[Peace-discuss] Afghan pipe dream

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Escobar has been writing sense for a long time at Asia Times Online.  He has a 
marked tendency to notice the elephant in the parlor.  --CGE]

	Published on Wednesday, August 19, 2009
	The Afghan Pipe Dream
	by Pepe Escobar

America's convoluted, Alice-in-Wonderland interpretation of this summer's top 
political show - the "free expression of the people" in the Afghanistan election 
- reads like an opium dream. In fact, it is actually a pipe dream - as in 
Pipelineistan. With the added twist that no one's saying a word about the pipe 
that's delivering the opium dream.

As in an opium dream, delusion reigns. The chances of United States President 
Barack Obama actually elaborating what his AfPak strategy really is are as 
likely as having his super-envoy Richard Holbrooke share a pipe with explosive 
uber-guerrilla warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Obama says "success in Afghanistan" involves "diplomacy, development and good 
governance" - but all dazed and confused world public opinion sees are packs of 
extra marines being deployed to "fight the Taliban".

Former Waziristan jihad master Baitullah Mehsud, a "Pak", not an "Af" Taliban, 
may have been done in by a clever US Predator drone. But one Osama bin Laden - 
as in an opium dream - still ghostly roams across the Hindu Kush, eight years 
after the 9/11 fact. A vision or a waking dream, he may be playing Return of the 
Living Dead in "Pak", not "Af" - so why all these extra marines frantically 
canvassing Afghan lands?

Or should we believe Pakistan Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira, who said 
there "is no evidence that Osama bin Laden is present in Pakistan" and that 
"those making claims of his presence in the country should provide valid proof 
of it"?

Furthermore, the US notion that a motley crew of Pashtun peasants, angry young 
religious men, gangsters, highway robbers and anti-government rabble-rousers 
sprinkled around Pashtun country in Afghanistan would suddenly start welcoming 
shady al-Qaeda new breeders bent on destroying Western civilization as we know 
it is, well, no less than an opium dream.

As for the sham election, who cares who's the winner - Pashtun President Hamid 
Karzai, aka "the kebab seller", Tajik Abdullah Abdullah or anyone else? 
Afghanistan will be ruled by Barack Hussein Obama anyway. "The Taliban" - this 
ghostly, immaterial entity - may start getting less cash from their former 
Pakistani intelligence masters; but pious, Salafi Persian Gulf potentates will 
still make sure they more than balance their budget - unlike certain Western 
powers. They couldn't care less about super-envoy Holbrooke's recently announced 
campaign to freeze wire transfers to "the Taliban".

Unable to fire Karzai, Washington watches impotently as he drafts psycho killer 
Uzbek General Rashid Dostum to campaign for him - as if sporting Tajik commander 
Muhammad Fahim as his running mate was not enough. It's Do the Warlord Dance in 
Kabul - and the prize is buckets of drug money for everybody so funding for 
private militias remains as free as a full supply of opium to the world economy.

And in the end, the warlords will find a shortcut to get rid of Karzai anyway.

Just ask the perennial Hekmatyar - who is fighting not only Karzai but the US 
and coalition troops (as if he's reading too much recent Iraq history, he 
insists on a timetable for Western troop withdrawal). Incidentally, good ol' 
friend of Saudi Arabia Hekmatyar is not a "Taliban" - but a Pashtun nationalist.

As for installed-by-George W Bush Karzai, he may be an Americanized aristocrat 
from the minor Popolzai tribe who knows his Pashtunwali - the inflexible Pashtun 
tribal code; but he's also a no-holds-barred opportunist who studied in India
, so he's betting on India to counter Pakistani influence over Afghanistan. He 
wants no "Pak" dominating "Af", while for Washington everything is now "AfPak". 
He knows that "the Taliban" control the day and virtually all the night in over 
half of Afghanistan. He knows he's got to do something to try to stop Westerners 
killing Pashtuns in droves. Yet another American puppet turns against his masters.

Ich bin ein Talibanistaner
And what to make of the McChrystal, Gates and Mullen show - worthy of the Marx 
Brothers? To amuse the galleries, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and chairman 
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen did a two-on-one and faced down 
commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan General 
Stanley McChyrstal's inimitable Dr Strangelove impersonation by asking him to 
take it easy and submit his new Afghan report to Obama only after the Afghan 
election.

Iron Gates wants an orgy of new troops; super-envoy Holbrooke, for his part, 
wants a massive nation-building squad - he's building his own (doomed), 
counterinsurgency-heavy, Afghan shadow government. The bottom line is that, 
mired in the opium dream that all Afghans love the concept of the North Atlantic 
Treaty Organization (NATO) occupying their country, the Pentagon wants a 
star-studded AfPak show running for decades.

McChrystal first said the Taliban are winning. Then he said they're not. Then he 
asked for - what else - more troops and more help on the civilian side. There 
will be 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan by the end of 2009. At the moment there 
are 96,500 US plus NATO troops on the ground - including 4,050 Germans, 485 
Norwegians, 470 Bulgarians and 2,378 from "other nations".

The extrapolations into ridicule boggle the mind. The 4,050 members of the 
Bundeswehr fighting "Taliban" in northern Afghanistan near Kunduz now have to 
shout out a trilingual warning before getting down to the nitty gritty. First, 
in English, it's "United Nations - stop, or I will fire!" Then comes the Pashto 
remix - "Melgaero Mellatuna-Dreesch, ka ne se dasee kawum!" And then the Dari 
remix. Forget about the cool and crisp Achtung! Sounds more like a Monty Python 
sketch about the European Commission in Brussels. Even German top commander 
General Wolfgang Schneiderhahn is embarrassed.

While all this funky charade goes on, virtually nobody - apart from Canadian 
energy economist John Foster, in an op-ed published by The Star newspaper - is 
talking about the (real) Afghan pipe dream. Once again, since the late 1990s, it 
all comes back to TAPI - the Turkmenistan/Afghanistan/Pakistan/India gas 
pipeline, the key reason Afghanistan (as an energy transit corridor) is of any 
strategic importance to the US, apart from being deployed as an aircraft carrier 
stationed right at the borders of geopolitical competitors China and Russia. 
TAPI, financed by the Asian Development Bank, should in theory start to be built 
in 2010.

Both Russia and Iran, accomplished chess masters, are honing their moves to make 
TAPI unworkable. Until then, the AfPak theater basically boils down to the US 
and NATO at war against nationalist Pashtuns. Washington hysteria will continue 
to rule - as in "the Taliban" about to take over Islamabad's nukes and convert 
the US into TalibanUStan. And last but not least, please save the last bowl of 
opium for that oh-so-savvy wild bunch - the warlords.

© Copyright 1999 - 2009 Asia Times Online
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is 
Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot 
of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan 
(Nimble Books, 2009).

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/19-3