US lacks guts to tackle Pakistan

War on Terror

19 Jul 2008, NewAgeIslam.Com

US lacks guts to tackle Pakistan

By Premen Addy Hamid Karzai's Government has fired a broadside at the Pakistani Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (taking special care not to bring the largely powerless civilian regime in Islamabad within his sights) in the wake of the bomb blast in front of the Indian Embassy in Kabul. The Afghan President didn't mince his words when he charged that Pakistan had become the global hub of Islamist terrorism, the primary external agent -- in cahoots with the Taliban -- of regional destabilisation and discord. The Bush Administration's relationship with its Pakistani client waxes and wanes, from indispensable member of the coalition of the willing in the war on terror, to a more dubious entity. Pakistani journalist and author Ahmed Rashid, with his extensive knowledge of the Taliban and the politics of Central Asia, has just written an arresting book, Descent into Chaos. It describes in graphic detail the continuing purgatory of Afghanistan, trapped between American confusion and ineptitude and Washington's talismanic ties with Pakistan's military; the military's own cancerous hatred of and paranoia about 'Hindu' India and the unending US quest for Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani Army's delusions are swaddled in the seamless robe of the Great Game, whose players strive mightily for the aphrodisiac of power and influence. America, writes Rashid, had a minimalist agenda for Pakistani democracy, its investment was in the future of the country's favoured Generals. This telling passage from his book sets the scene to an unfolding tragedy: "When Osama bin Laden escaped into FATA in December 2001, the place was so inviting that over the next few years he never strayed far. The seven tribal agencies that make up the Federally Administered Tribal Areas adjoining the North-West Frontier Province became the new base area for Al Qaeda. It was from there that the bomb plots in London, Madrid, Bali, Islamabad, and later Germany and Denmark were planned. While Mullah Omar's command structure in Quetta deliberately did not include Arabs or any non-Afghans, so they would not become a focus for US forces chasing only Al Qaeda, FATA became a multilayered terrorist cake. At its base were Pakistani Pashtun tribesmen, soon to become Taliban in their own right, who provided the hideouts and logistical support. Above them were the Afghan Taliban who settled there after 9/11, followed by militants from Central Asia, Chechnya, Africa, China, and Kashmir, and topped by Arabs who forged a protective ring around bin Laden. FATA became the world's terrorist central." So where are the Anglo-American UN Security Council resolutions admonishing Pakistan and calling for sanctions against its military leaders, those who in their time stole not one but many elections, under whose aegis nuclear secrets were purloined and smuggled through a well-lubricated trans-national network to sensitive points in the globe? Did the great and good in America and Britain call to account those responsible for the hijacking of an Indian Airlines aircraft in December 1990, beard those behind the attack on India's Parliament in December 2001, or interrogate the kidnapper and murderer of the American journalist Daniel Pearl? The culture of impunity, it would appear, rules supreme. The failure of Britain and America to carry the day in the UN Security Council for sanctions against the Mugabe Government in Zimbabwe in the face of Russian and Chinese vetoes were a shock to London and Washington, DC. For Russia the UN was not empowered to interfere in the internal affairs of a member state; China argued that Zimbabwe represented no threat to regional security. Moscow's move was possibly inspired by a calculated British intelligence media leak attributing the death in London of Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian double agent, through polonium poisoning to the Russian state. A week earlier, The Times had published a report, based on information culled from an intelligence source, which claimed that Russia posed a level of threat to British security only below Al Qaeda's. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's one-on-one meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev on the sidelines of the G8 summit was redolent of the chill of a Siberian winter. Prof Robert Skidelsky, author of the masterful study, Keynes and the Ethics of Capitalism, in a Times opinion piece argued that imperial hubris in both countries, incubated over the centuries, had bred misunderstanding and discord. The Russians, emotionally fragile in the wake of the Soviet Union's dissolution , were inclined to see British spies and conspiracies everywhere, while "the British can't get over the feeling that it is their duty to lay down the law to lesser breeds. It is this mixture of Russian cussedness and British condescension that converts spats into more serious disputes". "But," he said, "there is also something else. At some point the Blair-Putin relationship broke down. This is probably because Mr Blair was seen to be President Bush's vassal, and therefore Russia had no incentive to give any special consideration to British interests and wishes. Why talk to the monkey when you can talk to the organ grinder? Britain would get more respect from Russia if it was more independent from the United States. This is a lesson Mr Brown could usefully take away from his tête-à-tête with Mr Medvedev." The Russians play a hard game of chess, having outmanoeuvred America in the contest for oil pipelines from Central Asia to Europe. Historically, they have matched, if not exceeded, the British in guile, ruthlessness and endurance. Winston Churchill saw the Soviet Union's wartime Foreign Minister, Vyachelev Molotov, as a "man of outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness", much in the line of Mazarin, Talleyrand and Metternich. John Foster Dulles, the arch American anti-Communist, wrote: "I have seen in action all the great international statesmen in this century. I have never seen such personal diplomatic skill at so high a degree of perfection as Molotov's." The German interpreter Hilger was witness to Molotov's robust joust with Adolf Hitler in Berlin. As for the closing assault on the forces of Nazi Germany, "The offensive of the Soviet Army... was carried out with remarkable clarity of purpose by the co-ordinated operations of numerous Army groups, united across a theatre of military operations extending for a thousand kilometres, according to a single strategic plan and a single strategic will, that of the Supreme C-in-C, that of the great Stalin." (Evan Mawdsley's Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War 1941-1945). Such national resolve can be an immovable object or an irresistible force. Or both. Mr Mugabe and Zimbabwe are small potatoes. Source: http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=EDITS&file_name=edit3%2Etxt&counter_img=3