The myth of Talibanistan

The myth of Talibanistan

Pepe Escobar
May 1, 2009 - Asia Times

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Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack Obama administration and United States corporate media - from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to The New York Times. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat to the security of Britain.

But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won't fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.

Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan's 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There's no evidence they are about to embrace Talibanistan; they are essentially Shi'ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis - faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari's centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People's Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces - amounting to 85% of Pakistan's population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class - are an infinitesimal minority.

The Pakistan-based Taliban - subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles - are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.

To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional 550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world, which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous proposition.

Moreover, there's no evidence the Taliban, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, have any capability to hit a target outside of "Af-Pak"(Afghanistan and Pakistan). That's mythical al-Qaeda's privileged territory. As for the nuclear hysteria of the Taliban being able to crack the Pakistani army codes for the country's nuclear arsenal (most of the Taliban, by the way, are semi-literate), even Obama, at his 100-day news conference, stressed the nuclear arsenal was safe.

Of course, there's a smatter of junior Pashtun army officers who sympathize with the Taliban - as well as significant sections of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But the military institution itself is backed by none other than the American army - with which it has been closely intertwined since the 1970s. Zardari would be a fool to unleash a mass killing of Pakistani Pashtuns; on the contrary, Pashtuns can be very useful for Islamabad's own designs.

Zardari's government this week had to send in troops and the air force to deal with the Buner problem, in the Malakand district of NWFP, which shares a border with Kunar province in Afghanistan and thus is relatively close to US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. They are fighting less than 500 members of the Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan (TTP). But for the Pakistani army, the possibility of the area joining Talibanistan is a great asset - because this skyrockets Pakistani control of Pashtun southern Afghanistan, ever in accordance to the eternal "strategic depth" doctrine prevailing in Islamabad.

So if Islamabad is not burning tomorrow, why the hysteria? There are several reasons. To start with, what Washington - now under Obama's "Af-Pak" strategy - simply cannot stomach is real democracy and a true civilian government in Islamabad; these would be much more than a threat to "US interests" than the Taliban, whom the Bill Clinton administration was happily wining and dining in the late 1990s.

What Washington may certainly relish is yet another military coup - and sources tell Asia Times Online that former dictator General Pervez Musharraf (Busharraf as he was derisively referred to) is active behind the hysteria scene.

It's crucial to remember that every military coup in Pakistan has been conducted by the army chief of staff. So the man of the hour - and the next few hours, days and months - is discreet General Ashfaq Kiani, Benazir's former army secretary. He is very cozy with US military chief Admiral Mike Mullen, and definitely not a Taliban-hugger.

Moreover, there are canyons of the Pakistani military/security bureaucracy who would love nothing better than to extract even more US dollars from Washington to fight the Pashtun neo-Taliban that they are simultaneously arming to fight the Americans and NATO. It works. Washington is now under a counter-insurgency craze, with the Pentagon eager to teach such tactics to every Pakistani officer in sight.

What is never mentioned by US corporate media is the tremendous social problems Pakistan has to deal with because of the mess in the tribal areas. Islamabad believes that between the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and NWFP, at least 1 million people are now displaced (not to mention badly in need of food aid). FATA's population is around 3.5 million - overwhelmingly poor Pashtun peasants. And obviously war in FATA translates into insecurity and paranoia in the fabled capital of NWFP, Peshawar.

The myth of Talibanistan anyway is just a diversion, a cog in the slow-moving regional big wheel - which in itself is part of the new great game in Eurasia.

During a first stage - let's call it the branding of evil - Washington think-tanks and corporate media hammered non-stop on the "threat of al-Qaeda" to Pakistan and the US. FATA was branded as terrorist central - the most dangerous place in the world where "the terrorists" and an army of suicide bombers were trained and unleashed into Afghanistan to kill the "liberators" of US/NATO.

In the second stage, the new Obama administration accelerated the Predator "hell from above" drone war over Pashtun peasants. Now comes the stage where the soon over 100,000-strong US/NATO troops are depicted as the true liberators of the poor in Af-Pak (and not the "evil" Taliban) - an essential ploy in the new narrative to legitimize Obama's Af-Pak surge.

For all pieces to fall into place, a new uber-bogeyman is needed. And he is TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud, who, curiously, had never been hit by even a fake US drone until, in early March, he made official his allegiance to historic Taliban leader Mullah Omar, "The Shadow" himself, who is said to live undisturbed somewhere around Quetta, in Pakistani Balochistan.

Now there's a US$5 million price on Baitullah's head. The Predators have duly hit the Mehsud family's South Waziristan bases. But - curioser and curioser - not once but twice, the ISI forwarded a detailed dossier of Baitullah's location directly to its cousin, the Central Intelligence Agency. But there was no drone hit.

And maybe there won't be - especially now that a bewildered Zardari government is starting to consider that the previous uber-bogeyman, a certain Osama bin Laden, is no more than a ghost. Drones can incinerate any single Pashtun wedding in sight. But international bogeymen of mystery - Osama, Baitullah, Mullah Omar - star players in the new OCO (overseas contingency operations), formerly GWOT ("global war on terror"), of course deserve star treatment.

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Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge.

Chasing Ghosts in Afghanistan

Chasing Ghosts in Afghanistan

Katrina vanden Heuvel & Greg Kaufmann
April 27, 2009 - The Nation

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There were two important hearings regarding Afghanistan on the Hill last week -- in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and at the Congressional Progressive Caucus' (CPC) third forum examining the war. Both raised critical questions about the current strategy of escalation -- questions Congress should take to heart as it considers the $83 billion war supplemental in coming weeks.

Senator John Kerry -- who as a young Vietnam veteran famously asked the Foreign Relations Committee, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" -- now chaired that same committee's hearing titled "Voice of Veterans of the Afghan War." He said in his opening statement that he "would not compare all of our conflicts to the Vietnam War.... [That] does not mean, however, that there are no parallels between the two wars." The hearing bore out some of those parallels.

There was a diversity of opinion among the four veterans and retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich as to whether sending more troops is the right thing to do. But there was also something they held in common: their connection to this war -- its stakes, costs, and consequences -- is very personal (in the case of Bacevich his personal connection comes not only from having served in Vietnam but also losing his son in Iraq.)

Retired Corporal Rick Reyes was the most vocal of the Afghanistan War veterans in opposing escalation. He spoke of his determination -- and that of his fellow Marines -- to "fight the enemy" following 9/11. But Reyes said that instead they were "sent to fight an enemy we could never see. The entire time we were there, we were chasing ghosts."

Reyes' mission was to "locate and capture suspected members of the Taliban" during nighttime raids. But it was impossible to distinguish between suspected terrorists and the civilian population and "we began creating enemies out of innocent civilians." He told a story of beating a suspected terrorist "to submission" only to discover he was a civilian trying to deliver milk to his kids.

"There were hundreds of incidents like this one," he said. "... Almost 100 percent of the time we would find that suspected terrorists turned out to be innocent civilians."

Reyes called the presence of so many troops "a sign of poor intelligence. With strong intelligence there's no need to occupy the country with [this] massive amount of troops. So we need to strengthen our intelligence, and then plan, and then execute."

He's convinced, in fact, that the escalation will only make the situation worse. "I can almost guarantee you that sending more troops will mean more civilian and US troop casualties, more homes being broken into, more children without food, more women without husbands.... Sending more troops will not make the US safer, it will only build more opposition against us." He concluded with an appeal "on behalf of truth and patriotism to consider carefully and rethink Afghanistan. More troops, more war is not the answer."

Bacevich -- a graduate of West Point and current Boston University faculty member -- also offered compelling testimony on finding an alternative to military force. He drew a parallel to the Vietnam War and President Lyndon Johnson's "tragic failure of imagination, persuading himself that there existed no alternative to a massive US troop commitment."

Bacevich said that if the objective is indeed to ensure that Afghanistan is not a "safe haven" for Al Qaeda, then one example of an alternative to escalation is to "recognize the tribal nature of Afghan politics... and to provide incentives to the tribal chiefs to govern their patch of Earth in ways consistent with our interests. In other words, just don't let Al Qaeda in. And where those incentives don't work then it might be necessary for us to engage in some kind of a punitive action... to eliminate any elements of Al Qaeda." He also spoke of building more "robust defenses" at home, denying terrorist networks financial resources through less dependence on foreign oil, and emphasizing smart police work and intelligence sharing which is more effective and cheaper.

Senator Russ Feingold -- one of the earliest of a growing number of Democrats to question President Obama's policy -- pointed out that increasing the number of troops "may have no lasting positive impact so long as there are safe havens militants in Pakistan.... [it] may further destabilize the situation in Pakistan to the detriment of US national security."

Bacevich agreed. "Even if we could magically wave our wand, and tomorrow have the Afghanistan problem be solved," he said, "...what exactly would we have achieved in a strategic sense...? In many respects the larger problem is in neighboring Pakistan. To invest enormous resources in Afghanistan I think is allowing technical considerations to take precedence over strategic thinking." (A point which seems all the more compelling in light ofrecent events in Pakistan.)

"What about the possibility that an escalation in Afghanistan can actually be more destabilizing to Pakistan?" Sen. Feingold asked. "In other words, in terms of militants spilling back over into that border. Is that a fair concern or not?

"I think it's a very real concern," Bacevich said. "...To some measurable degree, in places like Afghanistan, increasing the US presence actually increases the dimensions of the problem."

Even supporters of President Obama's policy expressed doubt about the prospects for success. Captain Westley Moore said -- even with the escalation -- the number of troops for the mission at hand is still "paltry." (He's right, if one follows General Petraeus' counterinsurgency principles it's been suggested we would need upward of 400,000 troops.) At the CPC forum, Hekmat Karzai, Director of the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies in Kabul, said: "Counterinsurgency is supposed to be about 80 percent political and 20 percent military... but in Afghanistan we have had over 90 percent of our resources allocated towards military, about 8 percent towards development."

Retired Major General Paul Eaton -- who was charged with rebuilding the Iraqi Armed Forces from 2003-04 and later became an outspoken critic of the Bush Administration -- was also at the CPC forum. He quoted his son's commander in Afghanistan who said, "I don't need any more combat power. I need agriculture experts, I need water engineers, I need doctors, nurses, dentists...."

CPC Policy Advisor Bill Goold posed a critical question as to whether US and NATO forces are widely "viewed as foreign occupiers", and if so, "what military strategy could possibly succeed?"

Clare Lockhart, who served as a UN advisor in Afghanistan during the 2001 Bonn process -- a meeting of Afghans under UN auspices to help the transition to a permanent government and constitution -- said there is indeed "a risk" of the perception of the military as a foreign occupation.

Karzai pointed out that in 2004-05 Afghan support for the international forces was over 80 percent, and that support has now fallen to "the high 40s."

In a dramatic moment, Rep. John Conyers arrived during the forum to make a statement against escalation: "As one who supported the 44th President before nearly everybody else, I want you to understand that my reasons for thinking this is a mistake is not based on the fact that I think I'm smarter than Barack Obama. I think he's the smartest political person in the United States. But I think he's getting some terrible advice. And so I'm here to help straighten that out, because I want him to stay on track.... My first suggestion is that we're making precisely the same mistake that we've been making for six years in Iraq.... [There] is a very suspicious, uneasy feeling among a number of people that this is the beginning of an open-ended situation, that no matter how well tailored it is, no matter how carefully though out it is... we're getting into another hole...."

Conyers is absolutely right. The best thing anyone can do right now to support President Obama is to advise against digging us deeper into what could become a quagmire. Senator Kerry promised more hearings, a thorough vetting of all alternatives, and that the committee will exercise its oversight authority. Let's hope he follows through. Now is also a good time to let your legislators know you are against escalation and that you want to see more hearings that explore alternatives.

As Corporal Reyes suggested, it's time to stop chasing ghosts in Afghanistan.

A new order emerges in Lebanon

A new order emerges in Lebanon

Sami Moubayed
Apr 29, 2009 - Asia Times

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Last week, one of America's top allies in Lebanon, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, caused a row when he made remarks - off the record - criticizing his allies in the pro-Western March 14 Coalition. Among other things, Jumblatt scoffed at his patron Saad al-Hariri, the head of the largest bloc in the Lebanese parliament, for having tried - and failed - to combat Hezbollah on the streets of Beirut last May.

Then, Hariri's armed men were round up and disarmed in a matter of minutes by the well-trained Hezbollah fighters. "We have seen the Sunnis in the field, huh!" he said, adding, "They didn't last for

more than 15 minutes!" Jumblatt quickly apologized - but the damage was already done.

Shortly afterwards, when landing in Beirut, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not meet the Druze warlord - who had often played host to her predecessor Condoleezza Rice, and been received previously at the Oval Office by George W Bush.

Jumblatt is a symbol of a loud anti-Syrian and anti-Hezbollah stance in Lebanon. The fact that he has lost faith in his own allies - who have bankrolled him for years - and was snubbed by Clinton, are testimony to how much things have changed in Lebanon. This is the same man after all who called for regime change in Damascus, and betted on American and Israeli forces to disarm Hezbollah in 2006.

Jumblatt is a political animal, however, who knows how to get off a ship before it sinks. The US is simply no longer interested in battle, either with Damascus or with Hezbollah. On the contrary, it is trying to find common ground with the Syrians to solve a basket of problems in the region, like Iran's nuclear file, Palestinian reconciliation and the future of Hezbollah.

If March 14 continues to challenge Syria, it should not except much support from the Barack Obama administration. That is why, according to some observers, Jumblatt might be toying with the idea of a u-turn - which from where the Syrians see it, is close to impossible, given the aggressive stance he took against Damascus during the difficult years in Syrian-American relations.

Why would the US continue to support March 14 if it is cooperating fully with the Syrians? March 14 was useful, after all, during the war against Syria in 2005-2008 - mainly to punish the Syrians for having worked against US interests in Iraq.

Jumblatt realizes that for all practical purposes, its only a matter of time until the United States begins dialogue with two arch-enemies of the former Bush White House - Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah. Delaying his own rapprochement with Hezbollah would harm nobody but him.

During the recent Summit of the Americas, Obama said that he would respect the "legitimacy" of all democratically elected governments, even if the US "might not be happy" with the results of any elections. He added that the US "condemns any efforts at a violent overthrow of democratically elected governments, wherever it happens in the hemisphere". Talks with Hamas have already begun in Europe and it is only a matter of time until they are expanded to include Hezbollah.

Earlier this year, Britain announced that it would commence political dialogue with Hezbollah, much to the displeasure of March 14. In early April, British parliamentarians came to Damascus and met with Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal. Certain American political figures, like former president Jimmy Carter, also met with the Hamas chief in Syria last December.

According to a January 9 article in The Guardian, "sources close to the [Obama] transition team" will change course via Hamas, and "initiate low-level clandestine approaches". For that to be done, not only would there be a need for a change in US mentality - both in the media level, on the street and in American officialdom - but it would also require changing a 2006 Congressional law banning any kind of assistance to the Islamic group.

Recently, however, Paul Volker, a senior economic advisor to Obama, was among those who authored a letter calling for a more rational approach to dealing with Hamas. Martin Indyk, the former US ambassador to Israel, who is close to Clinton, recently wrote that any peace deal without Hamas was destined to fail.

Additionally, former British prime minister Tony Blair in his capacity as international envoy for the Middle East warned of the dangers of continuing to ignore the Gaza Strip, which effectively is under the command of Hamas. He was quoted saying, "I think it is important to find a way to engage Hamas in dialogue."

Richard Hass, a diplomat under both president George H W Bush and George W Bush, who was earmarked to become Obama's Middle East envoy, also supports low-level contacts with Hamas. James A Baker, former secretary of state now based at the Baker Institute at Rice University in Houston, was quoted in Newsweek as saying that Obama must involve Hamas in any peace process in the Middle East. Baker said, "You cannot negotiate peace with only half the Palestinian polity at the table."

Richard W Murphy, a veteran American diplomat and former ambassador to Syria, added, "I don't think it will happen quickly but I think it is inevitable. Hamas is, in my opinion, a legitimate representative of part of the Palestinian community."

Taking all of that into account, many raised questions about Clinton's weekend visit to Beirut ahead of parliamentary elections in June, which are expected to bring about a smashing victory for Hezbollah. Already, France has said that it will not boycott any Lebanese government, even if it is packed with members of the Islamic group.

With loud voices coming out of Washington calling for engagement with Hezbollah, Obama promising to respect any election, Britain taking the lead in dialogue with non-state players, and the Syrians back in the international arena, times are not good for leftovers of the Bush era in the Middle East.

Decision-makers around the world have reasoned that not talking to Hezbollah or Hamas will not make them disappear. On the contrary, it will only lead them to radicalize.

Looking back at the Hamas tenure in government, everybody realizes that the Bush administration missed a golden opportunity when the Palestinian group said that it was willing to accept a long-term truce with Israel, and abide by the borders of 1967. Israel couldn't get them to disarm by force, clearly demonstrated by the results of the December 2008 war on Gaza.

The United Nations couldn't disarm them, nor could Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat or the United States. The same applies to Hezbollah, which emerged victorious from the war of 2006. Obama, a practical leader by all accounts, realizes that if these groups are voted into power, it would be sheer hypocrisy not to deal with them and repeat what was committed by Bush.

Walid Jumblatt - and anti-Hamas figures in Palestine like President Mahmud Abbas - is among the first to fully grasp this new attitude in Washington.

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Sami Moubayed is editor-in-chief of Forward Magazine in Syria.