And a Dose of Realism for Afghanistan?
Candidate Obama declared his determination to scale up the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, apparently in an effort to demonstrate that, despite his opposition to the Iraq war, he possessed the necessary bombs away! martial ardor to serve as America’s Commander in Chief.
President Obama, in one his first acts upon taking office, explicitly authorized a drone attack that killed 18 in Pakistan’s Waziristan (in contrast to the unacknowledged incursions under the Bush administration), in order to show his determination to pursue the fight into Pakistan despite misgivings in Islamabad.
These actions, combined with the extensive publicity giving to the reassessment of Afghanistan strategy conducted under the aegis of CENTCOM commander and Iraq surge mastermind General David Petraeus, aroused concerns that the Obama administration would pursue a ruinous escalation of the conflict that would do a lot to destabilize Pakistan while doing little to improve the situation in Afghanistan, all to provide political cover against Republican critics.
In a piece I wrote in August of last year, America Drinks the COIN Kool-aid, I pointed out Pakistan’s inability to withstand blowback in its heartland engineered by the Pakistani Taliban in response to attacks in the border regions and warned:
American planners originally hoped that Musharraf’s armies would be the anvil upon which Western forces crushed the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan.
Pakistan is more like a rotten melon that will fly apart under the hammer blows of a U.S. counter-insurgency campaign in west Pakistan.
In a Salon op-ed on January 26, Juan Cole criticized the implications of the drone attack authorized by President Obama for America's Afghanistan policy, warned of the dangers of becoming infatuated with a search for a military solution, and invoked the dreaded “V” (Vietnam) and “Q” (Quagmire) words.
However, based on the statements of Defense Secretary Gates and news coming out of Pakistan, I have hope.
Perhaps not Obama-hope that the magic aura of our president will bring about the yearned for “Grand Bargain”—miraculous progress on Kashmir, the emergence of a forceful and capable civilian Pakistan government from the unlikely chrysalis of the inept and opportunistic Zardari regime, the unprecedented success of a counterinsurgency campaign in the Pashtun areas of eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan after 100 years of futility, climaxed with a convivial dogpile of Afghan, Taliban, Pakistani, and Indian lions and lambs in Kabul…
…but hope that intelligent people will look at a situation intelligently and do something intelligent.
Consider this quote from Secretary Gates in the January 28 New York Times:
“If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who served under Mr. Bush and is staying on under Mr. Obama, told Congress on Tuesday. He said there was not enough “time, patience or money” to pursue overly ambitious goals in Afghanistan, and he called the war there “our greatest military challenge.”
The title of the article is “Aides Say Obama’s Afghan Aims Elevate War”, an unmistakable indication to a cynic like myself that President Obama’s intention is not to elevate the war; just the opposite—he is busy, with the unstinting assistance of the New York Times, trying to lower expectations and downgrade the objectives of the Afghan war while using the rhetoric of a great military effort to obtain political cover.
Meanwhile, the Zardari administration has been lobbying for an end to drone strikes and a fundamental rethink of U.S. policy away from military counterinsurgency toward an accommodation with the Taliban—and a rebalancing of U.S. foreign policy for South Asia that takes Pakistan’s circumstances and priorities into greater account.
Judging from Pakistani media coverage (here, here, and here) of President Zardari’s and Prime Minister Gilani’s remarks in Europe and a publicity given to a negative assessment on the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Pakistan hopes that a split within NATO between the United States and Europe on further commitments to Afghanistan will compel the United States to adopt a more accommodating posture vis a vis the Taliban, allow the Pakistan government to deal with its Pashtun problem in a more relaxed, protracted, and political manner, and, on a more fundamental level, focus Washington’s attention on Pakistan as a key regional partner whose quest for security, political stability and economic growth is a worthy object of sympathy and U.S. aid in its own right, and not simply as a footdragging adjunct to the Afghan adventure and an impediment to Washington’s all-important relationship with India.
For an example of the current framing, Pakistan’s GEO media outlet reported on Prime Minister Gilani’s remarks as follows:
US Afghan policy has been a failure:
PM Updated at: 2103 PST, Wednesday, January 28, 2009
DAVOS: Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani has called upon the world leaders to renew their commitment to introduce equitable global rules and ensure participation of developing countries including Pakistan in economic decision-making.
In his message to the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, the prime minister said that the US policy in Afghanistan has failed to achieve its objectives. Gilani said Pakistan has sacrificed more than any other country including NATO in war against terrorism.
The prime minister said that narco-money coming from Afghanistan into Pakistan was destabilizing the county. Gilani said Pakistan wants peace in the region and a stable Afghanistan was in the interest of Pakistan.
I speculate that Pakistan is hoping for a new, post-election realism in the Obama administration that draws on several facts:
1) The Mumbai attacks and Islamabad’s shaky response have put Pakistan-India relations in the deep freeze and demonstrated the inability of the Zardari administration to pursue rapprochement with India over the objections of the army;
2) As the estimable Laura Rozen reported, the Indian government deep-sixed the idea of internationalizing (or at least multi-lateralizing) the Kashmir problem by lobbying the Obama administration to remove the issue (and India itself) from newly minted Afghanistan/Pakistan envoy Richard Holbrooke’s brief;
3) The bloom is, therefore, off the “Grand Bargain” rose;
4) Judging from Secretary Gates’ remarks, I speculate that General Petraeus’ assessment indicates that, absent the “Grand Bargain” miracle, equivocal Pakistan support of counterinsurgency operations in Pashtun areas on both sides of the Durand line means that the Taliban will continue to kick behind in Afghanistan;
5) Given the slim likelihood of a spectacular sea change in Western fortunes in Afghanistan, I am hoping that the Obama administration re-examined its assumptions for the region and decided that the immediate risks of destabilizing Pakistan—a huge (population 170 million, GDP $500 billion) Muslim, nuclear-armed country with a vigorous democratic movement, highly developed economy, a military whose leadership is finally trying to remove itself from domestic politics, and enormous urbanized population sick of extremism and violence—outweighed the pie-in-the sky hope of crushing the Taliban and creating a democratic showcase for 33 million impoverished Afghans (GDP $35 billion) riven by tribal loyalties and at the mercy of a determined and effective insurgency.
America’s stated strategic posture under both Bush and the new Obama administration is, of course, unchanged: turning around Afghanistan, cleaning up the tribal areas of western Pakistan/eastern Afghanistan, and tilting toward India.
And, given the welter of conflicting, inconvenient, and politically explosive interests surrounding any major policy change, the temptation will be great to stay the course with the same murderous muddling that has characterized America’s South Asia policy over the last years.
However, I would say that the most practical objective for Mr. Obama would be to keep the Afghan turd swirling aimlessly in the foreign policy commode for the rest of his administration, but chunk enough troops in there to make sure that, in 2012, the Republicans are not running campaign ads showing triumphant Taliban reoccupying the presidential palace in Kabul on his watch…
…while focusing some of America’s attention and energy on protecting and preserving Pakistan’s democratic government and society.
It will be an interesting test of President Obama’s pragmatism, vision, and ability to innovate to see if he decides to complement a political and security hedge on Afghanistan with an effective and far-sighted rethink of America’s Pakistan policy.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Fear of a Black Sneaker
If America can be understood by observing its sports—and, more importantly, its sports fans—the news does not look all good for Obama’s America.
For the last couple days, the American sporting world has been aboil with l’affaire Chase Budinger.
Chase Budinger is a star basketball player (white) with the Arizona Wildcats. In a game against the University of Houston Cougars on January 24, Budinger drew a charge by UH’s star player (black) Aubrey Coleman.
Budinger was knocked to the floor, slid backwards, and the referee whistled a foul. In the aftermath of the play, Coleman continued forward and his foot came down on the side of Budinger’s neck and jaw.
Budinger jumped up to give Coleman a retaliatory shove.
The referees reviewed the play, apparently determined that Coleman’s action was intentional, and kicked him out of the game. Budinger stated that he thought the step was intentional. So, apparently, did a lot of other people.
To China Matters, the video is inconclusive. It looks to me like Coleman is carelessly trying to step over Budinger (or perhaps not caring enough about not stepping on Budinger); as his foot comes down on Budinger’s jaw Coleman stumbles forward, an indication, perhaps, of a mis-step.
The next day, Coleman issued a contrite-sounding apology for the “accident” (you can see Coleman’s apology—and the video of the original incident—here, on the blog of Houston Chronicle sportswriter Michael Murphy).
One might think that the ambiguity concerning Coleman’s culpability, the apology, and the lack of adverse consequences (Budinger was unhurt except for a raspberry on his shoulder; the fired-up Wildcats erased Houston’s lead and won the game in overtime) might cause this incident to sink into immediate obscurity.
However, sports media is, along with celebrity journalism, a subset of mainstream American journalism that proudly clings to its tabloid roots. Sport is one of the few things Americans care about passionately, and it is easy and profitable for sports media outlets to arouse these emotions in order to generate controversy, debate, flame wars, and the kind of traffic and intensity that advertisers crave.
I don’t reside inside a sportswriter’s head, but I imagine the governing theory is that controversy is good and the heated emotions are harmless. After all, it’s just jockstraps and touchdowns and arguing about whose team is the best.
Well, in this case I suspect that the sports media got a little more than it bargained for.
ESPN appointed itself judge and jury in the Coleman case, preparing a video that purported to demonstrate that the step was intentional. In particular, it employed a graphic I would characterize as “Guilt-o-Vision”, a depiction of Coleman’s alleged field of view that, in ESPN’s opinion, demonstrated that he must have seen Budinger and, therefore, intentionally put his foot on his face.
The video included a sequence that also appeared to me rather inflammatory: a clip of Coleman leaving the court (ten minutes later, after the review had been completed and the brouhaha died down), exchanging a high-five with a teammate and apparently relaxed and uncrippled by remorse.
ESPN energetically promoted the story. A YouTube version of the video collected three million hits and it became a story other outlets had to pick up.
Connor Ennis of the New York Times’ college basketball blog called the foul “vicious”.
As the story moved to the downmarket blogs, the prose got more purple.
College OTR (“Your Online Frathouse”) posted the video and commented, “There are fouls, there are horrendous fouls, and there are absolutely the worst fouls ever caught on film. This one might qualify for the third option on that list.”
The step became a" stomp". Then the stomp became a “curb stomp”, presumably some sort of vicious ghetto punishment meted out on streetcorners by scary black men.
Yahoo led with the story on its homepage, linking to a January 25 post, Please Note Chase Budinger’s Face is Not a Doormat, on one of its sports blogs, The Dagger, written by Matthew J. Darnell.
By the next morning, the post had collected 12,000 (not a typo—12,000) comments.
Virtually all of the Dagger posts condemned Coleman, declaring his act intentional and fuming at the apparent lack of remorse shown in the ESPN clip.
Many posts called for Coleman to be kicked off the team and have his scholarship yanked, and quite a few posts lamented the rise of the “thug” culture in NCAA basketball, a complaint (sometimes coupled with nostalgia for the halcyon days of Bob Cousy and the two-handed set shot) that can easily be construed as racist.
There is no need, however, to exercise guesswork with a large number of posts, which managed to convey explicit and unashamed racism despite the writers’ struggles with literacy and Yahoo’s overworked profanity filter.
What was interesting to me was the number of racist posts that linked Coleman’s behavior with the new Barack Obama administration.
Obviously there is a significant reservoir of racism that once carried with it a sense or expectation of superiority but has now, post-election, morphed into fear and resentment looking for a socially-acceptable outlet—like fury at the alleged misbehavior of a black man on a basketball court.
Be it sports, politics, or policy, the Obama administration will be challenged by people looking to play the victim card and depict the Obama presidency as a dangerous incitement to African-American assertiveness and a challenge to the vulnerable rights and privileges of other Americans.
The selection of comments taken from the Dagger post are, admittedly, cherry-picked. On the other hand, I got all this material just by going through the last 1000 posts. There’s plenty more.
All quotes from The Dagger (needless to say, hopefully, China Matters endorses none of these views and regrets the language):
TS ALL OBAMAS FAULT. THEY THINK THEY OWN IT ALL NOW! ooh ooh ooh aah aah aah!
of course that big gorilla did i on purpose!
did you see how all the other monkeys gave him high 5's and banannas afterwards?
they're all less tyhan human
ts time for the NCAA to start weeding out these little [profane] street urchins that have come to infest the college basketball courts across the country. It used to be a respectful sport, until they started allowing these thugs from Harlem in.
I would propose that the racial balance be the same as the ratio of the school itself. If the school is all black then it is permissible to have an all black team. If a school is 90% white then the team must not exceed 10% non-white on the team.
Just what are they offering for courses in the instituions. Advanced thuggery. Kick the white boy while he's down. Coward punkass [profane] Throw his ass down the toilet, along with his NBA hopes.
Hang the ni**er!!!
[profane] that dirty ass [profane] i would want that dirty ass [profane] to read what i am writing. [profane] that nasty dirty [profane] [profane] that fool! step on me and ill stomp step on him! but first make that [profane]ing [profane] bite the curb. make that [profane]ing [profane] bite the [profane]ing curb!!!
welcome to the niggering of America
He did it because obama is in office
What a Nasty Man, But Hey! He's Black, Obama's Black, Everything is OTay!
Have Houston come to Spokane and pull that crap while playin the Zags. We know how to handle people who behave like Negros up here. Boy, would have never made it to the bus.
it wasnt his fault.. a fan threw a banana on the court and the monkey tried to get to it before the other monkeys did.
worthless apes. welfare leaching maggots.smelly monkeys. no value to this country. wow thats alot of posts, not to mention the famous n word. racist s are alive and well and america. i love it. and if the blacks thing obama is going to do anything for them i got news for them. you are still going to be getto trash 4 yrs from now. ha ha ha.
now that Obama is Prez you'll be seeing alot more of this kind of crap.
Then all his monkey friends congratulate him! Standard Nigs!
look at the black people act like idiots. this is exactly the change obama was talking about. every opportunity the blacks have to step all over the white man, they're on it !
Surprize, Surprize.....Coleman is black and no one cares what he does.....but if it would have been a white man steping on a black guy's face, the whole darn world would be in an up roar.....what is the world coming to???
No, just a shotty arrogant fu#king N!GER....
typical ignorant monkey on the playground. Pull his scholarship, there is no way his momentum carried him, that was deliberate and to say different is negligent. To top it off his nappy headed teammate high fived him. Total crap.
don't blame him....he is a victim...just an innocent, poor, black .....piece of Sh*t
exactly why i hate black people
Come on.............If BLACKS couldn't pull the race card WHERE would our nation be today??!! People would have to actually take PERSONAL responsibility for themselves and their kids AND would have to EARN a spot in college b/c of their brain! Let's not be crazy...............we have worked hard to raise a generation of VICTIMS......and now our new president will continue this great legacy our country is famous for............POOR US
insert obama and any white person and there you have the next 4 years
You vote in a NIg and look what happens. If this was reversed it would be a heat crime and fat black Al Sharpten would be marching around the arena and boycotting the team. They should ban this stupid Gorilla and the rest of the monkeys that congratulated him for doing it. THANKS ALLO MR. PREDISENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gatekeeper, the racial aspect of this is that because the player is black he gets a bye, if he was white all of black america would be up in arms. The is a backlash coming from white america if blacks don't start taking responisbility for their actions equal to whites.
Thugs playing ball. Another incident in the past few days highlights the PC'ness of the athletic associations.
http://ncaabasketball.fanhouse.com/2009/01/21/syracuse-player-has-run-in-with-geno-auriemma-big-east-takes-no/
"The above video appears to show UConn women's basketball coach Geno Auriemma and Syracuse forward Nicole Michael exchanging words as they go through the post-game handshake line, followed by Michael trying to trip Auriemma when they cross paths again, and Auriemma being restrained by his players from going after Michael. A bizarre incident, to say the least.
But Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese has reviewed the incident and said he's not going to take any action."
I have an idea why these players suddenly seem emboldened, but I get labeled for my thought.
He showed his "TRUE COLORS" didn't he?
A future President of the USA....
typical nig behavior...no class ghetto jungle behavior.
The college game is imitating the pros......bunch of non-caucasion thugs all trying to be the alpha male.
When you have ignorant, ghetto-thug animals admitted to college merely because they possess athletic ability - this is what you get. Once again, shame on our society for prizing athletics over academics. What a sad commentary.
Just another rude act against a white boy. And they ask why no white guys play anymore? Its cause of crap like this - what happened to the great game of basketball? Stay home thugs, stop coming to our universities and screwing up society.
that thug or shall I say animal must be ban for life
Now that we have a black president, get used to it. Its our time to step on whitey...
thats how monkeys act... no surprise
woody H .... whats up you Nig... get a job.... wait Obama is in office so the whites will really continue to payf or you... dont bite the hand that feeds you
For the last couple days, the American sporting world has been aboil with l’affaire Chase Budinger.
Chase Budinger is a star basketball player (white) with the Arizona Wildcats. In a game against the University of Houston Cougars on January 24, Budinger drew a charge by UH’s star player (black) Aubrey Coleman.
Budinger was knocked to the floor, slid backwards, and the referee whistled a foul. In the aftermath of the play, Coleman continued forward and his foot came down on the side of Budinger’s neck and jaw.
Budinger jumped up to give Coleman a retaliatory shove.
The referees reviewed the play, apparently determined that Coleman’s action was intentional, and kicked him out of the game. Budinger stated that he thought the step was intentional. So, apparently, did a lot of other people.
To China Matters, the video is inconclusive. It looks to me like Coleman is carelessly trying to step over Budinger (or perhaps not caring enough about not stepping on Budinger); as his foot comes down on Budinger’s jaw Coleman stumbles forward, an indication, perhaps, of a mis-step.
The next day, Coleman issued a contrite-sounding apology for the “accident” (you can see Coleman’s apology—and the video of the original incident—here, on the blog of Houston Chronicle sportswriter Michael Murphy).
One might think that the ambiguity concerning Coleman’s culpability, the apology, and the lack of adverse consequences (Budinger was unhurt except for a raspberry on his shoulder; the fired-up Wildcats erased Houston’s lead and won the game in overtime) might cause this incident to sink into immediate obscurity.
However, sports media is, along with celebrity journalism, a subset of mainstream American journalism that proudly clings to its tabloid roots. Sport is one of the few things Americans care about passionately, and it is easy and profitable for sports media outlets to arouse these emotions in order to generate controversy, debate, flame wars, and the kind of traffic and intensity that advertisers crave.
I don’t reside inside a sportswriter’s head, but I imagine the governing theory is that controversy is good and the heated emotions are harmless. After all, it’s just jockstraps and touchdowns and arguing about whose team is the best.
Well, in this case I suspect that the sports media got a little more than it bargained for.
ESPN appointed itself judge and jury in the Coleman case, preparing a video that purported to demonstrate that the step was intentional. In particular, it employed a graphic I would characterize as “Guilt-o-Vision”, a depiction of Coleman’s alleged field of view that, in ESPN’s opinion, demonstrated that he must have seen Budinger and, therefore, intentionally put his foot on his face.
The video included a sequence that also appeared to me rather inflammatory: a clip of Coleman leaving the court (ten minutes later, after the review had been completed and the brouhaha died down), exchanging a high-five with a teammate and apparently relaxed and uncrippled by remorse.
ESPN energetically promoted the story. A YouTube version of the video collected three million hits and it became a story other outlets had to pick up.
Connor Ennis of the New York Times’ college basketball blog called the foul “vicious”.
As the story moved to the downmarket blogs, the prose got more purple.
College OTR (“Your Online Frathouse”) posted the video and commented, “There are fouls, there are horrendous fouls, and there are absolutely the worst fouls ever caught on film. This one might qualify for the third option on that list.”
The step became a" stomp". Then the stomp became a “curb stomp”, presumably some sort of vicious ghetto punishment meted out on streetcorners by scary black men.
Yahoo led with the story on its homepage, linking to a January 25 post, Please Note Chase Budinger’s Face is Not a Doormat, on one of its sports blogs, The Dagger, written by Matthew J. Darnell.
By the next morning, the post had collected 12,000 (not a typo—12,000) comments.
Virtually all of the Dagger posts condemned Coleman, declaring his act intentional and fuming at the apparent lack of remorse shown in the ESPN clip.
Many posts called for Coleman to be kicked off the team and have his scholarship yanked, and quite a few posts lamented the rise of the “thug” culture in NCAA basketball, a complaint (sometimes coupled with nostalgia for the halcyon days of Bob Cousy and the two-handed set shot) that can easily be construed as racist.
There is no need, however, to exercise guesswork with a large number of posts, which managed to convey explicit and unashamed racism despite the writers’ struggles with literacy and Yahoo’s overworked profanity filter.
What was interesting to me was the number of racist posts that linked Coleman’s behavior with the new Barack Obama administration.
Obviously there is a significant reservoir of racism that once carried with it a sense or expectation of superiority but has now, post-election, morphed into fear and resentment looking for a socially-acceptable outlet—like fury at the alleged misbehavior of a black man on a basketball court.
Be it sports, politics, or policy, the Obama administration will be challenged by people looking to play the victim card and depict the Obama presidency as a dangerous incitement to African-American assertiveness and a challenge to the vulnerable rights and privileges of other Americans.
The selection of comments taken from the Dagger post are, admittedly, cherry-picked. On the other hand, I got all this material just by going through the last 1000 posts. There’s plenty more.
All quotes from The Dagger (needless to say, hopefully, China Matters endorses none of these views and regrets the language):
TS ALL OBAMAS FAULT. THEY THINK THEY OWN IT ALL NOW! ooh ooh ooh aah aah aah!
of course that big gorilla did i on purpose!
did you see how all the other monkeys gave him high 5's and banannas afterwards?
they're all less tyhan human
ts time for the NCAA to start weeding out these little [profane] street urchins that have come to infest the college basketball courts across the country. It used to be a respectful sport, until they started allowing these thugs from Harlem in.
I would propose that the racial balance be the same as the ratio of the school itself. If the school is all black then it is permissible to have an all black team. If a school is 90% white then the team must not exceed 10% non-white on the team.
Just what are they offering for courses in the instituions. Advanced thuggery. Kick the white boy while he's down. Coward punkass [profane] Throw his ass down the toilet, along with his NBA hopes.
Hang the ni**er!!!
[profane] that dirty ass [profane] i would want that dirty ass [profane] to read what i am writing. [profane] that nasty dirty [profane] [profane] that fool! step on me and ill stomp step on him! but first make that [profane]ing [profane] bite the curb. make that [profane]ing [profane] bite the [profane]ing curb!!!
welcome to the niggering of America
He did it because obama is in office
What a Nasty Man, But Hey! He's Black, Obama's Black, Everything is OTay!
Have Houston come to Spokane and pull that crap while playin the Zags. We know how to handle people who behave like Negros up here. Boy, would have never made it to the bus.
it wasnt his fault.. a fan threw a banana on the court and the monkey tried to get to it before the other monkeys did.
worthless apes. welfare leaching maggots.smelly monkeys. no value to this country. wow thats alot of posts, not to mention the famous n word. racist s are alive and well and america. i love it. and if the blacks thing obama is going to do anything for them i got news for them. you are still going to be getto trash 4 yrs from now. ha ha ha.
now that Obama is Prez you'll be seeing alot more of this kind of crap.
Then all his monkey friends congratulate him! Standard Nigs!
look at the black people act like idiots. this is exactly the change obama was talking about. every opportunity the blacks have to step all over the white man, they're on it !
Surprize, Surprize.....Coleman is black and no one cares what he does.....but if it would have been a white man steping on a black guy's face, the whole darn world would be in an up roar.....what is the world coming to???
No, just a shotty arrogant fu#king N!GER....
typical ignorant monkey on the playground. Pull his scholarship, there is no way his momentum carried him, that was deliberate and to say different is negligent. To top it off his nappy headed teammate high fived him. Total crap.
don't blame him....he is a victim...just an innocent, poor, black .....piece of Sh*t
exactly why i hate black people
Come on.............If BLACKS couldn't pull the race card WHERE would our nation be today??!! People would have to actually take PERSONAL responsibility for themselves and their kids AND would have to EARN a spot in college b/c of their brain! Let's not be crazy...............we have worked hard to raise a generation of VICTIMS......and now our new president will continue this great legacy our country is famous for............POOR US
insert obama and any white person and there you have the next 4 years
You vote in a NIg and look what happens. If this was reversed it would be a heat crime and fat black Al Sharpten would be marching around the arena and boycotting the team. They should ban this stupid Gorilla and the rest of the monkeys that congratulated him for doing it. THANKS ALLO MR. PREDISENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gatekeeper, the racial aspect of this is that because the player is black he gets a bye, if he was white all of black america would be up in arms. The is a backlash coming from white america if blacks don't start taking responisbility for their actions equal to whites.
Thugs playing ball. Another incident in the past few days highlights the PC'ness of the athletic associations.
http://ncaabasketball.fanhouse.com/2009/01/21/syracuse-player-has-run-in-with-geno-auriemma-big-east-takes-no/
"The above video appears to show UConn women's basketball coach Geno Auriemma and Syracuse forward Nicole Michael exchanging words as they go through the post-game handshake line, followed by Michael trying to trip Auriemma when they cross paths again, and Auriemma being restrained by his players from going after Michael. A bizarre incident, to say the least.
But Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese has reviewed the incident and said he's not going to take any action."
I have an idea why these players suddenly seem emboldened, but I get labeled for my thought.
He showed his "TRUE COLORS" didn't he?
A future President of the USA....
typical nig behavior...no class ghetto jungle behavior.
The college game is imitating the pros......bunch of non-caucasion thugs all trying to be the alpha male.
When you have ignorant, ghetto-thug animals admitted to college merely because they possess athletic ability - this is what you get. Once again, shame on our society for prizing athletics over academics. What a sad commentary.
Just another rude act against a white boy. And they ask why no white guys play anymore? Its cause of crap like this - what happened to the great game of basketball? Stay home thugs, stop coming to our universities and screwing up society.
that thug or shall I say animal must be ban for life
Now that we have a black president, get used to it. Its our time to step on whitey...
thats how monkeys act... no surprise
woody H .... whats up you Nig... get a job.... wait Obama is in office so the whites will really continue to payf or you... dont bite the hand that feeds you
Friday, January 23, 2009
The Brave New World of the RMB Valuation Debate
As China settles in for the New Year holiday, its leaders can chew over Treasury Secretary designate Timothy Geithner’s declaration, made in a written statement to the Senate Finance Committee as it reviewed his nomination, that President Obama—” backed by the conclusions of a broad range of economists”-- believes that China is manipulating its currency.
Before the U.S. recession hit, China might have had more reason to worry that a new Democratic administration might settle in for some serious China bashing to placate its base. Formal designation of China as a currency manipulator would have been the first of a series of big stick measures meant to improve the position of American exporters and labor vis a vis their Chinese competitors.
Geithner’s response is, of course, a long way from the official formal designation by Treasury of China as an intentional currency manipulator for the purpose of gaining an unfair trade advantage under the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 that would trigger the sanctions process.
I’m not expecting aggressive moves by the Obama administration to sanction China into adopting a floating exchange rate, at least at this moment.
The Obama administration is pushing a $850 billion stimulus package through Congress and an amount of U.S. Treasury securities conservatively estimated to be “oodles” will have to be sold to China to finance it.
The need to market U.S. government debt to Beijing is perhaps the most important headache in America's China policy. But the financial crisis has also undermined America's prestige as the world's financial arbiter, provoked fresh displays of Chinese assertiveness, and limited the credible diplomatic options available to the Obama administration.
Concerning the bond market fallout, The New York Times tells us:
Prices of Treasury debt fell modestly after news of Mr. Geithner’s comments, reflecting worry among investors that China might be less willing to buy United States debt if the new administration pushed the country to further revalue its currency. The yield on the 30-year bond, which moves in the opposite direction from its price, climbed to 3.247 percent from 3.159 percent on Wednesday afternoon.
So, ixnay on the trade war, I would say.
The main Chinese media outlet, Xinhua, reported on Geithner’s statement in detail.
The assembled Chinese pundits were eager to fit President Obama with the robes of Herbert Hoover, significantly reframing the RMB issue as part of the Democratic Party’s protectionist agenda instead of accepting it as an orthodox free market nostrum for rationalizing exchange rate regimes and ameliorating trade imbalances.
Mdme. Zuo Xiaolei , Chief Economist of the Milky Way Securities Company, dismissed U.S. remarks on the undervalued RMB as “the same old song” (老调重弹), and warned darkly, “ Obama made no statements opposing protectionism, either on the campaign trail or in his inaugural address…add to that the inclination of the Democratic Party, and American protectionism has already become the greatest concern of the international community.” [emph. added]
American protectionism is the biggest concern of the international community? Bigger than, say, the Western financial system going tits up? Ya think?
In another piece of interesting framing, the article talks of the “China-U.S. economic relationship” as “by far the most important economic entity in the world”, one that accounted for 20% of global economic growth in the last year.
It is, of course, noteworthy that the United States, instead of being feted in its traditional role as “the engine of the world economy”, is now presented as an economically and ideologically shaky co-partner in the joint Sino-American free market economic enterprise.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Unfortunately, America’s forensic disadvantage in the U.S.-China RMB valuation debate go beyond the obvious difficulty that we are flat on our ass and in a poor position to give marching orders to China.
The RMB exchange rate issue has always included a backstory of opening up China’s financial markets to wider participation by foreign companies.
It goes back to 1997, during the Asian financial crisis.
The dominant Western narrative—that the East Asian tigers fully deserved their forex asskicking by George Soros for struggling to sustain improperly valued dollar pegs—endured some difficulty dealing with the awkward fact that since then China kept its undervalued RMB to USD peg (with a modest managed float after 2005), refused to open up its financial markets to significant global capital flows, declined, in short, to let the invisible hand rummage around in its wallet, and has yet to suffer the dire consequences ordained for countries with misvalued currencies. In fact, it's done rather well.
Western economists assumed their position would eventually be vindicated as the large capital inflows associated with an undervalued currency fueled a growth in the domestic money supply that the Chinese government would be finally unable to sterilize through bond sales, inflation would rear its head, and the government would be forced to float the RMB to protect the economy and manage the value of the RMB through monetary and interest rate policies.
It was possible that the Chinese banking system, undercapitalized, saddled with non-performing loans, over-regulated, and driven by government demands instead of market forces, would be ill-equipped to raise and allocate capital and distribute government debt efficiently enough under this sophisticated new regime to protect the economy from an arbitrage-driven meltdown, domestically driven but otherwise similar to the one that happened in Asia in 1997.
In 2003, Treasury Secretary Snow called on China to grasp the nettle, deregulate, and allow foreign capital to romp through its financial markets, so that the value of the RMB would be determined transparently by the free-market interaction between overseas demand and domestic policy:
Market-determined floating currencies are really the key to a well-functioning international financial system. For the world’s major traders, only freely floating currencies bring the accuracy and the efficiency necessary for the proper pricing account settlement in capital flows. That’s really our central point, that floating rates, market-based, flexible exchanges create the signals for a well-functioning flow of resources on a global basis. There’s ultimately no substitute for that.
In 2007, then Treasury Secretary Paulson, in a speech to the Shanghai Stock Exchange that perhaps marked the high-water mark of Bush administration free-market evangelism vis a vis China, painted the orthodox picture as he pushed China to open its financial markets to foreign companies:
"Time is of the essence," for China to develop a strong capital market, Paulson said. "The longer China waits, the more difficult it will be to create robust capital markets.".
"China's underdeveloped financial markets place the nation in a challenging position, trying to balance between a centrally administered and a market-driven economy," Paulson said.
But when the reckoning came, Western, not Chinese financial houses were on the losing side.
The international financial community, instead of playing sugar daddy to mismanaged Chinese banks, is begging sovereign wealth funds from Beijing to Dubai for injections of capital.
Ironically, the U.S. and British banking systems now look a lot like the Chinese system—stuffed with bad loans they can’t digest and propped up by public money because, apparently, the firms are too big to fail and free market forces no longer apply.
More importantly, the fact that the big international banks led the world economy and entire countries like Iceland off a cliff in pursuit of easy profits from an orgy of reckless lending has discredited the West’s financial wizards. It’s fueled the suspicion that Wall Street is not on an eternal search for maximum global economic efficiency—it’s on a neverending quest for the next greater fool.
In September 2008, Bloomberg commented acridly on the current state of affairs (especially bitchy comments in bold):
Eighteen months ago, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told an audience at the Shanghai Futures Exchange that China risked trillions of dollars in lost economic potential unless it freed up its capital markets.
``An open, competitive, and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than governmental intervention,'' Paulson said.
That advice rings hollow in China as Paulson plans a $700 billion rescue for U.S. financial institutions and the Securities and Exchange Commission bans short sales of insurers, banks and securities firms. Regulators in the fastest-growing major economy say they may ditch plans to introduce derivatives, and some company bosses are rethinking U.S. business models.
``The U.S. financial system was regarded as a model, and we tried our best to copy whatever we could,'' said Yu Yongding, a former adviser to China's central bank. ``Suddenly we find our teacher is not that excellent, so the next time when we're designing our financial system we will use our own mind more.''
The recent moves by Paulson, the former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., contradict what the U.S. told Asian governments over the past decade. Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia were urged to let unviable banks fail during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.
...
``It's the end of an era,'' said Shanghai-based Andy Xie, a independent analyst who was formerly Morgan Stanley's chief Asia economist. ``In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, socialism was discredited and the whole world turned right. Now financial capital has been discredited and the whole world, including the U.S., is turning left.''
…
Since China permitted securities backed by assets such as mortgages in 2005, only 14 such instruments have been approved for sale, according to the Web site run by China Government Securities Depository Trust and Clearing Co., the country's biggest debt clearing house.
China's financial institutions were slow to buy the mortgage-related securities that triggered the U.S. meltdown, incurring just $4.3 billion in losses and writedowns, according to data compiled Bloomberg.
Globally, banks have written down more than $520 billion as the credit crisis led to the demise or makeover of Wall Street's five biggest investment banks.
…
``It's ironic Paulson has become the manager of many large financial institutions,'' said Wang Jun, a finance specialist at the World Bank in Beijing. ``He will have to ask the Chinese leaders about their experience of managing state-owned assets.''
…
``China's made it clear it won't listen to these snake-oil salesmen who come from Wall Street, even if they're wearing suits issued by the Treasury Department,'' [Arthur Kroeber of Dragonomics Advisory Services Ltd.] said. ``It's strengthened the hands of all the people who are very skeptical about financial liberalization in China.''
Ouchouchouchouchouch.
So much for the United States holding the moral and intellectual high ground in the RMB debate.
So the Chinese government, unwilling to revalue and exacerbate the pain of its exporters during its recession, finds itself holding quite a few effective rhetorical cards in the debate with the United States.
And the Obama administration finds itself, at least for now, with few persuasive tools to compel an RMB revaluation.
Before the U.S. recession hit, China might have had more reason to worry that a new Democratic administration might settle in for some serious China bashing to placate its base. Formal designation of China as a currency manipulator would have been the first of a series of big stick measures meant to improve the position of American exporters and labor vis a vis their Chinese competitors.
Geithner’s response is, of course, a long way from the official formal designation by Treasury of China as an intentional currency manipulator for the purpose of gaining an unfair trade advantage under the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 that would trigger the sanctions process.
I’m not expecting aggressive moves by the Obama administration to sanction China into adopting a floating exchange rate, at least at this moment.
The Obama administration is pushing a $850 billion stimulus package through Congress and an amount of U.S. Treasury securities conservatively estimated to be “oodles” will have to be sold to China to finance it.
The need to market U.S. government debt to Beijing is perhaps the most important headache in America's China policy. But the financial crisis has also undermined America's prestige as the world's financial arbiter, provoked fresh displays of Chinese assertiveness, and limited the credible diplomatic options available to the Obama administration.
Concerning the bond market fallout, The New York Times tells us:
Prices of Treasury debt fell modestly after news of Mr. Geithner’s comments, reflecting worry among investors that China might be less willing to buy United States debt if the new administration pushed the country to further revalue its currency. The yield on the 30-year bond, which moves in the opposite direction from its price, climbed to 3.247 percent from 3.159 percent on Wednesday afternoon.
So, ixnay on the trade war, I would say.
The main Chinese media outlet, Xinhua, reported on Geithner’s statement in detail.
The assembled Chinese pundits were eager to fit President Obama with the robes of Herbert Hoover, significantly reframing the RMB issue as part of the Democratic Party’s protectionist agenda instead of accepting it as an orthodox free market nostrum for rationalizing exchange rate regimes and ameliorating trade imbalances.
Mdme. Zuo Xiaolei , Chief Economist of the Milky Way Securities Company, dismissed U.S. remarks on the undervalued RMB as “the same old song” (老调重弹), and warned darkly, “ Obama made no statements opposing protectionism, either on the campaign trail or in his inaugural address…add to that the inclination of the Democratic Party, and American protectionism has already become the greatest concern of the international community.” [emph. added]
American protectionism is the biggest concern of the international community? Bigger than, say, the Western financial system going tits up? Ya think?
In another piece of interesting framing, the article talks of the “China-U.S. economic relationship” as “by far the most important economic entity in the world”, one that accounted for 20% of global economic growth in the last year.
It is, of course, noteworthy that the United States, instead of being feted in its traditional role as “the engine of the world economy”, is now presented as an economically and ideologically shaky co-partner in the joint Sino-American free market economic enterprise.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Unfortunately, America’s forensic disadvantage in the U.S.-China RMB valuation debate go beyond the obvious difficulty that we are flat on our ass and in a poor position to give marching orders to China.
The RMB exchange rate issue has always included a backstory of opening up China’s financial markets to wider participation by foreign companies.
It goes back to 1997, during the Asian financial crisis.
The dominant Western narrative—that the East Asian tigers fully deserved their forex asskicking by George Soros for struggling to sustain improperly valued dollar pegs—endured some difficulty dealing with the awkward fact that since then China kept its undervalued RMB to USD peg (with a modest managed float after 2005), refused to open up its financial markets to significant global capital flows, declined, in short, to let the invisible hand rummage around in its wallet, and has yet to suffer the dire consequences ordained for countries with misvalued currencies. In fact, it's done rather well.
Western economists assumed their position would eventually be vindicated as the large capital inflows associated with an undervalued currency fueled a growth in the domestic money supply that the Chinese government would be finally unable to sterilize through bond sales, inflation would rear its head, and the government would be forced to float the RMB to protect the economy and manage the value of the RMB through monetary and interest rate policies.
It was possible that the Chinese banking system, undercapitalized, saddled with non-performing loans, over-regulated, and driven by government demands instead of market forces, would be ill-equipped to raise and allocate capital and distribute government debt efficiently enough under this sophisticated new regime to protect the economy from an arbitrage-driven meltdown, domestically driven but otherwise similar to the one that happened in Asia in 1997.
In 2003, Treasury Secretary Snow called on China to grasp the nettle, deregulate, and allow foreign capital to romp through its financial markets, so that the value of the RMB would be determined transparently by the free-market interaction between overseas demand and domestic policy:
Market-determined floating currencies are really the key to a well-functioning international financial system. For the world’s major traders, only freely floating currencies bring the accuracy and the efficiency necessary for the proper pricing account settlement in capital flows. That’s really our central point, that floating rates, market-based, flexible exchanges create the signals for a well-functioning flow of resources on a global basis. There’s ultimately no substitute for that.
In 2007, then Treasury Secretary Paulson, in a speech to the Shanghai Stock Exchange that perhaps marked the high-water mark of Bush administration free-market evangelism vis a vis China, painted the orthodox picture as he pushed China to open its financial markets to foreign companies:
"Time is of the essence," for China to develop a strong capital market, Paulson said. "The longer China waits, the more difficult it will be to create robust capital markets.".
"China's underdeveloped financial markets place the nation in a challenging position, trying to balance between a centrally administered and a market-driven economy," Paulson said.
But when the reckoning came, Western, not Chinese financial houses were on the losing side.
The international financial community, instead of playing sugar daddy to mismanaged Chinese banks, is begging sovereign wealth funds from Beijing to Dubai for injections of capital.
Ironically, the U.S. and British banking systems now look a lot like the Chinese system—stuffed with bad loans they can’t digest and propped up by public money because, apparently, the firms are too big to fail and free market forces no longer apply.
More importantly, the fact that the big international banks led the world economy and entire countries like Iceland off a cliff in pursuit of easy profits from an orgy of reckless lending has discredited the West’s financial wizards. It’s fueled the suspicion that Wall Street is not on an eternal search for maximum global economic efficiency—it’s on a neverending quest for the next greater fool.
In September 2008, Bloomberg commented acridly on the current state of affairs (especially bitchy comments in bold):
Eighteen months ago, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told an audience at the Shanghai Futures Exchange that China risked trillions of dollars in lost economic potential unless it freed up its capital markets.
``An open, competitive, and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in a manner that promotes stability and prosperity far better than governmental intervention,'' Paulson said.
That advice rings hollow in China as Paulson plans a $700 billion rescue for U.S. financial institutions and the Securities and Exchange Commission bans short sales of insurers, banks and securities firms. Regulators in the fastest-growing major economy say they may ditch plans to introduce derivatives, and some company bosses are rethinking U.S. business models.
``The U.S. financial system was regarded as a model, and we tried our best to copy whatever we could,'' said Yu Yongding, a former adviser to China's central bank. ``Suddenly we find our teacher is not that excellent, so the next time when we're designing our financial system we will use our own mind more.''
The recent moves by Paulson, the former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., contradict what the U.S. told Asian governments over the past decade. Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia were urged to let unviable banks fail during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.
...
``It's the end of an era,'' said Shanghai-based Andy Xie, a independent analyst who was formerly Morgan Stanley's chief Asia economist. ``In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, socialism was discredited and the whole world turned right. Now financial capital has been discredited and the whole world, including the U.S., is turning left.''
…
Since China permitted securities backed by assets such as mortgages in 2005, only 14 such instruments have been approved for sale, according to the Web site run by China Government Securities Depository Trust and Clearing Co., the country's biggest debt clearing house.
China's financial institutions were slow to buy the mortgage-related securities that triggered the U.S. meltdown, incurring just $4.3 billion in losses and writedowns, according to data compiled Bloomberg.
Globally, banks have written down more than $520 billion as the credit crisis led to the demise or makeover of Wall Street's five biggest investment banks.
…
``It's ironic Paulson has become the manager of many large financial institutions,'' said Wang Jun, a finance specialist at the World Bank in Beijing. ``He will have to ask the Chinese leaders about their experience of managing state-owned assets.''
…
``China's made it clear it won't listen to these snake-oil salesmen who come from Wall Street, even if they're wearing suits issued by the Treasury Department,'' [Arthur Kroeber of Dragonomics Advisory Services Ltd.] said. ``It's strengthened the hands of all the people who are very skeptical about financial liberalization in China.''
Ouchouchouchouchouch.
So much for the United States holding the moral and intellectual high ground in the RMB debate.
So the Chinese government, unwilling to revalue and exacerbate the pain of its exporters during its recession, finds itself holding quite a few effective rhetorical cards in the debate with the United States.
And the Obama administration finds itself, at least for now, with few persuasive tools to compel an RMB revaluation.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Concerning the sorry situation in Gaza...
...there are a few points I haven't seen made in the press.
1. It was always clear that Israel was going to take advantage of the post-Bush/pre-anybody interregnum to attack one of its enemies. Remember when the possibility of an attack on Iran or Lebanon 2.0 were being chewed over? It turned out badly for the people of Gaza, but Iran & Syria are probably noting that all Israel could do in the end was beat up the little guy on its doorstep.
2. It seems to me painfully obvious that the Gaza invasion is a hail-mary attempt to topple Hamas. The rocket issue a) gives Israel a pretext to attack and b) a justification for declaring victory and withdrawing even though Hamas hasn't fallen--though Israel has killed enough Hamas leaders and destroyed enough Gazan infrastructure to push Gaza firmly in the failed-state category.
3.It might be said that the real target of the Gaza invasion is the Obama administration. Israel has made the statement that any U.S. rethink on the Middle East must accept Israel's desire to destroy Hamas as a precondition. Israel is betting that Obama is preoccupied with domestic economic issues and not interested in using up political capital to challenge the Israeli framing and rebalance the U.S. posture away from Israel and toward the other Middle Eastern countries. Will Israel offer Obama a deal: back us on Hamas and we'll follow through on the Syria peace deal that's already brewing? Let's see.
4. I find risible the whole idea that Hamas will be weakened in the eyes of the Gazans. When an entire community is subjected to extensive and brutal collective punishment, they tend to blame the people dropping the bombs. I expect this has been a recruitment bonanza for Hamas.
5. Assuming that Hamas is still standing after the invasion ends, Israel's endgame involves corraling the U.S., EU, and Egypt to assist it in setting up a chokehold over humanitarian aid to Gaza and exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in an attempt to topple Hamas. Firing phosphorous shells into a UN compound and setting fire to hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid would be a convenient way to make things worse and make sure that resupply of food and medicine has to occur on Israeli terms. A multilateral force to shut down the smuggling tunnels is another important measure to restrict the flow of money, food, and medicine to Gaza. Rocket and arms interdiction are useful ways to pressure Hamas but perhaps not the core objective of Israel’s war on the tunnels.
6. It seems to me that this invasion will create more problems than it solves for Israel. It’s a classic illustration of the “doing something is better than doing nothing” fallacy which seems to afflict countries with large armies and weak opponents. Just because the U.S. presidential transition created a vacuum, that doesn’t mean taking advantage of it to invade Gaza was a good idea. If Israel unilaterally deposes Hamas, I don’t think Fatah is going to find a lot of eager volunteers to serve as Israeli assets inside Gaza. In the face of widespread suffering and anger inside Gaza and swelling international outrage over the invasion, I’m filing the statements from Israel and supporters of the invasion that everything is going great in the dubious/grain of salt file. The only people who will be genuinely happy are those who believe that Israel’s best hope for continued American attention and support is an atmosphere of perpetual, self-manufactured crisis—and keeping Gaza and the Arab world aboil with misery and anger.
7.With a few notable exceptions, media reporting and analysis on the Gaza invasion has been as crappy as the job they did on the Iraq invasion. Total inability to challenge the invader's national security talking points, blind acceptance of stated imperatives and objectives that make no logical sense, inability to ask the cui bono question, let alone let alone question the motives of the attacker or make an independent assessment of the overall political dynamic. Handwringing over the carnage and laughing at Joe Wurzelbacher seems about as deep as our pundits and reporters can go.
8. Did everybody skip the "collective punishment = war crime" day at the Nuremberg trials?
1. It was always clear that Israel was going to take advantage of the post-Bush/pre-anybody interregnum to attack one of its enemies. Remember when the possibility of an attack on Iran or Lebanon 2.0 were being chewed over? It turned out badly for the people of Gaza, but Iran & Syria are probably noting that all Israel could do in the end was beat up the little guy on its doorstep.
2. It seems to me painfully obvious that the Gaza invasion is a hail-mary attempt to topple Hamas. The rocket issue a) gives Israel a pretext to attack and b) a justification for declaring victory and withdrawing even though Hamas hasn't fallen--though Israel has killed enough Hamas leaders and destroyed enough Gazan infrastructure to push Gaza firmly in the failed-state category.
3.It might be said that the real target of the Gaza invasion is the Obama administration. Israel has made the statement that any U.S. rethink on the Middle East must accept Israel's desire to destroy Hamas as a precondition. Israel is betting that Obama is preoccupied with domestic economic issues and not interested in using up political capital to challenge the Israeli framing and rebalance the U.S. posture away from Israel and toward the other Middle Eastern countries. Will Israel offer Obama a deal: back us on Hamas and we'll follow through on the Syria peace deal that's already brewing? Let's see.
4. I find risible the whole idea that Hamas will be weakened in the eyes of the Gazans. When an entire community is subjected to extensive and brutal collective punishment, they tend to blame the people dropping the bombs. I expect this has been a recruitment bonanza for Hamas.
5. Assuming that Hamas is still standing after the invasion ends, Israel's endgame involves corraling the U.S., EU, and Egypt to assist it in setting up a chokehold over humanitarian aid to Gaza and exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in an attempt to topple Hamas. Firing phosphorous shells into a UN compound and setting fire to hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid would be a convenient way to make things worse and make sure that resupply of food and medicine has to occur on Israeli terms. A multilateral force to shut down the smuggling tunnels is another important measure to restrict the flow of money, food, and medicine to Gaza. Rocket and arms interdiction are useful ways to pressure Hamas but perhaps not the core objective of Israel’s war on the tunnels.
6. It seems to me that this invasion will create more problems than it solves for Israel. It’s a classic illustration of the “doing something is better than doing nothing” fallacy which seems to afflict countries with large armies and weak opponents. Just because the U.S. presidential transition created a vacuum, that doesn’t mean taking advantage of it to invade Gaza was a good idea. If Israel unilaterally deposes Hamas, I don’t think Fatah is going to find a lot of eager volunteers to serve as Israeli assets inside Gaza. In the face of widespread suffering and anger inside Gaza and swelling international outrage over the invasion, I’m filing the statements from Israel and supporters of the invasion that everything is going great in the dubious/grain of salt file. The only people who will be genuinely happy are those who believe that Israel’s best hope for continued American attention and support is an atmosphere of perpetual, self-manufactured crisis—and keeping Gaza and the Arab world aboil with misery and anger.
7.With a few notable exceptions, media reporting and analysis on the Gaza invasion has been as crappy as the job they did on the Iraq invasion. Total inability to challenge the invader's national security talking points, blind acceptance of stated imperatives and objectives that make no logical sense, inability to ask the cui bono question, let alone let alone question the motives of the attacker or make an independent assessment of the overall political dynamic. Handwringing over the carnage and laughing at Joe Wurzelbacher seems about as deep as our pundits and reporters can go.
8. Did everybody skip the "collective punishment = war crime" day at the Nuremberg trials?
Monday, December 15, 2008
New Article Up at Japan Focus
I have a article up at Japan Focus entitled Mumbai Aftermath: U.S. Tilt Toward India Alienates Pakistan and Undermines War Prospects in Afghanistan.
The "Made in Pakistan" label is by now pretty firmly affixed to the Mumbai outrage.
The most significant development in the story, however, has been the determined efforts by the United States, grudgingly supported by India and enthusiastically echoed by Pakistan, to divert any attention from the possibility that state actors e.g. the notorious Inter Services Intelligence directorate or ISI and its supporters in the government and inside Pakistan's elites were implicated in the attack.
The United States has openly stated its fear that an understandable escalation in hostilities between India and Pakistan could provide Pakistan's army the excuse to abandon the unpopular anti-Taliban adventure in the west in exchange for a more traditional and much less destabilizing eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the Indian military to the east.
Therefore, the line has been drawn, clearly if somewhat arbitrarily, to limit international condemnation to "non-state actors" such as Lashkar-e-Taibi (which supplied the manpower for the Mumbai attacks), while not scrutinizing potential ISI involvement in an attack which was meticulously and expensively planned inside Pakistan and did nothing to try to advance LeT's stated goals in Kashmir.
In case India and the United States thought that the pro-U.S. Zardari administration could be employed as an effective tool to remove the pro-Taliban/pro-al Qaeda rot inside Pakistan's ruling elite, they were quickly disabused of the notion.
The fallout of the Mumbai siege inside Pakistan was not a wave of sympathy. Instead, there was a series of manufactured outrages blamed on India but apparently generated inside Pakistan that allowed Pakistan to play the victim card (at least in its own eyes) while India was still reeling from the bloody attacks.
Chief among these "incidents" was the apparently groundless rumor propagated by the Pakistani media and its sources that Hamid Gul, the retired head of the ISI who plays the Darth Vader role in the U.S.-Pakistan saga, had been targeted for arrests or sanctions at the behest of the American and/or Indian governments in the aftermath of the attacks.
The story found its way into the Washington Post before being denied in its various forms by Secretary Rice and Pakistan Prime Minister Gilani.
To me, the primary motive of the Gul story and other rumors appears to be a shot across the bow of the Zardari administration, which had made precipitously conciliatory statements and offers of cooperation with India at the behest of the American government.
Apparently any attempts to treat the Mumbai attacks as a watershed moment in the Pakistani-Indian relationship and Pakistan's role as an anti-terror democracy that might a) infringe Pakistani sovereignty and b) challenge the policy and prerogatives (and deniability) of the ISI would excite powerful popular and institutional opposition within Pakistan.
When I read the stories in the Pakistani media about Gul, accounts that morphed Indian requests into unacceptable "demands", the supposedly threatening phone call to President Zardari from Indian foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee, etc. etc., I recalled the Gary Larson cartoon, "How Nature Says, 'Do Not Touch'".
To the warning rattle of a rattlesnake, the distended display of a pufferfish, the hiss of an angry cat with its fur on end, and a guy on a street corner dressed in an overcoat, a horsehead swim tube, a shoe on his head, and a bazooka, add the enthusiastic and uncritical fulminations of the Pakistan media concerning affronts to national sovereignty, dignity, and security that haven't even occured.
The Zardari government played along with the anti-Indian agitation sweeping the media.
I expect it made its own calculation that it could not afford (or survive) a confrontation with its security apparatus on behalf of the Indian government and U.S. policy and, even if it did think about standing up to the ISI, the likely outcome would be a protracted and traumatic process that would, among other things, enmesh Pakistan in the web of U.N. and U.S. sanctions and blacklists reserved for terror states.
For now, at least, the scope of rhetoric and action has been carefully circumscribed to encompass Lashkar-e-Taiba and a Muslim charity. India has publicly applauded Pakistan's actions, while grumbling about President Zardari's weakness.
Before we condemn the Zardari administration's spinelessness and the inexplicable pro-terrorist sympathies of Pakistan's security apparatus, we should remember that the U.S. security policy for Afghanistan has been a catastrophe for Pakistan, corrupting its government, foreclosing its most viable options for dealing with Pashtun unrest, exposing its citizens to terrorist attacks, and contributing to the collapse of its economy.
All this misery has been in the service of a single-track counter-insurgency strategy that hasn't worked in Afghanistan, and the U.S. government is on the brink of abandoning there--but insists on escalating inside Pakistan.
Given this context, we should be saddened but not too surprised that there is a dearth of sympathy inside Pakistan for the United States' Global War on Terror, or for the victims of Mumbai.
Friday, December 05, 2008
Playing With Fire
Yesterday’s post, The Mumbai Paradox, placed the Mumbai attacks within the context of America’s persistent efforts to rein in pro-Taliban elements of Pakistan’s ISI and neutralize unsympathetic and powerful ex-ISI officers like retired General Hamid Gul.
Gul was Director General of the ISI during its salad days running the anti-Soviet mujihadeen effort in Afghanistan. Gul is a chief architect of Pakistan’s security policy of using proxy extremist and terrorist groups—like the Taliban in Afghanistan and the LeT (implicated in the Mumbai attacks) in Kashmir–to reduce the attention and resources India could devote to direct military confrontation with the much-smaller Pakistan army. Now Gul bookends his traditional anti-India views with virulent opposition to U.S. GWOT policies in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I argued that the Mumbai outrage might have been a provocation engineered by the ISI to heighten tensions with India and provide a pretext for abandoning the alliance with the United States that is destroying Pakistan’s security and society and, not the least importantly, threatening the power and prerogatives of the ISI.
The ISI has no qualms about using terror as a weapon or accepting battle-level losses and collateral damage inside and outside Pakistan in the struggle to protect the nation, and the honor and objectives of the ISI.
I wrote “It does not appear that anyone—inside or outside of Pakistan—can mess with the ISI or Hamid Gul lightly.”
Well, it looks like we’re going to find out how big everybody’s balls really are.
From today’s The News:
Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi has met Lt-Gen (retd) Hameed Gul and assured him that the government would seriously look into the issue of Washington’s move to include the names of ex-ISI officials in the list of international terrorist through UN’s Security Council.
…
Gen Gulís name is said to on top of the US’s sponsored recommended list of international terrorist for being former chief of the ISI and an outspoken critic of the US policies and its controversial war on terror.
…
Gul said the enemies of Pakistan are presently targeting the ISI to weaken the institution of Pakistan Army and to attain the ultimate objective of de-nuclearising this only Muslim nuclear state in the world.
Gen Gul said Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi assured him that the government would seriously look into the matter and take appropriate measures. The United States has recently sought from the UN Security Council the inclusion of the names of five ex-ISI officials, including the name of Lt Gen (retd) Hameed Gul to put them on the list of international terrorists.
A few observations:
First of all, the United States either believes that Gul was directly involved with the Mumbai attack, or is trying to use the event as a galvanizing event to get Pakistan’s civilian government to acquiesce to dropping the UN hammer on Gul and his ex-ISI buddies. I suspect that there’s some smoking-gun intel, either generated by the U.S. itself or obtained through India, that would encourage the U.S. to make such an overt, incendiary move against Gul.
Second, it doesn’t look like Gul is a paper tiger used as a cutout by Saudi millionaires or a retired sorehead general with no domestic clout or reach. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister was dispatched to personally stroke Gul and make sure he concentrates his ire on the United States and India and not the Pakistani government. Taking on Gul may have bloody consequences that Pakistan’s elite understands well but the United States, which has an unhealthy misconception that using the U.N. to harass and infuriate its enemies is relatively blowback-free, may find difficult to appreciate.
Third, the Pakistan government no doubt finds this situation one excruciatingly embarrassing. They want to please the United States, but they don’t want Hamid Gul and everybody in the ISI and army who think as Gul does at their throats. So the Foreign Minister is dispatched to personally reassure Gul that the government is not going to…well, they are going to “seriously look into it”, which means that Asif Zardari will weasel and equivocate for the next few weeks and hope the whole problem goes away.
Fourth, Gul’s not just sitting in his La-Z-Boy expecting that the feckless government will stand up for Pakistani sovereignty and save his bacon.
Gul told the news that he and Qureshi had
discussed the idea of convening an immediate session of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) where Russia and China should be invited as observers to discuss the challenges confronting Pakistan, including the latest anti-Pakistan and anti-ISI campaign launched by India after the recent Mumbai attack.
In other words, Gul is proposing an alternative political and diplomatic roadmap for Pakistan. Instead of cleaving to the United States, as the Zardari government has done, and buying into the whole anti-Taliban and anti-al Qaeda strategy that is devastating Pakistan, Gul is proposing a alternate tie-up with two strategic competitors of the United States—Russia and China.
Given the fundamentals of Pakistan right now—growing dissatisfaction with the Zardari government, a dislike of the U.S. security strategy that is approaching hatred, a burgeoning economic and security crisis, and a feeling of desperation and persecution that now finds India as well as America as its focus—Gul will find fertile ground for his rhetorical seeds.
I expect the OIC initiative is going to go exactly nowhere, but it provides a viable, valid, and politically popular context for whatever Gul and his ISI buddies do next if the United States and India persist with their efforts to sanction him.
Given what the ISI has done in Kashmir, Afghanistan, and India, don’t expect what comes next to be small, peaceful, or bloodless.
Gul was Director General of the ISI during its salad days running the anti-Soviet mujihadeen effort in Afghanistan. Gul is a chief architect of Pakistan’s security policy of using proxy extremist and terrorist groups—like the Taliban in Afghanistan and the LeT (implicated in the Mumbai attacks) in Kashmir–to reduce the attention and resources India could devote to direct military confrontation with the much-smaller Pakistan army. Now Gul bookends his traditional anti-India views with virulent opposition to U.S. GWOT policies in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I argued that the Mumbai outrage might have been a provocation engineered by the ISI to heighten tensions with India and provide a pretext for abandoning the alliance with the United States that is destroying Pakistan’s security and society and, not the least importantly, threatening the power and prerogatives of the ISI.
The ISI has no qualms about using terror as a weapon or accepting battle-level losses and collateral damage inside and outside Pakistan in the struggle to protect the nation, and the honor and objectives of the ISI.
I wrote “It does not appear that anyone—inside or outside of Pakistan—can mess with the ISI or Hamid Gul lightly.”
Well, it looks like we’re going to find out how big everybody’s balls really are.
From today’s The News:
Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi has met Lt-Gen (retd) Hameed Gul and assured him that the government would seriously look into the issue of Washington’s move to include the names of ex-ISI officials in the list of international terrorist through UN’s Security Council.
…
Gen Gulís name is said to on top of the US’s sponsored recommended list of international terrorist for being former chief of the ISI and an outspoken critic of the US policies and its controversial war on terror.
…
Gul said the enemies of Pakistan are presently targeting the ISI to weaken the institution of Pakistan Army and to attain the ultimate objective of de-nuclearising this only Muslim nuclear state in the world.
Gen Gul said Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi assured him that the government would seriously look into the matter and take appropriate measures. The United States has recently sought from the UN Security Council the inclusion of the names of five ex-ISI officials, including the name of Lt Gen (retd) Hameed Gul to put them on the list of international terrorists.
A few observations:
First of all, the United States either believes that Gul was directly involved with the Mumbai attack, or is trying to use the event as a galvanizing event to get Pakistan’s civilian government to acquiesce to dropping the UN hammer on Gul and his ex-ISI buddies. I suspect that there’s some smoking-gun intel, either generated by the U.S. itself or obtained through India, that would encourage the U.S. to make such an overt, incendiary move against Gul.
Second, it doesn’t look like Gul is a paper tiger used as a cutout by Saudi millionaires or a retired sorehead general with no domestic clout or reach. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister was dispatched to personally stroke Gul and make sure he concentrates his ire on the United States and India and not the Pakistani government. Taking on Gul may have bloody consequences that Pakistan’s elite understands well but the United States, which has an unhealthy misconception that using the U.N. to harass and infuriate its enemies is relatively blowback-free, may find difficult to appreciate.
Third, the Pakistan government no doubt finds this situation one excruciatingly embarrassing. They want to please the United States, but they don’t want Hamid Gul and everybody in the ISI and army who think as Gul does at their throats. So the Foreign Minister is dispatched to personally reassure Gul that the government is not going to…well, they are going to “seriously look into it”, which means that Asif Zardari will weasel and equivocate for the next few weeks and hope the whole problem goes away.
Fourth, Gul’s not just sitting in his La-Z-Boy expecting that the feckless government will stand up for Pakistani sovereignty and save his bacon.
Gul told the news that he and Qureshi had
discussed the idea of convening an immediate session of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) where Russia and China should be invited as observers to discuss the challenges confronting Pakistan, including the latest anti-Pakistan and anti-ISI campaign launched by India after the recent Mumbai attack.
In other words, Gul is proposing an alternative political and diplomatic roadmap for Pakistan. Instead of cleaving to the United States, as the Zardari government has done, and buying into the whole anti-Taliban and anti-al Qaeda strategy that is devastating Pakistan, Gul is proposing a alternate tie-up with two strategic competitors of the United States—Russia and China.
Given the fundamentals of Pakistan right now—growing dissatisfaction with the Zardari government, a dislike of the U.S. security strategy that is approaching hatred, a burgeoning economic and security crisis, and a feeling of desperation and persecution that now finds India as well as America as its focus—Gul will find fertile ground for his rhetorical seeds.
I expect the OIC initiative is going to go exactly nowhere, but it provides a viable, valid, and politically popular context for whatever Gul and his ISI buddies do next if the United States and India persist with their efforts to sanction him.
Given what the ISI has done in Kashmir, Afghanistan, and India, don’t expect what comes next to be small, peaceful, or bloodless.
Thursday, December 04, 2008
The Mumbai Paradox
As India Bleeds, Pakistan Gets Pushed Closer to its Breaking Point
The rhetoric of the Global War on Terror doesn’t seem to have its old magic anymore.
In the aftermath of the horrendous Mumbai attacks, it seems there were just as many articles in the papers saying this wasn’t Mumbai’s 9/11 as there were efforts to raise the bloody flag of America’s catastrophe over the carnage.
The most conspicuous example of 9/11 exhaustion is Pakistan.
According to the GWOT mythology, Pakistan experienced its galvanizing moment in the suicide bombing of the Islamabad Marriott Hotel, and the people and government of Pakistan are now standing shoulder to shoulder with the world’s democracies to combat extremism.
However, after the initial shock of the Mumbai attack wore off in Pakistan—and the international narrative that the attackers were Pakistani coalesced--there was an immediate and emotional rejection of the idea that long-suffering Pakistan should be further destabilized under U.S. and Indian insistence that the miscreants be pursued inside Pakistan’s borders.
A common theme in Pakistan’s media is that the Mumbai attack was carried out by Hindu extremists, or even was a false flag operation carried out by India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) to provoke a conflict with Pakistan.
One commenter opined, Maybe this wasn’t India’s 9/11. Maybe it was India’s Oklahoma City.
That’s very bad news for the United States and its covert struggle inside Pakistan against government and public apathy concerning the Western struggle to stabilize Afghanistan, and to neutralize pro-Taliban and pro-al Qaeda elements in the notorious Inter Services Intelligence directorate (ISI).
Pakistan’s Zardari government, which is almost doglike in its desire to please the United States, is nervously playing word games about cooperating with India as the United States demands, while it drags its feet in order to keep in step with its domestic constituency.
The U.S. is fully aware of the fragility of the Zardari government, and popular resistance to U.S. aims in the region, and is trying to tread carefully, eschewing the rhetoric of the war on terror.
However, by the momentum of its policies, the desperate need to keep Afghanistan from going down the tubes, its pro-India tilt in South Asia, and the discovery of another perceived lever to compel Pakistan’s cooperation, the United States appears determined to disregard or steamroll over Pakistan’s obvious anxieties.
In India, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice condoled with India, as AFP reports:
"Pakistan needs to act with urgency and with resolve and cooperate fully and transparently," Rice said during her one-day visit to India.
"The response of the Pakistan government should be one of cooperation and action. That is what we expect and we have been sending that message," she said.
And, according to the U.S. embassy via AFP, Admiral Mullen passed the same message to President Zardari:
[Mullen] urged Pakistani leaders, including President Asif Ali Zardari, "to investigate aggressively any and all possible ties to groups based in Pakistan," the US embassy said in a statement.
Seemingly eager to demonstrate that he possesses an invincible tin ear when it comes to Pakistani politics, Admiral Mullen took advantage of his meeting with Zardari to press Pakistan’s participation in what is possibly the only initiative less popular than assisting the Indians in a murder investigation—America’s bloody counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan.
Admiral Mike Mullen urged Pakistan on Wednesday to investigate all possible links between the Mumbai attacks and Pakistani groups and to broaden its campaign against militants.
Trouble is, the War on Terror dog doesn’t hunt anymore where it matters most—Pakistan.
Today the rhetoric of the war on terror is irretrievably linked to the United States, its failed strategy, its dubious objectives…and Islamabad’s coerced participation in a U.S.-orchestrated military, political, economic, and security drama that threatens to rip Pakistan apart.
The result is skewed narratives, distorted policies, an unavoidable but counter-productive American reliance on arm-twisting instead of persuasion, and a visceral Pakistan opposition to U.S. policies that is reaching the point of desperate revulsion.
And, triumphant Democrats be warned, it doesn’t look like things will improve in an Obama administration.
The horror perpetrated in Mumbai might be the work of al Qaeda, Kashmir separatists, some previously unknown Islamic extremist group indigenous to India, or an obscenity committed by Indian gangsters or Hindu ultra-nationalists.
But to me it looks a lot like blowback from the U.S. campaign to rein in Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) apparatus and orchestrate an anti-Taliban/anti-al Qaeda united front of democracies stretching from Kabul to Islamabad to New Delhi.
Any proven involvement by Pakistani state institutions in the Mumbai attack would be a catastrophe for Pakistan-India relations.
It would immediately provoke the shift of Pakistan’s military focus and resources away from a conflict it detests—the U.S. imposed counterinsurgency in west Pakistan’s Frontier and Tribal Areas (FATA)--to an arrangement much more comfortable for Pakistan’s army: the familiar display of ritualized hostility and the deployment of a conventional order of battle on the eastern border with India.
Therefore, despite some hard-to-explain anomalies, there is a determined effort by the United States, with the obliging assistance of the media, to squeeze the Mumbai outrage into a conventional South Asian narrative: a brutal episode in the proxy war between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, with militants of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) Kashmir independence organization nurtured by Pakistan’s ISI serving as shock troops in the struggle.
Indeed, LeT’s fingerprints are apparently all over the operation. The single captured terrorist, Ajmal Amin Kamal, has been identified as a Pakistani citizen and LeT fidayeen. A satellite phone that had made calls to the LeT operations chief was allegedly recovered. According to details of Kamal’s testimony leaked to Indian media, he was trained and indoctrinated in TeL camps.
However, analysts are undoubtedly wondering why the LeT attackers, while slaughtering almost 200 random Indian victims, targeted Americans, Britons, and Jews.
And they are wondering why no mention was made of Kashmir by the attackers.
The e-mail taking responsibility for the attack, ostensibly from a previously unknown group, the Deccan Mujahideen, and a cell phone conversation between an attacker and Indian media during the incident both couched the incident in terms of the Hindu-Muslim relationship inside India proper: the alleged mistreatment of the head of a radical Islamic group, the Students Islamic Movement of India, one Abul Bashar Qasmi, by the Indian police; the provocative destruction of a mosque, Babri Masjid, by Hindu nationalists; and the plight of “mujahideen” languishing in Indian prisons.
Decca is, perhaps conveniently, at exactly the other end of India from Kashmir.
A possible answer to these puzzling questions goes well beyond Kashmir and has disturbing implications for U.S. policy in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
The Mumbai operation was carefully planned over an extended period—perhaps a year—apparently in Pakistan.
Targets were carefully scouted ahead of time—the owner of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel said the attackers knew the layout of the hotel, its kitchens, and service areas better than the Indian commandoes—and apartments and rooms were rented ahead of time.
The circumstances of the alleged transit from Pakistan’s main port of Karachi to Mumbai argue a chilling level of planning, resources, professional capability, ruthlessness, and a professional fighter’s talent for improvisation.
From The Hindu:
Based on the continuing interrogation of arrested Lashkar terrorist Ajmal Amir Kamal, investigators believe the 12 terrorists who left Karachi on a merchant ship hijacked a fishing boat to facilitate their final assault on Mumbai.
According to Kamal, the group hijacked the Porbandar-registered Kuber to avoid detection by Indian Navy and Coast Guard patrols, which had a considerable presence in off Mumbai.
While one group of terrorists used the hijacked boat to land at Sassoon Docks on the eastern coast of Mumbai, a second group used a fibreglass lifeboat to row west to the Cuffe Parade fisherman’s colony.
Before leaving the fishing boat, the terrorists beheaded its captain, who Gujarat authorities have identified as Balwant Tandel, from Una village in the Union Territory of Diu. There is no word on the fate of the remaining crew of five.
To recap: the terrorists had an entire merchant ship at their disposal, as well as an arsenal of weapons. Their complex plan to evade detection by the Indian military involved locating and hijacking a suitable vessel. They got their vessel, executed the hapless captain (and apparently his crew), and continued on their mission.
Further reports indicate that the attackers left timed explosive charges in the two taxis they took to reach their targets, in order to kill the drivers and further cover their tracks.
The subsequent assault culminated in near simultaneous attacks on multiple targets and a protracted siege at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel where the attackers held off Indian commandoes for sixty hours.
No wonder that people are thinking that al Qaeda or Pakistan’s ISI are the only two organizations that could have carried out such a massive, well-planned assault.
Efforts to paint the attack as a LeT initiative are less convincing.
The New York Times dutifully reported the spin provided by “U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials” concerning the Kashmir angle, while admitting that the targets of the Mumbai attack—Americans, Britons, and Jews--don’t quite fit with the supposed objective of advancing TeL’s military and political objectives in Kashmir:
Lashkar-e-Taiba is not known to have singled out Westerners in past terrorist attacks, as the gunmen in Mumbai seem to have done. But one counterterrorism official said Friday that the group “has not pursued an exclusively Kashmiri agenda” and that it might certainly go after Westerners to advance broader goals.
As to how LeT could cobble together a boat hijacking and a commando-style amphibious operation:
An American counterterrorism official said there was strong evidence that Lashkar-e-Taiba had a “maritime capability” and would have been able to mount the sophisticated operation in Mumbai.
Kashmir is, as that counterterrorism official is undoubtedly aware, landlocked.
Clearly, the elephant in the room is Pakistan’s ISI, which has supported LeT as a proxy in its struggle with India.
The ISI, which nurtured the anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan (with U.S. aid) and supported the Taliban government is not sympathetic to America’s faltering effort to create an anti-Taliban bulwark in Kabul.
It is especially unhappy that the United States has abandoned any pretense of even-handedness in the Pakistan-India relationship.
Washington has overtly tilted toward New Delhi.
An eyebrow-raising nuclear giveaway negotiated bilaterally between the U.S. and India allowed India to normalize its relationship with the international nuclear and non-proliferation community even while the Bush administration denied the same facility to Pakistan.
Even more dangerously, the United States has chosen to allow India to establish itself in Afghanistan—Pakistan’s only regional geopolitical asset and ally, at least when it was controlled by the Taliban--at Pakistan’s expense, thereby coupling a long-term American presence and the fate of the Karzai regime with New Delhi’s continued influence inside Afghanistan.
Now that the battle in eastern Afghanistan has become desperate and Taliban have been exploiting their safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the U.S. has been pulling all the political, military, and economic levers at its command in order to compel Pakistan’s active and effective cooperation in the struggle, and to force Islamabad to accept a security condominium in South Asia by which the U.S. is the dominant power, India its ally, and Pakistan a disrespected client of dubious loyalty and reliability.
A wake-up call for Pakistan was undoubtedly the American response to the suicide bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul in July 2008.
Rather than tacitly understanding Pakistan’s right to punish Indian meddling in its Afghan/Muslim back yard, or just shrugging its shoulders at yet another episode in the brutal South Asian dance of death between New Delhi and Islamabad, the United States came down openly and unequivocally on India’s side, dispatching a CIA official to confront Pakistan over the matter and, significantly, leaking the news of intelligence linking the ISI to the attack to the New York Times.
With the fall of Musharraf, the U.S. disenchantment with Pakistan appears to have intensified.
When Musharraf was forced from office despite heroic U.S. measures to prolong his reign, the United States lost a relatively capable ally with strong links to his country’s military and intelligence services.
Instead, it now finds itself forced to work through a willing but undeniably feckless and unpopular civilian government led by Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Zardari.
Recognizing Zardari’s weakness, the United States has apparently made the decision to insert itself more directly into Pakistan’s internal affairs.
Pakistan’s sovereignty has been eroded by the United States to a degree that is not generally appreciated in the U.S.
It’s not just the U.S. military incursions into Pakistan, and the drone attacks that have recently spread beyond the tribal regions to take out Taliban and al-Qaeda elements in the North West Frontier Province.
It also involves the United States asserting more and more overt direction of events inside Pakistan in order to compensate for Pakistan’s manifest lack of enthusiasm for a polarizing and high-stakes battle against the Taliban in Pakistan’s west.
It is difficult to look at the public humiliation that the United States has subjected Pakistan to on the issue of an IMF loan without wondering if it is part of a plan to bring the civilian government to heel.
Indeed, in an event that is either the sign of the ever-increasing militarization of U.S. foreign policy or a signal that international aid to Pakistan must conform to America’s security strategy—or both—none other than the head of the U.S. Central Command, General Petraeus, discussed Pakistan’s needs at the IMF annual meeting.
When energy and food price bubbles, the global recession, and a healthy dose of government mismanagement and inaction pushed Pakistan on the brink of defaulting on its foreign debt in November 2008, the United States forced Pakistan into the arms of the IMF—considered inside Pakistan a symbol of national humiliation that compromises its status as a proud regional power.
The IMF conditions for its $7.6 billion loan, including a slate of price and tax increases in a severe recessionary environment seem wrongheaded enough to exacerbate the crisis and force Pakistan’s government to become even more dependent on the so-called “Friends of Pakistan”, the group of nations that the U.S. has corralled to control the flow of further international assistance to Pakistan.
Since Zardari’s backing from the army is almost non-existent, the U.S. has apparently also taken military matters into its own hands, coordinating its anti-Taliban strategy—and delivering its demands for actionable intelligence—in direct meetings with Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Kayani, most memorably summoning the general to a meeting on board the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln with Admiral Mullen and General Petraeus in August of this year.
As veteran South Asia reporter and analyst Syed Saleem Shahzad pointed out in a recent article in Asia Times, a U.S. decision to bypass the Foreign Ministry and brief Pakistani legislators directly raised some eyebrows:
Last week [mid November 2008—ed], the NATO commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, visited Islamabad to brief parliamentarians, but several of them, including those of the dominant Pakistan People's Party and Federal Minister Raza Rabbani, refused to attend.
They called the meeting a serious breach of Pakistan's sovereignty as no military official of another country is supposed to approach parliamentarians without the Foreign Office's mediation.
The riskiest element of the U.S. strategy is an effort to rein in the notoriously independent and pro-Taliban Inter Services Intelligence apparatus of Pakistan’s military. Taliban sympathizers inside and outside the ISI have presented roadblocks to U.S. efforts to pursue Taliban insurgents and al-Qaeda assets aggressively, and the United States has been looking for ways to bring the refractory intelligence service to heel.
The Zardari government is apparently not up to the task. Prior to his state visit to the United States in August—during which he received a pointedly-leaked “charge sheet” from a deputy director of the CIA describing ISI—Taliban links-- Pakistan Prime Minister Gilani proudly announced that the ISI would henceforth report to the civilian cabinet.
It was an assertion that he was forced to retract in the most humiliating and public matter imaginable within 24 hours.
As Shahzad reports, reining in the ISI and its supporters is a consistent U.S. objective:
High-level meetings between US intelligence and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) have already been held at different levels to devise plans to cripple the support systems of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
Two prominent names came under discussion at these meetings: retired Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul and a former ISI official, retired Squadron Leader Khalid Khawaja.
Gul, a former head of the ISI, is suspected of providing political and moral support to the Taliban-led resistance in Afghanistan. Last year, former premier Benazir Bhutto named him as a suspect for the October 18 attack on her life in Karachi. She was subsequently assassinated in December.
Khawaja was the first person in the country to assist the displaced families of Arab fighters who fled to Pakistan after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. He fought their cases in court, arranged temporary housing for them and assisted them in departing to their countries. Khawaja is active in the cause of missing people (those detained without trial for years) and wants to register cases against the former chief of army staff and president, General Pervez Musharraf, and his military aides for abuses allegedly committed during their eight years in power.
Tightening the noose around people such as Gul and Khawaja and the like is one way to cut off support for the Taliban.
The battle has begun in earnest in preparation for next year's showdown.
Maybe the showdown over the ISI’s more-than-tacit support for the Taliban began a little earlier than expected—in November 2008 in Mumbai.
Hamid Gul, the ISI advocate mentioned in Shahzad’s article, is a genuine hard case.
Gul headed the ISI from 1987 to 1989, during the height of the mujihadeed insurgency against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He has spent 20 years organizing insurgencies and terrorism in Afghanistan and Kashmir. He conceived and executed the ISI’s successful campaign to organize a right wing Islamacist party to oppose the PPP in the 1980s. In a letter written in late 2007, Benazir Bhutto named him as one of the three likely organizers of her anticipated assassination. He’s violently anti-Indian and the architect of the Kashmir insurgency. In the aftermath of America’s abandonment of Afghanistan in 1989 and U.S. sanctions on Pakistan’s nuclear program, he’s passionately anti-American, turning against Musharraf when he became, in Gul’s view, too accommodating to the United States’ Global War on Terror demands.
In retirement, Gul speaks for a powerful conservative political and military constituency that values Pakistani independence, a hard line against India, and disdain for the anti-Taliban policies the United States is pushing on the PPP civilian government.
His views probably resonate more with Pakistani public opinion than the pro-U.S./India-accommodating policies of the Zardari government.
It does not appear that anyone—inside or outside of Pakistan—can mess with the ISI or Hamid Gul lightly.
In reviewing its South Asia policy—and trying to keep the fragile rapprochement of the Indian and Pakistan governments from shattering into a million bloody pieces in the aftermath of the Mumbai attack--the Bush administration may be acquiring a belated understanding of how its overt pro-India tilt and heavy-handed approach toward Pakistan have combined to create an atmosphere inside Pakistan charged with bad things: feelings of persecution, humiliation, encirclement, and peril.
The equivocal and delicate position of the ISI—and a popular Pakistani hostility toward India and, by extension, the United States that goes well beyond “ambivalent”-- was strikingly demonstrated even before the Mumbai siege had ended.
On November 28, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza to dispatch the Director General of ISI, one Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha to India to receive Indian findings concerning the TeL links of the attackers and “share information”.
Gilani agreed.
This request does not seem unreasonable, given that Pakistani citizens had apparently turned the center of India’s greatest city into a three-day abattoir. Nevertheless, the request—ineluctably morphing into an intolerable “Indian demand” in Pakistani news reports--ignited a political firestorm inside Pakistan. The dominant civilian party in opposition, Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, questioned the government’s decision to send the DG. Islamicist parties lambasted the idea.
Even Gilani's own cabinet piled on, in the process displaying its exasperation that India was getting a chance to play the victim card even as Pakistan was in danger of coming apart at the seams:
On the domestic level, thanks to the uncalled for Indian allegations, some ministers of the Yousuf Raza Gilani cabinet got an opportunity to criticise their prime minister on his face for giving an assurance to India that the ISI chief will go to New Delhi without consulting even his cabinet colleagues.
Angry ministers told Gilani clearly in Saturday’s cabinet meeting that his decision was not good and he should concentrate on “institutionalised decision-making” rather than going for solo flights in the future. Gilani was forced to change his decision. The cabinet, after discussing the Mumbai carnage and the Indian allegations in detail, also advised the prime minister that no ISI official should be sent to India in the near future.
It was discussed in the meeting as to why the militants made a ridiculous demand of liberating the Hyderabad Deccan (Andhra Pradesh). This issue was never raised by any hardline Muslim militant in India or Pakistan in the past. Why did they not demand the liberation of Kashmir, which was the prime objective of banned Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan?
The Indian government claimed that these militants reached Gujarat from Karachi by boat through a 500-km sea route. Why did the Indian Navy fail to stop this boat? The cabinet unanimously agreed that Pakistan will not come under any Indian pressure but efforts will also be made to decrease tensions without annoying the public opinion.
One minister was of the view that the Indian media war against Pakistan had helped Islamabad indirectly as the local media ignored all the domestic political issues and got involved in the tension created by India.
And who was there to throw another anvil the government’s way? Hamid Gul, of course.
“Former military dictator Pervez Musharraf had bowed down to the US immediately after 9/11 and had let the nation down and now the sitting rulers have humiliated the nation by bowing down to India,” said Lt-Gen (retd) Hamid Gul, former chief of ISI, while commenting on the development.
“We are losing our position. The decision of sending the ISI director-general to India should have been taken through diplomatic channels,” he added.
Saying the preliminary information suggested that “some elements” in Pakistan were responsible for the terror strikes in Mumbai, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday asked his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani to send ISI chief to Delhi to share information on Mumbai terror attacks.
…
The former top spymaster of the country said India should not have demanded Pakistan to send the ISI chief to New Delhi. He said had Pakistan needed help of the Indian intelligence chief, they would have never allowed it.
“It seems there is no authority in Pakistan. It is not information-sharing but in fact an interrogation of the ISI chief and the United States is doing this behind the scenes,” he said. “Washington wants India and Pakistan to wage its so-called war on terror,” he remarked.
Lt-Gen (retd) Hamid Gul said in view of his experience as top spymaster of the country, he could say confidently that it (the Mumbai attacks) is an inside job to pressurise Pakistan. “The summoning of the ISI chief is a pretext that is part of the greater objective of getting the ISI dissolved,” Hamid Gul said. “It is a credible institution of Pakistan and sentiments of the Pakistani nation are being hurt by making a mockery of this institution,” he said.
The former ISI chief said he would also raise the issue in the next meeting of the Pakistan Ex-Servicemen Society because the rulers could not be allowed to play around with an institution like the ISI.
Gul used the Pakistan Ex-Servicemen Society as a platform in his campaign to bring down Pervez Musharraf, a fact that Asif Zardari is certainly uncomfortably aware of.
In an eerie reprise of the August scenario, the Zardari government subsequently backed down and announced that the ISI DG would not go to India.
If the Mumbai massacres were organized and condoned by the ISI as a provocation, I suppose we can say “mission accomplished”.
The fundamental hostility between India and Pakistan has been affirmed, the inability of the PPP government to back up its U.S.-mandated good wishes toward India with meaningful action has been exposed, and the willingness of the ISI to meet challenges to its power with brutal violence has been revealed.
And by targeting Americans, Britons, and Jews, the attack was overtly linked, not to the never-ending squabble between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, but to the U.S.-led security policy for Afghanistan and South Asia
According to Pakistan’s The News, the Taliban in western Pakistan responded to the heightened tensions with India with a suspiciously prompt and unanimous offer (met with an suspiciously prompt and positive response from the government) to cease operations so that Pakistan’s army could shift its resources to the east:
All main militant groups fighting in Fata, from South Waziristan to Bajaur and from Mohmand to the Khyber Agency, have contacted the government through different sources after the Mumbai bombings and have offered a ceasefire if the Pakistan Army also stops its operations.
And as a positive sign that this ceasefire offer may be accepted, the Pakistan Army has, as a first step, declared before the media some notorious militant commanders, including Baitullah Mehsud and Maulvi Fazlullah, as “patriotic” Pakistanis.
These two militant commanders are fighting the Army for the last four years and have invariably been accused of terrorism against Pakistan but the aftermath of the Mumbai carnage has suddenly turned terrorists into patriots.
A top security official told a group of senior journalists on Saturday: “We have no big issues with the militants in Fata. We have only some misunderstandings with Baitullah Mehsud and Fazlullah. These misunderstandings could be removed through dialogue.”
Pakistan’s normally fractious media has also circled the wagons on the nation’s behalf in denigrating the Indian allegations, earning rare praise from the military:
The change in the attitude of the Pakistani military establishment is remarkable. Thanks to India, the security officials, who used to criticise the Pakistani media, are now praising its role in the recent days, saying: “You have proven that you are patriotic Pakistanis.”
Last year, the same officials were part of a decision to impose a ban on many Pakistani TV channels because of their alleged anti-state behaviour. Meanwhile, Army Chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has made it clear to President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani that if India escalates tensions, then Pakistan has to move its troops from the tribal areas to the eastern borders and it would not be possible to continue the war against terrorism.
Top military officials conveyed the same message to the media representatives on Saturday.
Asia Times’ Syed Saleem Shahzad has presented a highly circumstantial account of the the background of the Mumbai attack, presenting a narrative of al Qaeda Bangladesh hijacking plans for a ISI-organized, LeT-executed outrage in Kashmir and transplanting it to Mumbai.
However, one can be forgiven if one wonders if the narrative presented is possibly a self-serving attempt by the ISI to shirk responsibility for an attack organized not only under its nose but by its own officers and shift responsibility for the incident that has aroused global outrage to the broad shoulders of al Qaeda:
Zakiur [LeT’s Commander in chief] and the ISI's forward section in Karachi, completely disconnected from the top brass, approved the plan under which more than 10 men took Mumbai hostage for nearly three days and successfully established a reign of terror.
Hmm.
Even if the Mumbai attack was not choreographed by elements within the ISI to generate a confrontation with India and give Pakistani elite and popular opinion an excuse to back out of the bloody and unpopular campaign it is pursuing at America’s behest in FATA, the result appears to be the same.
The Zardari government’s capitulation to its domestic critics on the issue of dispatching the ISI Director General is a bad augury for the United States. Pakistan is threatening to backtrack on rapprochement with India and active participation in U.S. security operations in the west.
As The News reported:
The Indian allegations against Pakistan have suddenly forced the military establishment in Pakistan to finally accept that they are not fighting an American war inside the Pakistani territory.
On another level, the parliamentary leader of the 12 Fata members in the National Assembly, Munir Orakzai, has expressed optimism in this regard, saying: “I see a bright ray of peace in the tribal areas and if we come out of the American pressure, I can guarantee that there will be peace in the tribal areas in a few days and we will be ready to fight against India on the eastern border along with the Pakistan Army.”
The news from India? Not good either. The prestige of the ruling Congress Party has been rocked by the Mumbai attacks.
Although America’s transparent desire to keep a lid on the crisis (and Pakistan’s troops fighting on the Afghan border) has forestalled the usual martial chest-thumping and deployment of Pakistan and Indian army divisions eyeball to eyeball, the Indian government could not resist summoning the Pakistan High Commissioner to the External Affairs Ministry to receive a demarche (protest note) containing a list a laundry list of 20 bad guys, apparently including a key TeL operative, that India wants extradited from Pakistan.
A new government even more eager to wave the bloody shirt may be in the offing.
The virulently Hindu-nationalist BJP is waiting in the wings to put India squarely on a confrontational, anti-Muslim footing.
From The Hindu:
By the time he landed in Mumbai, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha L.K. Advani had begun expressing mild criticism of the government for not being hard enough on terror. Before the evening wore out, the BJP had finalised its new election campaign for New Delhi, which appeared in many newspapers on Friday morning: “Brutal terror strikes at will, weak government, unwilling and incapable.”
…
While one senior BJP leader admitted that the first reaction to the Mumbai incidents was that it would appear wrong on the part of the party to criticise the government when it faced a “war-like” situation — Mr. Advani himself initially described the terror attack as a “full-scale war on India” — the leadership felt that it could not let go of the opportunity to electorally cash in on the episode.
That’s the dilemma for the United States.
Its security policy is not particularly popular in South Asia. Washington is trying to orchestrate support for those policies through democracies that are weak and/or equivocal about loyally toeing the U.S. line. Finally, the heavy-handed approach and frequent resort to violence it has resorted to in the region routinely unleashes forces that America cannot consistently channel and control.
And the real danger for U.S. interests is that, as the U.S. continues to lean on the weak reed that is the Zardari administration, Pakistan will opt out of a war in Afghanistan and an American security policy for South Asia that looks like a disaster for Pakistan’s military, economy, and society.
In a recent article, Asia Times' Shahzad presents a worst-case scenario that is as bad as it gets:
The situation in NWFP is spiraling out of control, with militancy spilling over from the tribal areas into this province.
In the past four days, militants have abducted a record 60 people from the provincial capital Peshawar, most of them retired army officers and members or relatives of the Awami National Party (ANP), which rules in the province. The Taliban have butchered many people with affiliations to the ANP or those with relatives in the security apparatus.
Meanwhile, North Atlantic Treaty Organization supply convoys passing through Khyber Agency en route to Afghanistan have come under increasing attacks. In the most recent incident, militants destroyed 40 containers in supposedly secure terminals in the middle of Peshawar.
In this anarchic situation, the Jamaatut Dawa (LET), with its well-defined vertical command structure under the single command of Saeed, could commit its several thousand members, virtually a para-military force, to the cause of the anti-state al-Qaeda-linked Pakistani militants.
What has stopped the anti-India orientated group from doing this is its under-riding loyalty to and support from Pakistan. If the authorities start to mess with the LET, beyond the routine rhetoric, all hell could break loose inside the country.
Similarly, if pressure is placed on the ISI, there could be a severe reaction from the more hardline elements in that organization, as well as in the military.
To date, the authorities have not given any indication of their plans. If they do indeed resist the overtures of Mullen and Rice, it is most likely that the Pakistani armed forces will withdraw from the Swat Valley and Bajaur Agency, leaving that area open for the Taliban-led insurgency n Afghanistan. Militants can also be expected to launch further attacks on India, with dire consequences for whole South Asia region.
Yet the alternative of cracking down on the LET is equally unappealing, and potentially as disastrous.
It isn’t just the Pakistani leadership that’s faced with a tough decision.
Faced with the Mumbai outrage, the U.S. can reconsider its South Asia approach—and its secret war against pro-Taliban elements in Pakistan--or intensify it.
However, as John McCain and Condoleezza Rice fly into India to express their outrage and sympathy, the FBI, and Scotland Yard put their forensics teams at India’s disposal, and the Indian government, perhaps with the backing of both the Bush and incoming Obama administration, threaten to enmesh Pakistan in the toils of the international investigation, censure, and sanction mechanism usually reserved for America’s enemies, the United States does not appear to fully understand that Pakistan is getting pushed closer to its breaking point.
The rhetoric of the Global War on Terror doesn’t seem to have its old magic anymore.
In the aftermath of the horrendous Mumbai attacks, it seems there were just as many articles in the papers saying this wasn’t Mumbai’s 9/11 as there were efforts to raise the bloody flag of America’s catastrophe over the carnage.
The most conspicuous example of 9/11 exhaustion is Pakistan.
According to the GWOT mythology, Pakistan experienced its galvanizing moment in the suicide bombing of the Islamabad Marriott Hotel, and the people and government of Pakistan are now standing shoulder to shoulder with the world’s democracies to combat extremism.
However, after the initial shock of the Mumbai attack wore off in Pakistan—and the international narrative that the attackers were Pakistani coalesced--there was an immediate and emotional rejection of the idea that long-suffering Pakistan should be further destabilized under U.S. and Indian insistence that the miscreants be pursued inside Pakistan’s borders.
A common theme in Pakistan’s media is that the Mumbai attack was carried out by Hindu extremists, or even was a false flag operation carried out by India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) to provoke a conflict with Pakistan.
One commenter opined, Maybe this wasn’t India’s 9/11. Maybe it was India’s Oklahoma City.
That’s very bad news for the United States and its covert struggle inside Pakistan against government and public apathy concerning the Western struggle to stabilize Afghanistan, and to neutralize pro-Taliban and pro-al Qaeda elements in the notorious Inter Services Intelligence directorate (ISI).
Pakistan’s Zardari government, which is almost doglike in its desire to please the United States, is nervously playing word games about cooperating with India as the United States demands, while it drags its feet in order to keep in step with its domestic constituency.
The U.S. is fully aware of the fragility of the Zardari government, and popular resistance to U.S. aims in the region, and is trying to tread carefully, eschewing the rhetoric of the war on terror.
However, by the momentum of its policies, the desperate need to keep Afghanistan from going down the tubes, its pro-India tilt in South Asia, and the discovery of another perceived lever to compel Pakistan’s cooperation, the United States appears determined to disregard or steamroll over Pakistan’s obvious anxieties.
In India, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice condoled with India, as AFP reports:
"Pakistan needs to act with urgency and with resolve and cooperate fully and transparently," Rice said during her one-day visit to India.
"The response of the Pakistan government should be one of cooperation and action. That is what we expect and we have been sending that message," she said.
And, according to the U.S. embassy via AFP, Admiral Mullen passed the same message to President Zardari:
[Mullen] urged Pakistani leaders, including President Asif Ali Zardari, "to investigate aggressively any and all possible ties to groups based in Pakistan," the US embassy said in a statement.
Seemingly eager to demonstrate that he possesses an invincible tin ear when it comes to Pakistani politics, Admiral Mullen took advantage of his meeting with Zardari to press Pakistan’s participation in what is possibly the only initiative less popular than assisting the Indians in a murder investigation—America’s bloody counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan.
Admiral Mike Mullen urged Pakistan on Wednesday to investigate all possible links between the Mumbai attacks and Pakistani groups and to broaden its campaign against militants.
Trouble is, the War on Terror dog doesn’t hunt anymore where it matters most—Pakistan.
Today the rhetoric of the war on terror is irretrievably linked to the United States, its failed strategy, its dubious objectives…and Islamabad’s coerced participation in a U.S.-orchestrated military, political, economic, and security drama that threatens to rip Pakistan apart.
The result is skewed narratives, distorted policies, an unavoidable but counter-productive American reliance on arm-twisting instead of persuasion, and a visceral Pakistan opposition to U.S. policies that is reaching the point of desperate revulsion.
And, triumphant Democrats be warned, it doesn’t look like things will improve in an Obama administration.
The horror perpetrated in Mumbai might be the work of al Qaeda, Kashmir separatists, some previously unknown Islamic extremist group indigenous to India, or an obscenity committed by Indian gangsters or Hindu ultra-nationalists.
But to me it looks a lot like blowback from the U.S. campaign to rein in Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) apparatus and orchestrate an anti-Taliban/anti-al Qaeda united front of democracies stretching from Kabul to Islamabad to New Delhi.
Any proven involvement by Pakistani state institutions in the Mumbai attack would be a catastrophe for Pakistan-India relations.
It would immediately provoke the shift of Pakistan’s military focus and resources away from a conflict it detests—the U.S. imposed counterinsurgency in west Pakistan’s Frontier and Tribal Areas (FATA)--to an arrangement much more comfortable for Pakistan’s army: the familiar display of ritualized hostility and the deployment of a conventional order of battle on the eastern border with India.
Therefore, despite some hard-to-explain anomalies, there is a determined effort by the United States, with the obliging assistance of the media, to squeeze the Mumbai outrage into a conventional South Asian narrative: a brutal episode in the proxy war between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, with militants of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) Kashmir independence organization nurtured by Pakistan’s ISI serving as shock troops in the struggle.
Indeed, LeT’s fingerprints are apparently all over the operation. The single captured terrorist, Ajmal Amin Kamal, has been identified as a Pakistani citizen and LeT fidayeen. A satellite phone that had made calls to the LeT operations chief was allegedly recovered. According to details of Kamal’s testimony leaked to Indian media, he was trained and indoctrinated in TeL camps.
However, analysts are undoubtedly wondering why the LeT attackers, while slaughtering almost 200 random Indian victims, targeted Americans, Britons, and Jews.
And they are wondering why no mention was made of Kashmir by the attackers.
The e-mail taking responsibility for the attack, ostensibly from a previously unknown group, the Deccan Mujahideen, and a cell phone conversation between an attacker and Indian media during the incident both couched the incident in terms of the Hindu-Muslim relationship inside India proper: the alleged mistreatment of the head of a radical Islamic group, the Students Islamic Movement of India, one Abul Bashar Qasmi, by the Indian police; the provocative destruction of a mosque, Babri Masjid, by Hindu nationalists; and the plight of “mujahideen” languishing in Indian prisons.
Decca is, perhaps conveniently, at exactly the other end of India from Kashmir.
A possible answer to these puzzling questions goes well beyond Kashmir and has disturbing implications for U.S. policy in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
The Mumbai operation was carefully planned over an extended period—perhaps a year—apparently in Pakistan.
Targets were carefully scouted ahead of time—the owner of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel said the attackers knew the layout of the hotel, its kitchens, and service areas better than the Indian commandoes—and apartments and rooms were rented ahead of time.
The circumstances of the alleged transit from Pakistan’s main port of Karachi to Mumbai argue a chilling level of planning, resources, professional capability, ruthlessness, and a professional fighter’s talent for improvisation.
From The Hindu:
Based on the continuing interrogation of arrested Lashkar terrorist Ajmal Amir Kamal, investigators believe the 12 terrorists who left Karachi on a merchant ship hijacked a fishing boat to facilitate their final assault on Mumbai.
According to Kamal, the group hijacked the Porbandar-registered Kuber to avoid detection by Indian Navy and Coast Guard patrols, which had a considerable presence in off Mumbai.
While one group of terrorists used the hijacked boat to land at Sassoon Docks on the eastern coast of Mumbai, a second group used a fibreglass lifeboat to row west to the Cuffe Parade fisherman’s colony.
Before leaving the fishing boat, the terrorists beheaded its captain, who Gujarat authorities have identified as Balwant Tandel, from Una village in the Union Territory of Diu. There is no word on the fate of the remaining crew of five.
To recap: the terrorists had an entire merchant ship at their disposal, as well as an arsenal of weapons. Their complex plan to evade detection by the Indian military involved locating and hijacking a suitable vessel. They got their vessel, executed the hapless captain (and apparently his crew), and continued on their mission.
Further reports indicate that the attackers left timed explosive charges in the two taxis they took to reach their targets, in order to kill the drivers and further cover their tracks.
The subsequent assault culminated in near simultaneous attacks on multiple targets and a protracted siege at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel where the attackers held off Indian commandoes for sixty hours.
No wonder that people are thinking that al Qaeda or Pakistan’s ISI are the only two organizations that could have carried out such a massive, well-planned assault.
Efforts to paint the attack as a LeT initiative are less convincing.
The New York Times dutifully reported the spin provided by “U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials” concerning the Kashmir angle, while admitting that the targets of the Mumbai attack—Americans, Britons, and Jews--don’t quite fit with the supposed objective of advancing TeL’s military and political objectives in Kashmir:
Lashkar-e-Taiba is not known to have singled out Westerners in past terrorist attacks, as the gunmen in Mumbai seem to have done. But one counterterrorism official said Friday that the group “has not pursued an exclusively Kashmiri agenda” and that it might certainly go after Westerners to advance broader goals.
As to how LeT could cobble together a boat hijacking and a commando-style amphibious operation:
An American counterterrorism official said there was strong evidence that Lashkar-e-Taiba had a “maritime capability” and would have been able to mount the sophisticated operation in Mumbai.
Kashmir is, as that counterterrorism official is undoubtedly aware, landlocked.
Clearly, the elephant in the room is Pakistan’s ISI, which has supported LeT as a proxy in its struggle with India.
The ISI, which nurtured the anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan (with U.S. aid) and supported the Taliban government is not sympathetic to America’s faltering effort to create an anti-Taliban bulwark in Kabul.
It is especially unhappy that the United States has abandoned any pretense of even-handedness in the Pakistan-India relationship.
Washington has overtly tilted toward New Delhi.
An eyebrow-raising nuclear giveaway negotiated bilaterally between the U.S. and India allowed India to normalize its relationship with the international nuclear and non-proliferation community even while the Bush administration denied the same facility to Pakistan.
Even more dangerously, the United States has chosen to allow India to establish itself in Afghanistan—Pakistan’s only regional geopolitical asset and ally, at least when it was controlled by the Taliban--at Pakistan’s expense, thereby coupling a long-term American presence and the fate of the Karzai regime with New Delhi’s continued influence inside Afghanistan.
Now that the battle in eastern Afghanistan has become desperate and Taliban have been exploiting their safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the U.S. has been pulling all the political, military, and economic levers at its command in order to compel Pakistan’s active and effective cooperation in the struggle, and to force Islamabad to accept a security condominium in South Asia by which the U.S. is the dominant power, India its ally, and Pakistan a disrespected client of dubious loyalty and reliability.
A wake-up call for Pakistan was undoubtedly the American response to the suicide bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul in July 2008.
Rather than tacitly understanding Pakistan’s right to punish Indian meddling in its Afghan/Muslim back yard, or just shrugging its shoulders at yet another episode in the brutal South Asian dance of death between New Delhi and Islamabad, the United States came down openly and unequivocally on India’s side, dispatching a CIA official to confront Pakistan over the matter and, significantly, leaking the news of intelligence linking the ISI to the attack to the New York Times.
With the fall of Musharraf, the U.S. disenchantment with Pakistan appears to have intensified.
When Musharraf was forced from office despite heroic U.S. measures to prolong his reign, the United States lost a relatively capable ally with strong links to his country’s military and intelligence services.
Instead, it now finds itself forced to work through a willing but undeniably feckless and unpopular civilian government led by Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Zardari.
Recognizing Zardari’s weakness, the United States has apparently made the decision to insert itself more directly into Pakistan’s internal affairs.
Pakistan’s sovereignty has been eroded by the United States to a degree that is not generally appreciated in the U.S.
It’s not just the U.S. military incursions into Pakistan, and the drone attacks that have recently spread beyond the tribal regions to take out Taliban and al-Qaeda elements in the North West Frontier Province.
It also involves the United States asserting more and more overt direction of events inside Pakistan in order to compensate for Pakistan’s manifest lack of enthusiasm for a polarizing and high-stakes battle against the Taliban in Pakistan’s west.
It is difficult to look at the public humiliation that the United States has subjected Pakistan to on the issue of an IMF loan without wondering if it is part of a plan to bring the civilian government to heel.
Indeed, in an event that is either the sign of the ever-increasing militarization of U.S. foreign policy or a signal that international aid to Pakistan must conform to America’s security strategy—or both—none other than the head of the U.S. Central Command, General Petraeus, discussed Pakistan’s needs at the IMF annual meeting.
When energy and food price bubbles, the global recession, and a healthy dose of government mismanagement and inaction pushed Pakistan on the brink of defaulting on its foreign debt in November 2008, the United States forced Pakistan into the arms of the IMF—considered inside Pakistan a symbol of national humiliation that compromises its status as a proud regional power.
The IMF conditions for its $7.6 billion loan, including a slate of price and tax increases in a severe recessionary environment seem wrongheaded enough to exacerbate the crisis and force Pakistan’s government to become even more dependent on the so-called “Friends of Pakistan”, the group of nations that the U.S. has corralled to control the flow of further international assistance to Pakistan.
Since Zardari’s backing from the army is almost non-existent, the U.S. has apparently also taken military matters into its own hands, coordinating its anti-Taliban strategy—and delivering its demands for actionable intelligence—in direct meetings with Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Kayani, most memorably summoning the general to a meeting on board the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln with Admiral Mullen and General Petraeus in August of this year.
As veteran South Asia reporter and analyst Syed Saleem Shahzad pointed out in a recent article in Asia Times, a U.S. decision to bypass the Foreign Ministry and brief Pakistani legislators directly raised some eyebrows:
Last week [mid November 2008—ed], the NATO commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, visited Islamabad to brief parliamentarians, but several of them, including those of the dominant Pakistan People's Party and Federal Minister Raza Rabbani, refused to attend.
They called the meeting a serious breach of Pakistan's sovereignty as no military official of another country is supposed to approach parliamentarians without the Foreign Office's mediation.
The riskiest element of the U.S. strategy is an effort to rein in the notoriously independent and pro-Taliban Inter Services Intelligence apparatus of Pakistan’s military. Taliban sympathizers inside and outside the ISI have presented roadblocks to U.S. efforts to pursue Taliban insurgents and al-Qaeda assets aggressively, and the United States has been looking for ways to bring the refractory intelligence service to heel.
The Zardari government is apparently not up to the task. Prior to his state visit to the United States in August—during which he received a pointedly-leaked “charge sheet” from a deputy director of the CIA describing ISI—Taliban links-- Pakistan Prime Minister Gilani proudly announced that the ISI would henceforth report to the civilian cabinet.
It was an assertion that he was forced to retract in the most humiliating and public matter imaginable within 24 hours.
As Shahzad reports, reining in the ISI and its supporters is a consistent U.S. objective:
High-level meetings between US intelligence and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) have already been held at different levels to devise plans to cripple the support systems of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
Two prominent names came under discussion at these meetings: retired Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul and a former ISI official, retired Squadron Leader Khalid Khawaja.
Gul, a former head of the ISI, is suspected of providing political and moral support to the Taliban-led resistance in Afghanistan. Last year, former premier Benazir Bhutto named him as a suspect for the October 18 attack on her life in Karachi. She was subsequently assassinated in December.
Khawaja was the first person in the country to assist the displaced families of Arab fighters who fled to Pakistan after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. He fought their cases in court, arranged temporary housing for them and assisted them in departing to their countries. Khawaja is active in the cause of missing people (those detained without trial for years) and wants to register cases against the former chief of army staff and president, General Pervez Musharraf, and his military aides for abuses allegedly committed during their eight years in power.
Tightening the noose around people such as Gul and Khawaja and the like is one way to cut off support for the Taliban.
The battle has begun in earnest in preparation for next year's showdown.
Maybe the showdown over the ISI’s more-than-tacit support for the Taliban began a little earlier than expected—in November 2008 in Mumbai.
Hamid Gul, the ISI advocate mentioned in Shahzad’s article, is a genuine hard case.
Gul headed the ISI from 1987 to 1989, during the height of the mujihadeed insurgency against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He has spent 20 years organizing insurgencies and terrorism in Afghanistan and Kashmir. He conceived and executed the ISI’s successful campaign to organize a right wing Islamacist party to oppose the PPP in the 1980s. In a letter written in late 2007, Benazir Bhutto named him as one of the three likely organizers of her anticipated assassination. He’s violently anti-Indian and the architect of the Kashmir insurgency. In the aftermath of America’s abandonment of Afghanistan in 1989 and U.S. sanctions on Pakistan’s nuclear program, he’s passionately anti-American, turning against Musharraf when he became, in Gul’s view, too accommodating to the United States’ Global War on Terror demands.
In retirement, Gul speaks for a powerful conservative political and military constituency that values Pakistani independence, a hard line against India, and disdain for the anti-Taliban policies the United States is pushing on the PPP civilian government.
His views probably resonate more with Pakistani public opinion than the pro-U.S./India-accommodating policies of the Zardari government.
It does not appear that anyone—inside or outside of Pakistan—can mess with the ISI or Hamid Gul lightly.
In reviewing its South Asia policy—and trying to keep the fragile rapprochement of the Indian and Pakistan governments from shattering into a million bloody pieces in the aftermath of the Mumbai attack--the Bush administration may be acquiring a belated understanding of how its overt pro-India tilt and heavy-handed approach toward Pakistan have combined to create an atmosphere inside Pakistan charged with bad things: feelings of persecution, humiliation, encirclement, and peril.
The equivocal and delicate position of the ISI—and a popular Pakistani hostility toward India and, by extension, the United States that goes well beyond “ambivalent”-- was strikingly demonstrated even before the Mumbai siege had ended.
On November 28, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza to dispatch the Director General of ISI, one Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha to India to receive Indian findings concerning the TeL links of the attackers and “share information”.
Gilani agreed.
This request does not seem unreasonable, given that Pakistani citizens had apparently turned the center of India’s greatest city into a three-day abattoir. Nevertheless, the request—ineluctably morphing into an intolerable “Indian demand” in Pakistani news reports--ignited a political firestorm inside Pakistan. The dominant civilian party in opposition, Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N, questioned the government’s decision to send the DG. Islamicist parties lambasted the idea.
Even Gilani's own cabinet piled on, in the process displaying its exasperation that India was getting a chance to play the victim card even as Pakistan was in danger of coming apart at the seams:
On the domestic level, thanks to the uncalled for Indian allegations, some ministers of the Yousuf Raza Gilani cabinet got an opportunity to criticise their prime minister on his face for giving an assurance to India that the ISI chief will go to New Delhi without consulting even his cabinet colleagues.
Angry ministers told Gilani clearly in Saturday’s cabinet meeting that his decision was not good and he should concentrate on “institutionalised decision-making” rather than going for solo flights in the future. Gilani was forced to change his decision. The cabinet, after discussing the Mumbai carnage and the Indian allegations in detail, also advised the prime minister that no ISI official should be sent to India in the near future.
It was discussed in the meeting as to why the militants made a ridiculous demand of liberating the Hyderabad Deccan (Andhra Pradesh). This issue was never raised by any hardline Muslim militant in India or Pakistan in the past. Why did they not demand the liberation of Kashmir, which was the prime objective of banned Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan?
The Indian government claimed that these militants reached Gujarat from Karachi by boat through a 500-km sea route. Why did the Indian Navy fail to stop this boat? The cabinet unanimously agreed that Pakistan will not come under any Indian pressure but efforts will also be made to decrease tensions without annoying the public opinion.
One minister was of the view that the Indian media war against Pakistan had helped Islamabad indirectly as the local media ignored all the domestic political issues and got involved in the tension created by India.
And who was there to throw another anvil the government’s way? Hamid Gul, of course.
“Former military dictator Pervez Musharraf had bowed down to the US immediately after 9/11 and had let the nation down and now the sitting rulers have humiliated the nation by bowing down to India,” said Lt-Gen (retd) Hamid Gul, former chief of ISI, while commenting on the development.
“We are losing our position. The decision of sending the ISI director-general to India should have been taken through diplomatic channels,” he added.
Saying the preliminary information suggested that “some elements” in Pakistan were responsible for the terror strikes in Mumbai, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday asked his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani to send ISI chief to Delhi to share information on Mumbai terror attacks.
…
The former top spymaster of the country said India should not have demanded Pakistan to send the ISI chief to New Delhi. He said had Pakistan needed help of the Indian intelligence chief, they would have never allowed it.
“It seems there is no authority in Pakistan. It is not information-sharing but in fact an interrogation of the ISI chief and the United States is doing this behind the scenes,” he said. “Washington wants India and Pakistan to wage its so-called war on terror,” he remarked.
Lt-Gen (retd) Hamid Gul said in view of his experience as top spymaster of the country, he could say confidently that it (the Mumbai attacks) is an inside job to pressurise Pakistan. “The summoning of the ISI chief is a pretext that is part of the greater objective of getting the ISI dissolved,” Hamid Gul said. “It is a credible institution of Pakistan and sentiments of the Pakistani nation are being hurt by making a mockery of this institution,” he said.
The former ISI chief said he would also raise the issue in the next meeting of the Pakistan Ex-Servicemen Society because the rulers could not be allowed to play around with an institution like the ISI.
Gul used the Pakistan Ex-Servicemen Society as a platform in his campaign to bring down Pervez Musharraf, a fact that Asif Zardari is certainly uncomfortably aware of.
In an eerie reprise of the August scenario, the Zardari government subsequently backed down and announced that the ISI DG would not go to India.
If the Mumbai massacres were organized and condoned by the ISI as a provocation, I suppose we can say “mission accomplished”.
The fundamental hostility between India and Pakistan has been affirmed, the inability of the PPP government to back up its U.S.-mandated good wishes toward India with meaningful action has been exposed, and the willingness of the ISI to meet challenges to its power with brutal violence has been revealed.
And by targeting Americans, Britons, and Jews, the attack was overtly linked, not to the never-ending squabble between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, but to the U.S.-led security policy for Afghanistan and South Asia
According to Pakistan’s The News, the Taliban in western Pakistan responded to the heightened tensions with India with a suspiciously prompt and unanimous offer (met with an suspiciously prompt and positive response from the government) to cease operations so that Pakistan’s army could shift its resources to the east:
All main militant groups fighting in Fata, from South Waziristan to Bajaur and from Mohmand to the Khyber Agency, have contacted the government through different sources after the Mumbai bombings and have offered a ceasefire if the Pakistan Army also stops its operations.
And as a positive sign that this ceasefire offer may be accepted, the Pakistan Army has, as a first step, declared before the media some notorious militant commanders, including Baitullah Mehsud and Maulvi Fazlullah, as “patriotic” Pakistanis.
These two militant commanders are fighting the Army for the last four years and have invariably been accused of terrorism against Pakistan but the aftermath of the Mumbai carnage has suddenly turned terrorists into patriots.
A top security official told a group of senior journalists on Saturday: “We have no big issues with the militants in Fata. We have only some misunderstandings with Baitullah Mehsud and Fazlullah. These misunderstandings could be removed through dialogue.”
Pakistan’s normally fractious media has also circled the wagons on the nation’s behalf in denigrating the Indian allegations, earning rare praise from the military:
The change in the attitude of the Pakistani military establishment is remarkable. Thanks to India, the security officials, who used to criticise the Pakistani media, are now praising its role in the recent days, saying: “You have proven that you are patriotic Pakistanis.”
Last year, the same officials were part of a decision to impose a ban on many Pakistani TV channels because of their alleged anti-state behaviour. Meanwhile, Army Chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has made it clear to President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani that if India escalates tensions, then Pakistan has to move its troops from the tribal areas to the eastern borders and it would not be possible to continue the war against terrorism.
Top military officials conveyed the same message to the media representatives on Saturday.
Asia Times’ Syed Saleem Shahzad has presented a highly circumstantial account of the the background of the Mumbai attack, presenting a narrative of al Qaeda Bangladesh hijacking plans for a ISI-organized, LeT-executed outrage in Kashmir and transplanting it to Mumbai.
However, one can be forgiven if one wonders if the narrative presented is possibly a self-serving attempt by the ISI to shirk responsibility for an attack organized not only under its nose but by its own officers and shift responsibility for the incident that has aroused global outrage to the broad shoulders of al Qaeda:
Zakiur [LeT’s Commander in chief] and the ISI's forward section in Karachi, completely disconnected from the top brass, approved the plan under which more than 10 men took Mumbai hostage for nearly three days and successfully established a reign of terror.
Hmm.
Even if the Mumbai attack was not choreographed by elements within the ISI to generate a confrontation with India and give Pakistani elite and popular opinion an excuse to back out of the bloody and unpopular campaign it is pursuing at America’s behest in FATA, the result appears to be the same.
The Zardari government’s capitulation to its domestic critics on the issue of dispatching the ISI Director General is a bad augury for the United States. Pakistan is threatening to backtrack on rapprochement with India and active participation in U.S. security operations in the west.
As The News reported:
The Indian allegations against Pakistan have suddenly forced the military establishment in Pakistan to finally accept that they are not fighting an American war inside the Pakistani territory.
On another level, the parliamentary leader of the 12 Fata members in the National Assembly, Munir Orakzai, has expressed optimism in this regard, saying: “I see a bright ray of peace in the tribal areas and if we come out of the American pressure, I can guarantee that there will be peace in the tribal areas in a few days and we will be ready to fight against India on the eastern border along with the Pakistan Army.”
The news from India? Not good either. The prestige of the ruling Congress Party has been rocked by the Mumbai attacks.
Although America’s transparent desire to keep a lid on the crisis (and Pakistan’s troops fighting on the Afghan border) has forestalled the usual martial chest-thumping and deployment of Pakistan and Indian army divisions eyeball to eyeball, the Indian government could not resist summoning the Pakistan High Commissioner to the External Affairs Ministry to receive a demarche (protest note) containing a list a laundry list of 20 bad guys, apparently including a key TeL operative, that India wants extradited from Pakistan.
A new government even more eager to wave the bloody shirt may be in the offing.
The virulently Hindu-nationalist BJP is waiting in the wings to put India squarely on a confrontational, anti-Muslim footing.
From The Hindu:
By the time he landed in Mumbai, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha L.K. Advani had begun expressing mild criticism of the government for not being hard enough on terror. Before the evening wore out, the BJP had finalised its new election campaign for New Delhi, which appeared in many newspapers on Friday morning: “Brutal terror strikes at will, weak government, unwilling and incapable.”
…
While one senior BJP leader admitted that the first reaction to the Mumbai incidents was that it would appear wrong on the part of the party to criticise the government when it faced a “war-like” situation — Mr. Advani himself initially described the terror attack as a “full-scale war on India” — the leadership felt that it could not let go of the opportunity to electorally cash in on the episode.
That’s the dilemma for the United States.
Its security policy is not particularly popular in South Asia. Washington is trying to orchestrate support for those policies through democracies that are weak and/or equivocal about loyally toeing the U.S. line. Finally, the heavy-handed approach and frequent resort to violence it has resorted to in the region routinely unleashes forces that America cannot consistently channel and control.
And the real danger for U.S. interests is that, as the U.S. continues to lean on the weak reed that is the Zardari administration, Pakistan will opt out of a war in Afghanistan and an American security policy for South Asia that looks like a disaster for Pakistan’s military, economy, and society.
In a recent article, Asia Times' Shahzad presents a worst-case scenario that is as bad as it gets:
The situation in NWFP is spiraling out of control, with militancy spilling over from the tribal areas into this province.
In the past four days, militants have abducted a record 60 people from the provincial capital Peshawar, most of them retired army officers and members or relatives of the Awami National Party (ANP), which rules in the province. The Taliban have butchered many people with affiliations to the ANP or those with relatives in the security apparatus.
Meanwhile, North Atlantic Treaty Organization supply convoys passing through Khyber Agency en route to Afghanistan have come under increasing attacks. In the most recent incident, militants destroyed 40 containers in supposedly secure terminals in the middle of Peshawar.
In this anarchic situation, the Jamaatut Dawa (LET), with its well-defined vertical command structure under the single command of Saeed, could commit its several thousand members, virtually a para-military force, to the cause of the anti-state al-Qaeda-linked Pakistani militants.
What has stopped the anti-India orientated group from doing this is its under-riding loyalty to and support from Pakistan. If the authorities start to mess with the LET, beyond the routine rhetoric, all hell could break loose inside the country.
Similarly, if pressure is placed on the ISI, there could be a severe reaction from the more hardline elements in that organization, as well as in the military.
To date, the authorities have not given any indication of their plans. If they do indeed resist the overtures of Mullen and Rice, it is most likely that the Pakistani armed forces will withdraw from the Swat Valley and Bajaur Agency, leaving that area open for the Taliban-led insurgency n Afghanistan. Militants can also be expected to launch further attacks on India, with dire consequences for whole South Asia region.
Yet the alternative of cracking down on the LET is equally unappealing, and potentially as disastrous.
It isn’t just the Pakistani leadership that’s faced with a tough decision.
Faced with the Mumbai outrage, the U.S. can reconsider its South Asia approach—and its secret war against pro-Taliban elements in Pakistan--or intensify it.
However, as John McCain and Condoleezza Rice fly into India to express their outrage and sympathy, the FBI, and Scotland Yard put their forensics teams at India’s disposal, and the Indian government, perhaps with the backing of both the Bush and incoming Obama administration, threaten to enmesh Pakistan in the toils of the international investigation, censure, and sanction mechanism usually reserved for America’s enemies, the United States does not appear to fully understand that Pakistan is getting pushed closer to its breaking point.
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