[Peace-discuss] Re: Robert Naiman | Stopping Pakistan Drone Strikes

[C. G. Estabrook]

"Are you scared to death yet? Or even better: are you scared enough to give your 
approval to 'whatever it takes' to save us? After all, the president himself 
says that the situation in Pakistan is a 'mortal threat' to the sacred Homeland; 
a view reiterated by his special 'Af-Pak' envoy, Richard Holbrooke, who told 
Congress yesterday ... that 'our most vital national security interests are at 
stake,' in Pakistan. A mortal threat to our most vital interests -- can there be 
a greater, more urgent, more noble casus belli?"


[The drone strikes are neither a mistake nor an accident, but a policy choice by 
the Obama administration, who sneered at the mere "baby steps" the Bush 
administration was taking in killing Pakistanis. They're the way the Obamans 
choose to fight the war.  We need to oppose the policy, not just the tactics. --CGE]

	May 7, 2009
	A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War:
	Rolling Out the Product Again
	By CHRIS FLOYD

     We asked for signs, / And signs were sent. --Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"

I.  We are now in the midst of a full-blown campaign to "roll out the product" 
for a new war: this time, in Pakistan. Anyone who lived through the run-up to 
the invasion of Iraq should be able to read the signs -- anyone, that is, who is 
not blinded by partisan labels, or by the laid-back cool of a media-savvy leader 
far more presentable than his predecessor.

This week brings yet another bumper crop of panic buttons and alarm bells from 
the powers-that-be, with ever-increasing emphasis on the "Taliban kooks with 
Muslim nukes" theme: one more variation on the old "mushroom clouds rising in 
American cities" ploy that has worked like a charm for our militarists lo these 
60 years or more.

Some of the war-pushing powers-that-be are public figures in the Obama 
Administration (including Obama himself, who has dutifully taken on the Bushian 
mantle of Fearmonger-in-Chief), and some of them are shadowy, unnamed eminences 
in the military-security apparat, clearly aiming to act for Obama as those 
daggers of the mind did for Macbeth: "Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going."

The first story to greet America's political class as they sat down to their 
prunes and Post Toasties this morning was a big New York Times spread with one 
loud, clanging message: You cannot defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan without 
going deep into Pakistan.

It seems the Times has discovered an unusually loquacious "Pakistani logistics 
tactician" who for some reason has spent the last six months spilling the beans 
on the Taliban's strategy to the leading newspaper of  the American 
establishment. The anonymous 28-year-old guy from somewhere in Pakistan's tribal 
lands told a harrowing tale of the "workings and ambitions of the Taliban" as 
they prepare to defeat Obama's Afghan surge from their safe havens in Pakistan, 
then seize Islamabad's nuclear arsenal.

What's more, the "logistics tactician" has provided his American enemies with a 
ready-made, pre-positioned "justification" for the mass civilian slaughter that 
will inevitably accompany Obama's surge:

     "He acknowledged that the Americans would have far superior forces and 
power this year, but was confident that the Taliban could turn this advantage on 
its head. 'The Americans cannot take control of the villages,' he said. 'In 
order to expel us they will have to resort to aerial bombing, and then they will 
have more civilian casualties.'"

This is of course the precise "reason" trotted out every time American-led 
occupation forces kill a group of civilians in Afghanistan: the Taliban made us 
do it. This happened just yesterday, in the village of Gerani, where village 
leaders tried to shield children, women and elderly men in housing compounds far 
away from fighting between Taliban forces and Afghan troops with American 
"advisors." But the advisors called in an airstrike that destroyed the 
civilians' safe haven, killing between 70 and 100 innocent people, as two of the 
New York Times' non-stovepipe reporters, Taimoor Shah and Carlotta Gall, report:

     "Mohammad Nieem Qadderdan, the former top official in the district of Bala 
Baluk, said he had seen dozens of bodies when he visited the village of Gerani. 
'These houses that were full of children and women and elders were bombed by 
planes. It is very difficult to say how many were killed because nobody can 
count the number, it is too early,' Mr. Qadderdan, who no longer holds a 
government position, told The A.P. by telephone. 'People are digging through 
rubble with shovels and hands.'"

The outraged and grieving villagers gathered up at least 30 of the slain and 
took them to officials in the provincial capital as proof of the massacre: a 
grisly, desperate measure forced on them by the American's constant denials and 
denigrations of reports of civilian casualties, as we saw last year, when an 
American air assault killed up to 90 civilians in Azizabad.

But now the great and good can turn from this disturbing story to the convenient 
divulgings of the unnamed 28-year-old guy from an unnamed place in Pakistan, and 
see that such slaughters are all just part of the Taliban's fiendish plan. In 
fact, he provides grist for the PR mill of the great imperial blood libel of 
them all: There no "civilians."

     "The tactician says he embeds his men in what he described as friendly 
Afghan villages, where they will spend the next four to six months with the 
residents, who provide the weapons and succor for the missions against American 
and NATO soldiers."

There, you see? Every villager is a two-faced sneak, working to kill Americans. 
  If they die -- then they deserve it. Boy, that makes the prunes and Post 
Toasties a little easier to digest, doesn't it!

But Anonymous Guy is not done toting water for the militarists yet. Not only 
does provide cover for collateral damage, and red-flag the hot-button issues of 
the new roll-out -- Pakistan as the true epicenter of the Good War in 
Afghanistan, and kooks with nukes -- he also praises the effectiveness of their 
most beloved new toy: the robot drones that rain remote-control death on 
Pakistani villages:

     "The one thing that impressed him were the missile strikes by drones — 
virtually the only American military presence felt inside Pakistan. 'The drones 
are very effective,' he said, acknowledging that they had thinned the top 
leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the area. He said 29 of his friends 
had been killed in the strikes."

Of course, they have also killed almost 700 Pakistani civilians (as of last 
month), according to the Pakistani government. But what of that, when the 
remarkably top-heavy leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban has been pruned a 
bit -- at least, according to some anonymous guy from somewhere in Pakistan. 
(Surely no organizations in history have ever had so many "top leaders" as 
America's Terror War enemies, who, according to Washington, have been felled in 
their hundreds over the years in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan.)

In any case, the anonymous guy from somewhere or other could hardly have put the 
militarists' case for war in Pakistan any better even if they had, you know, 
paid him to do it or something.


II.  But the New York Times is only one front in the new campaign. On the same 
day as Anonymous Guy was working his militarist mojo, McClatchy Newspapers fired 
off a resounding fusillade of largely unnamed "experts" from the 
military-security apparat, all of them, remarkably enough, with the same 
message: Pakistan is falling to the Muslim kooks who want them nukes.

It is an astounding performance. The story, by Jonathan Landy, marshall'st a 
multitude of nightmare scenarios now coming true before our very eyes. But this 
is not to say the story is unbalanced in any way: there are two short passages, 
buried in the middle and at the end of the story, that take a different view. 
Such as this one:

     "Many Pakistanis, however, dismiss such warnings as inflated. They think 
that the militants are open to dialogue and political accommodation to end the 
unrest, which many trace to the former military regime's cooperation with the 
U.S. after 9/11."

But this nugget of genuine insight gleaned from, you know, the actual people who 
live in the actual country in question, is swamped by waves of heavy-duty 
doomsaying from anonymous Washington savants. Such as:

     "A growing number of U.S. intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials 
have concluded that there's little hope of preventing nuclear-armed Pakistan 
from disintegrating into fiefdoms controlled by Islamist warlords and 
terrorists, posing a greater threat to the U.S. than Afghanistan's terrorist 
haven did before 9/11.

     "'It's a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution,' 
said a U.S. intelligence official with long experience in Pakistan who requested 
anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly...

     "'Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is 
bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al Qaida sitting in 
two-thirds of the country which the government does not control,' said David 
Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer, a former State Department adviser 
and a counterinsurgency consultant to the Obama administration."

Significantly, one of the few people named in the article is directly connected 
to the White House, giving an official seal of approval to the other, anonymous 
alarmists:

     "The experts McClatchy interviewed said their views aren't a worst case 
scenario but a realistic expectation based on the militants' gains and the 
failure of Pakistan's civilian and military leadership to respond.

     "'The place is beyond redemption,' said a Pentagon adviser who asked not to 
be further identified so he could speak freely. 'I don't see any plausible 
scenario under which the present government or its most likely successor will 
mobilize the economic, political and security resources to push back this rising 
tide of violence.

     "'I think Pakistan is moving toward a situation where the extremists 
control virtually all of the countryside and the government controls only the 
urban centers,' he continued. 'If you look out 10 years, I think the government 
will be overrun by Islamic militants.'"

Are you scared to death yet? Or even better: are you scared enough to give your 
approval to "whatever it takes" to save us? After all, the president himself 
says that the situation in Pakistan is a "mortal threat" to the sacred Homeland; 
a view reiterated by his special "Af-Pak" envoy, Richard Holbrooke, who told 
Congress yesterday (on yet another front in the roll-out campaign) that "our 
most vital national security interests are at stake," in Pakistan. A mortal 
threat to our most vital interests -- can there be a greater, more urgent, more 
noble casus belli?

Again, Pakistanis have a different view of their own country, which is large, 
diverse, cosmopolitan, and made up overwhelmingly of adherents of Sufi Islam, as 
well as non-violent, non-militant Sunnis and Shiites. These ordinary human 
beings enjoy the arts, popular entertainment, sports, technology, eating out, 
running businesses, pursuing scientific research and intellectual studies, 
raising their families. As Ahsan Iqbal, a top aide to opposition leader and 
former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, told McClatchy:

     "'While militants will overrun small pockets, most Pakistanis embrace 
democracy and will resist living under the Taliban's harsh interpretation of 
Islam,' he said.

     "'The psychology, the temperament, the mood of the Pakistani nation does 
not subscribe to these extremist views,' Iqbal said."

But of course, the anonymous unipolar dominationists of the American power 
structure know better:

     "The U.S. intelligence official, however, said that Pakistan's elite, 
dominated since the country's independence in 1947 by politicians, bureaucrats 
and military officers from Punjab, have failed to recognize the seriousness of 
the situation.

     "'The Punjabi elite has already lost control of Pakistan, but neither they 
nor the Obama administration realize that,' the official said. 'Pakistan will be 
an Islamist state — or maybe a collection of four Islamic states, probably 
within a few years. There's no civilian leadership in Islamabad that can stop 
this, and so far, there hasn't been any that's been willing to try.'"

Of course, Islamabad has been carrying out military operations against 
insurgents for many years, losing hundreds of soldiers in the campaigns. But 
this history is being erased and rewritten to accommodate the new narrative: The 
United States will be forced to intervene directly in Pakistan because the 
Pakistanis are too stupid to realize the danger posed by the militants, and too 
weak and cowardly to even try to stop them. The whole damned place was "beyond 
redemption," so we have to step in.

We have been here before, and not so long ago either. The signs are there -- for 
anyone who wants to see them.

Chris Floyd is an American writer and a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. 
His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com