NIE: Pakistan on Brink
The new National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan will apparently depict that country as 'on the edge,' with 'no money, no energy, no government.' The fear is expressed that an unstable Pakistan will become a center for al-Qaeda plotting against the US.
The situation in Pakistan for ordinary people is indeed tough. Fuel and wheat prices have skyrocketed.
But all along, a third of the population has had to live on less than a dollar a day and the NIE wasn't so worried about them a few years ago.
But I'm suspicious that all the talk about instability and 'no government' is really a way of saying that US intelligence agencies liked having a military dictatorship there much better than they like having an elected parliamentary regime.
Actually, the Pakistani bureaucracy does a fairly good job for a third world country, and the employees of the bureaucracy at the non-political level don't change with the change of governments. I don't know what they mean by 'no government.' The elected government headed by the Pakistan People's Party has a majority and is not in danger of falling. The new president, Asaf Ali Zardari, is widely thought to be corrupt, but then the impeachment charges prepared against ousted military dictator Pervez Musharraf alleged the same thing of him, so it is hard to see how things have gotten worse in that regard.
The campaign of bombings and attacks by the Tehrik-i Taliban guerrillas of the Pushtun tribal agencies are worrisome, but life goes on in big cities such as Lahore, which are distant from the tribal areas, despite occasional attacks there.
Moreover, the Pushtuns of the North-West Frontier Province voted in a secular party in the last elections, and even a lot of people in the tribal areas oppose the neo-Taliban.
American reports about Pakistan are schizophrenic, because they say the Pakistani army is not fighting the Taliban. But the Pakistani military has chased 300,000 from their homes in Bajaur, one of 7 tribal agencies, and has engaged in firefights with dissident Muslim groups there. I mean, what do the authors of the NIE want?
The Pakistani military admittedly does not attack the Pushtun tribes it is paying to make trouble in southern Afghanistan, but then their activity is abroad and directed from Islamabad. The Mohmands and other tribes in Bajaur have been fighting the Pakistani military, which has hit them hard in retaliation.
The idea that the 3.5 million Pushtuns of the tribal areas could take over a country of 165 million with one of the most professional armies in Asia is just silly.
The most worrisome thing that has happened in the past year from my point of view was the 3-day orgy of destruction engaged in by Sindhis after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated last December, suggesting that Sindhi subnationalism was extremely strong. But the PPP is a party rooted in Sindh, though it has supporters in the other provinces, and its ascendancy should assuage Sindhi feelings. Sindhis make up about 25% of the Pakistani population.
If Pakistan can weather the ethnic tensions in the rest of the country, surviving the terrorist attacks emanating from the tribal areas will be easy.
People who know Pakistan well are more afraid of the right wing elements in the Pakistani military (whom the CIA has long funded and coddled) than they are about an elected civilian government being weak or corrupt.
posted by Juan Cole @ 10/15/2008 12:54:00 AM
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Dear Professor Cole
M K Bhadrakumar who has a fairly well informed view of things thinks the US is trying to drag India into the Afghan fiasco.
The March of Folly
I expect this to bring India into conflict with Pakistan.
I wonder if the US gameplan is to declare Pakistan a failed state and then capture their nuclear weapons.
The sheer "unaffordability" of an open-ended war in Afghanistan will influence thinking in Washington if the crisis in the US economy deepens. But we are still some way from that threshold. The war should be "affordable" if the new head of US Central Command, General David Petraeus, can somehow make it more "efficient", which is what he did in Iraq. Presently, American politicians only speak about robustly conducting the war.
They are nowhere near framing the fundamental issue: How central is the Afghan war to the global struggle against terrorism? The answer is crystal clear. Afghanistan has very little to do with the basic national interests of the United States. Political violence in Afghanistan is primarily rooted in local issues, and "warlordism" is an ancient trait. That is to say, the Taliban can be made part of the solution.
......
Russia lashes out
But what clouds judgment is the geopolitics of the war. The war provided a context for the establishment of a US military presence in Central Asia; NATO's first-ever "out of area" operation; a turf which overlooks the two South Asian nuclear weapon states of India and Pakistan, Iran and China's restive Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; a useful toehold on a potential transportation route for Caspian energy bypassing Russia and Iran, etc. The situation around Iran; the US's "Great Central Asia" policy and containment strategy towards Russia; NATO's expansion - these have become added factors. Surely, geopolitical considerations lie embedded even within the current attempt to revive the Saudi mediatory role.
The interplay of these various geopolitical factors has made the war opaque. Major regional powers - Russia, Iran and India - do not see the US or NATO contemplating a pullout from Afghanistan in the foreseeable future. Tehran has been alleging that the US strategy in Afghanistan is essentially to perpetuate its military presence.
As a result, Russian statements regarding the US role in Afghanistan have become highly critical. Moscow seems to have assessed that the US-led war is getting nowhere and blame-game had begun. More important, Russia has began to pinpoint the US's "unilateralism" in Afghanistan.
.....
What was perplexing was Rabbani's remark, "The only solution to the Afghan crisis lies in the creation of unity among all national and jihadi [read mujahideen] forces in the country and the establishment of national reconciliation among all tribes without ethnic, tribal and religious prejudice." This was also the proclaimed political platform of the Northern Alliance. To be sure, Iran will oppose any ploy by US and British intelligence to resurrect the paradigm of the 1990s to put the Taliban in power so as to "pacify" Afghanistan and to create a modicum of stability necessary for the development of transportation routes for Caspian energy.
At a time when the fabulous Kashagan oil fields in Kazakhstan are expected to come on stream in 2013, when Washington hopes to reverse the tide of Russia-Turkmenistan energy cooperation, when volatility in the southern Caucasus impedes the advancement of new trans-Caspian pipelines, then, Afghanistan bounces back as the most realistic and viable evacuation route for Caspian energy bypassing Russia and Iran - provided the ground situation could be stabilized and security provided which investors and oil companies would find reassuring.
Indian dilemma
Both Russia and Iran will be keenly watching how India, which was a soul mate in the late 1990s staunchly supporting the anti-Taliban alliance, reacts to the current US-British-Saudi move. Indian leaders never tired of underscoring that there was nothing called "good Taliban" and "bad Taliban". That was up until a year ago. However, there is bound to be uneasiness in both Moscow and Tehran as to where exactly Delhi stands at the present juncture in the geopolitics of the region.
One thing is clear: a US-sponsored oil/gas pipeline via Afghanistan suits India, though that may undercut Russia and Iran in the energy sweepstakes.
From all accounts, discussions were going on between the security establishments of India and the US for the past several months regarding an Indian military involvement in Afghanistan. Washington has been pressing for a major Indian role. A two-member Indian team, which visited Kabul in early September, claimed they were on a mission sponsored by the government to make an assessment of the layout for Indian military involvement. The team apparently held discussions with top American diplomats and military officials based in Kabul.
What an interesting mess young Mr Bush is leaving for the world.
Professor Cole, you are absolutely right.
365 days of Ramadan is what the Pakistani poor have historically suffered with and no one cared.
The poor of Pakistan "fast" 365 days a year, and not by choice!!! The Pakistani elite has not cared and the Western elite has never cared. DO NOT TRUST IT when the Western elite suddenly start to care. It is a ruse. They are fixing to do nefarious things.
Ahmed Rashid spoke at Harvard yesterday and painted a dire picture of what is now going on with the Taliban. He says they are resurgent in Afghanistan and have ambitions in Pakistan too while providing training to international fighters from around the world with Al Qaeda.
Now 93% of the world's heroin comes from Afghanistan while Kabul has only 4 hours of electrricity every other day and "Kabul has become the new Kashmir."
To complicate things, there is near famine in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan making the whole region even more unstable.
Interesting times indeed.
Others have a different perspective on Ahmad Rashid's point of view.
In an article questioning Amy Goodman's conspicuous lack of coverage of Obama's belly-crawl at the AIPAC meeting in Washington, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad noted :
When AIPAC Went Missing
It is with some alarm and dismay that I watched Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” provide platform to right-wing Paksitani journalist Ahmad Rashid, long an apologist for Bush's war-on-terror, to recycle propaganda from British tabloid press and other discredited sources.
His tale about al-Qa'ida recruiting white converts for terrorist acts in Europe originated with the British security services as part of their fearmongering campaign to build support for the 42-day detention without charge plan.
No shred of evidence was ever offered.
The accuracy of the NIE on Pakistan and the motives behind it are hard to gage, but it is clear that the situation in Pakistan is very chaotic with growing unrest among the population because of the falling rupee, dwindling foreign exchange reserves and skyrocketing prices of food and fuel. President Zardari is trying to line up significant emergency economic aid from the US, the Europeans and the Chinese to bail out Pakistan. His government will probably not last long if he fails.
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