Foreign Policy In Focus

After a 10-day blockade, the Torkham border crossing to Afghanistan in the Khyber Pass was reopened by Pakistan. It had, of course, been closed after a U.S. helicopter gunship mistakenly killed three Pakistani troops in a raid for which U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson apologized and called a "tragic accident."

Washington must have breathed a sigh of relief not only because it can resume its operation, but because the situation had become embarrassing. At IPS News Gareth Porter had painted this picture on Friday: "Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported Friday that 6,500 NATO vehicles are backed up along the entire 1,500 km route from the port of Karachi to the Khyber Pass."

The convoys rolling again is, in fact, an oopportunity missed. Porter also noted that the halt in NATO convoys had momentarily "brought an end to the unilateral attacks in Pakistan pushed by Gen. David Petraeus and forced Washington to make a new accommodation." Furthermore, it might have made it "impossible for Petraeus to make the argument in the future that the United States can succeed in Afghanistan, given the refusal of Pakistan to budge on the issue." [Emphasis added.] 

You've heard the vaguely Eastern expression "Within crisis lies opportunity." In this case, within chagrin would have lied opportunity. In its refusal to uncategorically go after insurgents within its borders (which it engages less as if they were a threat than a chance to hone the fighting skills of both its army and the Taliban), Pakistan might seem to be an endless source of headeaches to Washington.

But, if, along with refusing to commit itself wholeheartedly to eliminating the Palistani Taliban, Pakistan had kept the border closed, the case could have been made that Pakistan not only seeks no help with its internal security but in shoring up Afghanistan as a bulwark against India. The United States could then have begun in earnest to back away from the crime scene that has become Afghanistan.

The New York Times reports today:

Dozens of tankers carrying fuel to Afghanistan for NATO troops were torched near Quetta [capital of the southern province of Balochistan and base of the Quetta Shura Taliban -- RW] on Wednesday, the third major attack on supplies since Pakistan closed one border crossing to Afghanistan a week ago and the first at the only checkpoint that remained open. . . . That crossing was closed last week in protest over NATO helicopter strikes against a mountainous border post at Kurram manned by Pakistani paramilitary soldiers. . . . Pakistan was demanding an apology from NATO for the helicopter attacks, but NATO was only willing to offer regrets, the newspaper said.

Meanwhile, a Pakistani newspaper, the Nation, represented the views of those who expected a stronger response on the part of Pakistan to what it called "effectively an act of naked aggression" on the part of the United States and NATO. 

It is becoming pathetic to see the Pakistani state whimpering its protests against the spiralling aggression against its territory and people by NATO and the US. . . . Pakistani security forces blocked only one . . . of two vital NATO supply routes -- a mere symbolism rather than an actual act of reciprocal hostility. Even worse was President Zardari's request to the CIA Chief not to breach Pakistan's sovereignty. He should have refused to meet the CIA Chief. . . .

At this time the nation has a right to ask why we are accumulating such expensive and state of the art weaponry and why we are maintaining such a large military . . . if this military machine cannot protect its people or the country's borders?

The Nation's editorial writer isn't the only one advocating a military response. The Washington Post writes (thanks to Bernhard of the late, essential Moon of Alabama for bringing it to my attention):

Pakistan's punishment of NATO [notwithstanding] its resistance to a more muscular U.S. campaign in North Waziristan, where the Haqqani faction is based, is unacceptable. The Obama administration has repeatedly pressed the Pakistani military to act against the Haqqani and al-Qaeda sanctuaries -- and the military has just as often refused, arguing that its forces are stretched too thin by other campaigns and by the need to respond to massive flooding. These explanations have some substance. But if Pakistan is really unable to tackle the sanctuaries, it cannot be allowed to prevent the United States and its allies from doing so. . . . The administration. . . . must insist on a robust military campaign in North Waziristan -- if not by Pakistani forces, then by the United States.

Which is exactly what the Nation fears.

If the Pakistani rulers continue to give this "unable or unwilling signal" now, it will encourage the US to go to the next level of aggression -- that is sending in ground troops into Pakistan. That will cause even greater instability in the country and lead the US to push the argument of Pakistan being "unable to" protect its nuclear assets to the international community [enabling] the US to get control of these assets.

Pakistan seems to be in a double bind: Resist the United States and NATO and open the door to loss of your nukes; cooperate and suffer the same results.

"As the United States and China become great power rivals, the direction in which India tilts could determine the course of geopolitics in Eurasia in the 21st century," writes renowned journalist Robert Kaplan in a paper titled South Asia's Geography of Conflict. It was commissioned by the Center for a New American Security, for which he serves as a senior fellow. CNAS, of course, is known for its advocacy of COIN, the "counterinsurgency" or ostensible nation-building strategy followed by the United States in Afghanistan. Kaplan continues.

But even as the Indian political class understands at a very intimate level America's own historical and geo­graphical situation, the American political class has no such understanding of India's.

Kaplan then details how critical geography has been in determining the course of history for India, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan. As a result . . .

Only in the Western view is Afghanistan part of Central Asia; to Indians it is very much part of the subcontinent. Afghanistan's geography makes it central not only as a principal invasion route into India for terror­ists in our day as for armies in days past, but also as a strategically vital rear base for . . .

. . . Pakistan, which . . .

. . . from the historical perspective of India . . . constitutes much more than a nuclear-armed adversary, a state sponsor of terrorism and a large, conventional army breathing down its neck on the border. [In fact, its location makes it] the very geographical and national embodiment of all the Muslim invasions that have swept down into India throughout its history.

Worse, according to Kaplan . . .

. . . an Afghanistan that falls under Taliban sway. . . . would be, in effect, a greater Pakistan, giving Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) the ability to create a clandestine empire composed of the likes of Jallaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Lashkar-e-Taiba. . . .

The quickest way to undermine U.S.-India relations is for the United States to withdraw precipitously from Afghanistan. [It] would sig­nal to Indian policy elites that the United States is surely a declining power on which they cannot depend. Detente with China might then seem to be in India's interest. . . . Put simply, if the United States deserts Afghanistan, it deserts India.

Kaplan's use of the word "deserts" may confirm your worst suspicions about this "ex-travel writer who has been transformed into a geo-political thinker and amateur imperialist," as respected libertarian commentator Leon Hadar once called him. After all, in 2006 Kaplan wrote, "I was once a supporter of the invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein. . . . I cannot disavow my earlier support, because it was also based on firsthand experiences in Iraq. To know a totalitarian regime abstractly is different from knowing it intimately." If he can't be blamed for seeking to bring down Saddam, he and others like him can be for their failure to understand that, to the Bush administration, that was just a pretext to assert its wider Middle-East agenda.

The reader, then, can't be faulted for his or her concern that, for his part, Kaplan is using the geography and history of the Asian subcontinent as a justification for the United States to remain in Afghanistan. In fact, though, he doesn't argue for a particular course of action. Instead, he writes:

I do not suggest that we should commit so much money and national treasure to Afghanistan merely for the sake of impressing India. But I am suggesting that the deleterious effect on U.S.-India bilateral relations of giving up on Afghanistan should be part of our national debate on the war effort there, for at the moment it is not.

One would like to think that a solution exists which doesn't require the presence of our military in Afghanistan. Ideally, too, it would include discontinuing, rather than compounding, U.S. triangulation (or a zero-sum game -- take your pick of clichés) with India and China.

Though the New York Times is a valuable source of information, its tone and content sometimes betray its mainstream liberal bias to an embarrassing degree. This Monday’s front-page piece, titled “Pakistan’s Elite Pay Few Taxes, Widening Gap” well illustrates the point.

Published in sync with Hillary Clinton’s visit to Pakistan, the report says that the absence of an equitable tax system is helping to “[create] conditions that have helped spread an insurgency that is tormenting the country and complicating American policy in the region.”

Tongue-clucking about Pakistan’s failure to do its part in America’s war, it describes “a sorry performance for a country that is among the largest recipients of American aid, payments of billions of dollars that prop up the country’s finances and are meant to help its leaders fight the insurgency.”

Nowhere in the article, however, does the Times offer any evidence, statements of fact, expert commentary, or testimony from ordinary Pakistanis to substantiate its claim that its tax policy has “created the conditions” for the insurgency.

It is doubtless true that inequality is rampant in Pakistan, and it is equally true that its ruling elite is corrupt, parasitic, and stunningly myopic. But that is not unusual in a poor country, and it does not explain the rapid rise of the blistering Pakistani Taliban insurgency.

A more methodical tax collection effort would certainly bolster state revenue, but most uncollected taxes would be drawn from major cities like Karachi, which lies far to the south, and from the playgrounds of the rich that pepper Islamabad, the country’s capital.

The insurgency, on the other hand, is burgeoning in the North Western Frontier Province that lies north and borders Afghanistan. The government exercises little administrative control there because of the fierce Pashtun tribalism that prevails on both sides of the border. That has been the case since the country’s founding more than sixty years ago.

So how could a long history of unfair wealth distribution explain an insurgency that has sprung up only recently? If mere poverty were a kindle for political violence, wouldn’t the populations of, say, Bangladesh or North Korea be engaged in mass revolt? And if taxation policies benefiting the rich were responsible for the violence, shouldn’t America have been in the throes of an insurgency after G.W. Bush enacted massive tax cuts for the country’s richest citizens?

To find the real catalyst for the insurgency, the Times ought to have looked a little closer to home. Before the United States launched its invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistani extremists were either working with the state or lying low. Indeed, it is only very recently—when the U.S. woke up from its neoconservative-induced coma in Iraq and shifted focus back to Afghanistan—that Pakistani cities, mosques, shrines, government centers, and military installations have regularly become scenes of bloody militant attacks.

Though the Pakistani Taliban have certainly exploited the poverty of the rural masses, their rallying cry has not exactly echoed the slogan of “no taxation without representation”; it has instead homed in on the Pakistan’s support for the U.S. led war along the “Af-Pak” border. Its bloodiest assaults, including the cowardly massacres at an Ahmadi mosque and a Sufi shrine, came only after Pakistan launched a 2009 summer offensive in parts of the NWFP.

Of course, the American-led war in Afghanistan is not the only reason for the insurgency, even though the Pakistani press, reflecting the impotence of the people, has heaped all blame on America. The Pakistani elites have themselves been playing a cynical and myopic double-game with militants, hoping to leverage ties with extremists such as the local Haqqani network and even the Afghan Taliban to shape Afghanistan once the United States exits the stage. According to one recent report, the ties are even more extensive than previously believed.

The Pakistani military, blind to the pernicious effects of empowering illiterate and backward Pahstun tribal elements who imagine themselves to be pious Muslims, thinks it can harness the extremists’ violence against Indian interests in Afghanistan—even though these Pakistani “Islamists” have so far succeeded only in killing Muslim civilians and Pakistani soldiers at an unprecedented pace.

The Times’ fixation on Pakistan’s tax policies is curiously off the mark, blaming Pakistan for the insurgency without pointing to either of the actual reasons to blame. It is the presence of thousands of American troops in neighboring Afghanistan and the Pakistani state’s tacit support for extremism, not an absence of tax collectors, that is most responsible for kindling the flames of the insurgency.

"Pakistani authorities now believe a dangerous new militant group [the Ghazi Force], out to avenge a deadly army assault on a mosque in Islamabad three years ago, has carried out several major bombings in the capital previously blamed on the Taliban," reports Kathy Gannon for the Associated Press.

"The emergence of the Ghazi Force was part of the outrage among many deeply religious Pakistani Muslims over the July 2007 attack by security forces against the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, a stronghold of Islamic militants. … The new group is made up of relatives of students who died in the Red Mosque assault. It is named after the students' leader, Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who was also killed."

Last June I hosted a FireDogLake book salon for Nicholas Schmidle, the author of To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan. Before the attack, he visited Lal Masjid and interviewed Ghazi, who, along with his brother, inherited its leadership from his father, who was assassinated there. Of the three only Ghazi's brother, who, you may recall, escaped dressed as a woman in a burqua, was spared that fate. (Later caught, he was recently released from prison. Guess Pakistan's prison system is still a swinging door for jihadis.) The first mosque built in Islamabad, Lal Masjid once served an exclusive neighborhood of Islamabad.

Ghazi impressed Schmidle with his genial nature -- in appearance, he reminded the author of Jerry Garcia! Gannon again:

A former senior official [said] that the police wanted to storm the mosque and end the siege at its outset [and] send the students home . . . until tempers cooled. President Gen. Pervez Musharraf refused, the official said, even though police knew that members of [an al-Qaida] affiliate organization . . . were bringing in weapons for the students. Musharraf relented and ordered the assault after militants kidnapped several Chinese nationals running a massage parlor in Islamabad, accusing them of prostitution.

Since the Chinese had invested hundreds of millions in buiding up the port in Gwadar (on the Arabian Sea), they pressured Musharraf to protect their people in Pakistan. Despite a government clean-up after the attack faster than Ground Zero after 9/11, Schmidle estimates that as many as 1,000 of those inside the Red Mosque were killed.

Meanwhile, news that it wasn't the Taliban that had committed the string of Islamabad attacks caught many by surprise. In retrospect, though, it was no more surprising than when David Koresh and his Branch Davidians were slaughtered at Waco, Texas in 1993 and, along with Ruby Ridge, became a rallying point of the American militia movement.

Me to Nicholas Schmidle: How is it that the genial, level-headed Ghazi, as you wrote, "morphed from an outspoken extremist with a perma-smirk into a bona fide terrorist"? In other words, how did he wind up becoming Pakistan's version of David Koresh and backing himself and his followers into an apocalyptic corner?

Schmidle: Ghazi was not a suicidal dude, or at least I didn't think so. If anyone reads my account of him, you'll see that he was critical in me getting access to jihadis that would have otherwise been unthinkable. … I felt remarkably safe in his presence.

But I believe that he was a victim of his own personality cult. … He had built up the jihad and built up himself to such a degree, and surrounded himself with some bad-ass fighters from Pakistan's most elite jihadi organizations, that when it came down to the final showdown, he left no room for himself to back down.

Likewise, apparently, those carrying on his legacy leave no room for themselves to back down -- or give no quarter.