[Marxism] Tariq Ali: Pakistan war is US bid to turn tide in Afghanistan

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

THE AMERICAN WAR MOVES TO PAKISTAN
By Tariq Ali

TomDispatch.com
September 16, 2008

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174977/tariq_ali_has_the_u_s_invasion_of_pak
istan_begun_


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 center 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.
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.

--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.



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