[Peace-discuss] The Democrats' criminal war

[C. G. Estabrook]

[What the US is doing in AfPak constitutes the "supreme international crime," as 
Nuremberg said (i.e., worse than terrorism) -- launching an aggressive war.  Our 
demand should be, "All US troops out of the Middle East" -- from Palestine to 
Pakistan, and from Central Asia to the Horn of Africa.  --CGE]


	Obama risks turning the Taliban into Pakistan's Khmer Rouge
	Unless the US president can break his hardline posture,
	the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan could prove his Vietnam
	Pankaj Mishra guardian.co.uk
	Tuesday 16 June 2009 21.00 BST

Last month Richard Holbrooke, the US state department's special representative, 
met students from Pakistan's north-west tribal areas. They were enraged by drone 
attacks, which – according to David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency adviser to 
General Petraeus – have eliminated only about 14 terrorist leaders while killing 
700 civilians. One young man told Holbrooke that he knew someone killed in a 
Predator drone strike. "You killed 10 members of his family," he said. Another 
claimed that the strikes had unleashed a fresh wave of refugees. "Are many of 
them Taliban?" Holbrooke asked. "We are all Taliban," he replied.

Describing this scene in Time, Joe Klein said he was shocked by the declaration, 
though he recognised it as one "of solidarity, not affiliation". He was also 
bewildered by the "mixed loyalties and deep resentments [that] make Pakistan so 
difficult to handle". One wishes Klein had paused to wonder if people anywhere 
else would wholeheartedly support a foreign power that "collaterally" murders 50 
relatives and friends from the air for every militant killed.

Much has been made of Pakistan's "denial" about the threat posed by the Taliban 
rather than India; correspondingly, western politicians and commentators have 
applauded the Pakistani military operation in Swat valley that has exposed 3 
million people to what Human Rights Watch calls a humanitarian catastrophe. 
Relatively little attention has been given to America's more damaging evasion of 
the fact that most people in Pakistan, a "frontline" country in the war on 
terror, are unsympathetic, if not actively hostile, to it.

Political bitterness rather than racial or religious supremacism fuels this 
variant of anti-Americanism. Twice in three decades the US has enlisted military 
dictators in Pakistan to fight its battles – most damagingly in the cold war 
when, as Barack Obama conceded recently in Cairo, the US heedlessly deployed 
Muslims as proxies against Soviet communism. Many Pakistanis remember how the 
blowback from the CIA's anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan (millions of Afghan 
refugees, a rampant Kalashnikov "culture", and the rise of Islamic 
fundamentalism) ravaged their country, years before it crashed into the US 
itself on 11 September 2001. Pakistanis now accuse the US, again not 
unreasonably, for pursuing its failed war on terror in Afghanistan into 
Pakistan, reinvigorating the extremists it had helped to spawn.

Though beholden to American aid, Pakistan's civilian-military elite has been 
naturally reluctant to fight too hard to redeem the blunders of an overweening 
and unreliable ally; covertly supporting extremist groups, elements in the army 
and intelligence have tried to maintain their room for manoeuvre in both 
Afghanistan and Kashmir. Occasionally, as in Swat and now again in Waziristan, 
intense American pressure yields a military assault. It can even attract a 
degree of public support, as most Pakistanis are appalled by the brutality of 
Talibanised Pashtuns.

But this does not amount to popular endorsement of drone attacks. Last month 
Fareed Zakaria informed Jon Stewart on the Daily Show that Pakistan is emerging 
from its state of denial since his Pakistani friends, who previously opposed the 
drone attacks, now tell him: "You know what? If that's the only thing that will 
work, kill those guys." Some members of Pakistan's tiny elite, where Zakaria's 
native informants come from, may long to exterminate the brutes: they fear, 
often correctly, Islamic extremists as embodying the rage and frustration of the 
country's underprivileged majority. But as the suffering of civilians in Swat 
becomes known, the highly qualified public support for military action will wane 
quickly.

Certainly, claims of success in Swat are premature. The Taliban may vanish in 
order to regroup as they did after their apparently decisive defeat in 
Afghanistan in 2001. Furthermore, the refugee crisis can only strengthen the 
Taliban. Their pied pipers of jihad, nursed on hatred in refugee camps, will 
easily recruit suicide-bombers among the freshly uprooted millions. Pakistan 
will suffer many more attacks of the kind we have seen in recent days.

But all is not lost. The idea that Pakistan, with its ethnically and politically 
diverse population of Punjabis, Sindhis, and Balochs, is ready to surrender to 
fanatics led by Pashtuns is a paranoid fantasy – easily dispelled by the 
briefest scrutiny of structures of religious and political power, and indeed 
recent election results, in any region of Pakistan.

As Mohsin Hamid recently pointed out, Pakistan's apparently failed state is more 
than capable of dealing with violent extremists if it can sort out its mixed 
loyalties. Institutionally distrustful of the US, which recently turned India 
into its main Asian ally with an extravagant nuclear deal, Pakistan has 
continued to incite extremists against the America-backed, pro-India regime in 
Kabul and Indian interests in Kashmir. However, much of the strength of the 
duplicitous intelligence agency, the ISI, derives from its claim to protect what 
even moderate Pakistanis regard as their country's legitimate interests in 
Afghanistan and Kashmir – national interests that, as Obama partly admitted in 
Cairo, America's overriding geopolitical priorities have often rendered illicit, 
driving them underground.

The US has the opportunity to shrink the ISI's malign role and redeem its 
standing among Pakistanis by urging India and Pakistan to a comprehensive 
political solution in Kashmir and by explicitly acknowledging that Pakistan, 
which shares a long border and a large Pashtun population with Afghanistan, will 
never tolerate a hostile ruler in Kabul, especially if backed by India.

Abandoned by their American allies after the anti-Soviet jihad, some of 
Pakistan's megalomaniac generals sought "strategic depth" in Afghanistan against 
India; even their sober successors are unlikely to affect indifference to their 
volatile neighbor. Having grudgingly admitted Iran's influence in Iraq, tThe US 
will eventually have to trust Pakistan to control its proxies in Afghanistan – a 
crucial component of any ­"regional" solution. The US can reasonably expect 
responsible behaviour from Islamabad only if – as with Iran – it treats Pakistan 
as a power with inalienable interests, rather than as a nuclear-armed "rogue" 
state. Obama could then expedite the inevitable task of drawing up a timetable 
for the withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan.

Deprived of their main antagonists, the Taliban are unlikely to collectively 
embrace Sufism. But ending the occupation of Afghanistan would dry up their main 
source of legitimacy and support, and undermine their loose alliance with 
al-Qaida. It is no accident that Afghan Pashtuns have not been implicated in any 
international terrorist conspiracies even as many of them fight Nato troops in 
Afghanistan. The Obama administration should consider the possibility that, as 
Graham Fuller, the CIA's forer station chief in Kabul puts it, few Pashtuns 
"will long maintain a radical and international jihadi perspective once the 
incitement of the US presence is gone."

Obama came to power, however, promising to exert brawn in Afghanistan rather 
than Iraq. Even his harshest Republican critics, including Dick Cheney, have 
applauded his recent military "surge". Admiral Mike Mullen, the US joint chief 
of staff , admitted that intensified action in Afghanistan could push the 
Taliban deeper into Pakistan, further destabilising the country. Whether Obama, 
who is probably aware of the dangers of turning the Taliban into Pakistan's 
Khmer Rouge, can break out of his hardline posture remains to be seen. But it is 
clear that, regardless of what Obama does with healthcare and financial reform, 
the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan will define his presidency just as Vietnam 
tainted Lyndon Johnson's achievement with civil rights.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/16/obama-afghanistan-pakistan-taliban