[Peace-discuss] The Myth of Talibanistan

Tue May 5 02:46:04 CDT 2009

Carl especially will appreciate this, from The Wisdom Fund.

*THE WISDOM FUND
http://www.twf.org*

May 1, 2009
Asia Times

*The Myth of Talibanistan*
By Pepe Escobar

[Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is
Dissolving into Liquid War, and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during
the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan.]

Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of
Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack
Obama administration and United States corporate media - from Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton to The New York Times. Even British Prime Minister
Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat
to the security of Britain.

But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won't
fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.

Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At
least 55% of Pakistan's 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There's
no evidence they are about to embrace Talibanistan; they are essentially
Shi'ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis - faithful
followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali
Zardari's centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People's Party.
Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces - amounting to 85% of
Pakistan's population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class
- are an infinitesimal minority.

The Pakistan-based Taliban - subdivided in roughly three major groups,
amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator
drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles - are concentrated in
the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province
(NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.

To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional
550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world,
which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous
proposition.

Moreover, there's no evidence the Taliban, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan,
have any capability to hit a target outside of "Af-Pak"(Afghanistan and
Pakistan). That's mythical al-Qaeda's privileged territory. As for the
nuclear hysteria of the Taliban being able to crack the Pakistani army codes
for the country's nuclear arsenal (most of the Taliban, by the way, are
semi-literate), even Obama, at his 100-day news conference, stressed the
nuclear arsenal was safe.

Of course, there's a smatter of junior Pashtun army officers who sympathize
with the Taliban - as well as significant sections of the powerful
Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But the military institution itself is
backed by none other than the American army - with which it has been closely
intertwined since the 1970s. Zardari would be a fool to unleash a mass
killing of Pakistani Pashtuns; on the contrary, Pashtuns can be very useful
for Islamabad's own designs.

Zardari's government this week had to send in troops and the air force to
deal with the Buner problem, in the Malakand district of NWFP, which shares
a border with Kunar province in Afghanistan and thus is relatively close to
US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. They are fighting
less than 500 members of the Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan (TTP). But for the
Pakistani army, the possibility of the area joining Talibanistan is a great
asset - because this skyrockets Pakistani control of Pashtun southern
Afghanistan, ever in accordance to the eternal "strategic depth" doctrine
prevailing in Islamabad.

Bring me the head of Baitullah Mehsud

So if Islamabad is not burning tomorrow, why the hysteria? There are several
reasons. To start with, what Washington - now under Obama's "Af-Pak"
strategy - simply cannot stomach is real democracy and a true civilian
government in Islamabad; these would be much more than a threat to "US
interests" than the Taliban, whom the Bill Clinton administration was
happily wining and dining in the late 1990s.

What Washington may certainly relish is yet another military coup - and
sources tell Asia Times Online that former dictator General Pervez Musharraf
(Busharraf as he was derisively referred to) is active behind the hysteria
scene.

It's crucial to remember that every military coup in Pakistan has been
conducted by the army chief of staff. So the man of the hour - and the next
few hours, days and months - is discreet General Ashfaq Kiani, Benazir's
former army secretary. He is very cozy with US military chief Admiral Mike
Mullen, and definitely not a Taliban-hugger.

Moreover, there are canyons of the Pakistani military/security bureaucracy
who would love nothing better than to extract even more US dollars from
Washington to fight the Pashtun neo-Taliban that they are simultaneously
arming to fight the Americans and NATO. It works. Washington is now under a
counter-insurgency craze, with the Pentagon eager to teach such tactics to
every Pakistani officer in sight.

What is never mentioned by US corporate media is the tremendous social
problems Pakistan has to deal with because of the mess in the tribal areas.
Islamabad believes that between the Federally Administered Tribal Areas
(FATA) and NWFP, at least 1 million people are now displaced (not to mention
badly in need of food aid). FATA's population is around 3.5 million -
overwhelmingly poor Pashtun peasants. And obviously war in FATA translates
into insecurity and paranoia in the fabled capital of NWFP, Peshawar.

The myth of Talibanistan anyway is just a diversion, a cog in the
slow-moving regional big wheel - which in itself is part of the new great
game in Eurasia.

During a first stage - let's call it the branding of evil - Washington
think-tanks and corporate media hammered non-stop on the "threat of
al-Qaeda" to Pakistan and the US. FATA was branded as terrorist central -
the most dangerous place in the world where "the terrorists" and an army of
suicide bombers were trained and unleashed into Afghanistan to kill the
"liberators" of US/NATO.

In the second stage, the new Obama administration accelerated the Predator
"hell from above" drone war over Pashtun peasants. Now comes the stage where
the soon over 100,000-strong US/NATO troops are depicted as the true
liberators of the poor in Af-Pak (and not the "evil" Taliban) - an essential
ploy in the new narrative to legitimize Obama's Af-Pak surge.

For all pieces to fall into place, a new uber-bogeyman is needed. And he is
TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud, who, curiously, had never been hit by even a
fake US drone until, in early March, he made official his allegiance to
historic Taliban leader Mullah Omar, "The Shadow" himself, who is said to
live undisturbed somewhere around Quetta, in Pakistani Balochistan.

Now there's a US$5 million price on Baitullah's head. The Predators have
duly hit the Mehsud family's South Waziristan bases. But - curioser and
curioser - not once but twice, the ISI forwarded a detailed dossier of
Baitullah's location directly to its cousin, the Central Intelligence
Agency. But there was no drone hit.

And maybe there won't be - especially now that a bewildered Zardari
government is starting to consider that the previous uber-bogeyman, a
certain Osama bin Laden, is no more than a ghost. Drones can incinerate any
single Pashtun wedding in sight. But international bogeymen of mystery -
Osama, Baitullah, Mullah Omar - star players in the new OCO (overseas
contingency operations), formerly GWOT ("global war on terror"), of course
deserve star treatment.

MORE at http://www.twf.org/News/Y2009/0328-ObamasWar.html
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