Pakistan – the Fuze in the Powder Keg

This is a glass half full sort of story, the kind you don’t see on this blog very often. Here’s the premise – maybe a South Asian Cold War wouldn’t be all that bad.

Pakistan is in a shambles. It needs a big power patron to get it through the tough times it’s now in. The US has already gone with India and has now fallen into its own economic abyss. Maybe we’d all be better off if China stepped in.

Just how bad are things in Pakistan today? That’s pretty much answered in today’s Guardian:

…A special session of parliament called by the government to forge a political consensus on the “war on terror” has backfired spectacularly as parties, including some in the ruling coalition, denounced the alliance with Washington and Nato rather than backing the army to take on the Pakistani Taliban.

…Critics of the government, which is led by controversial president Asif Ali Zardari, complain that there is a paralysis of decision-making and policy. A leaked US top secret National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan concludes that the country is “on the edge”. A US official was quoted summing up the assessment as “no money, no energy, no government“.

The economic nosedive will aid recruitment to extremist groups, experts fear, and force more poor families to send their children to the free madrassa schools, which offer an exclusively religious curriculum. Inflation is running at 25%, or up to 100% for many staple food items, and unemployment is growing, pushing millions more into poverty. The rupee has lost around 30% of its value so far this year.

“The canvas of terrorism is expanding by the minute,” said Faisal Saleh Hayat, a former interior minister.

“It’s not only ideological motivation. Put that together with economic deprivation and you have a ready-made force of Taliban, al-Qaida, whatever you want to call them. You will see suicide bombers churned out by the hundred,” he said.

“The majority of the people of Pakistan do not see it as our war. We are fighting for somebody else and we are suffering because of that,” said Tariq Azim, a former minister in the previous government of Pervez Musharraf, whose party now sits in the opposition. “At the moment the only ones toeing the line are the People’s party.”

Members of parliament are particularly angered by recent signals from Washington that it is prepared to talk to the Afghan Taliban, while telling Pakistan that it must fight its Taliban menace. “They [the US] are showing a lot more flexibility on their side of the border,” said Khurram Dastagir, a member of parliament for Sharif’s party. “The US are trying to externalise their failure in Afghanistan by dumping it on us.”

The rising spread of anti-American and anti-NATO anger among the Pakistani people and their leaders is bloody awful for those of us with troops stuck in next door Afghanistan. It seems that the more we push Pakistan, the worse our position becomes.

So, it’s becoming painfully clear that we really can’t deal with Pakistan and we’d be fools to keep repeating the same mistakes. Maybe we’d all be better off with Pakistan stabilized under Chinese hegemony. At least we know we have some ability to deal with the Chinese.

Don’t get angry about this, it’s our own damned fault. Back in the days of Bush I, we came to treat the end of the Cold War as the end of our problems. We refused to see the obvious, that the decline of Soviet hegemony would actually make the world a more dangerous place, spawning a whole nest of failed and rogue states.

There was an enormous opportunity to create a Marshall Plan for the most critical Third World states to stabilize them politically and economically but it was a window of opportunity that we neglected. If you don’t understand that, look at Afghanistan. There was an enormous opportunity but no one was in the mood to commit the vast resources it would have taken to promote such an initiative, and so we let too much slide and we’re paying for that today.

Maybe a return to Cold War hegemony wouldn’t be entirely bad. For starters, it’s already underway, it’s happening whether we like it or not. Powerful nations inevitably seek to establish spheres of influence in their neighbouring states. We take ours for granted but imagine what Washington would do if it found Russian weaponry deployed along the Rio Grande?

As China borders both Afghanistan and Pakistan it has an inevitable vested interest in the spread of its sphere of influence into these countries. Likewise Russia has a strategic interest in maintaining its sphere of influence in the Cacasus and Eastern Europe. That doesn’t mean subjugation as much as co-operation and doing what’s necessary to achieve stability in these regions.

Maybe it’s time we stopped running around trying to poke rivals in the eye with a sharp stick. It might be time to work with the Chinese to see if they can accomplish in Pakistan what we can’t achieve. That might mean handing over a hunk of geo-political interest but that much seems inevitable in any case so perhaps we ought to see what we can get for it through negotiation first.

 

Pakistan, Land of Circuitous Problems

What to do, what to do? If we want to achieve some sort of success in Afghanistan (and what that might look like grows smaller as the years pass), there will have to be some breakthrough in Pakistan.

Musharraf is gone. Like most things that happen in Pakistan, that’s a mixed blessing, certainly for NATO forces in Afghanistan and probably for the Pakistanis themselves. Mushie might not have been a great ally to the West in the fight against al Qaeda but he was a somewhat effective keel for his country.

Without Musharraf, the two ruling parties will now have to try to govern and, in Pakistan, that’s a Herculean chore. The pols are going to have to carve out turf that has been traditionally dominated by Pakistan’s army. The military is actually far more than just an armed force. It’s also a wealthy and powerful political and economic institution and, as such, tearing the country out of the generals’ grasp may not be all that easy. Pakistan’s military is more than familiar with seizing power in coups.

The other key segment of the military is Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency or ISI. This secretive outfit is still believed to be harbouring Taliban forces in the tribal lands and is also strongly believed to have played a role in the July 7th bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Some experts believe the ISI remains a free agent utterly beyond the control of the civilian government.

While the attempted orderly transition of power into civilian hands proceeds there’s the question of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and Dr. Kahn’s nuclear weapons export shop that was never completely dismantled. There are some experts who fear that Kahn & Co. could surreptitiously resume business if the fledgling government gets distracted.

Finally there’s al Qaeda and the Taliban operating relatively freely in the tribal lands. Mushie was never able to bring them to heel and he was Washington’s boy, something that severely wounded his popularity and political survival. The new bunch seems intent on distancing themselves from America and, when it comes right down to it, there’s really only one way to do that.

America keeps raising the notion of crossing into Pakistan to hunt down the terrorists and the insurgents but that’s probably just noise. The US and ISAF are woefully understrength in Afghanistan as it is. Where would they get the megaforce it would take to try to tame the tribal homelands and purge them of the insurgents? That’s really tough, forbidding territory and any infidel who seeks to take it on will be fighting more than the insurgents. They’ll have to fight the tribesmen themselves and they are genuinely tough customers.

There seem to be no good answers on how to deal with Pakistan. Perhaps with infinite patience, and perseverence and solid groundwork, some breakthrough may yet be achieved, eventually. And yet the Bush administration’s recent courting of India has created an enormous setback in relations with Pakistan.

What we ultimately achieve in Afghanistan may well depend on Washington’s ability to sort out its problems with Islamabad. Don’t hold your breath.

 

When Your Pals Torture, It’s Not Torture

Canada’s federal bootlickers, the SHarper government, are falling all over themselves to avoid their pals being called what they are, torturers. From CanWest:

ForeignAffairs Minister Maxime Bernier lashed out Saturday at a controversial document identifying the U.S. and Israel as countries it suspects of practising torture, calling it “wrong” and demanding it be rewritten.

“I regret the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual used in the department’s torture awareness training,” said Bernier in a statement.

“It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten,” said Bernier.

After making this pronouncement, Maxie swung deftly back to his perch and whiled away the rest of the afternoon tossing his own waste at passing children.

America doesn’t torture? Israel doesn’t torture?

Let’s begin with Israel and this BBC report from February, 2000:

“An official Israeli report has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli security service tortured detainees during the Palestinian uprising, the Intifada, between 1988 and 1992.

The report, written five years ago but kept secret until now, said the leadership of the security service Shin Bet knew about the torture but did nothing to stop it.

The report did not detail the torture methods used, but human rights organisations say some detainees died or were left paralysed.”

“Most of the violations were not caused by lack of knowledge of the line between what was permitted and what was forbidden, but were committed knowingly,” the report said.

“At the Gaza facility, veteran and even senior investigators committed very grave and systematic violations.”

So, Maxi-pad, that ought to whet your intellectual appetite on the subject of Israel and torture, if you had the slightest interest in anything beyond whitewashing your government’s buddies.

As for the United States? Well we know at least the tip of the iceberg on the waterboarding business. That, Maxi, is also torture – plain and simple just the way you like it. Even former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge has just condemned waterboarding as torture because, well because it is dimmo.

Then there’s that special rendition business – kidnapping folks and flying them off to sunny destinations where, for a few bags of cash, you can hire people to do your torturing for you. Hey Maxi, remember that guy, Maher Arar? He got done up pretty good, didn’t he? We paid him ten million bucks. Why was that again? Oh yeah, I remember now – we paid him because he spent a year in captivity as America’s guest being tortured.

There’s something really creepy about people like the Harpies who choose to erase the historical record to whitewash the evils of their friends. At the end of the day, they all wind up with the same stench.

 

Afghanistan’s Newest Benefactor – China

No, they’re not going to help NATO fight the Taliban or al-Qaeda. Instead the Chinese will be helping themselves to one of the largest copper deposits in the world. It’s the Aynak copper mine in Logar province and the Chinese beat out rivals from Canada, the US and Russia to get it.

China Metallurgical Group has committed $4-billion to the project which will also see a direct rail line constructed linking Afghanistan and China. I wonder if the Chinese project will be using electricity generated by the Kajaki dam NATO has been struggling to defend against the Taliban? Maybe NATO will even wind up providing security for China’s investment.

It’s believed that part of the investment is a desire, on China’s part, to “push back” against India and the Indian/US efforts to contain China. Now it’s seen in some quarters that it’s China working to encircle India. This is the take of M K Bhadrakumar, a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, published in Asia Times Online:

“…the mother of all Chinese encirclement of India still remains largely unnoticed in Delhi – the Beijing-Tehran axis. There is wide recognition that if the United States hasn’t been able to push through another tougher United Nations Security Council resolution against Iran over its nuclear program, that has been largely because of China’s reluctance to concur.

But what happened last Sunday still came as a bolt from the blue. China Petroleum Corporation, better known as the Sinopec Group, signed a contract with the Iranian Oil Ministry for the development of the Yadavaran oil and gas fields in southwestern Iran.

The current estimation is that the project cost will be $2 billion. Under the contract, China will make the entire investment necessary to develop the fields. The first phase is to produce 85,000 barrels of oil per day and the second phase will add another 100,000 barrels. According to Iranian estimates, Yadavaran has in place oil reserves of 18.3 billion barrels and gas reserves amounting to 12.5 trillion cubic feet.

China outmaneuvered both the US and India on Iran. When the American National Intelligence Estimates collapsed Bush’s claims of Iran’s imminent nuclear threat to the world, China was ready to move – and quickly. India, meanwhile, found itself shut out, having succumbed to US pressure to sanctions against Iran.

Indian diplomacy has a lot of catching up to do. In the short term, Delhi will have to pay a price for overlooking the geopolitical reality that Iran is the only really viable regional power in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Delhi’s best hope is that true to their innate pragmatism, Iranians will let bygones be bygones.

 

Russia Turns Inward

Ten, fifteen years ago there existed an opportunity to bring Russia into the West. Instead we just declared the Cold War over and treated Russia with distrust.

Implicit in the Russian withdrawal from its Warsaw Pact allies’ territory was an understanding that the West wouldn’t swallow them up so that they could serve as a neutral, buffer zone at least for a couple of decades.

Instead of that, we began gobbling them up bringing them into the European Union and, worse, NATO. Just as Russia was wobbling its way toward some form of democracy we decided to bring it’s former allies into our own alliance that is now parked right on Russia’s doorstep. We got away with it because Russia was in disarray and weak. Now that’s all changed.

Today’s Russia is energetic and self-confident. It has a lot of oil wealth. And it is now Russia that has a deep distrust of us, the West. From the BBC:

In the last few weeks Russian suspicion of the outside world seems to have reached a new level of hysteria.

The day after Russia’s parliamentary elections last week we awoke to find thousands of fanatical young Putin supporters patrolling the streets of Moscow.

They had been told by their Kremlin masters to take control of “key buildings” to prevent any attempt at a political take-over by “foreign-backed groups”.

Among the buildings targeted for special attention were the British Embassy and the BBC bureau.
When I went outside to ask them why they were picketing us, the group of callow youths were hard put to come up with an answer.

“We are here to make sure no-one tries to steal our victory,” one young woman tried.

No one in Russia believes the American missile-interceptor batteries and radars being positioned in Poland and the Czech republic are there to defend America against a rogue attack by Iran. Most Russians have little doubt that America has effected a policy of trying to contain and isolate Russia, pretty much along the same lines as what it’s doing with China.

Last week Andrei Lugovoi, the man wanted in Britain for the poisoning murder of Alexander Litvinienko, was elected to parliament as an ultra-nationalist MP.

At the time the sole surviving MP from Russia’s pro-Western liberal parties lost his seat in parliament.

Speaking afterwards one of his colleagues put it to me this way: “In the 1990s we had an opportunity to turn Russia outwards towards the West. But we failed. Now it’s gone, and it won’t be back for at least a generation.”

Why does this matter? Because the world’s current sole superpower is beginning to decline, helped along the way by the emergence of the BRIC nations – Brazil, Russia, India and China – as the new economic superpowers. A recent international poll found that most believed that Russia and China would be equal rivals to the United States in terms of global influence by 2020.

Not much attention has been paid to it in the West but Bush has triggered arms races in both Russia and China. In Russia, Putin has reacted to Bush’s plan to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons and anti-missile systems with a Russian plan to develop its own next generation of nukes and systems to defeat America’s ABM defences. America has embraced India to effect a military cordone sanitaire of China’s entire coastline. In response China is fielding a new and highly capable blue water navy, advanced long-range missiles and new generation combat aircraft.

Are we headed for another Cold War, one in which the other side may hold the key economic advantages? Let’s hope not. A good step would be a US President not committed to continuing the blockheaded policies of the current dolt.