Pakistan, 2008: the beckoning abyss

David Seaton's News Links

In common speech, "nightmarish" often means to clearly see what is tragic and dreaded coming and not be able to do anything stop it or to even soften its effects. In nightmares the dreamer sees the unnameable approach, rustling and twittering in the dark of bedroom night and tries to escape, dragging impossibly leaden feet. The relentless pull of gravity toward the object of dread is the stuff of nightmares.

As we enter the inauspicious year of 2008 the situation in Pakistan could be fairly called "nightmarish". We are being daily drawn deeper into a cauldron of molten misery and an abattoir of hemorrhaging violence: a civil war in a country where there are atom bombs and where the men who broke the skyline of New York live and work.

Benazir Bhutto's death, in itself, is not in any way the end of the world. Corrupt and intriguing, she was no Joan of Arc... or the real solution to anything. What is significant about her assassination is the will to chaos that it manifests and the casual ease with which it was carried out. That will to chaos and its clockwork precision of execution is certainly not going to stop at eliminating one politician. In the butchering of Benazir Bhutto we begin to see the tragic and futile waste of lives, political capital and military power of invading and occupying Iraq. Now when they might be needed desperately, that capital, those lives, that power and the will to use them may no longer be at hand.

Because at some point a decision is going to have to be taken... Pakistan with its atomic bombs, home away from home for Osama bin Laden, cannot be allowed to turn into a "failed state"... I use the passive tense "cannot be allowed", but somebody is finally going to have to bell the cat and that cannot be done in the passive tense. If the situation continues to deteriorate, and who imagines it won't, "surgical strikes" and "special forces" are not going to be enough, it would require a multinational force of hundreds of thousands of men to take, occupy and literally smother anarchy and rebuild a collapsed state of many millions of citizens. This would surely require a return to universal military service in both the USA and NATO in order to pull off. At this point I feel I am writing political fiction. After Iraq an effort of such magnitude is unthinkable.

As I write these words, I can feel how even the language necessary to describe the action which may finally be inevitable, may have become impossible to use through the neocon-speak travesty of Iraq. All the sophistries and bad faith used to needlessly invade Iraq and to unjustifiably try to start a war with Iran have emptied the credibility from American speech so that every statement coming from Washington rings with the sinister cynicism of "arbeit macht frei". If someday 9-11 becomes little more than a curious footnote to much greater tragedies, the men and women who gutted the language and credibility of power will be responsible for every drop of blood shed. DS

Al-Qaeda aims at Pakistan's heart - Asia Times
Abstract: Following the killing of Bhutto - considered by her al-Qaeda killers to be an "American asset" - al-Qaeda can be expected to launch more suicide attackers on those considered a part of the United States plan to establish a broad coalition government comprising secular and liberal elements that would change the political and social dynamics of the country and the region. At stake is the very soul of the country and how it should be governed. On the one side are US-backed President Pervez Musharraf and political parties such as Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (now headed by her 19-year-old son Bilawal) and Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League. Against them are al-Qaeda ideologues such as Egyptian scholar Sheikh Essa, who are determined to stamp their vision on the country and its neighbor, Afghanistan. Prior to 2003, the entire al-Qaeda camp in the North Waziristan and South Waziristan tribal areas of Pakistan was convinced that its battle should be fought in Afghanistan against the foreign troops there, and not in Pakistan against its Muslim army. That stance was changed by Sheikh Essa, who had taken up residence in the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan, where his sermons raised armies of takfiris (those who consider all non-practicing Muslims to be infidels). He was convinced that unless Pakistan became the Taliban's (and al-Qaeda's) strategic depth, the war in Afghanistan could not be won. In a matter of a few years, his ideology has taken hold and all perceived American allies in Pakistan have become prime targets. Local adherents of the takfiri ideology, like Sadiq Noor and Abdul Khaliq, have grown strong and spread the word in North Waziristan. Former members of jihadi outfits such as Jaish-i-Mohammed, Laskhar-i-Toiba and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi have gathered in North Waziristan and declared Sheikh Essa their ideologue. This is the beginning of the new world of takfiriat, reborn in North Waziristan many decades after having first emerged in Egypt in the late 1960s. On the advice of Sheikh Essa, militants have tried several times to assassinate Musharraf, launched attacks on the Pakistani military, and then declared Bhutto a target. This nest of takfiris and their intrigues was on the radar of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the day after Bhutto's killing Sheikh Essa was targeted by CIA Predator drones in his home in North Waziristan. According to Asia Times Online contacts, he survived, but was seriously wounded. Sheikh Essa had only recently recovered from a stroke which had left him bedridden. READ IT ALL

Musharraf... another spin bites the dust

David Seaton's News Links
I wrote about Pakistan recently. The drift of what I wrote is that Pakistan, not Iran, is where danger's real elite meet to eat.

Iran has a stable, if unattractive, "faith-based" leadership. Pakistan is little more than an army by all reliable accounts and they have the atomic bomb... and Osama lives there... Certainly it would be easier for Osama to lay his hands on a bomb in a Sunni country, which actually has several and where he lives than in a faraway Shiite country which doesn't have any. However since Pakistan doesn't pose any threat to Israel, they are a "partner in the war on terrorism".

Like everything else he touches Pakistan looks about to explode in Bush's face too. DS

Our friend Pervez Musharraf

General Pervez Musharraf

David Seaton's News Links
The article by Arnaud de Borchgrave, which I have "abstracted" with a heavy hand, should be read in its entirety.

Nobody has had to walk the razor's edge after 9-11 more than Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf. He has had precious little room to maneuver between the feelings of his people (and his intelligence service) and Bush's brutal "for us or against us". As the Spanish say, he has managed "to swim and to keep his clothes dry at the same time." By doing so he has probably saved his country a world of grief.

As America fails in Iraq, Musharraf is a reliable weather vane as to how leaders all over the world will have to "make other arrangements". DS

De Borchgrave: How much longer in Afghanistan? - United Press International
Abstract: The way Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf reads the geopolitical tea leaves in the Middle East and South Asia is not to our liking, but hardly surprising. Political science 101 shows a U.S. Congress, controlled by the Democrats, not prepared to see the Iraq conflict through to victory -- i.e., a free democratic country able to sustain and defend itself without the U.S. military.(...) Mohammad Aurakzai, the Musharraf-appointed governor of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier province, described the Taliban as waging "a war of liberation" against foreign troops occupying Afghanistan. Local populations, he added, are "increasingly supporting Taliban."(...) public and political support for a close U.S.-Pakistan partnership is rapidly evaporating in a Muslim country with the world's second largest Muslim population -- and a nuclear arsenal. Pakistani extremists are making their views known with suicide bombings in major cities, including Islamabad, and rocket and mortar attacks on mosques. By Musharraf's own reckoning, there are about 1.6 million people willing to push extremist agendas through acts of violence -- or one percent of the population.(...) In his testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Anthony H. Cordesman said, "No one can return from visiting the front in Afghanistan without realizing there is a very real risk that the U.S. and NATO could lose their war with al-Qaida, the Taliban and the other Islamist movements fighting the Afghan government. We are still winning a tactically, but we may well be losing strategically." Cordesman, the Center for Strategic and International Studies' strategic thinker, added, "Winning will take more resources, more forces, more patience and at least five to 10 more years of persistent effort." In the light of the Congressional debates over Iraq, and the reticence of America's NATO allies to provide more troops for Afghanistan, Musharraf and his ISI analysts have concluded the West's will to win won't last the required five-to-10 years. Hence, the Pakistani leader's belief, denials notwithstanding, that a "moderate" Taliban regime in Kabul is a safer strategic bet. READ IT ALL

Bin Laden isn't back, he never left

David Seaton's News Links
The article below doesn't really touch on the center of the question of why Al Qaeda is so dangerous. Al Qaeda exists because of a political failure that goes back many years. A political failure born of contempt for a stubborn culture's refusal to bend its neck to "reality". At the heart of the GWOT is a rebellion of the most proactive, hard core and daring of the Muslim world against Western domination of their space. Once that political failure connects with a plan to attack it, organizations will spring up spontaneously to continue that attack.

Religion in itself is not really the driving force here, but rather serves as the ideological adhesive to articulate a cultural rebellion that cuts across nationalities and ethnic groups and welds them into a force for violent change. Osama's Islam replaces Marxist-Leninism and nationalism, all of which have failed to free Muslim countries from their perceived oppression. Tied to the newest technologies the ancient concept of the Muslim Umma is proving more potent than any imported ideology ever was.

I agree with Harvard professor, Niall Ferguson, who thinks that Osama Bin Laden is in reality more a "Leninist" than a religious leader. Just as Lenin was first a revolutionary and second a Marxist. Bin Laden's Islam structures his proud rebelliousness. Bin Laden shares with Lenin the rather unique ability to see revolutionary possibilities where others see only backward and illiterate masses and then to craft an organization and an ideology to fit that vision... and he also shares Lenin's "just do it" insistence on action instead of endless talk. DS

Remember Al Qaeda? They're baaack - Los Angeles Times
Abstract: Just last month, this alarming development produced a dramatic reversal in the Bush administration's public assessment of the Al Qaeda threat. In contrast to long-standing White House claims, the annual threat assessment presented by outgoing National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence painted a disquieting picture of a highly resilient terrorist movement that, he said, is cultivating stronger operational connections to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Al Qaeda's stunning resurrection, before the very eyes of American military forces stationed across the border in southern Afghanistan, begs the question of how the most powerful country in the world can launch a six-year, no-holds-barred, global war on terrorism — at great cost to its pocketbook and international standing — only to find the main target of these Herculean efforts still alive and kicking. In retrospect, it appears that Iraq blinded us to the possibility of an Al Qaeda renaissance. The United States' entanglement there has consumed the attention and resources of our country's military and intelligence communities — at precisely the time that Osama bin Laden and other senior Al Qaeda commanders were in their most desperate straits and stood to benefit most from this distraction. What's more, even as we took solace in the president's argument that we were "fighting terrorists over there, so that we don't have to fight them here," Al Qaeda was regrouping. Pakistan is both the problem and the solution to the most salient terrorist threat still directed against us. Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies could not function without the passive connivance of Pakistani authorities. Moreover, agreements concluded over the past two years between President Pervez Musharraf and the restive tribes along the Afghan border have assured Al Qaeda the noninterference with its activities that enables it to thrive. At the same time, the pivotal role played by Pakistan in the disruption of major attacks and the arrests of low-level plotters shows how dependent the U.S. remains on even this partial cooperation. READ IT ALL