 troops and police to maintain security.
Despite having gotten where he is through US and NATO help, President Hamid Karzai has been revealed to be on a $2 million a year retainer by Iran. And, his brothers and circle are allegedly highly corrupt, getting unsecured loans from a bank they run to buy posh villas in Dubai.
Then there is the invisibility of the war itself.The first half of the year saw over 3000 civilian deaths and injuriesfrom conflict-related violence, which would be more than 6000 a year this year if the trends continue. Many of those casualties are produced by the insurgents, when Afghan civilians get in the way of their attacks on US & NATO forces or on Karzai’s army and police. But whereas the US press makes sure we know that thousands are killed or wounded every year in Mexico’s drug cartel wars, we hear little about Afghan casualties of the war.
Quite apart from the bombings in the Afghan capital, far beyond anything in Western capitals, some 1,795 children were killed or wounded in conflict-related violence from September 2008 to August 2010 (admittedly in the whole country and not just in Kabul). Moreover, there are powerful crime syndicates and kidnapping rings in the capital and drug addiction is spreading among even children and youth. He wasn’t speaking of infant mortality, so it isn’t fair to slam him on the grounds that a fifth of Afghan children die before reaching age five. But knowledge of the truly horrific health statistics of Afghan children might have instilled some caution about making Panglossian statements.
Another scam is the whole trope of democracy. Hamid Karzai bald-facedly stole the presidential election in 2009. The parliamentary elections of 2010 were so riddled with fraud that ten percent of the winners had to be denied their seats even by Karzai’s hand-picked electoral commission, and there are charges that the wrong ten percent were thrown out.
The elections are on a “non-party” basis, i.e. not actually democratic. Far from supporting democratic forces, the US and NATO have essentiallyensconced warlords in power. Sima Samar, the prominent woman politician so lauded by George W. Bush,is no longer in government.
All this is not to mention the bizarre split personality of the Pakistani military, which fights fierce battles against some Taliban, incurring heavy troop casualties, while behind the scenes supporting other Taliban.
Nothing is as it seems in Afghanistan, a war full of impostors. And now a further cruel pretense has been advertised, thatthe war will be over in 2014.Mostly.
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2,500 hundred years ago, one of the greatest military strategists ever - Sun Tzu - said:
"What is essential in war is victory, not prolonged operations."
"No nation has ever benefited from a prolonged war."
"Now, when an army of one hundred thousand is raised and dispatched on a distant campaign, the expenses borne by the people together with disbursements of the treasury will amount to a thousand pieces of gold daily. In addition, there will be continuous commotion both at home and abroad, people will be exhausted by the corvee of transport, and the farm work of seven hundred thousand households will be disrupted."
"A thousand pieces of gold" is a metaphorical, not set, amount. The costs of today's wars are actually much higher than a ton of gold per day....???
The face of war (don't look!)
A new isolationism is metastasizing in the American body politic. At its heart lies not an urge to avoid war, but an urge to avoid contemplating the costs and realities of war. It sees war as having analgesic qualities - as lessening a collective feeling of impotence, a collective sense of fear and terror. Making war in the name of reducing terror serves this state of mind and helps to preserve it. Marked by a calculated estrangement from war's horrific realities and mercenary purposes, the new isolationism magically turns an historic term on its head, for it keeps us in wars, rather than out of them.
Old-style American isolationism had everything to do with avoiding "entangling alliances" and conflicts abroad. It was tied to America's historic tradition of rejecting a large standing army - a tradition in which many Americans took pride. Yes, we signed on to World War I in 1917, but only after we had been "too proud to fight".
Even when we joined, we did so as a non-aligned power with the goal of ending major wars altogether. Before Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Americans again resisted the call to arms, looking on Adolf Hitler's rise and other unnerving events in Europe and Asia with alarm, but with little eagerness to send American boys into yet another global bloodbath.
In the decades since World War II, however, "isolationism" has been turned inside-out and upside-down. Instead of seeking eternal peace, Washington elites have, by now, plunged the country into a state of eternal war, and they've done so, in part, by isolating ordinary Americans from war's brutal realities.
With rare exceptions (notably John F Kennedy's call for young Americans to pay any price and bear any burden), our elites have not sought to mobilize a new "greatest generation", but rather to keep a clueless one - clueless, that is, as to war's fatal costs and bitter realities - unmobilized (if not immobilized).
Such national obliviousness has not gone unnoticed. In a recent New York Times op-ed headlined "The Wars that America Forgot About", former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw asked the obvious question: Why, in an otherwise contentious political season, have our wars gone so utterly undebated? His answers - that we're in a recession in which people have more pressing concerns, and that we've restricted the burdens of war to a tiny minority - are sensible, but don't go quite far enough. It's important to add that few Americans are debating, or even discussing, our wars in part because our ruling elites haven't wanted them debated - as if they don't want us to get the idea that we have any say in war-making at all.
Think of it this way: the old isolationism was a peaceable urge basic to the American people; the new isolationism is little short of a government program to keep the old isolationism, or opposition of any sort to American wars, in check.
Americans express skepticism about war ... so?
When you're kept isolated from war's costs, it's nearly impossible to mount an effective opposition to them. While our elites, remembering the Vietnam years, may have sought to remove US public opinion from the enemy's target list, they have also worked hard to remove the public as a constraint on their war-making powers. Recall former Vice President Dick Cheney's dismissive "So?" when asked about opinion polls showing declining public support for the Iraq War in 2008.
So what if the American people are uneasy? The elites can always call on a professional, non-draft military, augmented by hordes of privatized hire-a-gun outfits, themselves so isolated from society at large that they've almost become the equivalent of foreign legionnaires. These same elites encourage us to "support our troops", but otherwise to look away.
Mainstream media coverage of our wars has only added to the cocoon created by the new isolationism. After all, it rarely addresses the full costs of those conflicts to US troops (including their redeployment to war zones, even when already traumatized), let alone to foreign non-combatants in faraway Muslim lands. When such civilians are killed, their deaths tend to take place under the media radar. "If it bleeds, it doesn't lead," could be a news motto for much of recent war coverage, especially if the bleeding is done by civilians.
