US to commit Suicide in FATA of Pakistan (1)

By Dr Shahid Qureshi
Thursday 03 June 2010

Those who are advising US to invade FATA in Pakistan must be hanged for putting lives of US soldiers at risk or in some mental institution for ‘suicidal ideation’ be they are backed Indians or Israelis. It is not online computer bingo, which one can enjoy with coffee? As far as reported computer simulation exercise by the US to invade FATA is concerned it always look cosy on the simulation like photos of Mount Everest will not give frostbites. US might have dollar-infected elements with Green Cards in the Pakistani establishment who will evaporate like ‘hot air’, and then what?

On 24th July 2008, at (IISS) International Institute of Strategic Studies in London I asked, Pakistani Foreign Minister HE Shah Mahmood Qureshi, “Foreign Minister your democratic government’s sole motto seems to be, ‘Visit USA before US visits you’ because you just came from the USA and Prime Minister Gilani is going to USA too. On the other hand, ‘If US want to (visit) invade Pakistan’s tribal areas (FATA) then “SO BE IT”.

Pakistan Crisis and Social Statistics

by Juan Cole

Readers have written me asking what I think of the rash of almost apocalyptic pronouncements on the security situation in Pakistan issuing from the New York Times, The Telegraph, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in recent days.

And Stephen Walt also is asking why there are such varying assessments of Pakistan’s security prospects. He suggests that one problem is the difficulty of predicting a revolutionary situation. But Pakistan just had a revolution against the military dictatorship! The polling, the behavior in the voting booth, the history of political geography, aren’t these data relevant to the issue? Why does no one instance them?

As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can’t see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism. Most are religious traditionalists, Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. At the federal level, they mainly voted in February 2008 for the Pakistan People’s Party or the Muslim League, neither of them fundamentalist. The issue that excercised them most powerfully recently was the need to reinstate the civilian Supreme Court justices dismissed by a military dictatorship, who preside over a largely secular legal system.

Another major province is Sindh, with nearly 50 mn. of Pakistan’s 165 mn. population. It is divided between Urdu-speakers and the largely rural Sindhis who are religious traditionalists, many of the anti-Taliban Barelvi school. They voted overwhelmingly for the centrist, mostly secular Pakistan People’s Party in the recent parliamentary elections. Then there are the Urdu-speakers originally from India who mostly live in Karachi and a few other cities. In the past couple of decades the Urdu-speakers have tended to vote for the secular MQM party.

Residents of Sindh and Punjab constitute some 85% of Pakistan’s population, and while these provinces have some Muslim extremists, they are a small fringe there.

Pakistan has a professional bureaucracy. It has doubled its literacy rate in the past three decades. Rural electrification has increased enormously. The urban middle class has doubled since 2000. Economic growth in recent years has been 6 and 7 percent a year, which is very impressive. The country has many, many problems, but it is hardly the Somalia some observers seem to imagine.

Opinion polling shows that even before the rounds of violence of the past two years, most Pakistanis rejected Muslim radicalism and violence. The stock of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda plummeted after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

The Pakistani Taliban are largely a phenomenon of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas west of the North-West Frontier Province, and of a few districts within the NWFP itself. These are largely Pushtun ethnically. The NYT’s breathless observation that there are Taliban a hundred miles from Islamabad doesn’t actually tell us very much, since Islamabad is geographically close to the Pushtun regions without that implying that Pushtuns dominate or could dominate it. It is like saying that Lynchburg, Va., is close to Washington DC and thereby implying that Jerry Falwell’s movement is about to take over the latter.

The Pakistani Taliban amount to a few thousand fighters who lack tanks, armored vehicles, and an air force.

The Pakistani military is the world’s sixth largest, with 550,000 active duty troops and is well equipped and well-trained. It in the past has acquitted itself well against India, a country ten times Pakistan’s size population-wise. It is the backbone of the country, and has excellent command and control, never having suffered an internal mutiny of any significance.

So what is being alleged? That some rural Pushtun tribesmen turned Taliban are about to sweep into Islamabad and overthrow the government of Pakistan? Frankly ridiculous. Wouldn’t the government bring some tank formations up from the Indian border and stop them?

Or is it being alleged that the Pakistani army won’t fight the Taliban? But then explain the long and destructive Bajaur campaign.

Or is the fear that some junior officers in the army are more or less Taliban and that they might make a coup? But the Pakistani military has typically sought a US alliance after every coup it has made. Who would support Talibanized officers? Not China, not the US, the major patrons of Islamabad.

If that is the fear, in any case, then the US should strengthen the civilian, elected government, which was installed against US wishes by a popular movement during the past two years. The officers should be strictly instructed that they are to stay in their barracks.

What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan’s nuclear capacity.

All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.

My guess is that the alarmism is also being promoted from within Pakistan by Pervez Musharraf, who wants to make another military coup; and by civilian politicians in Islamabad, who want to extract more money from the US to fight the Taliban that they are secretly also bribing to attack Afghanistan.

Advice to Obama: Pakistan is being configured for you in ways that benefit some narrow sectional interests. Caveat emptor.

—

Update: In answer to some comments below. First of all, the Pakistani military is not “unable” to stop the Taliban in the North-West Frontier Province. The Zardari government is just not desirous of alienating the Pushtuns by being heavy-handed. They only sent in 250 special ops troops to deal with Buner, which is a very light touch for an army with lots of artillery, tanks and fighter jets.

Pakistan now is not like Russia in 1917. Its two main political parties are of old standing, have contested many elections, have millions of supporters and canvassers. The main threat to the PPP government is parliamentary– that it will be unseated by the Muslim League if it fails a vote of no contest and there are new elections.

All the military coups in Pakistan have been made from the top by the army chief of staff. Therefore Gen. Ashfaq Kayani is the man to watch. He was Benazir Bhutto’s army secretary and has ties to the Pakistan People’s Party. Not a Talib.

The hype about Pakistan is very sinister and mysterious and makes no sense to someone who actually knows the country.

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Who Benefitted from 9/11?

Jeff Gates

On the day of the 9/11 attacks, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked what the attack would mean for US-Israeli relations. His quick reply was: “It’s very good…. Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel).”

Intelligence wars rely on mathematical models to anticipate the response of “the mark” to staged provocations. Reactions thereby become foreseeable – within an acceptable range of probabilities. When Israeli mathematician Robert J. Aumann received the 2005 Nobel Prize in economic science, he conceded that “the entire school of thought that we have developed here in Israel” has turned “Israel into the leading authority in this field.” With a well-planned provocation, the anticipated response can even become a weapon in the arsenal of the agent provocateur.

In response to 9/11, how difficult would it be to foresee that the US would deploy its military to avenge that attack? With fixed intelligence, how difficult would it be to redirect that response to wage a long-planned war in Iraq – not for US interests but to advance the agenda for Greater Israel?

The emotionally wrenching component of a provocation plays a key role in game theory war planning where Israel is the authority. With the televised murder of 3,000 Americans, a shared mindset of shock, grief and outrage made it easier for US policy makers to believe that a known Evil Doer in Iraq was responsible, regardless of the facts.

The strategic displacement of facts with induced beliefs, in turn, requires a period of “preparing the mindset” so that “the mark” will put their faith in a pre-staged fiction. Those who induced the March 2003 invasion of Iraq began “laying mental threads” and creating agenda-advancing mental associations more than a decade earlier.

Notable among those threads was the 1993 publication in Foreign Affairs of an article by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington. By the time his analysis appeared in book-length form in 1996 as The Clash of Civilisations, more than 100 academies and think tanks were prepared to promote it, pre-staging a “clash consensus”- five years before 9-11.

Also published in 1996 under the guidance of Richard Perle was A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm (i.e., Israel). A member since 1987 of the US Defence Policy Advisory Board, this self-professed Zionist became its chairman in 2001. As a key adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Perle’s senior Pentagon post helped lay the required foundation for removing Saddam Hussein as part of a Greater Israel strategy, a key theme of A Clean Break, released five years before 9-11.

A mass murder, articles, books, think tanks and Pentagon insiders, however, are not enough to manage the variables in a “probabilistic” war-planning model. Supportive policy makers are also required to lend the appearance of legitimacy and credibility to an operation justified by intelligence fixed around a pre-determined agenda.

Senators John McCain, Joe Lieberman, a Jewish Zionist from Connecticut, and Jon Kyl, a Christian Zionist from Arizona, filled that role when they co-sponsored the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. Echoing Tel Aviv’s agenda in A Clean Break, their bill laid another mental thread in the public mindset by calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein – three years before 9/11.

The legislation also appropriated $97 million, largely to promote that Zionist agenda. Distracted by mid-term Congressional elections and by impeachment proceedings commenced in reaction to a well-timed presidential affair involving White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton signed that agenda into law October 31, 1998 — five years before the US-led invasion that removed Saddam Hussein.

After 9/11, John McCain and Joe Lieberman became inseparable travel companions and irrepressible advocates for the invasion of Iraq. Looking “presidential” aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt in January 2002, McCain laid another key thread when he waved an admiral’s cap while proclaiming, alongside Lieberman, “On to Baghdad.”

The chutzpah with which this game theory strategy progressed in plain sight could be seen in the behaviour of Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, another Zionist insider. Four days after 9-11, in a principals’ meeting at Camp David, he proposed that the US invade Iraq. At that time, the intelligence did not yet point to Iraqi involvement and Osama bin Laden was thought to be hiding in a remote area 
of Afghanistan.

The fictions accepted as ‘generally accepted truths’ included Iraqi WMD, Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, Iraqi meetings with Al Qaeda in Prague, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories and Iraqi purchases of “yellowcake” uranium from Niger. Only the last fact was conceded as phoney in the relevant time frame. All the rest were disclosed as false, flawed or fixed only after the war began. An attempt to cover-up the yellowcake account led to the federal prosecution of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis Libby, another well-placed Zionist insider.

By manipulating the shared mindset, skilled game theory war-planners can wage battles in plain sight and on multiple fronts with minimal resources. One proven strategy: Pose as an ally of a well-armed nation predisposed to deploy its military in response to a mass murder. In this case, the result destabilised Iraq, creating crises that could be exploited to strategic advantage by expanding the conflict to Iran, another key Israeli goal announced in A Clean Break – seven years before the 
invasion of Iraq. Which nation benefitted from the deployment of coalition forces to the region?

Today’s mathematically model-able outcome undermined US national security by overextending its military, discrediting its leadership, degrading its financial condition and disabling its political will. In game theory terms, these results were “perfectly predictable”- within an acceptable range of probabilities.

In the asymmetry that typifies today’s unconventional warfare, those who are few in numbers must wage war by way of deception-non-transparently and with means that leverage their impact. Which nation – if not Israel – fits 
that description?

Only one nation had the means, motive, opportunity and stable nation state intelligence required to take the US to war in the Middle East while also making it appear that Islam is the problem. If Barack Obama continues to defer to Tel Aviv, he can rightly be blamed when the next attack occurs in the US or the European Union featuring the usual orgy of evidence pointing to a predetermined target. Should another mass murder occur, that event will be traceable directly to the US-Israeli relationship and the failure of US policy makers to free America from this 
enemy within.

Eminent American lawyer and social
activist Jeff Gates is the author of Guilt By Association, Democracy at Risk and The Ownership Solution