Has the U.S. Invasion of Pakistan Begun?

By Tariq Ali, Tomdispatch.com. Posted September 18, 2008.

The Bush administration in its waning months seems intent on a slo-mo
launching of a third war in the border regions of Pakistan.

The decision to make public a presidential order of last July
authorizing American strikes inside Pakistan without seeking the
approval of the Pakistani government ends a long debate within, and on
the periphery of, the Bush administration. Senator Barack Obama, aware
of this ongoing debate during his own long battle with Hillary
Clinton, tried to outflank her by supporting a policy of U.S. strikes
into Pakistan. Senator John McCain and Vice Presidential candidate
Sarah Palin have now echoed this view and so it has become, by
consensus, official U.S. policy.

Its effects on Pakistan could be catastrophic, creating a severe
crisis within the army and in the country at large. The overwhelming
majority of Pakistanis are opposed to the U.S. presence in the region,
viewing it as the most serious threat to peace.

Why, then, has the U.S. decided to destabilize a crucial ally? Within
Pakistan, some analysts argue that this is a carefully coordinated
move to weaken the Pakistani state yet further by creating a crisis
that extends way beyond the badlands on the frontier with Afghanistan.
Its ultimate aim, they claim, would be the extraction of the Pakistani
military's nuclear fangs. If this were the case, it would imply that
Washington was indeed determined to break up the Pakistani state,
since the country would very simply not survive a disaster on that
scale.

In my view, however, the expansion of the war relates far more to the
Bush administration's disastrous occupation in Afghanistan. It is
hardly a secret that the regime of President Hamid Karzai is becoming
more isolated with each passing day, as Taliban guerrillas move ever
closer to Kabul.

When in doubt, escalate the war is an old imperial motto. The strikes
against Pakistan represent -- like the decisions of President Richard
Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to bomb and
then invade Cambodia (acts that, in the end, empowered Pol Pot and his
monsters) -- a desperate bid to salvage a war that was never good, but
has now gone badly wrong.

It is true that those resisting the NATO occupation cross the
Pakistan-Afghan border with ease. However, the U.S. has often engaged
in quiet negotiations with them. Several feelers have been put out to
the Taliban in Pakistan, while U.S. intelligence experts regularly
check into the Serena Hotel in Swat to discuss possibilities with
Mullah Fazlullah, a local pro-Taliban leader. The same is true inside
Afghanistan.

After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a whole layer of the
Taliban's middle-level leadership crossed the border into Pakistan to
regroup and plan for what lay ahead. By 2003, their guerrilla factions
were starting to harass the occupying forces in Afghanistan and,
during 2004, they began to be joined by a new generation of local
recruits, by no means all jihadists, who were being radicalized by the
occupation itself.

Though, in the world of the Western media, the Taliban has been
entirely conflated with al-Qaeda, most of their supporters are, in
fact, driven by quite local concerns. If NATO and the U.S. were to
leave Afghanistan, their political evolution would most likely
parallel that of Pakistan's domesticated Islamists.

The neo-Taliban now control at least twenty Afghan districts in
Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan provinces. It is hardly a secret that
many officials in these zones are closet supporters of the guerrilla
fighters. Though often characterized as a rural jacquerie they have
won significant support in southern towns and they even led a
Tet-style offensive in Kandahar in 2006. Elsewhere, mullahs who had
initially supported President Karzai's allies are now railing against
the foreigners and the government in Kabul. For the first time, calls
for jihad against the occupation are even being heard in the
non-Pashtun northeast border provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan.

The neo-Taliban have said that they will not join any government until
"the foreigners" have left their country, which raises the question of
the strategic aims of the United States. Is it the case, as NATO
Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer suggested to an audience at
the Brookings Institution earlier this year, that the war in
Afghanistan has little to do with spreading good governance in
Afghanistan or even destroying the remnants of al-Qaeda? Is it part of
a master plan, as outlined by a strategist in NATO Review in the
Winter of 2005, to expand the focus of NATO from the Euro-Atlantic
zone, because "in the 21st century NATO must become an alliance
designed to project systemic stability beyond its borders"?

As that strategist went on to write:

"The centre of gravity of power on this planet is moving inexorably
eastward. As it does, the nature of power itself is changing. The
Asia-Pacific region brings much that is dynamic and positive to this
world, but as yet the rapid change therein is neither stable nor
embedded in stable institutions. Until this is achieved, it is the
strategic responsibility of Europeans and North Americans, and the
institutions they have built, to lead the way [S]ecurity effectiveness
in such a world is impossible without both legitimacy and capability."

Such a strategy implies a permanent military presence on the borders
of both China and Iran. Given that this is unacceptable to most
Pakistanis and Afghans, it will only create a state of permanent
mayhem in the region, resulting in ever more violence and terror, as
well as heightened support for jihadi extremism, which, in turn, will
but further stretch an already over-extended empire.

Globalizers often speak as though U.S. hegemony and the spread of
capitalism were the same thing. This was certainly the case during the
Cold War, but the twin aims of yesteryear now stand in something
closer to an inverse relationship. For, in certain ways, it is the
very spread of capitalism that is gradually eroding U.S. hegemony in
the world. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's triumph in Georgia
was a dramatic signal of this fact. The American push into the Greater
Middle East in recent years, designed to demonstrate Washington's
primacy over the Eurasian powers, has descended into remarkable chaos,
necessitating support from the very powers it was meant to put on
notice.

Pakistan's new, indirectly elected President, Asif Zardari, the
husband of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto and a Pakistani "godfather"
of the first order, indicated his support for U.S. strategy by
inviting Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai to attend his inauguration, the
only foreign leader to do so. Twinning himself with a discredited
satrap in Kabul may have impressed some in Washington, but it only
further decreased support for the widower Bhutto in his own country.

The key in Pakistan, as always, is the army. If the already heightened
U.S. raids inside the country continue to escalate, the much-vaunted
unity of the military High Command might come under real strain. At a
meeting of corps commanders in Rawalpindi on September 12th, Pakistani
Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani received unanimous support for
his relatively mild public denunciation of the recent U.S. strikes
inside Pakistan in which he said the country's borders and sovereignty
would be defended "at all cost."

Saying, however, that the Army will safeguard the country's
sovereignty is different from doing so in practice. This is the heart
of the contradiction. Perhaps the attacks will cease on November 4th.
Perhaps pigs (with or without lipstick) will fly. What is really
required in the region is an American/NATO exit strategy from
Afghanistan, which should entail a regional solution involving
Pakistan, Iran, India, and Russia. These four states could guarantee a
national government and massive social reconstruction in that country.
No matter what, NATO and the Americans have failed abysmally.

See more stories tagged with: taliban, u.s., afghanistan, pakistan

Tariq Ali, writer, journalist, filmmaker, contributes regularly to a
range of publications including the Guardian, the Nation, and the
London Review of Books. His most recent book, just published, is The
Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (Scribner, 2008).
In a two-part video, released by TomDispatch.com, he offers critical
commentary on Barack Obama's plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan, as
well as on the tangled U.S.-Pakistani relationship.