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Writers Articles And Opinions |
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18 October 2010 By Rick Rozoff
Two recent news items emanating from the United
States have begun to reverberate in Pakistan and give
rise to speculation that growing American drone
strikes and NATO helicopter attacks in that country
may be the harbingers of far broader actions: Nothing
less than the expansion of the West’s war in
Afghanistan into Pakistan with the ultimate goal of
seizing the nation’s nuclear weapons.
The News International, Pakistan’s largest
English-language newspaper, published a report on
October 13 based on excerpts from American journalist
Bob Woodward’s recently released volume “Obama’s Wars”
which stated that during a trilateral summit between
the presidents of the U.S., Afghanistan and Pakistan
on May 6 of 2009 Pakistani head of state Asif Ali
Zardari accused Washington of being behind Taliban
attacks inside his country with the intent to use them
so “the US could invade and seize its nuclear
weapons.” [1]
Woodward recounted comments exchanged at a dinner
with Zardari and Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, former
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (2007-2009), to
Iraq (2005-2007) and Afghanistan (2003-2005).
Khalilzad was also a close associate of Jimmy Carter
administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski, architect of the U.S. strategy to support
attacks by armed extremists based in Pakistan against
Afghanistan starting in 1978, when he joined the
Polish expatriate at Columbia University from
1979-1989.
The baton for what is now Washington’s over 30-year
involvement in Afghanistan was passed from Brzezinski
to Khalilzad in the 1980s when the latter was
appointed one of the Ronald Reagan administration’s
senior State Department officials in charge of
supporting Mujahedin fighters operating out of
Peshawar in Pakistan. He joined the State Department
in 1984 on a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship
and worked for Paul Wolfowitz, then-Assistant
Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs,
at Foggy Bottom. His efforts were augmented by the
Central Intelligence Agency’s deputy director at the
time, Robert Gates, now U.S. defense secretary. Two of
their three chief clients, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and
Jalaluddin Haqqani, are founders and leaders of Hezb-e
Islami Gulbuddin and the Haqqani network, against whom
Gates’ Pentagon is currently waging war on both sides
of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
According to Woodward’s account of the Pakistani
president’s accusations to Khalilzad in May of last
year, “Zardari dropped his diplomatic guard. He
suggested that one of…two countries was arranging the
attacks by the Pakistani Taliban inside his country:
India or the US. Zardari didn’t think India could be
that clever, but the US could. [Afghan President Hamid]
Karzai had told him the US was behind the attacks,
confirming the claims made by the Pakistani ISI
[Inter-Services Intelligence].” [2]
Khalilzad, whose résumé also includes stints at the
Defense Department, the National Security Council, the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, the
National Endowment for Democracy, the RAND Corporation
(where he assisted in establishing the Middle East
Studies Center) and the Project for the New American
Century, reportedly took issue with Zardari’s
contention, which led to the latter responding that
what he had described “was a plot to destabilize
Pakistan,” hatched in order that, according to
Woodward’s version of his words, “the US could invade
and seize [Pakistan's] nuclear weapons.”
The account stated Zardari “could not explain the
rapid expansion in violence otherwise. And the CIA had
not pursued the leaders of the Pakistani Taliban, a
group known as Tehrik-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan or TTP that
had attacked the government. TTP was also blamed for
the assassination of Zardari’s wife, Benazir Bhutto.”
In the Pakistani president’s words: “We give you
targets of Taliban people you don’t go after. You go
after other areas. We’re puzzled.”
When Khalilzad mentioned that U.S. drone attacks
inside Pakistan “were primarily meant to hunt down
members of al Qaeda and Afghan insurgents, not the
Pakistan Taliban,” Zardari responded by insisting “But
the Taliban movement is tied to al Qaeda…so by not
attacking the targets recommended by Pakistan the US
had revealed its support of the TTP. The CIA at one
time had even worked with the group’s leader,
Baitullah Mehsud,” Zardari asserted. [3] (Three months
later a CIA-directed drone strike killed Mehsud, his
wife and several in-laws and bodyguards.)
In August of 2009, while still commander of all
U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, then-General
Stanley McChrystal issued his classified COMISAF
(Commander of International Security Assistance Force)
Initial Assessment which asserted the “major insurgent
groups in order of their threat to the mission are:
the Quetta Shura Taliban (05T), the Haqqani Network (HQN),
and the Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HiG).” [4] The first
is an Afghan Taliban group which as its name indicates
is based in the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan
province.
Steve Coll, Alfred McCoy and other authorities on
the subject have documented the CIA’s involvement with
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani: That they
were shared with if not transferred by Pakistan’s
Inter-Services Intelligence to the CIA as private
assets. Coll has additionally claimed that Haqqani
sheltered and supported Osama bin Laden starting in
the 1980s.
At the meeting between Obama, Zardari and Karzai in
May of 2009, the American president slighted his two
counterparts for alleged lack of resolve in
prosecuting the war on both sides of the Durand Line,
although even as he spoke Pakistan was engaged in a
major military assault in the Swat Valley which led to
the displacement of 3 million civilians.
Four days after the dinner exchange between Zardari
and Khalilzad, the Pakistani president appeared on the
May 10 edition of NBC’s Meet the Press on a program
which also included Afghan President Karzai and Steve
Coll, now president and CEO of the New America
Foundation and author of Ghost Wars: The Secret
History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from
the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004) and
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American
Century (2008).
Zardari’s comments to his American audience
included the claim that the Taliban “was part of your
past and our past, and the ISI and the CIA created
them together. And I can find you 10 books and 10
philosophers and 10 write-ups on that….” [5]
That the leaders of the other two armed groups
identified by McChrystal – Haqqani and Hekmatyar –
were among the three Mujahedin leaders financed, armed
and trained by the CIA (the late Ahmed Shah Massoud
being the third), makes the pattern complete: Robert
Gates the defense secretary is leading a war against
forces that Robert Gates the deputy director of the
CIA earlier supported through one of the Agency’s
longest and most expensive covert programs, Operation
Cyclone.
After retiring from public life, George Kennan, the
main architect of U.S. Cold War policy, cited a line
he ascribed to Goethe to warn that in the end we are
all destroyed by monsters of our own creation. To
emend Voltaire, the White House rather than God is a
comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Woodward’s account of last year’s comments by
Pakistan’s president and Zalmay Khalilzad could be
dismissed as merely anecdotal if not for an article
that appeared in the New York Post on October 3 and
developments in Pakistan itself over the past six
weeks.
Arthur Herman, a visiting scholar at the
conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank,
stated in an article entitled “Our Pakistan problem:
Obama’s approach is failing” that “The bitter irony is
that even as Obama is trying to get out of the war in
Afghanistan, he may be heading us into one in
Pakistan.”
The author detailed that whereas in 2009 the U.S.
launched 45 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (drone)
attacks inside Pakistan, it had tripled that number by
the time his article appeared, and that half as many
as last year’s total strikes had been launched this
September alone.
Also mentioning the NATO helicopter attack in the
Kurram Agency of Pakistan’s Federally Administered
Tribal Areas on September 30 which killed three
members of the Frontier Corps and that “Raids by the
CIA’s Counterterrorism Pursuit Team – with its 3,000
Afghan troops – into Pakistan are also becoming
routine,” Herman warned:
“All this adds up to a US effort in Pakistan highly
reminiscent of the one we undertook in Laos in the
1960s – one of the springboards into the Vietnam
quagmire.
“If Obama’s growing pressure on Pakistan
destabilizes that government, the only thing keeping
that country’s nukes out of the hands of al Qaeda may
have to be US troops. That’s a shooting-war scenario
that will make Obama wish his name was Lyndon Baines
Johnson.” [6]
Herman attributes the expansion of the Afghan war
into Pakistan at a qualitatively more dangerous level
to the machinations of former CIA officer and current
Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution Bruce
Riedel and the commander of 152,000 U.S. and NATO
troops in Afghanistan General David Petraeus.
A report of October 13 documented that since
Petraeus took command of the war effort in Afghanistan
in June there has been a 172 percent increase in U.S.
and NATO air strikes, from 257 assault missions in
September of 2009 to over 700 last month. In addition,
“Surveillance flights increased to nearly three times
the number from September 2009 and supply flights are
up as well….Petraeus is sometimes seen as more willing
to risk the so-called ‘collateral damage’ of civilian
deaths….[7]
Last month’s drone attacks were the most in any
month since the targeted assasinations were started in
2004 and the amount of deaths they caused – over 150 –
the highest monthly total to date.
By the middle of this month there have been at
least eight drone attacks and no fewer than 66 people
killed.
According to Steve Coll’s New America Foundation,
1,439 of the 1,844 deaths caused by drone attacks in
Pakistan since 2004 have occurred in 2009 and so far
this year. [8]
Similarly, the deaths of 1,111 of 2,160 U.S. and
NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2001
occurred in the same period. Seventeen foreign
soldiers were killed between October 13 and 16 alone.
On October 13 the Pakistani press reported that
NATO helicopters, until then operating solely in the
Federally Administered Tribal Areas (in four attacks
between September 25-30 against the Haqqani network),
violated the nation’s airspace over the province of
Balochistan, leading Islamabad to lodge a formal
protest with NATO.
Since the revelations from Bob Woodward’s new book
and the publication of Arthur Herman’s article,
commentaries in Pakistani newspapers have appeared
which indicate the seriousness with which recent
developments and even more ominous portents are being
viewed.
An October 13 feature in The Nation stated that
“the ongoing war on terror in Afghanistan is aimed to
take the operations into Pakistani territory….The real
target is Pakistan’s nuclear potential; they [the U.S.
and NATO] have no plausible security threat from the
ill-equipped Taliban or ragtag extremists.”
Commenting on the New York Post feature cited
earlier, Pakistani commentator A R Jerral further
claimed that what “Herman suggests in his write-up is
in fact a policy direction to the US administration.
He implies that the policy of sending drones and
attacking militant hideouts in the Pakistan territory
has not worked….[T]he thrust is Pakistan’s nukes. It
is a tacit way to tell the policymakers in Washington
to keep the pressure on our country, which will weaken
the Pakistani government’s standing, causing
instability. That will provide the reason for the US
troops to move in.”
He added: “We know about the drone attacks as these
are reported in the media, but what we do not know and
our media does not report is the fact that US-led NATO
forces are launching crossborder raids into
Pakistan….For this, CIA is operating Counterterrorism
Pursuit Teams in Afghanistan.
“These teams are regularly mounting ground raids
into Pakistani territory.”
“In this way, things are getting hot as far as the
war on terror is concerned. Pakistan is moving to
become centre stage in this war. Bruce Riedel, a
former CIA and NSC [National Security Council]
official, has advised Mr Obama to shift the focus of
war ‘from Afghanistan to Pakistan’; this is what we
are witnessing in the shape of heightened war effort
into the Pakistan territory.” [9]
A Pakistani commentary of the preceding day stated:
“[W]e have…been dragged into giving the US access to
Balochistan from where it has been attempting to
destabilise the Iranian regime through support for the
terrorist group Jundullah….Even more threatening,
unless we change course now, we will have lost the
battle to retain our nuclear assets because that is
where the NATO-US trail is eventually leading to.”
“The free-wheeling access to US covert military and
intelligence operatives, both officials and private
contractors, is another destabilising factor that we
seem to be unable or unwilling to check. And now there
are the NATO incursions into our territory and
targeting of even our military personnel, which shows
how servile a state we are living in at present. [10]
As the war in Afghanistan, the largest and longest
in the world, proceeds with record casualties among
civilians and combatants alike on both sides of the
Afghan-Pakistani border, plans are afoot to further
expand the war into Pakistan and to threaten Iran as
well.
Comparisons to Washington’s war in Indochina have
been mentioned. [11] But Pakistan with its 180 million
people and nuclear weapons is not Cambodia and Iran
with its population of over 70 million is not Laos.
1) Shaheen Sehbai, Zardari says US behind
Taliban attacks in Pakistan
The News International, October 13, 2010
http://www.thenews.com.pk/13-10-2010/Top-Story/1276.htm
2) Ibid
3) Ibid
4) Washington Post, September 21, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2009/09/21/AR2009092100110.html
5) Meet the Press, May 10, 2009
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30658135
6) Arthur Herman, Our Pakistan problem: Obama’s
approach is failing
New York Post, October 3, 2010 http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/
our_pakistan_problem_1 TqxfBu89mDxSlZHUtHj2K
Obama’s Pakistan Failure
American Enterprise Institute, October 3, 2010
http://www.aei.org/article/102612
7) ABC News Radio, October 13, 2010
8) New America Foundation
http://counterterrorism.newamerica.net/drones
9) A R Jerral, Shifting war on terror to
Pakistan
The Nation, October 13, 2010
http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Opinions/Columns/13-Oct-2010/Shifting-war-on-terror-to-Pakistan
10) Shireen M Mazari, Ending Collaboration with
the US on the War on
Pakistan
The Dawn, October 12, 2010
http://thedawn.com.pk/2010/10/12/
ending-collaboration-with-the-us-on-the-war-on-pakistan
11) NATO Expands Afghan War Into Pakistan
Stop NATO, September 28, 2010
http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/
nato-expands-afghan-war-into-pakistan
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