Page 2 of 2 THE ROVING EYE
Backstage at the theater of 'terror'
By Pepe Escobar
Soviet pull out, on February 15: "I believe that the war was a huge and in many
respects irreparable political mistake of the leadership of the Soviet Union at
the time."
Nowadays, Gromov stresses "the Moscow region regularly sends humanitarian aid
to Afghanistan". If Obama placed a call to Gromov he would hear a few sobering
words: persist in your "strategy" and you and NATO will be defeated at the
"graveyard of empires".
The freedom fighters return
Unlike standard Obama rhetoric, Afghanistan is not the "central
front in the war on terror". The key to the riddle lies in the middle-echelons
of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the army. The ISI
"invented" the Taliban - and the middle to upper ranks, as well as some Pashtun
army officers, continue to fully support not only the "historic" Taliban of the
Mullah Omar group but the neo-Taliban of the Baitullah Mehsud and Maulana Sufi
Mohammed varieties.
The problem is Washington has no leverage, no credibility and no inside
intelligence to conduct a wide-ranging purge of the ISI and the Pakistani army.
And then there's the problem of endemic Afghan corruption. If you supply 93% of
the world's opium, you are definitely a narco-state. The Taliban may not
control the complex web of poppy cultivation - but they profit from its
transportation and smuggling.
The Northern Alliance, hegemonic in the Kabul power game, is directly involved,
as much as the Pashtun family of President Hamid Karzai. An extra measure of
Washington's puzzlement in Afghanistan is that a new "solution" being floated
involves getting rid of Karzai and installing a new asset/puppet dictator.
Obama - even without being familiar with the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater - has
got to be clever enough to see the surge per se as a suicidal gambit. The
problem is he still seems to believe the war is "winnable". His latest
definition of "winning", during his short visit to Canada, is "to defeat
al-Qaeda" and to make sure the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre is not a "launching
pad for attacks against North America". So, if that is the mission he must
acknowledge, the key node is Pakistan, not Afghanistan.
To the detriment of romanticized politics, 9/11 was never organized in a cave
in Afghanistan; it was plotted in cells in Germany and Spain by Saudis and
Pakistanis, with not a single Afghan among them. All subsequent attacks were
planned basically in Western Europe, not in Afghanistan.
For its part, "historic" al-Qaeda today has nothing to do with a
terror-oriented Citigroup; it is composed by no more than a few dozen shadowy
figures - including Ayman al-Zawahiri - most probably hiding in the Waziristans
and the enormous empty spaces of Balochistan.
Obama's problems are compounded by the fact that he is surrounded by people,
such as Pentagon supremo Robert Gates, that remain locked in "war on
terror"/Long War mode. Vice President Joe Biden and special envoy to the
Afghanistan-Pakistan theater Richard Holbrooke - not to mention General David
"I'm positioning myself for 2012" Petraeus - are certified hawks. They will do
everything in their power to steer the conclusions of the Afghanistan strategic
policy review Obama is waiting for towards the Long War concept .
For Andrew Bacevich, professor of International Relations and History at Boston
University, the last hope for sanity is represented by Senator John Kerry, the
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee.
It's never enough to stress the Bush "war on terror" framework remains in full
effect. Leon Panetta, the Obama nominee as CIA director, said that the CIA will
basically continue with extraordinary renditions. Elena Kagan, the Obama
nominee for solicitor general, said that indefinite detention without trial
still rules - wherever the detainee was captured. And acting Assistant Attorney
General Michael Hertz said that detainees in Bagram air base in Afghanistan
remain without legal rights. If Obama is serious about closing Guantanamo, he
must be serious about closing Bagram.
The two-fold, "Western alliance" strategy at the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater,
as it stands, consists of the US and NATO occupying the parts of Afghanistan
not occupied by the Taliban while Washington bribes Islamabad to let it attack
Pashtun peasants inside Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA).
No wonder that after de facto losing a war in Iraq to a bunch of "irregulars"
with Kalashnikovs, the Pentagon is now terrified that NATO is about to lose the
war in Afghanistan for good, thus proving to the whole world its absolute
irrelevancy - and shattering once and for all the shaky pillar of US hegemony
over Europe.
NATO is incompetent even at lying. A NATO report in January claimed that "only"
973 civilians were killed in Afghanistan in 2008, and "only 97" of these by
NATO. This month a UN report confirmed that NATO was lying. According to the
UN, at least 2,118 Afghan civilians were killed in 2008 - 828 of them by the US
or NATO.
Everyone's talking about US fighter jets and CIA Predator drones raising hell
out of three secret Pakistani air bases - with Islamabad's complicit silence.
But nobody talks about the "humint", or human intelligence, component of the
US's covert war in Afghanistan, conducted by what the New York Times defines,
with spectacular hypocrisy, as "military units operating outside the normal
chain of command".
US special forces are part of this deadly mix. A recent UN report identifies
these US commandos as the key culprits as far as the killing of Afghan
civilians is concerned. Washington happens to identify similar outfits - if
they operate under a different banner, or religion - as "terrorists".
In the case of this new American breed, it's fair to expect the Pentagon and
the Washington establishment to sooner or later start calling them - in a
sinister echo of recent Afghan past - "freedom fighters".
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