by Rick
Rozoff
Global Research, October 16, 2010
Stop NATO - 2010-10-15
Two recent news items emanating from the United
States have begun to reverberate in Pakistan and give rise to speculation that
growing American drone strikes and NATO helicopter attacks in that country may be
the harbingers of far broader actions: Nothing less than the expansion of the
West’s war in Afghanistan into Pakistan with the ultimate goal of seizing the
nation’s nuclear weapons.
The News International, Pakistan’s largest
English-language newspaper, published a report on October 13 based on excerpts
from American journalist Bob Woodward’s recently released volume “Obama’s Wars”
which stated that during a trilateral summit between the presidents of the
U.S., Afghanistan and Pakistan on May 6 of 2009 Pakistani head of state Asif
Ali Zardari accused Washington of being behind Taliban attacks inside his
country with the intent to use them so “the US could invade and seize its
nuclear weapons.” [1]
Woodward recounted comments exchanged at a
dinner with Zardari and Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, former U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations (2007-2009), to Iraq (2005-2007) and Afghanistan
(2003-2005). Khalilzad was also a close associate of Jimmy Carter
administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, architect of the
U.S. strategy to support attacks by armed extremists based in Pakistan against
Afghanistan starting in 1978, when he joined the Polish expatriate at Columbia
University from 1979-1989.
The baton for what is now Washington’s over 30-year
involvement in Afghanistan was passed from Brzezinski to Khalilzad in the 1980s
when the latter was appointed one of the Ronald Reagan administration’s senior
State Department officials in charge of supporting Mujahedin fighters operating
out of Peshawar in Pakistan. He joined the State Department in 1984 on a
Council on Foreign Relations fellowship and worked for Paul Wolfowitz,
then-Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, at Foggy
Bottom. His efforts were augmented by the Central Intelligence Agency’s deputy
director at the time, Robert Gates, now U.S. defense secretary. Two of their
three chief clients, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, are founders
and leaders of Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin and the Haqqani network, against whom
Gates’ Pentagon is currently waging war on both sides of the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
According to Woodward’s account of the Pakistani
president’s accusations to Khalilzad in May of last year, “Zardari dropped his
diplomatic guard. He suggested that one of…two countries was arranging the
attacks by the Pakistani Taliban inside his country: India or the US. Zardari
didn’t think India could be that clever, but the US could. [Afghan President
Hamid] Karzai had told him the US was behind the attacks, confirming the claims
made by the Pakistani ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence].” [2]
Khalilzad, whose résumé also includes stints at
the Defense Department, the National Security Council, the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, the National Endowment for Democracy, the RAND
Corporation (where he assisted in establishing the Middle East Studies Center)
and the Project for the New American Century, reportedly took issue with
Zardari’s contention, which led to the latter responding that what he had
described “was a plot to destabilize Pakistan,” hatched in order that,
according to Woodward’s version of his words, “the US could invade and seize
[Pakistan's] nuclear weapons.”
The account stated Zardari “could not explain
the rapid expansion in violence otherwise. And the CIA had not pursued the
leaders of the Pakistani Taliban, a group known as Tehrik-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan
or TTP that had attacked the government. TTP was also blamed for the
assassination of Zardari’s wife, Benazir Bhutto.”
In the Pakistani president’s words: “We give you
targets of Taliban people you don’t go after. You go after other areas. We’re
puzzled.”
When Khalilzad mentioned that U.S. drone attacks
inside Pakistan “were primarily meant to hunt down members of al Qaeda and
Afghan insurgents, not the Pakistan Taliban,” Zardari responded by insisting
“But the Taliban movement is tied to al Qaeda…so by not attacking the targets
recommended by Pakistan the US had revealed its support of the TTP. The CIA at
one time had even worked with the group’s leader, Baitullah Mehsud,” Zardari
asserted. [3] (Three months later a CIA-directed drone strike killed Mehsud,
his wife and several in-laws and bodyguards.)
In August of 2009, while still commander of all
U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, then-General Stanley McChrystal issued his
classified COMISAF (Commander of International Security Assistance Force)
Initial Assessment which asserted the “major insurgent groups in order of their
threat to the mission are: the Quetta Shura Taliban (05T), the Haqqani Network
(HQN), and the Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HiG).” [4] The first is an Afghan
Taliban group which as its name indicates is based in the capital of Pakistan’s
Balochistan province.
Steve Coll, Alfred McCoy and other authorities
on the subject have documented the CIA’s involvement with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
and Jalaluddin Haqqani: That they were shared with if not transferred by
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence to the CIA as private assets. Coll has
additionally claimed that Haqqani sheltered and supported Osama bin Laden
starting in the 1980s.
At the meeting between Obama, Zardari and Karzai
in May of 2009, the American president slighted his two counterparts for
alleged lack of resolve in prosecuting the war on both sides of the Durand
Line, although even as he spoke Pakistan was engaged in a major military
assault in the Swat Valley which led to the displacement of 3 million civilians.
Four days after the dinner exchange between
Zardari and Khalilzad, the Pakistani president appeared on the May 10 edition
of NBC’s Meet the Press on a program which also included Afghan President
Karzai and Steve Coll, now president and CEO of the New America Foundation and
author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin
Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (2004) and The Bin
Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (2008).
Zardari’s comments to his American audience
included the claim that the Taliban “was part of your past and our past, and
the ISI and the CIA created them together. And I can find you 10 books and 10
philosophers and 10 write-ups on that….” [5]
That the leaders of the other two armed groups
identified by McChrystal – Haqqani and Hekmatyar – were among the three
Mujahedin leaders financed, armed and trained by the CIA (the late Ahmed Shah
Massoud being the third), makes the pattern complete: Robert Gates the defense
secretary is leading a war against forces that Robert Gates the deputy director
of the CIA earlier supported through one of the Agency’s longest and most
expensive covert programs, Operation Cyclone.
After retiring from public life, George Kennan,
the main architect of U.S. Cold War policy, cited a line he ascribed to Goethe
to warn that in the end we are all destroyed by monsters of our own creation.
To emend Voltaire, the White House rather than God is a comedian playing to an
audience too afraid to laugh.
Woodward’s account of last year’s comments by
Pakistan’s president and Zalmay Khalilzad could be dismissed as merely
anecdotal if not for an article that appeared in the New York Post on October 3
and developments in Pakistan itself over the past six weeks.
Arthur Herman, a visiting scholar at the
conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, stated in an article
entitled “Our Pakistan problem: Obama’s approach is failing” that “The bitter
irony is that even as Obama is trying to get out of the war in Afghanistan, he
may be heading us into one in Pakistan.”
The author detailed that whereas in 2009 the
U.S. launched 45 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) attacks inside
Pakistan, it had tripled that number by the time his article appeared, and that
half as many as last year’s total strikes had been launched this September
alone.
Also mentioning the NATO helicopter attack in
the Kurram Agency of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas on
September 30 which killed three members of the Frontier Corps and that “Raids
by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Pursuit Team – with its 3,000 Afghan troops –
into Pakistan are also becoming routine,” Herman warned:
“All this adds up to a US effort in Pakistan
highly reminiscent of the one we undertook in Laos in the 1960s – one of the
springboards into the Vietnam quagmire.
“If Obama’s growing pressure on Pakistan
destabilizes that government, the only thing keeping that country’s nukes out
of the hands of al Qaeda may have to be US troops. That’s a shooting-war scenario
that will make Obama wish his name was Lyndon Baines Johnson.” [6]
Herman attributes the expansion of the Afghan
war into Pakistan at a qualitatively more dangerous level to the machinations
of former CIA officer and current Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution
Bruce Riedel and the commander of 152,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan
General David Petraeus.
A report of October 13 documented that since
Petraeus took command of the war effort in Afghanistan in June there has been a
172 percent increase in U.S. and NATO air strikes, from 257 assault missions in
September of 2009 to over 700 last month. In addition, “Surveillance flights
increased to nearly three times the number from September 2009 and supply
flights are up as well….Petraeus is sometimes seen as more willing to risk the
so-called ‘collateral damage’ of civilian deaths….[7]
Last month’s drone attacks were the most in any
month since the targeted assasinations were started in 2004 and the amount of
deaths they caused – over 150 – the highest monthly total to date.
By the middle of this month there have been at
least eight drone attacks and no fewer than 66 people killed.
According to Steve Coll’s New America
Foundation, 1,439 of the 1,844 deaths caused by drone attacks in Pakistan since
2004 have occurred in 2009 and so far this year. [8]
Similarly, the deaths of 1,111 of 2,160 U.S. and
NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2001 occurred in the same period.
Seventeen foreign soldiers were killed between October 13 and 16 alone.
On October 13 the Pakistani press reported that
NATO helicopters, until then operating solely in the Federally Administered
Tribal Areas (in four attacks between September 25-30 against the Haqqani
network), violated the nation’s airspace over the province of Balochistan,
leading Islamabad to lodge a formal protest with NATO.
Since the revelations from Bob Woodward’s new
book and the publication of Arthur Herman’s article, commentaries in Pakistani
newspapers have appeared which indicate the seriousness with which recent
developments and even more ominous portents are being viewed.
An October 13 feature in The Nation stated that
“the ongoing war on terror in Afghanistan is aimed to take the operations into
Pakistani territory….The real target is Pakistan’s nuclear potential; they [the
U.S. and NATO] have no plausible security threat from the ill-equipped Taliban
or ragtag extremists.”
Commenting on the New York Post feature cited
earlier, Pakistani commentator A R Jerral further claimed that what “Herman
suggests in his write-up is in fact a policy direction to the US
administration. He implies that the policy of sending drones and attacking
militant hideouts in the Pakistan territory has not worked….[T]he thrust is
Pakistan’s nukes. It is a tacit way to tell the policymakers in Washington to
keep the pressure on our country, which will weaken the Pakistani government’s
standing, causing instability. That will provide the reason for the US troops
to move in.”
He added: “We know about the drone attacks as
these are reported in the media, but what we do not know and our media does not
report is the fact that US-led NATO forces are launching crossborder raids into
Pakistan….For this, CIA is operating Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams in
Afghanistan.
“These teams are regularly mounting ground raids
into Pakistani territory.”
“In this way, things are getting hot as far as
the war on terror is concerned. Pakistan is moving to become centre stage in
this war. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA and NSC [National Security Council]
official, has advised Mr Obama to shift the focus of war ‘from Afghanistan to
Pakistan’; this is what we are witnessing in the shape of heightened war effort
into the Pakistan territory.” [9]
A Pakistani commentary of the preceding day
stated: “[W]e have…been dragged into giving the US access to Balochistan from
where it has been attempting to destabilise the Iranian regime through support
for the terrorist group Jundullah….Even more threatening, unless we change
course now, we will have lost the battle to retain our nuclear assets because
that is where the NATO-US trail is eventually leading to.”
“The free-wheeling access to US covert military
and intelligence operatives, both officials and private contractors, is another
destabilising factor that we seem to be unable or unwilling to check. And now
there are the NATO incursions into our territory and targeting of even our
military personnel, which shows how servile a state we are living in at
present. [10]
As the war in Afghanistan, the largest and
longest in the world, proceeds with record casualties among civilians and
combatants alike on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, plans are afoot
to further expand the war into Pakistan and to threaten Iran as well.
Comparisons to Washington’s war in Indochina
have been mentioned. [11] But Pakistan with its 180 million people and nuclear
weapons is not Cambodia and Iran with its population of over 70 million is not
Laos.
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