Escobar's article shows that the department of dirty tricks is alive and well. No doubt this will become part and parcel of Gen. McChrystal's holistic approach to the Afghan war even though Iran has been helpful to the US in Afghanistan in the past the US is not happy about Iran making pipeline arrangements with Pakistan without approval from the US!
THE ROVING EYE The shadow war in Balochistan
By Pepe Escobar
Just when Iran and Pakistan had reached a key Pipelineistan breakthrough, regional violence exploded involving, once again, "the greatest prize" Balochistan (Please see Balochistan is the greatest prize, May 9, 2009, Asia Times Online.) The key question to ask is, as usual, cui bono?, or "Who profits?" What's behind this new, bloody intersection of Pipelineistan and the former "global war on terror" - a key theme US President
Barack Obama would not dare touch in his Cairo address on Thursday to the "Muslim world"? On May 22 in Tehran, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad finally signed a preliminary agreement, after 14 long years of negotiations, to build the Iran-Pakistan (IP) pipeline, formerly the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI), or "peace pipeline". (The final deal should, in theory, be sealed in less than two weeks.) The decision brazenly defied Washington's diktat. (Please see Pipelineistan goes Iran-Pak, May 29, 2009, Asia Times Online.) On May 28 in Zahedan, in Sistan-Balochistan province in Iran, the Pakistan-based, hardcore Sunni, ultra-anti-Shi'ite outfit Jundallah ("Soldiers of God") claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing inside the Amir al-Momenin mosque that killed 25 people and wounded 125. The timing and the circumstances could not be more suspicious. Tehran simply cannot understand how Islamabad could not contain Jundallah after it has been offered key, on-the-ground intelligence. Tehran had told the Pakistani ambassador, M B Abbasi, that three Pakistanis - Haji Noti Zehi, Gholam Rasoul Zehi and Zabihollah Naroui - had confessed to smuggling explosives into Iran from Balochistan and passing them over to the suicide bomber. The trio was subsequently hanged in public in Zahedan on May 30. As for the Iranian ambassador to Pakistan, Mashallah Shakeri, already on March 20 he had publicly accused Islamabad of allowing Balochistan to be a Jundallah base for the destabilization of Iran. Islamabad said "it ain't so", but facts on the ground spelled otherwise. Now it's even more serious, as the future of the IP pipeline is on the line. How will the Balochis in the Pakistani army react? In Balochistan, the New Great Game in Eurasia is as enigmatic as it gets. There's an enormous discrepancy between some Baloch tribal leaders who live the good life in Karachi (in Sindh) and treat the province as their personal fiefdom, and an extremely destitute population who feels totally alienated by the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani establishment. The shadowy 'foreign player'And what does Jundallah really want? Jundallah, also known in Iran as the Rigi group (after its ringleader, Abdul Malik Rigi), is an outfit of Iranian Balochis, who happen to be Sunni and fiercely anti-Shi'ite, who claim to represent their minority's rights in the Iranian southeast province of Sistan-Balochistan. Their hideout is cross-border, in Pakistani Balochistan. Islamabad has also established they have operating ties with both the ultra-sectarian Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan. Tehran directly blames Jundallah for a series of cross-border guerrilla operations that have been going on since 2003, killing mostly Iranian soldiers and border guards. After the bombing, the diplomatic dance could not but step into overdrive. Islamabad insists it is aligned with Tehran in their regional brand of the war on terror. But Tehran, not beating around the bush, has now explicitly demanded Islamabad to hand over Jundallah supremo Rigi, who is based in Balochistan. Pakistan's Interior Ministry has promised, on the record, to "hunt down" Jundallah. Although still condemning the Zahedan bombing, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry strangely denies that Iran had sealed off its border with Pakistan. The fact is Tehran did close what they call "the zero point" at the tiny town of Taftan, in the Pakistan-Iran border. Bilateral trade is crucial for the tribal, regional livelihood - after all they are all Baloch "cousins". All the food for the Pakistani Baloch side comes from Iran. Crucially, Islamabad's tune also has begun to change, in tandem with Tehran, drifting to the "third party" gambit - a foreign player supporting Jundallah's cross-border destabilization campaign, which sabotages any Pakistan-Iran rapprochement and of course the IP. One does not need to share Tehran's national security worries to identify this foreign player: Washington, which not by accident supports a rival pipeline to IP, the ever-troubled Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, the raison d'etre for the US involvement in Afghanistan. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said as much, "We consider Rigi's network linked with some foreign forces in Afghanistan." And he added Iran had plenty of "evidence". Both Washington and Islamabad have tended to ignore Jundallah's anti-Iran activities. Well, not really, because under the George W Bush-era Jundallah was co-opted by US intelligence for regime change purposes in Iran. As for the Pakistani angle, will the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) finally move against Jundallah, as it seems to be moving against Baitullah Mehsud's Taliban? In principle, this should be a no-brainer; according to the Fars News Agency, the chief of the Iranian Armed Forces, General Hassan Firouzabadi, informed Islamabad of Rigi's exact location. At a Monday seminar in Quetta, the capital of Pakistani Balochistan, organized by the Awami National Party, influential Balochis made clear they would not allow for Taliban and al-Qaeda to thrive in Balochistan, and they urged Pashtuns living in the province to do the same. One has to wonder whether this show of unity against terrorist tactics applies to the Iranian Balochis of Jundallah as well. It gets much more complicated. Balochistan has been flooded by Pashtun refugees for 30 years (the break-up of the province is now roughly 50/50). Many have been cannon fodder not only for the 1980s jihad in Afghanistan but also for the jihad in Kashmir and of course for the Taliban, in Afghanistan during the 1990s and lately the Pakistani Taliban. Secular Balochis charge that Punjabi-based Islamabad has always encouraged this refugee wave to bolster its own agenda: to undermine secular Baloch nationalism. So, what is now happening in the Pashtun North-West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas because of the Pakistani army onslaught - a powerful sense of alienation - has already happened in Balochistan. Islamabad now has to confront not only Baloch nationalism but Pashtun nationalism as well. All-out shadow war With or without using Jundallah for its own Iran-destabilizing agenda, Washington's "shadow war" is about to hit Balochistan full speed ahead. It will mirror an already ongoing shadow war - which is the ISI war against Baloch nationalists; as Balochistan is virtually controlled by Islamabad's intelligence agencies, Islamabad cannot but systematically turn Balochis into victims of "targeted assassinations". For Islamabad, ethnic-based separatism is - in echoes of Israel - an "existential threat". Islamabad's reckless actions have only managed to turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of watching him meet that paragon of democracy, Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, and cozy up with perennial Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, the "Muslim world" would rather benefit from Obama explaining first-hand what a shadow war in Muslim lands is all about. By mid-summer, Obama's Afghan surge in troops will be in position. A new, US mega-base in the "desert of death" in Helmand province, in southern Afghanistan, will be operational. The base happens to be a stone's throw from the Iran-Afghan border, and just across the border from Pakistani Balochistan. It's the ideal, strategic base for an extended, tri-border (Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan) General David Petraeus-coined counter-insurgency splash. Ultra-shadowy task forces, "Hell from above" drone war, Hellfire missiles, the merciless logic of privatization and "covertization" of war, the Pentagon's "secret operational capabilities" to "locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups" - all this cannot but fester in this tri-border area. Philip Alston of the United Nations Human Rights Council has been an almost isolated voice denouncing US shadow, "targeted assassination" teams working out of Afghan bases in Kandahar and Nangarhar, and allied with wily, local militias. The victims are mostly Afghan civilians. In Balochistan, the available "local militia" will always be Jundallah. The base will be in the Afghan "desert of death". In the absence of Taliban or al-Qaeda, victims of "decapitation" are plenty of Iranians across the border. How better to apply Petraeus' tactics than to expand these teams into destabilizing Iran and preventing Iran and Pakistan from closer integration via a key Pipelineistan node - an integration that also benefits China? That is achievable with a Balochistan mired in chaos. From the Pentagon's point of view, China profiting from the Baloch port of Gwadar to be supplied with Iranian gas is anathema. Islamabad may not be allowed by Washington to take out Jundallah after all. Shadowplay rules. 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. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
Showing posts with label Pepe Escobar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pepe Escobar. Show all posts
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Friday, May 1, 2009
Pepe Escobar: The Myth of Talibanistan
As Escobar notes we have a new branding of evil the Taliban in Pakistan and some of their leaders. We also see a concerted attempt to brand the Taliban movement in Pakistan as a great threat to US interests. One wonders if the US is exploring its options including supporting a military takeover. The strong criticism of the Pakistan govt. points in this direction. But the Obama administration is also upping drone attacks and also it would seem the operation of special forces within Pakistan.
The myth of Talibanistan
By Pepe Escobar
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. Bring me the head of Baitullah MehsudSo 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. 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. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. (Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.
The myth of Talibanistan
By Pepe Escobar
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. Bring me the head of Baitullah MehsudSo 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. 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. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. (Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Escobar: On Obama's policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan
This is from Asiatimes.
Escobar is good at showing the implausibility if not downright silliness of some of the rationale given for US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama may not use the term "'war on terror'' but he uses the same sort of ridiculous rationales as Bush did for US policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan
THE ROVING EYE
The mother of all cockfights
By Pepe Escobar
On one side, the most powerful man on Earth, who happens to carry a Muslim middle name. On the other, the largest tribal nation in the world, which happens to be Muslim. Welcome to the mother of all cockfights. As it was leaked by government sources to the Pakistani daily The News, the success rate of the Barack Obama administration's "hell from above" Predator drone war over the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) is a mere 6%. Of "60 Predator strikes between January 14, 2006, and April 8, 2009, only 10 hit their targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders" but most of all "killing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians". All of them Pashtuns. Any sensible boss would fire those responsible for such a performance. Not Obama with the Pentagon - which is bound to
continue with its only game in (Pashtun) town, based on amassing non-existent, on-the-ground intelligence; accumulating unbearable "collateral damage"; provoking a mass Pashtun rebellion against the discredited 650,000-strong Pakistani army; and ensuring the military's definitive public humiliation. Last week, Pentagon supremo Robert Gates
left no doubt the Pentagon's future lay with "expeditionary warfare" or "COIN operations", counter-insurgency operations (COIN) of which the "hell from above" Predator diplomacy is a superstar. The strategy also includes replicating the Central Command chief General David Petraeus-coined "Sons of Iraq" COIN gambit - now renamed Afghan Public Protection Force, which will inevitably clash big time with the Hamid Karzai
government in Kabul, just as Sunni Iraqis clash with Prime Minster Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad. Needless to say, this COIN-saturated "future" peopled with Predator and Reaper drones, special forces and high-tech ground and air sensors apply essentially to Muslim countries. British colonialism, in a pre-COIN past, used to call this "colonial warfare", or "little wars" against brown people. Blame Albion's perfidyObama's lofty team of strategic reviewers seems to have overlooked that it's because of occupying US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops that moderate Pashtun tribals support the Taliban or even join the Taliban. Obviously, Obama's strategic reviewers forgot to ask Pashtuns themselves about the new US "strategy". It's now clear in Washington that the troika of special envoy Richard Holbrooke, Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to sell to Obama a COIN-based Afghan nation-building scheme - which, if it sounds like a contradiction, that's because it is. Always keen on taking over the news cycle, Obama preferred to strut his catchy, alliterative triad ("disrupt, dismantle, defeat") which will in theory eliminate evil al-Qaeda from the war theater in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or AfPak. Still, the fact remains: Obama's war in AfPak is a war against Pashtuns. Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Holbrooke, in an involuntary impersonation of Inspector Clouseau, admitted as much to CNN's State of the Union less than three weeks ago:
The people we are fighting in Afghanistan and the people they are sheltering in western Pakistan pose a direct threat - those are the men of 9/11, the people that killed [former prime minister] Benazir Bhutto - and you can be sure that as we sit here today they are planning further attacks on the United States and our allies. Holbrooke manages to muddle it all - merging Arab al-Qaeda with Pashtun Taliban, implying that the Pashtun Taliban were involved in 9/11 and also in the killing of Benazir (which some even claim was an inside Pakistan army/intelligence services job), not to mention the insinuation that Pashtuns are plotting to attack the US in a 9/11 replay. This newspeak is how the Washington establishment under Obama now sells an unwinnable war to US public opinion. What do Pashtuns have to say about it? According to Zar Ali Khan Musazai, chairman of the Pashtun Democratic Council, "Pashtun blood has turned cheaper than water in the area administered by Pakistan." He charges that what's happening is "the genocide of Pashtuns, which is inhuman and against international law". But he also makes the crucial point that as the US and NATO are so fragile - to the extent that they cannot protect even their own military convoys and warehouses - nobody believes they "will protect Pashtuns from terrorism and the wrath of their mentors". He points out to the inevitable - "the day Pashtuns revolt and demand their historic home"; in sum, Pashtunistan. The overwhelming majority of Pashtuns know how, in 1893, Henry Durand, a British colonial functionary, drew his now infamous line by crossing Pashtun tribal areas that Afghans considered their own territory. Now Obama's war at least is making sense of the term "AfPak". Pashtuns never accepted these artificial borders, nor did the Afghan state whenever it was not subject to foreign interference. Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line know the 3,300 kilometer-long AfPak border was one more classic "divide and rule" invention of the British Raj. They consider FATA and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) as occupied by Pakistan, or what they describe as "Pakistani-Punjabi forces" - who use these areas to foster the destabilization of Afghanistan. They routinely refer to "the Pakistani pro-terrorist establishment". And for them the "unification of Pashtuns with their motherland Afghanistan" is the only way out. Compare this with the way the Pakistan military-intelligence establishment understands "destabilization". The establishment is totally interlinked with the neo-Taliban in Pakistan - and the "historic" Taliban who took power in Afghanistan in 1996 - as part of the "strategic depth" doctrine of fighting any possible Indian influence in Afghanistan. Their ultimate paranoia is Washington losing interest in Afghanistan - again - and thus leaving Pakistan at the mercy of Indian and Russian "encirclement". Islamabad controls most of Pakistan - Sindh and Punjab provinces - with an iron fist. Pakistani police and army control most of NWFP. In "separatist" Balochistan there's only 5% of the total population. For Washington to believe that a small, rural, Pashtun tribal agglomeration of bands of a maximum of 30 fighters, with no air force, no heavy artillery and no tanks, could take over a Pakistan with a 650,000-strong well-trained army is an absolutely ridiculous notion. And for Washington to believe - as Holbrooke implied - that a few Pashtun tribals and a few expat jihadis can take on Western civilization as a whole is also an absolutely ridiculous notion. As for the Pakistan military, whenever they see the activities of the Balochistan Liberation Front or a road being built from Nimruz province in Afghanistan to the Iranian port of Chabahar, they see the hand of New Delhi. Hardcore paranoia as it may be, even senior Pakistan army officers believe in a concerted US-India plot to destabilize FATA and the country as a whole and then confiscate Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Obama's war on Pashtuns will only exacerbate this already volatile mix. The prizeThe Obama administration's war on Pashtunistan may be just a digression. No amount of Washington spin disguises the fact Afghanistan is currently - and will continue to be - occupied by the US and NATO virtually indefinitely as a strategic peon in the New Great Game in Eurasia. It's always crucial to remember Obama's national security advisor, General Jim Jones, is a former NATO supreme commander (2003-2006) and a huge fan of NATO's non-stop expansion in Eurasia. As reported by the Washington Post, the US Army is building no less than $1.1 billion worth of military bases (about the annual budget of President Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul) and planning an extra $1.3 billion in projects for 2009, according to Colonel Thomas E O'Donovan, commander of the US Army Corps of Engineers Afghanistan District. As for NATO, its mission will be to protect the projected, $7.6 billion (and counting), perennially troubled TAPI gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to India via Afghanistan and Pakistan, if investors are foolish enough to give it the go-ahead. As if public opinion mattered in the New Great Game in Eurasia, a recent BBC poll revealed that 73% of Afghans were against Obama's surge - or war against Pashtuns - and a majority supported a negotiated end to the war, even with a coalition government including the Taliban. "The Shadow" himself, the Pashtun Taliban leader Mullah Omar, through Saudi King Abdullah, advanced his plan: a timetable for withdrawal; a "national consensus government"; and the Taliban incorporated into the Afghan National Army. The other alternative scenario is the one advanced by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) - this insoluble problem not dealt with by NATO but debated and solved by Afghanistan's neighbors, SCO members China and Russia and SCO observers (and soon to be members) Iran, Pakistan and India. Obama should know by now that Islamabad won't fight the neo-Taliban. The Inter-Services Intelligence supports them - as do different Pashtun layers of the army. So Obama can pull a Donald Rumsfeld "stay the course", as the former US secretary of defense used to say. He can keep the anti-Pashtun surge going while getting rid of Karzai in Afghanistan and President Asif Ali Zardari in Pakistan (shades of Vietnam). What he won't do - and the Pentagon won't allow - is to do a full Vietnam and let the last helicopter leave Bagram, because he does not want to go down as the president who lost the American empire of bases and the dream of prevailing in the New Great Game in Eurasia. Meanwhile, it will be Predator hell from above raining over angry Pashtun tribals. Boing, boom, tschak. Boing, boom, tschak. (The Pentagon might consider hiring the legendary German band Kraftwerk to provide the soundtrack for the strikes; and why not release a videogame?) Countless more Pashtun wedding parties will be incinerated in the name of the brand new "overseas contingency operations", formerly the "global war on terror". Make no mistake: there will be blood - a lot of blood - in the mother of all cockfights. 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. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
Escobar is good at showing the implausibility if not downright silliness of some of the rationale given for US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama may not use the term "'war on terror'' but he uses the same sort of ridiculous rationales as Bush did for US policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan
THE ROVING EYE
The mother of all cockfights
By Pepe Escobar
On one side, the most powerful man on Earth, who happens to carry a Muslim middle name. On the other, the largest tribal nation in the world, which happens to be Muslim. Welcome to the mother of all cockfights. As it was leaked by government sources to the Pakistani daily The News, the success rate of the Barack Obama administration's "hell from above" Predator drone war over the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) is a mere 6%. Of "60 Predator strikes between January 14, 2006, and April 8, 2009, only 10 hit their targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders" but most of all "killing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians". All of them Pashtuns. Any sensible boss would fire those responsible for such a performance. Not Obama with the Pentagon - which is bound to
continue with its only game in (Pashtun) town, based on amassing non-existent, on-the-ground intelligence; accumulating unbearable "collateral damage"; provoking a mass Pashtun rebellion against the discredited 650,000-strong Pakistani army; and ensuring the military's definitive public humiliation. Last week, Pentagon supremo Robert Gates
left no doubt the Pentagon's future lay with "expeditionary warfare" or "COIN operations", counter-insurgency operations (COIN) of which the "hell from above" Predator diplomacy is a superstar. The strategy also includes replicating the Central Command chief General David Petraeus-coined "Sons of Iraq" COIN gambit - now renamed Afghan Public Protection Force, which will inevitably clash big time with the Hamid Karzai
government in Kabul, just as Sunni Iraqis clash with Prime Minster Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad. Needless to say, this COIN-saturated "future" peopled with Predator and Reaper drones, special forces and high-tech ground and air sensors apply essentially to Muslim countries. British colonialism, in a pre-COIN past, used to call this "colonial warfare", or "little wars" against brown people. Blame Albion's perfidyObama's lofty team of strategic reviewers seems to have overlooked that it's because of occupying US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops that moderate Pashtun tribals support the Taliban or even join the Taliban. Obviously, Obama's strategic reviewers forgot to ask Pashtuns themselves about the new US "strategy". It's now clear in Washington that the troika of special envoy Richard Holbrooke, Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to sell to Obama a COIN-based Afghan nation-building scheme - which, if it sounds like a contradiction, that's because it is. Always keen on taking over the news cycle, Obama preferred to strut his catchy, alliterative triad ("disrupt, dismantle, defeat") which will in theory eliminate evil al-Qaeda from the war theater in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or AfPak. Still, the fact remains: Obama's war in AfPak is a war against Pashtuns. Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Holbrooke, in an involuntary impersonation of Inspector Clouseau, admitted as much to CNN's State of the Union less than three weeks ago:
The people we are fighting in Afghanistan and the people they are sheltering in western Pakistan pose a direct threat - those are the men of 9/11, the people that killed [former prime minister] Benazir Bhutto - and you can be sure that as we sit here today they are planning further attacks on the United States and our allies. Holbrooke manages to muddle it all - merging Arab al-Qaeda with Pashtun Taliban, implying that the Pashtun Taliban were involved in 9/11 and also in the killing of Benazir (which some even claim was an inside Pakistan army/intelligence services job), not to mention the insinuation that Pashtuns are plotting to attack the US in a 9/11 replay. This newspeak is how the Washington establishment under Obama now sells an unwinnable war to US public opinion. What do Pashtuns have to say about it? According to Zar Ali Khan Musazai, chairman of the Pashtun Democratic Council, "Pashtun blood has turned cheaper than water in the area administered by Pakistan." He charges that what's happening is "the genocide of Pashtuns, which is inhuman and against international law". But he also makes the crucial point that as the US and NATO are so fragile - to the extent that they cannot protect even their own military convoys and warehouses - nobody believes they "will protect Pashtuns from terrorism and the wrath of their mentors". He points out to the inevitable - "the day Pashtuns revolt and demand their historic home"; in sum, Pashtunistan. The overwhelming majority of Pashtuns know how, in 1893, Henry Durand, a British colonial functionary, drew his now infamous line by crossing Pashtun tribal areas that Afghans considered their own territory. Now Obama's war at least is making sense of the term "AfPak". Pashtuns never accepted these artificial borders, nor did the Afghan state whenever it was not subject to foreign interference. Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line know the 3,300 kilometer-long AfPak border was one more classic "divide and rule" invention of the British Raj. They consider FATA and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) as occupied by Pakistan, or what they describe as "Pakistani-Punjabi forces" - who use these areas to foster the destabilization of Afghanistan. They routinely refer to "the Pakistani pro-terrorist establishment". And for them the "unification of Pashtuns with their motherland Afghanistan" is the only way out. Compare this with the way the Pakistan military-intelligence establishment understands "destabilization". The establishment is totally interlinked with the neo-Taliban in Pakistan - and the "historic" Taliban who took power in Afghanistan in 1996 - as part of the "strategic depth" doctrine of fighting any possible Indian influence in Afghanistan. Their ultimate paranoia is Washington losing interest in Afghanistan - again - and thus leaving Pakistan at the mercy of Indian and Russian "encirclement". Islamabad controls most of Pakistan - Sindh and Punjab provinces - with an iron fist. Pakistani police and army control most of NWFP. In "separatist" Balochistan there's only 5% of the total population. For Washington to believe that a small, rural, Pashtun tribal agglomeration of bands of a maximum of 30 fighters, with no air force, no heavy artillery and no tanks, could take over a Pakistan with a 650,000-strong well-trained army is an absolutely ridiculous notion. And for Washington to believe - as Holbrooke implied - that a few Pashtun tribals and a few expat jihadis can take on Western civilization as a whole is also an absolutely ridiculous notion. As for the Pakistan military, whenever they see the activities of the Balochistan Liberation Front or a road being built from Nimruz province in Afghanistan to the Iranian port of Chabahar, they see the hand of New Delhi. Hardcore paranoia as it may be, even senior Pakistan army officers believe in a concerted US-India plot to destabilize FATA and the country as a whole and then confiscate Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Obama's war on Pashtuns will only exacerbate this already volatile mix. The prizeThe Obama administration's war on Pashtunistan may be just a digression. No amount of Washington spin disguises the fact Afghanistan is currently - and will continue to be - occupied by the US and NATO virtually indefinitely as a strategic peon in the New Great Game in Eurasia. It's always crucial to remember Obama's national security advisor, General Jim Jones, is a former NATO supreme commander (2003-2006) and a huge fan of NATO's non-stop expansion in Eurasia. As reported by the Washington Post, the US Army is building no less than $1.1 billion worth of military bases (about the annual budget of President Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul) and planning an extra $1.3 billion in projects for 2009, according to Colonel Thomas E O'Donovan, commander of the US Army Corps of Engineers Afghanistan District. As for NATO, its mission will be to protect the projected, $7.6 billion (and counting), perennially troubled TAPI gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to India via Afghanistan and Pakistan, if investors are foolish enough to give it the go-ahead. As if public opinion mattered in the New Great Game in Eurasia, a recent BBC poll revealed that 73% of Afghans were against Obama's surge - or war against Pashtuns - and a majority supported a negotiated end to the war, even with a coalition government including the Taliban. "The Shadow" himself, the Pashtun Taliban leader Mullah Omar, through Saudi King Abdullah, advanced his plan: a timetable for withdrawal; a "national consensus government"; and the Taliban incorporated into the Afghan National Army. The other alternative scenario is the one advanced by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) - this insoluble problem not dealt with by NATO but debated and solved by Afghanistan's neighbors, SCO members China and Russia and SCO observers (and soon to be members) Iran, Pakistan and India. Obama should know by now that Islamabad won't fight the neo-Taliban. The Inter-Services Intelligence supports them - as do different Pashtun layers of the army. So Obama can pull a Donald Rumsfeld "stay the course", as the former US secretary of defense used to say. He can keep the anti-Pashtun surge going while getting rid of Karzai in Afghanistan and President Asif Ali Zardari in Pakistan (shades of Vietnam). What he won't do - and the Pentagon won't allow - is to do a full Vietnam and let the last helicopter leave Bagram, because he does not want to go down as the president who lost the American empire of bases and the dream of prevailing in the New Great Game in Eurasia. Meanwhile, it will be Predator hell from above raining over angry Pashtun tribals. Boing, boom, tschak. Boing, boom, tschak. (The Pentagon might consider hiring the legendary German band Kraftwerk to provide the soundtrack for the strikes; and why not release a videogame?) Countless more Pashtun wedding parties will be incinerated in the name of the brand new "overseas contingency operations", formerly the "global war on terror". Make no mistake: there will be blood - a lot of blood - in the mother of all cockfights. 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. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Pepe Escobar on NATO
This is an interesting critique of the present role of NATO in particular its function as a global robocop--mostly at the behest of the US and to bypass the UN.
As Escobar points out Obama is unlikely to get many if any more combat troops from his NATO allies. The most he can hope for is more money and perhaps troops whose combat role will be severely limited. At a time when the US is in economic dire straits it seems odd that Obama is committing the US to a long term expensive project in Afghanistan. Perhaps it is part of a stimulus project for the global military industrial complex funded by the US taxpayer and paid for with increased US casualties as well.
The theme of humanitarian aims such as improving the rights of Afghan women are now often played up especially with the recent law re a husband's right to sexual intercourse with the wife are concerned. Karzai is fishing for the Islamist vote. This type of humanitarian imperialism is a facade and no doubt bound to failure as the Soviets found when they too did even more for the rights of women. The US tolerates all kinds of anti-woman laws in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and elsewhere. They even fostered a democratic Iraq where women have fewer rights under the Shiite dominated govt. than they did under Hussein.
THE ROVING EYE Globocop versus the TermiNATO
By Pepe Escobar
The people of Strasbourg have voted in their apartment balconies for the French-German co-production of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 60th birthday this Saturday. Thousands of "No to NATO" banners, alongside "Peace" banners, sprung up all around town until forcibly removed by French police. Prime "liberal democracy" repression tactics were inevitably on show - just as in the much-hyped "we had 275 minutes to save the world and all we could come up with was half-a-trillion dollars for the International Monetary Fund" Group of 20 summit in London. Protesters were tear-gassed as terrorists. Downtown was
cordoned off. Residents were forced to wear badges. Demonstrations got banished to the suburbs. Then there's the musical metaphor. When NATO was created in Washington on April 4, 1949, the soundtrack was Gershwin's It Ain't Necessarily So. When seven countries from the former Warsaw Pact were admitted in 2004, the soundtrack came from the ghastly Titanic blockbuster. For the 60th birthday bash in Baden-Baden - with the Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel trio attending - it's Georges Bizet's Carmen. As much as Carmen is a gypsy who believes a fortune-teller and ends up dead, NATO is a global traveler who may end up dead by believing fortune-teller Washington. Sultans of swing NATO certainly has plenty to celebrate. France, under adrenalin junkie Sarkozy - known in NATOland as the "Sultan of Bruni", in reference to his smashing wife Carla - is back to NATO. Obama is presenting his new, comprehensive Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy to NATO. NATO "secures the peace" in Mafia-ridden Kosovo (an entity not recognized even by NATO members such as Spain and Greece). NATO, in full "war on terror" mode, acts like a supercop in the Mediterranean. NATO patrols the Horn of Africa looking for pirates. NATO trains Iraqi security forces. For a body of 60, NATO is fully fit. Physically, NATO is a bureaucratic nightmare occupying a huge, horrid building on Blvd Leopold III in Mons, outside of Brussels, employing 5,200 civilians divided into 320 committees sharing an annual budget of $2.7 billion. These committees manage 60,000 combat troops scattered all around the world. NATO should have been dead immediately after the fall of the enemy it was created to fight - the Soviet Union. Instead, NATO had a ball during the 1990s, when Russia was down and out and Russian president Boris Yeltsin spent more time filling up his vodka glass than worrying about geopolitics. In 1999 - to the delight of weapons makers in the US industrial-military complex - NATO expanded to the Balkans via its devastating air war on Russian ally Serbia, sold to world public opinion by then US president Bill Clinton on humanitarian grounds when it was, in fact, humanitarian imperialism. To say that NATO - a North Atlantic body - is overextended is an understatement. Members Romania and Bulgaria are nowhere near the Atlantic Ocean. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are landlocked. In Central Asia, Afghanistan (or at least the non-Taliban-controlled parts of it) is de facto occupied by NATO. Mega-bases such as Ramstein (Germany), Aviano (Italy) and Incirlik (Turkey) now have a counterpart halfway around the world in Bagram (Afghanistan). Decades after the British Empire, "Europe" tries to (re)occupy the Hindu Kush. Afghanistan is NATO's first war outside Europe and first ground war ever. It involves all 26 members (now 28; Albania and Croatia were finally admitted) plus 12 "partners", including five European nations that used to be neutral: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. All of them are bound by NATO's first-ever invocation of Article 5 of its charter, which determines mutual military assistance. In a mix of reading the writing on the wall (this is an unwinnable war) and appeasing the fury of their pacifist public opinions, most European governments will never relent to Obama's appeal - as charm offensive-laden as it may be - for more troops in Afghanistan. Opposition to the Afghan war in Germany, for instance, is around 70% (humanitarian aid is a different story). Many countries, including the most powerful, will shun Obama's demands based on secret "national provisos". As lawyers in Berlin told NATO, for example, German soldiers are prohibited from launching a pre-emptive, on-the-ground attack on the Taliban. That utterly misleading acronym, ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) used to be in charge of the Western occupation of Afghanistan starting in December 2001 - until, Transformer-style, it became a huge counter-insurgency (COIN) drive expanding all over the country all the way to western Pakistan. The management of this COIN is obviously American - first and foremost because it totally bypasses NATO's very complex political voting mechanisms. There's nothing "international" about ISAF. ISAF is NATO. And with swarms of combat troops and air strikes there’s nothing "assistance" about it either. ISAF/NATO is headquartered in Kabul, in a former riding club on renamed Great Masoud Road which was rebuilt into a veritable fortress. The buck stops with - what else is new - not an European, but an American, four-star General David McKiernan. As much as his personal mission in the 1970s was to prevent the Warsaw Pact from infiltrating West Germany, his mission nowadays is to prevent al-Qaeda from, in his words, "infiltrating Europe or the United States". By the way, if anybody had any doubts, this whole thing still falls under ongoing "Operation Enduring Freedom", according to the Pentagon. This really "enduring" freedom applies to no less than Afghanistan, Pakistan, Cuba (because of Guantanamo), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Yemen. McKiernan's big thing had to be the upcoming Obama Afghan surge - which will be executed by American, not NATO soldiers. After all, hardcore combat has nothing to do with ISAF's original mandate. But the problem is in the fog of war and ISAF/NATO has become a TermiNATO - ensnared as much as the Americans in a peace-by-Predator logic. Call it the coalition of the unwilling. No wonder European public opinion is horrified. And that leads to the breakdown of Obama lecturing NATO on his "AfPak" war, which needed, according to him, a "more comprehensive strategy, a more focused strategy, a more disciplined strategy". In the end, Obama is reduced to hitting up the Europeans for more money. The ISAF/NATO commander for all of southern Afghanistan, Dutch Major-General Mart de Kruif, believes the surge is the right thing - as US troops will go to "where they are most needed: to Kandahar and Helmand provinces", where Taliban commanders "are capable of launching major operations". As he told Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad, "we need more boots on the ground" and "we will also be able to transport more men and material via air transport". But when De Kruif talked about Petraeus' Iraq-surge-replay plan of arming local militias, he at least let it be known how hard it will be. "If you're going to arm local militia you need to make sure that they mirror the local power structure," he said. "Also, the local police has to be effective enough to guide and control the militia. You don't want some vague commander running the militia. You need to give the militia members the prospect of a job in the police force. And you need to have an exit strategy, a way to disband the militia again without having all those weapons disappear." Another Dutchman, pro-Iraq war Bush "poodle" Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has been NATO's secretary general since January 2004 (he leaves next July). At least he's now admitting - to German weekly Der Spiegel - that the Afghan war "can't be won militarily". Instead, he believes success lies in capturing the "hearts and minds of the people". Certainly not by accumulating bomb-a-wedding "collateral damage". ("We must be careful to avoid civilian casualties while battling the insurgents," he says.) Scheffer is also forced to admit that "cooperation with Iran" in Afghanistan is essential. Time for PATO? Key NATO powers France and Germany simply can't afford to antagonize Russia. Germany is a virtual energy hostage of Gazprom. Unlike irresponsible Eastern Europeans, no French or German government would even contemplate being a hostage of a New Cold War between Russia and the US (one of the key reasons why NATO membership for Georgia and the Ukraine is now virtually dead in the water). Paris and Berlin know Moscow could easily station missiles in Kaliningrad or in Russian-friendly Belarus pointed towards them. Russia's colorful ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin has the definitive take on NATO's spy-versus-spy obsession of encircling Russia. As he told Der Spiegel, "The closer their bases get to us, the easier it is for us to strike them. We would have needed missiles in the past. Today, machine guns are sufficient." As for Georgia and Ukraine as NATO members, Rogozin adds, why not invite "Hitler, Saddam Hussein and [Georgian president Mikhail] Saakashvili." Russia, Rogozin told French daily Le Monde, expects NATO to become "a modern political and military alliance", not a "globocop" (as Der Spiegel dubs it). Russia expects a partnership - not encirclement. Rogozin could not be more explicit on the Russian position regarding Afghanistan: "We want to prevent the virus of extremism from crossing the borders of Afghanistan and take over other states in the region such as Pakistan. If NATO failed, it would be Russia and her partners that would have to fight against the extremists in Afghanistan." The NATO-Russia Council is bound to meet again. Moscow's official view is of a security order stretching "from Vancouver to Vladivostok". Something even more ambitious than NATO: "Perhaps NATO could develop into PATO, a Pacific-Atlantic alliance. We just cannot allow troublemakers to deter us." Messing with Russia, anyway, was never a good idea - except for history and geography deprived neo-conservatives. In 2008 alone, no less than 120,000 US and NATO troops transited through Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan (the base will be closed this year). This, along with the neo-Taliban bombing of NATO's supply routes in the Khyber Pass, has forced Petraeus to turn to the Caucasus (Georgia and Azerbaijan) as alternative military transit routes, and beg Kazakhstan and Tajikistan in Central Asia for help; this will only materialize if Russia says "yes". Magnanimously, meanwhile, Russia has opened its territory for the transit of NATO supply convoys. What is NATO for? As much as Palestine is an invaluable test lab for the Israeli Defense Forces, Afghanistan, and now AfPak, is a lab for both the US and NATO for test driving weapons systems and variations of Petraeus' COIN. On the other hand, NATO incompetence has been more than evident in the drug front. Afghanistan under NATO occupation was back to being the world's number one producer and exporter of opium. And that, in turn, led to the current US/NATO drug war. So AfPak has really been a true Transformer war - from the hunt for Osama bin Laden to war against that portmanteau word "the Taliban" and to a Colombia-on-steroids drug war. And all this leaves aside the eternally invisible Pipelineistan angle - centered on the $7.6 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline which the Bill Clinton administration wanted to go ahead with via an (aborted) deal with ... the Taliban, who were in power in the second half of the 1990s. Watching Obama's actions so far, and considering the Pentagon mindset, there's no evidence to support the possibility that Washington and NATO would abandon crucially strategic Afghanistan, which happens to be a stone's throw from the heart of Eurasia. Just ask China, Russia and observer member Iran of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The SCO was founded in June 2001, at first to fight transnational drug smuggling and Islamic fundamentalists and then started to promote all sorts of cooperation on energy, transportation, trade and infrastructure. Both the US and NATO have totally ignored one of the SCO's aims: to find a regional, non-weaponized solution for the enduring Afghan tragedy. The US and NATO's intransigence during the Bush era is much to blame for the process of the SCO turning into Asia's NATO. In Asian and Russian eyes, NATO has nothing to do with "nation-building", peacekeeping or "humanitarian assistance". And Afghanistan proves it. Asians don't need a globocop - much less a TermiNATO. Obama, McKiernan, Scheffer, no one will admit it - but many in Washington and Brussels would actually love NATO to really be a borderless TermiNATO, bypassing the UN to perform humanitarian imperialism all over the globe, taking out "al-Qaeda" and "terrorists" anywhere, protecting Pipelineistan and pipeline lands for Western interests in all directions. The US, supported by NATO, was the midwife of a new incarnation of "Islamic fundamentalism" which should, as it did, get rid of the Soviets in Afghanistan and in the former, energy-rich Soviet republics. The fact that, millions of dead and millions of displaced people later, NATO is now asking for Russian help so as not be stranded in Afghanistan is just another bitter irony of AfPak history, and certainly not the last. 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. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
As Escobar points out Obama is unlikely to get many if any more combat troops from his NATO allies. The most he can hope for is more money and perhaps troops whose combat role will be severely limited. At a time when the US is in economic dire straits it seems odd that Obama is committing the US to a long term expensive project in Afghanistan. Perhaps it is part of a stimulus project for the global military industrial complex funded by the US taxpayer and paid for with increased US casualties as well.
The theme of humanitarian aims such as improving the rights of Afghan women are now often played up especially with the recent law re a husband's right to sexual intercourse with the wife are concerned. Karzai is fishing for the Islamist vote. This type of humanitarian imperialism is a facade and no doubt bound to failure as the Soviets found when they too did even more for the rights of women. The US tolerates all kinds of anti-woman laws in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and elsewhere. They even fostered a democratic Iraq where women have fewer rights under the Shiite dominated govt. than they did under Hussein.
THE ROVING EYE Globocop versus the TermiNATO
By Pepe Escobar
The people of Strasbourg have voted in their apartment balconies for the French-German co-production of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 60th birthday this Saturday. Thousands of "No to NATO" banners, alongside "Peace" banners, sprung up all around town until forcibly removed by French police. Prime "liberal democracy" repression tactics were inevitably on show - just as in the much-hyped "we had 275 minutes to save the world and all we could come up with was half-a-trillion dollars for the International Monetary Fund" Group of 20 summit in London. Protesters were tear-gassed as terrorists. Downtown was
cordoned off. Residents were forced to wear badges. Demonstrations got banished to the suburbs. Then there's the musical metaphor. When NATO was created in Washington on April 4, 1949, the soundtrack was Gershwin's It Ain't Necessarily So. When seven countries from the former Warsaw Pact were admitted in 2004, the soundtrack came from the ghastly Titanic blockbuster. For the 60th birthday bash in Baden-Baden - with the Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel trio attending - it's Georges Bizet's Carmen. As much as Carmen is a gypsy who believes a fortune-teller and ends up dead, NATO is a global traveler who may end up dead by believing fortune-teller Washington. Sultans of swing NATO certainly has plenty to celebrate. France, under adrenalin junkie Sarkozy - known in NATOland as the "Sultan of Bruni", in reference to his smashing wife Carla - is back to NATO. Obama is presenting his new, comprehensive Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy to NATO. NATO "secures the peace" in Mafia-ridden Kosovo (an entity not recognized even by NATO members such as Spain and Greece). NATO, in full "war on terror" mode, acts like a supercop in the Mediterranean. NATO patrols the Horn of Africa looking for pirates. NATO trains Iraqi security forces. For a body of 60, NATO is fully fit. Physically, NATO is a bureaucratic nightmare occupying a huge, horrid building on Blvd Leopold III in Mons, outside of Brussels, employing 5,200 civilians divided into 320 committees sharing an annual budget of $2.7 billion. These committees manage 60,000 combat troops scattered all around the world. NATO should have been dead immediately after the fall of the enemy it was created to fight - the Soviet Union. Instead, NATO had a ball during the 1990s, when Russia was down and out and Russian president Boris Yeltsin spent more time filling up his vodka glass than worrying about geopolitics. In 1999 - to the delight of weapons makers in the US industrial-military complex - NATO expanded to the Balkans via its devastating air war on Russian ally Serbia, sold to world public opinion by then US president Bill Clinton on humanitarian grounds when it was, in fact, humanitarian imperialism. To say that NATO - a North Atlantic body - is overextended is an understatement. Members Romania and Bulgaria are nowhere near the Atlantic Ocean. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia are landlocked. In Central Asia, Afghanistan (or at least the non-Taliban-controlled parts of it) is de facto occupied by NATO. Mega-bases such as Ramstein (Germany), Aviano (Italy) and Incirlik (Turkey) now have a counterpart halfway around the world in Bagram (Afghanistan). Decades after the British Empire, "Europe" tries to (re)occupy the Hindu Kush. Afghanistan is NATO's first war outside Europe and first ground war ever. It involves all 26 members (now 28; Albania and Croatia were finally admitted) plus 12 "partners", including five European nations that used to be neutral: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. All of them are bound by NATO's first-ever invocation of Article 5 of its charter, which determines mutual military assistance. In a mix of reading the writing on the wall (this is an unwinnable war) and appeasing the fury of their pacifist public opinions, most European governments will never relent to Obama's appeal - as charm offensive-laden as it may be - for more troops in Afghanistan. Opposition to the Afghan war in Germany, for instance, is around 70% (humanitarian aid is a different story). Many countries, including the most powerful, will shun Obama's demands based on secret "national provisos". As lawyers in Berlin told NATO, for example, German soldiers are prohibited from launching a pre-emptive, on-the-ground attack on the Taliban. That utterly misleading acronym, ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) used to be in charge of the Western occupation of Afghanistan starting in December 2001 - until, Transformer-style, it became a huge counter-insurgency (COIN) drive expanding all over the country all the way to western Pakistan. The management of this COIN is obviously American - first and foremost because it totally bypasses NATO's very complex political voting mechanisms. There's nothing "international" about ISAF. ISAF is NATO. And with swarms of combat troops and air strikes there’s nothing "assistance" about it either. ISAF/NATO is headquartered in Kabul, in a former riding club on renamed Great Masoud Road which was rebuilt into a veritable fortress. The buck stops with - what else is new - not an European, but an American, four-star General David McKiernan. As much as his personal mission in the 1970s was to prevent the Warsaw Pact from infiltrating West Germany, his mission nowadays is to prevent al-Qaeda from, in his words, "infiltrating Europe or the United States". By the way, if anybody had any doubts, this whole thing still falls under ongoing "Operation Enduring Freedom", according to the Pentagon. This really "enduring" freedom applies to no less than Afghanistan, Pakistan, Cuba (because of Guantanamo), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Yemen. McKiernan's big thing had to be the upcoming Obama Afghan surge - which will be executed by American, not NATO soldiers. After all, hardcore combat has nothing to do with ISAF's original mandate. But the problem is in the fog of war and ISAF/NATO has become a TermiNATO - ensnared as much as the Americans in a peace-by-Predator logic. Call it the coalition of the unwilling. No wonder European public opinion is horrified. And that leads to the breakdown of Obama lecturing NATO on his "AfPak" war, which needed, according to him, a "more comprehensive strategy, a more focused strategy, a more disciplined strategy". In the end, Obama is reduced to hitting up the Europeans for more money. The ISAF/NATO commander for all of southern Afghanistan, Dutch Major-General Mart de Kruif, believes the surge is the right thing - as US troops will go to "where they are most needed: to Kandahar and Helmand provinces", where Taliban commanders "are capable of launching major operations". As he told Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad, "we need more boots on the ground" and "we will also be able to transport more men and material via air transport". But when De Kruif talked about Petraeus' Iraq-surge-replay plan of arming local militias, he at least let it be known how hard it will be. "If you're going to arm local militia you need to make sure that they mirror the local power structure," he said. "Also, the local police has to be effective enough to guide and control the militia. You don't want some vague commander running the militia. You need to give the militia members the prospect of a job in the police force. And you need to have an exit strategy, a way to disband the militia again without having all those weapons disappear." Another Dutchman, pro-Iraq war Bush "poodle" Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, has been NATO's secretary general since January 2004 (he leaves next July). At least he's now admitting - to German weekly Der Spiegel - that the Afghan war "can't be won militarily". Instead, he believes success lies in capturing the "hearts and minds of the people". Certainly not by accumulating bomb-a-wedding "collateral damage". ("We must be careful to avoid civilian casualties while battling the insurgents," he says.) Scheffer is also forced to admit that "cooperation with Iran" in Afghanistan is essential. Time for PATO? Key NATO powers France and Germany simply can't afford to antagonize Russia. Germany is a virtual energy hostage of Gazprom. Unlike irresponsible Eastern Europeans, no French or German government would even contemplate being a hostage of a New Cold War between Russia and the US (one of the key reasons why NATO membership for Georgia and the Ukraine is now virtually dead in the water). Paris and Berlin know Moscow could easily station missiles in Kaliningrad or in Russian-friendly Belarus pointed towards them. Russia's colorful ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin has the definitive take on NATO's spy-versus-spy obsession of encircling Russia. As he told Der Spiegel, "The closer their bases get to us, the easier it is for us to strike them. We would have needed missiles in the past. Today, machine guns are sufficient." As for Georgia and Ukraine as NATO members, Rogozin adds, why not invite "Hitler, Saddam Hussein and [Georgian president Mikhail] Saakashvili." Russia, Rogozin told French daily Le Monde, expects NATO to become "a modern political and military alliance", not a "globocop" (as Der Spiegel dubs it). Russia expects a partnership - not encirclement. Rogozin could not be more explicit on the Russian position regarding Afghanistan: "We want to prevent the virus of extremism from crossing the borders of Afghanistan and take over other states in the region such as Pakistan. If NATO failed, it would be Russia and her partners that would have to fight against the extremists in Afghanistan." The NATO-Russia Council is bound to meet again. Moscow's official view is of a security order stretching "from Vancouver to Vladivostok". Something even more ambitious than NATO: "Perhaps NATO could develop into PATO, a Pacific-Atlantic alliance. We just cannot allow troublemakers to deter us." Messing with Russia, anyway, was never a good idea - except for history and geography deprived neo-conservatives. In 2008 alone, no less than 120,000 US and NATO troops transited through Manas airbase in Kyrgyzstan (the base will be closed this year). This, along with the neo-Taliban bombing of NATO's supply routes in the Khyber Pass, has forced Petraeus to turn to the Caucasus (Georgia and Azerbaijan) as alternative military transit routes, and beg Kazakhstan and Tajikistan in Central Asia for help; this will only materialize if Russia says "yes". Magnanimously, meanwhile, Russia has opened its territory for the transit of NATO supply convoys. What is NATO for? As much as Palestine is an invaluable test lab for the Israeli Defense Forces, Afghanistan, and now AfPak, is a lab for both the US and NATO for test driving weapons systems and variations of Petraeus' COIN. On the other hand, NATO incompetence has been more than evident in the drug front. Afghanistan under NATO occupation was back to being the world's number one producer and exporter of opium. And that, in turn, led to the current US/NATO drug war. So AfPak has really been a true Transformer war - from the hunt for Osama bin Laden to war against that portmanteau word "the Taliban" and to a Colombia-on-steroids drug war. And all this leaves aside the eternally invisible Pipelineistan angle - centered on the $7.6 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline which the Bill Clinton administration wanted to go ahead with via an (aborted) deal with ... the Taliban, who were in power in the second half of the 1990s. Watching Obama's actions so far, and considering the Pentagon mindset, there's no evidence to support the possibility that Washington and NATO would abandon crucially strategic Afghanistan, which happens to be a stone's throw from the heart of Eurasia. Just ask China, Russia and observer member Iran of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The SCO was founded in June 2001, at first to fight transnational drug smuggling and Islamic fundamentalists and then started to promote all sorts of cooperation on energy, transportation, trade and infrastructure. Both the US and NATO have totally ignored one of the SCO's aims: to find a regional, non-weaponized solution for the enduring Afghan tragedy. The US and NATO's intransigence during the Bush era is much to blame for the process of the SCO turning into Asia's NATO. In Asian and Russian eyes, NATO has nothing to do with "nation-building", peacekeeping or "humanitarian assistance". And Afghanistan proves it. Asians don't need a globocop - much less a TermiNATO. Obama, McKiernan, Scheffer, no one will admit it - but many in Washington and Brussels would actually love NATO to really be a borderless TermiNATO, bypassing the UN to perform humanitarian imperialism all over the globe, taking out "al-Qaeda" and "terrorists" anywhere, protecting Pipelineistan and pipeline lands for Western interests in all directions. The US, supported by NATO, was the midwife of a new incarnation of "Islamic fundamentalism" which should, as it did, get rid of the Soviets in Afghanistan and in the former, energy-rich Soviet republics. The fact that, millions of dead and millions of displaced people later, NATO is now asking for Russian help so as not be stranded in Afghanistan is just another bitter irony of AfPak history, and certainly not the last. 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. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Escobar: The secrets of Obama's surge
This is from Asia Times.
Another trenchant critique of Obama's policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The policy of selective assasination with drones and special forces carrying out the policy will hardly stop the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Given the collateral damage associated with the drones and the targetting of people on the basis of incorrect intelligence the likelihood is that this policy will increase the animus against the US in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The secrets of Obama's surgeBy Pepe Escobar
Is United States President Barack Obama telling it like it is as far as his new strategy for the Afghanistan and Pakistan war theater - AfPak, in Pentagonspeak - is concerned? There are reasons to believe otherwise. Obama's relentless media blitzkrieg stressed the new strategy is refocusing on al-Qaeda. Washington, we got a problem. Why deploy 17,000 troops against "the Taliban" in the poppy-growing province of Helmand, not in the east near the Pakistani tribal areas, where "al-Qaeda" is holed up, plus 4,000 advisers to train the Afghan Army, when Washington actually wants to fight no
more than 200 or 300 al-Qaeda jihadis roaming in Afghanistan, plus another 400 maximum in the Pakistani tribal areas? And by the way they are not Afghans - they are overwhelmingly Arabs, with a few Uzbeks, Chechens and Uyghurs thrown in. President Hamid Karzai, the puppet in Kabul which has left Washington beyond exasperated, loved Obama's plan to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Especially because it involves the improbable "hunt for the good Taliban" (always bribable by loads of US dollars) mixed with Special Ops inside Pakistan, and not Afghanistan. Former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto's widower, President Asif Ali Zardari, the puppet in Islamabad, loved it too. But as the Pakistani daily Dawn revealed, his Foreign Office diplomats definitely did not. The Afghanistan-Pakistan war has got to be 2009's prime theater of the absurd. It took the New York Times and the usual "American officials" something like 13 years to "discover" that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) - a Central Intelligence Agency twin - helps the Taliban. And this while the CIA, alongside their ISI pals, is compiling a mega hit list in the Pashtun tribal areas inside Pakistan. Maybe this is what US Central Command supremo General David "I'm always positioning myself for 2012" Petraeus means by a "trilateral" love affair, as he told CNN's State of the Union. The Pentagon's preferred pal is doubtless Pakistani Army Chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who happens to approve of what's not in Obama's presentation of the surge: the relentless drone war - with inevitable "collateral damage" - over what is for a fact Pashtunistan. As for the Pakistani masses, which have no say in all of this, they see the whole thing as a charade, and al-Qaeda as a threat to the US - not to Pakistan. Obama is selling the surge basically as nation building, based on trust. A hard sell if there ever was one - as Washington cannot trust the ISI or the Pakistani government, while the Pakistani masses don't trust Washington. Insistent rumors in Washington point to a troika - Holbrooke-Petraeus-Clinton - finally being able to convince Obama that the surge should be just the first step towards long-range nation building. Anyone with minimal familiarity with Afghanistan knows this is an impossible strategic target. The Salvador option And then Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to AfPak, finally let it slip on CNN: the "people we are fighting in Afghanistan" are essentially ... Pashtuns. This was followed by a stark admission: "In the informational side ... we don't have a strong enough counter-informational program to combat the Taliban and al-Qaeda." So this amounts to the State Department admitting that the Pentagon/Petraeus "humint" (human intelligence) component of counter-insurgency in AfPak, hailed as a gift from the Messiah all across US corporate media, is essentially useless. This also means there's no way of winning local hearts and minds. In the absence of "humint", what prevails is inevitably The Salvador option, performed by a Dick Cheney-supervised-style "executive assassination wing", as investigative icon Seymour Hersh first revealed in a talk at the University of Minnesota on March 10, "going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving". The "assassination wing" is in fact the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) - a shadowy, ultra-elite unit including Navy Seals and Delta Force commandos immune to Congressional investigations. So if you have such a unit killing "al-Qaeda" jihadis at random from Iraq to Kenya, from Somalia to countries in South and Central America (these are not necessarily "al-Qaeda"; let’s say they are inimical to "US interests"), why not let them loose in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas? Instead of a $5 million bounty on his head, why not send a crack JSOC commando to South Waziristan and take out Pakistani Taliban superstar Baitullah Mehsud, who has just boasted his outfit will "soon launch an attack on Washington that will amaze everyone in the world?" Well, maybe because US "humint" on South Waziristan is negligible - and even JSOC cannot infiltrate. JSOC by now should have been more than fully equipped to find Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Anyway, Vice-President Joseph Biden, to whom the unit would have to answer to, could at least come clean and state the "Salvador option" is not on the cards anymore. Or maybe it still is. The Obama administration is mum about it. A priceless, self-described "hip pocket" manual prepared by the US Army Training and Doctrine Command - TRADOC, one more wonderful, Pentagon acronym to memorize - and available only to "US government personnel, government contractors and additional cleared personnel for national security purposes and homeland defense" spells out what's (visibly) going on. On page 5, one learns this is a US war against, yes, Pashtuns, as Holbrooke said on CNN. The overwhelming majority of the "insurgent syndicate", they are funded by drug smuggling and US allies in the Gulf such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Emirates, and are trained and assisted by, yes, the ISI, with some - in fact marginal - al-Qaeda assistance. Al-Qaeda is a detail here. TRADOC does not seem to understand that al-Qaeda has a pan-Islamic agenda while the various groups bundled as "Taliban" are essentially in a war against foreign occupation and interference, with no dreams of establishing a Caliphate. On page 7, TRADOC estimates the Taliban in Afghanistan to be around 30,000, half of them Pakistani, and supported by the ISI. That's correct. But they overestimate al-Qaeda to be 2,000; these "Arab-Afghans" plus some recently arrived "white moors" (European Arabs) are probably no more than 700. On page 10, TRADOC finally admits that Karzai in Kabul is supported by a myriad of "warlord militias" profiting from crime, narco-trafficking and smuggling. The key element here is not "terrorism" - but regional wars for control over ultra-profitable poppy/heroin manufacturing and smuggling routes. Then there's this stark admission, by former Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Salam, currently governor of a town in poppy-infested Helmand province. He told Reuters that the Taliban are not the real enemy. If Kabul was not so corrupt, and capable of providing security to the rest of the country, most Pashtuns would not even be Taliban. No wonder the Obama administration has stacks of reasons to get rid of Karzai. An opening in The Hague Asia knows this whole thing is upside down. The crucial Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), grouping China, Russia and the Central Asian "stans", all concerned neighbors of Afghanistan, met in Moscow last Friday to discuss it, ahead of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meeting in The Hague this Tuesday privileged by the US. This is how Asia sees it - and that's an absolutely taboo issue for Obama to touch upon every time he faces American public opinion: Asians simply don't want US military bases in Central Asia. No wonder Iran, which is currently an observer, and soon to become a full member, officially said the SCO is the right forum to solve the Afghan tragedy, not NATO. A minimum of 40% of Afghans are either Shi'ites or they speak Dari, a Persian language. Well, at least Holbrooke admits "the door is open" for Iran to have a say on Afghanistan, but always with conditions attached ("plus our NATO allies"). If Holbrooke is clever, he should immediately buy dinner for legendary mujahid Ishmail Khan, the Lion of Herat, in Western Afghanistan. Khan, a complex mix of feudal warlord and economic developer, told al-Jazeera English "friendship between Iran and America" is essential to solve the Afghan riddle. What Washington has to admit is that Iran has been deeply involved for years in visible, post-Taliban reconstruction in Afghanistan - from roads and railroads to restoration of mosques, financing of libraries and madrassas and the provision of electricity. The Iranian Consulate in Herat, for instance, houses no less than 40 diplomats. Khan - the key Iranian liaison in Herat - was so successful in spite of Kabul that Karzai, under US pressure, stripped him off his enormous powers as local governor and gave him an innocuous ministry in Kabul. At the UN-sponsored, US-backed international conference on Afghanistan this Tuesday in The Hague, Mohammad Mehdi Akhundzadeh - one of Iran's deputy foreign ministers - officially broke the ice, offering to help the rebuilding and stabilization of Afghanistan, something that Iran is already doing anyway. Akhunzadeh was specifically referring to projects fighting drug trafficking - which badly affects Iranian society. But he was also very clear on how Iran views NATO: "The presence of foreign forces has not improved things in the country and it seems that an increase in the number of foreign forces will prove ineffective, too." But, significantly, he tipped his hat to Obama's decision to send those 4,000 trainers for the Afghan Army, when he stressed "Afghanization should lead the government-building process". As for US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she described corruption in the Kabul government, ie Karzai and his gang, as a "cancer" as threatening to Afghanistan as the Taliban. One more sign from Washington that Karzai’s days may be numbered. Follow the moneyDid Obama's "strategic reviewers" read this Carnegie Endowment report (http://carnegieendowment.org/files/afghan_war-strategy.pdf)? Apparently not. It states flatly "the mere presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important factor in the resurgence of the Taliban". So the question Americans must ask themselves is this: Would you buy a used car - sorry - war from people like Mullen, Petraeus, McKiernan? Well, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who's seen them all since John F Kennedy, wouldn't. For him, "they resemble all too closely the gutless general officers who never looked down at what was really happening in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time have been called, not without reason, 'a sewer of deceit'." So what if the AfPak quagmire had nothing to do with "terrorists" but with these facts: 1. A Cold War mentality in action still prevailing at the Pentagon. That explains a Vietnam-style surge - expanding the war to Cambodia then, expanding it to Pakistan now. As University of Michigan's Juan Cole has pointed out, the rationale is the same old fallacious domino theory (communism will take over Southeast Asia, terrorism will take over Central/South Asia). The Taliban are simply not able to take over and control the whole of Afghanistan (they didn't from 1996 to 2001). Al-Qaeda simply can't have bases in Afghanistan: they would be bombed to smithereens by the 80,000-strong Afghan Army plus Bagram-based US air strikes. 2. The US Empire of Bases still in overdrive, and in New Great Game mode - which implies very close surveillance over Russia and China via bases such as Bagram, and the drive to block Russia from establishing a commercial route to the Middle East via Pakistan. 3. The fear of a spectacular NATO failure. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, absolutely despised by progressives in Brussels and assorted European capitals, is pressuring everyone for more troops to avoid what he calls the "Americanization" of the war. No one is impressed - especially because Scheffer himself was forced to admit troops will have to stay on the ground "for the foreseeable future". 4. Last but not least, the energy wars. And that involves that occult, almost supernatural entity, the $7.6 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, which would carry gas from eastern Turkmenistan through Afghanistan east of Herat and down Taliban-controlled Nimruz and Helmand provinces, down Balochistan in Pakistan and then to the Pakistani port of Gwadar in the Arabian Sea. No investor in his right mind will invest in a pipeline in a war zone, thus Afghanistan must be "stabilized" at all costs. So is AfPak the Pentagon's AIG - we gotta bail them out, can't let them fail? Is it a Predator drone war disguised as nation building? Will it become Obama’s Vietnam? Whatever it is, it's not about "terrorists". Not really. Follow the money. Follow the energy. Follow the map. 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. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
Another trenchant critique of Obama's policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The policy of selective assasination with drones and special forces carrying out the policy will hardly stop the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Given the collateral damage associated with the drones and the targetting of people on the basis of incorrect intelligence the likelihood is that this policy will increase the animus against the US in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The secrets of Obama's surgeBy Pepe Escobar
Is United States President Barack Obama telling it like it is as far as his new strategy for the Afghanistan and Pakistan war theater - AfPak, in Pentagonspeak - is concerned? There are reasons to believe otherwise. Obama's relentless media blitzkrieg stressed the new strategy is refocusing on al-Qaeda. Washington, we got a problem. Why deploy 17,000 troops against "the Taliban" in the poppy-growing province of Helmand, not in the east near the Pakistani tribal areas, where "al-Qaeda" is holed up, plus 4,000 advisers to train the Afghan Army, when Washington actually wants to fight no
more than 200 or 300 al-Qaeda jihadis roaming in Afghanistan, plus another 400 maximum in the Pakistani tribal areas? And by the way they are not Afghans - they are overwhelmingly Arabs, with a few Uzbeks, Chechens and Uyghurs thrown in. President Hamid Karzai, the puppet in Kabul which has left Washington beyond exasperated, loved Obama's plan to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Especially because it involves the improbable "hunt for the good Taliban" (always bribable by loads of US dollars) mixed with Special Ops inside Pakistan, and not Afghanistan. Former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto's widower, President Asif Ali Zardari, the puppet in Islamabad, loved it too. But as the Pakistani daily Dawn revealed, his Foreign Office diplomats definitely did not. The Afghanistan-Pakistan war has got to be 2009's prime theater of the absurd. It took the New York Times and the usual "American officials" something like 13 years to "discover" that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) - a Central Intelligence Agency twin - helps the Taliban. And this while the CIA, alongside their ISI pals, is compiling a mega hit list in the Pashtun tribal areas inside Pakistan. Maybe this is what US Central Command supremo General David "I'm always positioning myself for 2012" Petraeus means by a "trilateral" love affair, as he told CNN's State of the Union. The Pentagon's preferred pal is doubtless Pakistani Army Chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who happens to approve of what's not in Obama's presentation of the surge: the relentless drone war - with inevitable "collateral damage" - over what is for a fact Pashtunistan. As for the Pakistani masses, which have no say in all of this, they see the whole thing as a charade, and al-Qaeda as a threat to the US - not to Pakistan. Obama is selling the surge basically as nation building, based on trust. A hard sell if there ever was one - as Washington cannot trust the ISI or the Pakistani government, while the Pakistani masses don't trust Washington. Insistent rumors in Washington point to a troika - Holbrooke-Petraeus-Clinton - finally being able to convince Obama that the surge should be just the first step towards long-range nation building. Anyone with minimal familiarity with Afghanistan knows this is an impossible strategic target. The Salvador option And then Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to AfPak, finally let it slip on CNN: the "people we are fighting in Afghanistan" are essentially ... Pashtuns. This was followed by a stark admission: "In the informational side ... we don't have a strong enough counter-informational program to combat the Taliban and al-Qaeda." So this amounts to the State Department admitting that the Pentagon/Petraeus "humint" (human intelligence) component of counter-insurgency in AfPak, hailed as a gift from the Messiah all across US corporate media, is essentially useless. This also means there's no way of winning local hearts and minds. In the absence of "humint", what prevails is inevitably The Salvador option, performed by a Dick Cheney-supervised-style "executive assassination wing", as investigative icon Seymour Hersh first revealed in a talk at the University of Minnesota on March 10, "going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving". The "assassination wing" is in fact the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) - a shadowy, ultra-elite unit including Navy Seals and Delta Force commandos immune to Congressional investigations. So if you have such a unit killing "al-Qaeda" jihadis at random from Iraq to Kenya, from Somalia to countries in South and Central America (these are not necessarily "al-Qaeda"; let’s say they are inimical to "US interests"), why not let them loose in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas? Instead of a $5 million bounty on his head, why not send a crack JSOC commando to South Waziristan and take out Pakistani Taliban superstar Baitullah Mehsud, who has just boasted his outfit will "soon launch an attack on Washington that will amaze everyone in the world?" Well, maybe because US "humint" on South Waziristan is negligible - and even JSOC cannot infiltrate. JSOC by now should have been more than fully equipped to find Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Anyway, Vice-President Joseph Biden, to whom the unit would have to answer to, could at least come clean and state the "Salvador option" is not on the cards anymore. Or maybe it still is. The Obama administration is mum about it. A priceless, self-described "hip pocket" manual prepared by the US Army Training and Doctrine Command - TRADOC, one more wonderful, Pentagon acronym to memorize - and available only to "US government personnel, government contractors and additional cleared personnel for national security purposes and homeland defense" spells out what's (visibly) going on. On page 5, one learns this is a US war against, yes, Pashtuns, as Holbrooke said on CNN. The overwhelming majority of the "insurgent syndicate", they are funded by drug smuggling and US allies in the Gulf such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Emirates, and are trained and assisted by, yes, the ISI, with some - in fact marginal - al-Qaeda assistance. Al-Qaeda is a detail here. TRADOC does not seem to understand that al-Qaeda has a pan-Islamic agenda while the various groups bundled as "Taliban" are essentially in a war against foreign occupation and interference, with no dreams of establishing a Caliphate. On page 7, TRADOC estimates the Taliban in Afghanistan to be around 30,000, half of them Pakistani, and supported by the ISI. That's correct. But they overestimate al-Qaeda to be 2,000; these "Arab-Afghans" plus some recently arrived "white moors" (European Arabs) are probably no more than 700. On page 10, TRADOC finally admits that Karzai in Kabul is supported by a myriad of "warlord militias" profiting from crime, narco-trafficking and smuggling. The key element here is not "terrorism" - but regional wars for control over ultra-profitable poppy/heroin manufacturing and smuggling routes. Then there's this stark admission, by former Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Salam, currently governor of a town in poppy-infested Helmand province. He told Reuters that the Taliban are not the real enemy. If Kabul was not so corrupt, and capable of providing security to the rest of the country, most Pashtuns would not even be Taliban. No wonder the Obama administration has stacks of reasons to get rid of Karzai. An opening in The Hague Asia knows this whole thing is upside down. The crucial Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), grouping China, Russia and the Central Asian "stans", all concerned neighbors of Afghanistan, met in Moscow last Friday to discuss it, ahead of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meeting in The Hague this Tuesday privileged by the US. This is how Asia sees it - and that's an absolutely taboo issue for Obama to touch upon every time he faces American public opinion: Asians simply don't want US military bases in Central Asia. No wonder Iran, which is currently an observer, and soon to become a full member, officially said the SCO is the right forum to solve the Afghan tragedy, not NATO. A minimum of 40% of Afghans are either Shi'ites or they speak Dari, a Persian language. Well, at least Holbrooke admits "the door is open" for Iran to have a say on Afghanistan, but always with conditions attached ("plus our NATO allies"). If Holbrooke is clever, he should immediately buy dinner for legendary mujahid Ishmail Khan, the Lion of Herat, in Western Afghanistan. Khan, a complex mix of feudal warlord and economic developer, told al-Jazeera English "friendship between Iran and America" is essential to solve the Afghan riddle. What Washington has to admit is that Iran has been deeply involved for years in visible, post-Taliban reconstruction in Afghanistan - from roads and railroads to restoration of mosques, financing of libraries and madrassas and the provision of electricity. The Iranian Consulate in Herat, for instance, houses no less than 40 diplomats. Khan - the key Iranian liaison in Herat - was so successful in spite of Kabul that Karzai, under US pressure, stripped him off his enormous powers as local governor and gave him an innocuous ministry in Kabul. At the UN-sponsored, US-backed international conference on Afghanistan this Tuesday in The Hague, Mohammad Mehdi Akhundzadeh - one of Iran's deputy foreign ministers - officially broke the ice, offering to help the rebuilding and stabilization of Afghanistan, something that Iran is already doing anyway. Akhunzadeh was specifically referring to projects fighting drug trafficking - which badly affects Iranian society. But he was also very clear on how Iran views NATO: "The presence of foreign forces has not improved things in the country and it seems that an increase in the number of foreign forces will prove ineffective, too." But, significantly, he tipped his hat to Obama's decision to send those 4,000 trainers for the Afghan Army, when he stressed "Afghanization should lead the government-building process". As for US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she described corruption in the Kabul government, ie Karzai and his gang, as a "cancer" as threatening to Afghanistan as the Taliban. One more sign from Washington that Karzai’s days may be numbered. Follow the moneyDid Obama's "strategic reviewers" read this Carnegie Endowment report (http://carnegieendowment.org/files/afghan_war-strategy.pdf)? Apparently not. It states flatly "the mere presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important factor in the resurgence of the Taliban". So the question Americans must ask themselves is this: Would you buy a used car - sorry - war from people like Mullen, Petraeus, McKiernan? Well, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who's seen them all since John F Kennedy, wouldn't. For him, "they resemble all too closely the gutless general officers who never looked down at what was really happening in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time have been called, not without reason, 'a sewer of deceit'." So what if the AfPak quagmire had nothing to do with "terrorists" but with these facts: 1. A Cold War mentality in action still prevailing at the Pentagon. That explains a Vietnam-style surge - expanding the war to Cambodia then, expanding it to Pakistan now. As University of Michigan's Juan Cole has pointed out, the rationale is the same old fallacious domino theory (communism will take over Southeast Asia, terrorism will take over Central/South Asia). The Taliban are simply not able to take over and control the whole of Afghanistan (they didn't from 1996 to 2001). Al-Qaeda simply can't have bases in Afghanistan: they would be bombed to smithereens by the 80,000-strong Afghan Army plus Bagram-based US air strikes. 2. The US Empire of Bases still in overdrive, and in New Great Game mode - which implies very close surveillance over Russia and China via bases such as Bagram, and the drive to block Russia from establishing a commercial route to the Middle East via Pakistan. 3. The fear of a spectacular NATO failure. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, absolutely despised by progressives in Brussels and assorted European capitals, is pressuring everyone for more troops to avoid what he calls the "Americanization" of the war. No one is impressed - especially because Scheffer himself was forced to admit troops will have to stay on the ground "for the foreseeable future". 4. Last but not least, the energy wars. And that involves that occult, almost supernatural entity, the $7.6 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, which would carry gas from eastern Turkmenistan through Afghanistan east of Herat and down Taliban-controlled Nimruz and Helmand provinces, down Balochistan in Pakistan and then to the Pakistani port of Gwadar in the Arabian Sea. No investor in his right mind will invest in a pipeline in a war zone, thus Afghanistan must be "stabilized" at all costs. So is AfPak the Pentagon's AIG - we gotta bail them out, can't let them fail? Is it a Predator drone war disguised as nation building? Will it become Obama’s Vietnam? Whatever it is, it's not about "terrorists". Not really. Follow the money. Follow the energy. Follow the map. 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. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Pepe Escobar: The Iranian Chessboard
This is from antiwar.com This is the sort of in depth article that you just do not find in the mass media in the west. Rather than just a few snippets of anti-Iranian factoids Escobar actually goes into some depth about the different forces at work in Iran and how they are reacting to western pressure.
The Iranian Chessboard
Five Ways to Think about Iran under the Gun
By Pepe Escobar
More than two years ago, Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker how George W. Bush was considering strategic nuclear strikes against Iran. Ever since, a campaign to demonize that country has proceeded in a relentless, Terminator-like way, applying the same techniques and semantic contortions that were so familiar in the period before the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq.
The campaign's greatest hits are widely known: "The ayatollahs" are building a Shi'ite nuclear bomb; Iranian weapons are killing American soldiers in Iraq; Iranian gunboats are provoking U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf – Iran, in short, is the new al-Qaeda, a terror state aimed at the heart of the United States. It's idle to expect the American mainstream media to offer any tools that might put this orchestrated blitzkrieg in context.
Here are just a few recent instances of the ongoing campaign: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insists that Iran "is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits that the Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" when it comes to Iran. In tandem with U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus, Mullen denounces Iran's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" in Iraq, although he claims to harbor "no expectations" of an attack on Iran "in the immediate future" and even admits he has "no smoking gun which could prove that the highest leadership [of Iran] is involved."
But keep in mind one thing the Great Saddam Take-out of 2003 proved: that a "smoking gun" is, in the end, irrelevant. And this week, the U.S. is ominously floating a second aircraft carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf.
But what of Iran itself under the blizzard of charges and threats? What to make of it? What does the world look like from Tehran? Here are five ways to think about Iran under the gun and to better decode the Iranian chessboard.
1. Don't underestimate the power of Shi'ite Islam: Seventy-five percent of the world's oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf. Seventy percent of the Gulf's population is Shi'ite. Shi'ism is an eschatological – and revolutionary – religion, fueled by a passionate mixture of romanticism and cosmic despair. As much as it may instill fear in hegemonic Sunni Islam, some Westerners should feel a certain empathy for intellectual Shi'ism's almost Sartrean nausea towards the vacuous material world.
For more than a thousand years Shi'ite Islam has, in fact, been a galaxy of Shi'isms – a kind of Fourth World of its own, always cursed by political exclusion and implacable economic marginalization, always carrying an immensely dramatic view of history with it.
It's impossible to understand Iran without grasping the contradiction that the Iranian religious leadership faces in ruling, however fractiously, a nation state. In the minds of Iran's religious leaders, the very concept of the nation-state is regarded with deep suspicion, because it detracts from the umma, the global Muslim community. The nation-state, as they see it, is but a way station on the road to the final triumph of Shi'ism and pure Islam. To venture beyond the present stage of history, however, they also recognize the necessity of reinforcing the nation-state that offers Shi'ism a sanctuary – and that, of course, happens to be Iran. When Shi'ism finally triumphs, the concept of nation-state – a heritage, in any case, of the West – will disappear, replaced by a community organized according to the will of Prophet Muhammad.
In the right context, this is, believe me, a powerful message. I briefly became a mashti – a pilgrim visiting a privileged Shi'ite gateway to Paradise, the holy shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, four hours west of the Iran-Afghan border. At sunset, the only foreigner lost in a pious multitude of black chadors and white turbans occupying every square inch of the huge walled shrine, I felt a tremendous emotional jolt. And I wasn't even a believer, just a simple infidel.
2. Geography is destiny: Whenever I go to the holy city of Qom, bordering the central deserts in Iran, I am always reminded, in no uncertain terms, that, as far as the major ayatollahs are concerned, their supreme mission is to convert the rest of Islam to the original purity and revolutionary power of Shi'ism – a religion invariably critical of the established social and political order.
Even a Shi'ite leader in Tehran, however, can't simply live by preaching and conversion alone. Iran, after all, happens to be a nation-state at the crucial intersection of the Arabic, Turkish, Russian, and Indian worlds. It is the key transit point of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Indian subcontinent. It lies between three seas (the Caspian, the Persian Gulf, and the sea of Oman). Close to Europe and yet at the gates of Asia (in fact part of Southwest Asia), Iran is the ultimate Eurasian crossroads. Isfahan, the country's third largest city, is roughly equidistant from Paris and Shanghai. No wonder Dick Cheney, checking out Iran, "salivates like a Pavlov dog" (to quote those rock 'n roll geopoliticians, the Rolling Stones).
Members of the Iranian upper middle classes in North Tehran might spin dreams of Iran recapturing the expansive range of influence once held by the Persian empire; but the silky, Qom-carpet-like diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will assure you that what they really dream of is an Iran respected as a major regional power. To this end, they have little choice, faced with the enmity of the globe's "sole superpower," but to employ a sophisticated counter-encirclement foreign policy. After all, Iran is now completely surrounded by post-9/11 American military bases in Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iraq, and the Gulf states. It faces the U.S. military on its Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, and Persian Gulf borders, and lives with ever tightening U.S. economic sanctions, as well as a continuing drumbeat of Bush administration threats involving possible air assaults on Iranian nuclear (and probably other) facilities.
The Iranian counter-response to sanctions and to its demonization as a rogue or pariah state has been to develop a "Look East" foreign policy that is, in itself, a challenge to American energy hegemony in the Gulf. The policy has been conducted with great skill by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was educated in Bangalore, India. While focused on massive energy deals with China, India, and Pakistan, it looks as well to Africa and Latin America. To the horror of American neocons, an intercontinental "axis of evil" air link already exists – a weekly commercial Tehran-Caracas flight via Iran Air.
Iran's diplomatic (and energy) reach is now striking. When I was in Bolivia early this year, I learned of a tour Iran's ambassador to Venezuela had taken on the jet of Bolivian President Evo Morales. The ambassador reportedly offered Morales "everything he wanted" to offset the influence of "American imperialism."
Meanwhile, a fierce energy competition is developing among the Turks, Iranians, Russians, Chinese, and Americans – all placing their bets on which future trade routes will be the crucial ones as oil and natural gas flow out of Central Asia. As a player, Iran is trying to position itself as the unavoidable bazaar-state in an oil-and-gas-fueled New Silk Road – the backbone of a new Asian Energy Security Grid. That's how it could recover some of the preeminence it enjoyed in the distant era of Darius, the King of Kings. And that's the main reason why U.S. neo-Cold Warriors, Zio-cons, armchair imperialists, or all of the above, are throwing such a collective – and threatening – fit.
3. What is the nuclear "new Hitler" Ahmadinejad up to?: Ever since the days when former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami suggested a "dialogue of civilizations," Iranian diplomats have endlessly repeated the official position on Iran's nuclear program: It's peaceful; the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no proof of the military development of nuclear power; the religious leadership opposes atomic weapons; and Iran – unlike the US – has not invaded or attacked any nation for the past quarter millennium.
Think of George W. Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new Blues Brothers: Both believe they are on a mission from God. Both are religious fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad believes fervently in the imminent return of the Mahdi, the Shi'ite messiah, who "disappeared" and has remained hidden since the ninth century. Bush believes fervently in a coming end time and the return of Jesus Christ. But only Bush, despite his actual invasions and constant threats, gets a (sort of) free pass from the Western ideological machine, while Ahmadinejad is portrayed as a Hitlerian believer in a new Holocaust.
Ahmadinejad is relentlessly depicted as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who wants to "wipe Israel off the map." That infamous quote, repeated ad nauseam but out of context, comes from an October 2005 speech at an obscure anti-Zionist student conference. What Ahmadinejad really said, in a literal translation from Farsi, was that "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time." He was actually quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said it first in the early 1980s. Khomeini hoped that a regime so unjust toward the Palestinians would be replaced by another more equitable one. He was not, however, threatening to nuke Israel.
In the 1980s, in the bitterest years of the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini also made it very clear that the production, possession, or use of nuclear weapons is against Islam. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei later issued a fatwa – a religious injunction – under the same terms. For the theocratic regime, however, the Iranian nuclear program is a powerful symbol of independence vis-á-vis what is still widely considered by Iranians of all social classes and educational backgrounds as Anglo-Saxon colonialism.
Ahmadinejad is mad for the Iranian nuclear program. It's his bread and butter in terms of domestic popularity. During the Iran-Iraq War, he was a member of a support team aiding anti-Saddam Hussein Kurdish forces. (That's when he became friends with "Uncle" Jalal Talabani, now the Kurdish president of Iraq.) Not many presidents have been trained in guerrilla warfare. Speculation is rampant in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, the leadership of the Quds Force, an elite division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), plus the hardcore volunteer militia, the Basij (informally known in Iran as "the army of twenty million") are betting on a U.S. attack on Iran's nuclear facilities to strengthen the country's theocratic regime and their faction of it.
Reformists refer to Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran last October, when he was received by the Supreme Leader (a very rare honor). Putin offered a new plan to resolve the explosive Iranian nuclear dossier: Iran would halt nuclear enrichment on Iranian soil in return for peaceful nuclear cooperation and development in league with Russia, the Europeans, and the IAEA.
Iran's top nuclear negotiator of that moment, Ali Larijani, a confidant of Supreme Leader Khamenei, as well as the Leader himself let it be known that the idea would be seriously considered. But Ahmadinejad immediately contradicted the Supreme Leader in public. Even more startling, yet evidently with the Leader's acquiescence, he then sacked Larijani and replaced him with a longtime friend, Saeed Jalili, an ideological hardliner.
4. A velvet revolution is not around the corner: Before the 2005 Iranian elections, at a secret, high-level meeting of the ruling ayatollahs in his house, the Supreme Leader concluded that Ahmadinejad would be able to revive the regime with his populist rhetoric and pious conservatism, which then seemed very appealing to the downtrodden masses. (Curiously enough, Ahmadinejad's campaign motto was: "We can.")
But the ruling ayatollahs miscalculated. Since they controlled all key levers of power – the Supreme National Security Council, the Council of Guardians, the Judiciary, the bonyads (Islamic foundations that control vast sections of the economy), the army, the IRGC (the parallel army created by Khomeini in 1979 and recently branded a terrorist organization by the Bush administration), the media – they assumed they would also control the self-described "street cleaner of the people." How wrong they have been.
For Khamenei himself, this was big business. After 18 years of non-stop internal struggle, he was finally in full control of executive power, as well as of the legislature, the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, and the key ayatollahs in Qom.
Ahmadinejad, for his part, unleashed his own agenda. He purged the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of many reformist-minded diplomats; encouraged the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to crackdown on all forms of "nefarious" Western influences, from entertainment industry products to colorful made-in-India scarves for women; and filled his cabinet with revolutionary friends from the Iran-Iraq War days. These friends proved to be as faithful as administratively incompetent – especially in terms of economic policy. Instead of solidifying the theocratic leadership under Supreme Leader Khamenei, Ahmadinejad increasingly fractured an increasingly unpopular ruling elite.
Nonetheless, discontent with Ahmadinejad's economic incompetence has not translated into street barricades and it probably will not; nor, contrary to neocon fantasyland scenarios, would an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities provoke a popular uprising. Every single political faction supports the nuclear program out of patriotic pride.
There is surely a glaring paradox here. The regime may be wildly unpopular – because of so much enforced austerity in an energy-rich land and the virtual absence of social mobility – but for millions, especially in the countryside and the remote provinces, life is still bearable. In the large urban centers – Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tabriz – most would be in favor of a move toward a more market-oriented economy combined with a progressive liberalization of mores (even as the regime insists on going the other way). No velvet revolution, however, seems to be on the horizon.
At least four main factions are at play in the intricate Persian-miniature-like game of today's Iranian power politics – and two others, the revolutionary left and the secular right, even though thoroughly marginalized, shouldn't be forgotten either.
The extreme right, very religiously conservative but economically socialist, has, from the beginning, been closely aligned with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Ahmadinejad is the star of this faction.
The clerics, from the Supreme Leader to thousands of provincial religious figures, are pure conservatives, even more patriotic than the extreme right, yet generally no lovers of Ahmadinejad. But there is a crucial internal split. The substantially wealthy bonyads – the Islamic foundations, active in all economic sectors – badly want a reconciliation with the West. They know that, under the pressure of Western sanctions, the relentless flight of both capital and brains is working against the national interest.
Economists in Tehran project there may be as much as $600 billion in Iranian funds invested in the economies of Persian Gulf petro-monarchies. The best and the brightest continue to flee the country. But the Islamic foundations also know that this state of affairs slowly undermines Ahmadinejad's power.
The extremely influential Revolutionary Guard Corps, a key component of government with vast economic interests, transits between these two factions. They privilege the fight against what they define as Zionism, are in favor of close relations with Sunni Arab states, and want to go all the way with the nuclear program. In fact, substantial sections of the IRGC and the Basij believe Iran must enter the nuclear club not only to prevent an attack by the "American Satan," but to irreversibly change the balance of power in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
The current reformists/progressives of the left were originally former partisans of Khomeini's son, Ahmad Khomeini. Later, after a spectacular mutation from Soviet-style socialism to some sort of religious democracy, their new icon became former President Khatami (of "dialogue of civilizations" fame). Here, after all, was an Islamic president who had captured the youth vote and the women's vote and had written about the ideas of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas as applied to civil society as well as the possibility of democratization in Iran. Unfortunately, his "Tehran Spring" didn't last long – and is now long gone.
The key establishment faction is undoubtedly that of moderate Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former two-term President, current chairman of the Expediency Council and a key member of the Council of Experts – 86 clerics, no women, the Holy Grail of the system, and the only institution in the Islamic Republic capable of removing the Supreme Leader from office. He is now supported by the intelligentsia and urban youth. Colloquially known as "The Shark," Rafsanjani is the consummate Machiavellian. He retains privileged ties to key Washington players and has proven to be the ultimate survivor – moving like a skilled juggler between Khatami and Khamenei as power in the country shifted.
Rafsanjani is, and will always remain, a supporter of the Supreme Leader. As the regime's de facto number two, his quest is not only to "save" the Islamic Revolution, but also to consolidate Iran's regional power and reconcile the country with the West. His reasoning is clear: He knows that an anti-Islamic tempest is already brewing among the young in Iran's major cities, who dream of integrating with the nomad elites of liquid global modernity.
If the Bush administration had any real desire to let its aircraft carriers float out of the Gulf and establish an entente cordiale with Tehran, Rafsanjani would be the man to talk to.
5. Heading down the New Silk Road
Reformist friends in Tehran keep telling me the country is now immersed in an atmosphere similar to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China or the 1980s rectification campaign in Cuba – and nothing "velvet" or "orange" or "tulip" or any of the other color-coded Western-style movements that Washington might dream of is, as yet, on the horizon.
Under such conditions, what if there were an American air attack on Iran? The Supreme Leader, on the record, offered his own version of threats in 2006. If Iran were attacked, he said, the retaliation would be doubly powerful against U.S. interests elsewhere in the world.
From American supply lines and bases in southern Iraq to the Straits of Hormuz, the Iranians, though no military powerhouse, do have the ability to cause real damage to American forces and interests – and certainly to drive the price of oil into the stratosphere. Such a "war" would clearly be a disaster for everyone.
The Iranian theocratic leadership, however, seems to doubt that the Bush administration and the U.S. military, exhausted by their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will attack. They feel a tide at their backs. Meanwhile the "Look East" strategy, driven by soaring energy prices, is bearing fruit.
Ahmadinejad has just concluded a tour of South Asia and, to the despair of American neocons, the Asian Energy Security Grid is quickly becoming a reality. Two years ago, at the Petroleum Ministry in Tehran, I was told Iran is betting on the total "interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-economic politics." This year Iran finally becomes a natural gas-exporting country. The framework for the $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as the "peace" pipeline, is a go. Both these key South Asian U.S. allies are ignoring Bush administration desires and rapidly bolstering their economic, political, cultural, and – crucially – geostrategic connections with Iran. An attack on Iran would now inevitably be viewed as an attack against Asia.
What a disaster in the making, and yet, now more than ever, Vice President Dick Cheney's faction in Washington (not to mention possible future president John McCain) seems ready to bomb. Perhaps the Mahdi himself – in his occult wisdom – is betting on a U.S. war against Asia to slouch towards Qom to be reborn.
Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News. He's been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has made frequent visits to Iran and is the author of Globalistan and also Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge, both published by Nimble Books in 2007.
The Iranian Chessboard
Five Ways to Think about Iran under the Gun
By Pepe Escobar
More than two years ago, Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker how George W. Bush was considering strategic nuclear strikes against Iran. Ever since, a campaign to demonize that country has proceeded in a relentless, Terminator-like way, applying the same techniques and semantic contortions that were so familiar in the period before the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq.
The campaign's greatest hits are widely known: "The ayatollahs" are building a Shi'ite nuclear bomb; Iranian weapons are killing American soldiers in Iraq; Iranian gunboats are provoking U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf – Iran, in short, is the new al-Qaeda, a terror state aimed at the heart of the United States. It's idle to expect the American mainstream media to offer any tools that might put this orchestrated blitzkrieg in context.
Here are just a few recent instances of the ongoing campaign: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insists that Iran "is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits that the Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" when it comes to Iran. In tandem with U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus, Mullen denounces Iran's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" in Iraq, although he claims to harbor "no expectations" of an attack on Iran "in the immediate future" and even admits he has "no smoking gun which could prove that the highest leadership [of Iran] is involved."
But keep in mind one thing the Great Saddam Take-out of 2003 proved: that a "smoking gun" is, in the end, irrelevant. And this week, the U.S. is ominously floating a second aircraft carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf.
But what of Iran itself under the blizzard of charges and threats? What to make of it? What does the world look like from Tehran? Here are five ways to think about Iran under the gun and to better decode the Iranian chessboard.
1. Don't underestimate the power of Shi'ite Islam: Seventy-five percent of the world's oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf. Seventy percent of the Gulf's population is Shi'ite. Shi'ism is an eschatological – and revolutionary – religion, fueled by a passionate mixture of romanticism and cosmic despair. As much as it may instill fear in hegemonic Sunni Islam, some Westerners should feel a certain empathy for intellectual Shi'ism's almost Sartrean nausea towards the vacuous material world.
For more than a thousand years Shi'ite Islam has, in fact, been a galaxy of Shi'isms – a kind of Fourth World of its own, always cursed by political exclusion and implacable economic marginalization, always carrying an immensely dramatic view of history with it.
It's impossible to understand Iran without grasping the contradiction that the Iranian religious leadership faces in ruling, however fractiously, a nation state. In the minds of Iran's religious leaders, the very concept of the nation-state is regarded with deep suspicion, because it detracts from the umma, the global Muslim community. The nation-state, as they see it, is but a way station on the road to the final triumph of Shi'ism and pure Islam. To venture beyond the present stage of history, however, they also recognize the necessity of reinforcing the nation-state that offers Shi'ism a sanctuary – and that, of course, happens to be Iran. When Shi'ism finally triumphs, the concept of nation-state – a heritage, in any case, of the West – will disappear, replaced by a community organized according to the will of Prophet Muhammad.
In the right context, this is, believe me, a powerful message. I briefly became a mashti – a pilgrim visiting a privileged Shi'ite gateway to Paradise, the holy shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, four hours west of the Iran-Afghan border. At sunset, the only foreigner lost in a pious multitude of black chadors and white turbans occupying every square inch of the huge walled shrine, I felt a tremendous emotional jolt. And I wasn't even a believer, just a simple infidel.
2. Geography is destiny: Whenever I go to the holy city of Qom, bordering the central deserts in Iran, I am always reminded, in no uncertain terms, that, as far as the major ayatollahs are concerned, their supreme mission is to convert the rest of Islam to the original purity and revolutionary power of Shi'ism – a religion invariably critical of the established social and political order.
Even a Shi'ite leader in Tehran, however, can't simply live by preaching and conversion alone. Iran, after all, happens to be a nation-state at the crucial intersection of the Arabic, Turkish, Russian, and Indian worlds. It is the key transit point of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Indian subcontinent. It lies between three seas (the Caspian, the Persian Gulf, and the sea of Oman). Close to Europe and yet at the gates of Asia (in fact part of Southwest Asia), Iran is the ultimate Eurasian crossroads. Isfahan, the country's third largest city, is roughly equidistant from Paris and Shanghai. No wonder Dick Cheney, checking out Iran, "salivates like a Pavlov dog" (to quote those rock 'n roll geopoliticians, the Rolling Stones).
Members of the Iranian upper middle classes in North Tehran might spin dreams of Iran recapturing the expansive range of influence once held by the Persian empire; but the silky, Qom-carpet-like diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will assure you that what they really dream of is an Iran respected as a major regional power. To this end, they have little choice, faced with the enmity of the globe's "sole superpower," but to employ a sophisticated counter-encirclement foreign policy. After all, Iran is now completely surrounded by post-9/11 American military bases in Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iraq, and the Gulf states. It faces the U.S. military on its Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, and Persian Gulf borders, and lives with ever tightening U.S. economic sanctions, as well as a continuing drumbeat of Bush administration threats involving possible air assaults on Iranian nuclear (and probably other) facilities.
The Iranian counter-response to sanctions and to its demonization as a rogue or pariah state has been to develop a "Look East" foreign policy that is, in itself, a challenge to American energy hegemony in the Gulf. The policy has been conducted with great skill by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was educated in Bangalore, India. While focused on massive energy deals with China, India, and Pakistan, it looks as well to Africa and Latin America. To the horror of American neocons, an intercontinental "axis of evil" air link already exists – a weekly commercial Tehran-Caracas flight via Iran Air.
Iran's diplomatic (and energy) reach is now striking. When I was in Bolivia early this year, I learned of a tour Iran's ambassador to Venezuela had taken on the jet of Bolivian President Evo Morales. The ambassador reportedly offered Morales "everything he wanted" to offset the influence of "American imperialism."
Meanwhile, a fierce energy competition is developing among the Turks, Iranians, Russians, Chinese, and Americans – all placing their bets on which future trade routes will be the crucial ones as oil and natural gas flow out of Central Asia. As a player, Iran is trying to position itself as the unavoidable bazaar-state in an oil-and-gas-fueled New Silk Road – the backbone of a new Asian Energy Security Grid. That's how it could recover some of the preeminence it enjoyed in the distant era of Darius, the King of Kings. And that's the main reason why U.S. neo-Cold Warriors, Zio-cons, armchair imperialists, or all of the above, are throwing such a collective – and threatening – fit.
3. What is the nuclear "new Hitler" Ahmadinejad up to?: Ever since the days when former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami suggested a "dialogue of civilizations," Iranian diplomats have endlessly repeated the official position on Iran's nuclear program: It's peaceful; the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no proof of the military development of nuclear power; the religious leadership opposes atomic weapons; and Iran – unlike the US – has not invaded or attacked any nation for the past quarter millennium.
Think of George W. Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new Blues Brothers: Both believe they are on a mission from God. Both are religious fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad believes fervently in the imminent return of the Mahdi, the Shi'ite messiah, who "disappeared" and has remained hidden since the ninth century. Bush believes fervently in a coming end time and the return of Jesus Christ. But only Bush, despite his actual invasions and constant threats, gets a (sort of) free pass from the Western ideological machine, while Ahmadinejad is portrayed as a Hitlerian believer in a new Holocaust.
Ahmadinejad is relentlessly depicted as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who wants to "wipe Israel off the map." That infamous quote, repeated ad nauseam but out of context, comes from an October 2005 speech at an obscure anti-Zionist student conference. What Ahmadinejad really said, in a literal translation from Farsi, was that "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time." He was actually quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said it first in the early 1980s. Khomeini hoped that a regime so unjust toward the Palestinians would be replaced by another more equitable one. He was not, however, threatening to nuke Israel.
In the 1980s, in the bitterest years of the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini also made it very clear that the production, possession, or use of nuclear weapons is against Islam. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei later issued a fatwa – a religious injunction – under the same terms. For the theocratic regime, however, the Iranian nuclear program is a powerful symbol of independence vis-á-vis what is still widely considered by Iranians of all social classes and educational backgrounds as Anglo-Saxon colonialism.
Ahmadinejad is mad for the Iranian nuclear program. It's his bread and butter in terms of domestic popularity. During the Iran-Iraq War, he was a member of a support team aiding anti-Saddam Hussein Kurdish forces. (That's when he became friends with "Uncle" Jalal Talabani, now the Kurdish president of Iraq.) Not many presidents have been trained in guerrilla warfare. Speculation is rampant in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, the leadership of the Quds Force, an elite division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), plus the hardcore volunteer militia, the Basij (informally known in Iran as "the army of twenty million") are betting on a U.S. attack on Iran's nuclear facilities to strengthen the country's theocratic regime and their faction of it.
Reformists refer to Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran last October, when he was received by the Supreme Leader (a very rare honor). Putin offered a new plan to resolve the explosive Iranian nuclear dossier: Iran would halt nuclear enrichment on Iranian soil in return for peaceful nuclear cooperation and development in league with Russia, the Europeans, and the IAEA.
Iran's top nuclear negotiator of that moment, Ali Larijani, a confidant of Supreme Leader Khamenei, as well as the Leader himself let it be known that the idea would be seriously considered. But Ahmadinejad immediately contradicted the Supreme Leader in public. Even more startling, yet evidently with the Leader's acquiescence, he then sacked Larijani and replaced him with a longtime friend, Saeed Jalili, an ideological hardliner.
4. A velvet revolution is not around the corner: Before the 2005 Iranian elections, at a secret, high-level meeting of the ruling ayatollahs in his house, the Supreme Leader concluded that Ahmadinejad would be able to revive the regime with his populist rhetoric and pious conservatism, which then seemed very appealing to the downtrodden masses. (Curiously enough, Ahmadinejad's campaign motto was: "We can.")
But the ruling ayatollahs miscalculated. Since they controlled all key levers of power – the Supreme National Security Council, the Council of Guardians, the Judiciary, the bonyads (Islamic foundations that control vast sections of the economy), the army, the IRGC (the parallel army created by Khomeini in 1979 and recently branded a terrorist organization by the Bush administration), the media – they assumed they would also control the self-described "street cleaner of the people." How wrong they have been.
For Khamenei himself, this was big business. After 18 years of non-stop internal struggle, he was finally in full control of executive power, as well as of the legislature, the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, and the key ayatollahs in Qom.
Ahmadinejad, for his part, unleashed his own agenda. He purged the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of many reformist-minded diplomats; encouraged the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to crackdown on all forms of "nefarious" Western influences, from entertainment industry products to colorful made-in-India scarves for women; and filled his cabinet with revolutionary friends from the Iran-Iraq War days. These friends proved to be as faithful as administratively incompetent – especially in terms of economic policy. Instead of solidifying the theocratic leadership under Supreme Leader Khamenei, Ahmadinejad increasingly fractured an increasingly unpopular ruling elite.
Nonetheless, discontent with Ahmadinejad's economic incompetence has not translated into street barricades and it probably will not; nor, contrary to neocon fantasyland scenarios, would an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities provoke a popular uprising. Every single political faction supports the nuclear program out of patriotic pride.
There is surely a glaring paradox here. The regime may be wildly unpopular – because of so much enforced austerity in an energy-rich land and the virtual absence of social mobility – but for millions, especially in the countryside and the remote provinces, life is still bearable. In the large urban centers – Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tabriz – most would be in favor of a move toward a more market-oriented economy combined with a progressive liberalization of mores (even as the regime insists on going the other way). No velvet revolution, however, seems to be on the horizon.
At least four main factions are at play in the intricate Persian-miniature-like game of today's Iranian power politics – and two others, the revolutionary left and the secular right, even though thoroughly marginalized, shouldn't be forgotten either.
The extreme right, very religiously conservative but economically socialist, has, from the beginning, been closely aligned with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Ahmadinejad is the star of this faction.
The clerics, from the Supreme Leader to thousands of provincial religious figures, are pure conservatives, even more patriotic than the extreme right, yet generally no lovers of Ahmadinejad. But there is a crucial internal split. The substantially wealthy bonyads – the Islamic foundations, active in all economic sectors – badly want a reconciliation with the West. They know that, under the pressure of Western sanctions, the relentless flight of both capital and brains is working against the national interest.
Economists in Tehran project there may be as much as $600 billion in Iranian funds invested in the economies of Persian Gulf petro-monarchies. The best and the brightest continue to flee the country. But the Islamic foundations also know that this state of affairs slowly undermines Ahmadinejad's power.
The extremely influential Revolutionary Guard Corps, a key component of government with vast economic interests, transits between these two factions. They privilege the fight against what they define as Zionism, are in favor of close relations with Sunni Arab states, and want to go all the way with the nuclear program. In fact, substantial sections of the IRGC and the Basij believe Iran must enter the nuclear club not only to prevent an attack by the "American Satan," but to irreversibly change the balance of power in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.
The current reformists/progressives of the left were originally former partisans of Khomeini's son, Ahmad Khomeini. Later, after a spectacular mutation from Soviet-style socialism to some sort of religious democracy, their new icon became former President Khatami (of "dialogue of civilizations" fame). Here, after all, was an Islamic president who had captured the youth vote and the women's vote and had written about the ideas of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas as applied to civil society as well as the possibility of democratization in Iran. Unfortunately, his "Tehran Spring" didn't last long – and is now long gone.
The key establishment faction is undoubtedly that of moderate Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former two-term President, current chairman of the Expediency Council and a key member of the Council of Experts – 86 clerics, no women, the Holy Grail of the system, and the only institution in the Islamic Republic capable of removing the Supreme Leader from office. He is now supported by the intelligentsia and urban youth. Colloquially known as "The Shark," Rafsanjani is the consummate Machiavellian. He retains privileged ties to key Washington players and has proven to be the ultimate survivor – moving like a skilled juggler between Khatami and Khamenei as power in the country shifted.
Rafsanjani is, and will always remain, a supporter of the Supreme Leader. As the regime's de facto number two, his quest is not only to "save" the Islamic Revolution, but also to consolidate Iran's regional power and reconcile the country with the West. His reasoning is clear: He knows that an anti-Islamic tempest is already brewing among the young in Iran's major cities, who dream of integrating with the nomad elites of liquid global modernity.
If the Bush administration had any real desire to let its aircraft carriers float out of the Gulf and establish an entente cordiale with Tehran, Rafsanjani would be the man to talk to.
5. Heading down the New Silk Road
Reformist friends in Tehran keep telling me the country is now immersed in an atmosphere similar to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China or the 1980s rectification campaign in Cuba – and nothing "velvet" or "orange" or "tulip" or any of the other color-coded Western-style movements that Washington might dream of is, as yet, on the horizon.
Under such conditions, what if there were an American air attack on Iran? The Supreme Leader, on the record, offered his own version of threats in 2006. If Iran were attacked, he said, the retaliation would be doubly powerful against U.S. interests elsewhere in the world.
From American supply lines and bases in southern Iraq to the Straits of Hormuz, the Iranians, though no military powerhouse, do have the ability to cause real damage to American forces and interests – and certainly to drive the price of oil into the stratosphere. Such a "war" would clearly be a disaster for everyone.
The Iranian theocratic leadership, however, seems to doubt that the Bush administration and the U.S. military, exhausted by their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will attack. They feel a tide at their backs. Meanwhile the "Look East" strategy, driven by soaring energy prices, is bearing fruit.
Ahmadinejad has just concluded a tour of South Asia and, to the despair of American neocons, the Asian Energy Security Grid is quickly becoming a reality. Two years ago, at the Petroleum Ministry in Tehran, I was told Iran is betting on the total "interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-economic politics." This year Iran finally becomes a natural gas-exporting country. The framework for the $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as the "peace" pipeline, is a go. Both these key South Asian U.S. allies are ignoring Bush administration desires and rapidly bolstering their economic, political, cultural, and – crucially – geostrategic connections with Iran. An attack on Iran would now inevitably be viewed as an attack against Asia.
What a disaster in the making, and yet, now more than ever, Vice President Dick Cheney's faction in Washington (not to mention possible future president John McCain) seems ready to bomb. Perhaps the Mahdi himself – in his occult wisdom – is betting on a U.S. war against Asia to slouch towards Qom to be reborn.
Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News. He's been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has made frequent visits to Iran and is the author of Globalistan and also Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge, both published by Nimble Books in 2007.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Iraq: Call an air strike
This is from the Information Clearing House.Escobar shows that in spite of the fact that there is less violence of some types in Iraq the situation is really not much improved if at all.
He correctly notes that one way of avoiding casualties is having less forays outside of bases and calling in air strikes whenever there fired upon, a tactic that increases civilian casualties.
Iraq: Call an air strike
By Pepe Escobar
"... the literature on counter-insurgency is so enormous that, had it been put aboard the Titanic, it would have sunk that ship without any help from the iceberg. However, the outstanding fact is that almost all of it has been written by the losers." - Martin van Creveld, in The Changing Face Of War, 2006
11/09/07 "Asia Times" -- -- Amid the George W Bush administration's relentless campaign to "change the subject" from Iraq to Iran, how to "win" the war against the Iraqi resistance, Sunni or Shi'ite, now means - according to counter-insurgency messiah General David Petraeus - calling an air strike.
On a parallel level, the Pentagon has practically finished a base in southern Iraq less than 10 kilometers from the border with Iran called Combat Outpost Shocker. The Pentagon maintains this is for the US to prevent Iranian weapons from being smuggled into Iraq. Rather, it's to control a rash of US covert, sabotage operations across the border targeting Iran's Khuzestan province.
With the looming Turkish threat of invading Iraqi Kurdistan and President General President Musharraf's new "let's jail all the lawyers" coup within a coup in Pakistan, the bloody war in the plains of Mesopotamia is lower down in the news cycle - not to mention the interminable 2008 US presidential soap opera. Rosy spinning, though, still rules unchecked.
The Pentagon - via Major General Joseph Fil, commander of US forces in Baghdad - is relentlessly spinning there's now less violence in the capital, a "sustainable" trend. This is rubbish.
Fil cannot even admit to the basic fact that Baghdad has been reduced to a collection of blast-walled, isolated ghettos in search of a city. Baghdad, from being 65% Sunni, is now at least 75% Shi'ite, and counting. Sunni and Shi'ite residents alike confirm sectarian violence has died down because there are virtually no more neighborhoods to be ethnically cleansed.
When Fil says the Iraqi forces are "much, much more effective", what he means is they are much more ferocious. Terrified middle class, secular Shi'ite residents have told Asia Times Online these guards - Shi'ites themselves - roaming Baghdad with their machine guns pointing to the sidewalks are "worse than the Americans".
Violence has also (relatively) decreased because the bulk of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is still lying low, following his strict orders, even though they are being targeted by constant US air strikes on Sadr City.
The falling numbers of US deaths have also been subjected to merciless spinning. Yet already more US troops have been killed in Iraq in 2007 than in all of 2006. This temporary fall is not caused by a burst of Sunni Iraqi resistance good will - even though an array of groups has taken some time out to concentrate forces in these past few months on unifying their struggle (See It's the resistance, stupid Asia Times Online, October 17, 2007.)
Once again, Baghdad residents, who daily have to negotiate life in hell, reveal what's going on. Lately, as a Shi'ite businessman says, "We have not seen the Americans. They used to come to my neighborhood almost every day at night, with Humvees and Bradleys. They stopped at the end of September." This means less US-conducted dangerous "missions" in the Baghdad wasteland - with less exposure to snipers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) - and more time spent in ultra-fortified bases.
The Pentagon even had to admit that sniper attacks, conducted by real pros, have quadrupled during the past year and could "potentially inflict even more casualties than IEDs". The US Department of Defense's Defense Advance Research Projects Agency had to rush a program using lasers to identify snipers before they shoot.
Anyway, whenever there is a mission in Baghdad now it inevitably means an air strike. Mega-slum Sadr City residents confirm the US keeps attacking alleged Mahdi Army "terrorist" haunts - but mostly from the air.
With the US corporate media operating virtually like a Pentagon information agency, the only news fit to print is that as of early this week there were 3,855 American dead in Iraq. But most of all - and never mentioned - there were 28,451 wounded in combat. And as of October 1, there were no less than 30,294 military victims of accidents and diseases so serious they had to be medically sent out of Iraq.
When in doubt, 'liberate' from the air
Brigadier General Qasim Atta, spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, revealed this week Iraq's security forces have set up 250 spy cameras across Baghdad - presumably to track the Sunni resistance, the Mahdi Army and remaining al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers operatives. Atta has argued "the terrorists are now forced to resort to kidnappings and planting roadside bombs because our security plan is working". That's more rubbish.
Kidnapping is an established industry in Baghdad; with the exodus of the middle classes to Jordan, Syria and beyond, now there's virtually no one flush enough to be kidnapped. IEDs continue to follow wherever American convoys roam. And since they are not roaming - they stick to base - fewer IEDs are exploding. As for al-Qaeda, it has relocated from Baghdad neighborhoods such as Dora - but it will be back.
With fewer missions on the ground, the Pentagon could not but launch four times more air strikes on Iraqis in 2007 - the year of Bush's "surge" - than in the whole of 2006. Up to the end of September, there had been 1,140 air strikes. Last month, there were more air strikes than during the siege that devastated Fallujah in November 2004.
Even discounting the criminal absurdity of an occupation routinely dropping the bomb on packed neighborhoods of a city it already occupies, civilians are the inevitable "collateral damage" of these attacks - families, women, children, assorted "non-combatants". The US Air Force does not even take responsibility - claiming the air strikes are ordered by scared-to-death convoys of Humvees patrolling, say, the mean streets of Sadr City.
The Pentagon talk of "precision strikes" and "reducing collateral damage" means nothing in this context. This appalling human-rights disaster has to be attributed to counter-insurgency messiah Petraeus, the "loser", according to Martin van Creveld, who wrote the latest book on the matter, The Changing Face Of War.
But for public relations purposes inside the US, Petraeus' "by his book" approach works wonders. The Pentagon can spin to oblivion to a cowered media that US deaths are falling. Who cares what the Nuri al-Maliki "sovereign" Iraqi government says? Maliki is nothing but the mayor of the Green Zone anyway. Who cares what the "fish" - who support the "sea" of the resistance, Sunni or Shi'ite - feel? 80% of them are unemployed anyway - and they merely struggle to survive as second-class citizens in their own land.
There's hardly any electricity, fuel or food in Baghdad - everything is rationed - for anyone who's not aligned with a militia-protected faction. The only other option is to flee. With at least a staggering 4.4 million, according to the United Nations, either refugees or internally displaced, options are dwindling fast. There may be as many as 2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria alone. Damascus, in despair, has tightened its visa rules: only academics and businessmen are now entitled. No less than 14% of the entire Iraqi population has been displaced - courtesy of the Bush administration.
Oh, but the Bush administration is "winning" the war, of course. Counter-insurgency doctrine rules that the enemy must be controlled with social, political, ideological and psychological weapons, and risks have to be taken so civilians can be protected.
The surging Petraeus turned that upside down. Or maybe not - he's just providing his own scholarly follow-up to the indiscriminate bombings of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s. Petraeus, His master's voice, might as well call an air strike over the whole of Mesopotamia and then call it "victory".
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
He correctly notes that one way of avoiding casualties is having less forays outside of bases and calling in air strikes whenever there fired upon, a tactic that increases civilian casualties.
Iraq: Call an air strike
By Pepe Escobar
"... the literature on counter-insurgency is so enormous that, had it been put aboard the Titanic, it would have sunk that ship without any help from the iceberg. However, the outstanding fact is that almost all of it has been written by the losers." - Martin van Creveld, in The Changing Face Of War, 2006
11/09/07 "Asia Times" -- -- Amid the George W Bush administration's relentless campaign to "change the subject" from Iraq to Iran, how to "win" the war against the Iraqi resistance, Sunni or Shi'ite, now means - according to counter-insurgency messiah General David Petraeus - calling an air strike.
On a parallel level, the Pentagon has practically finished a base in southern Iraq less than 10 kilometers from the border with Iran called Combat Outpost Shocker. The Pentagon maintains this is for the US to prevent Iranian weapons from being smuggled into Iraq. Rather, it's to control a rash of US covert, sabotage operations across the border targeting Iran's Khuzestan province.
With the looming Turkish threat of invading Iraqi Kurdistan and President General President Musharraf's new "let's jail all the lawyers" coup within a coup in Pakistan, the bloody war in the plains of Mesopotamia is lower down in the news cycle - not to mention the interminable 2008 US presidential soap opera. Rosy spinning, though, still rules unchecked.
The Pentagon - via Major General Joseph Fil, commander of US forces in Baghdad - is relentlessly spinning there's now less violence in the capital, a "sustainable" trend. This is rubbish.
Fil cannot even admit to the basic fact that Baghdad has been reduced to a collection of blast-walled, isolated ghettos in search of a city. Baghdad, from being 65% Sunni, is now at least 75% Shi'ite, and counting. Sunni and Shi'ite residents alike confirm sectarian violence has died down because there are virtually no more neighborhoods to be ethnically cleansed.
When Fil says the Iraqi forces are "much, much more effective", what he means is they are much more ferocious. Terrified middle class, secular Shi'ite residents have told Asia Times Online these guards - Shi'ites themselves - roaming Baghdad with their machine guns pointing to the sidewalks are "worse than the Americans".
Violence has also (relatively) decreased because the bulk of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is still lying low, following his strict orders, even though they are being targeted by constant US air strikes on Sadr City.
The falling numbers of US deaths have also been subjected to merciless spinning. Yet already more US troops have been killed in Iraq in 2007 than in all of 2006. This temporary fall is not caused by a burst of Sunni Iraqi resistance good will - even though an array of groups has taken some time out to concentrate forces in these past few months on unifying their struggle (See It's the resistance, stupid Asia Times Online, October 17, 2007.)
Once again, Baghdad residents, who daily have to negotiate life in hell, reveal what's going on. Lately, as a Shi'ite businessman says, "We have not seen the Americans. They used to come to my neighborhood almost every day at night, with Humvees and Bradleys. They stopped at the end of September." This means less US-conducted dangerous "missions" in the Baghdad wasteland - with less exposure to snipers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) - and more time spent in ultra-fortified bases.
The Pentagon even had to admit that sniper attacks, conducted by real pros, have quadrupled during the past year and could "potentially inflict even more casualties than IEDs". The US Department of Defense's Defense Advance Research Projects Agency had to rush a program using lasers to identify snipers before they shoot.
Anyway, whenever there is a mission in Baghdad now it inevitably means an air strike. Mega-slum Sadr City residents confirm the US keeps attacking alleged Mahdi Army "terrorist" haunts - but mostly from the air.
With the US corporate media operating virtually like a Pentagon information agency, the only news fit to print is that as of early this week there were 3,855 American dead in Iraq. But most of all - and never mentioned - there were 28,451 wounded in combat. And as of October 1, there were no less than 30,294 military victims of accidents and diseases so serious they had to be medically sent out of Iraq.
When in doubt, 'liberate' from the air
Brigadier General Qasim Atta, spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, revealed this week Iraq's security forces have set up 250 spy cameras across Baghdad - presumably to track the Sunni resistance, the Mahdi Army and remaining al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers operatives. Atta has argued "the terrorists are now forced to resort to kidnappings and planting roadside bombs because our security plan is working". That's more rubbish.
Kidnapping is an established industry in Baghdad; with the exodus of the middle classes to Jordan, Syria and beyond, now there's virtually no one flush enough to be kidnapped. IEDs continue to follow wherever American convoys roam. And since they are not roaming - they stick to base - fewer IEDs are exploding. As for al-Qaeda, it has relocated from Baghdad neighborhoods such as Dora - but it will be back.
With fewer missions on the ground, the Pentagon could not but launch four times more air strikes on Iraqis in 2007 - the year of Bush's "surge" - than in the whole of 2006. Up to the end of September, there had been 1,140 air strikes. Last month, there were more air strikes than during the siege that devastated Fallujah in November 2004.
Even discounting the criminal absurdity of an occupation routinely dropping the bomb on packed neighborhoods of a city it already occupies, civilians are the inevitable "collateral damage" of these attacks - families, women, children, assorted "non-combatants". The US Air Force does not even take responsibility - claiming the air strikes are ordered by scared-to-death convoys of Humvees patrolling, say, the mean streets of Sadr City.
The Pentagon talk of "precision strikes" and "reducing collateral damage" means nothing in this context. This appalling human-rights disaster has to be attributed to counter-insurgency messiah Petraeus, the "loser", according to Martin van Creveld, who wrote the latest book on the matter, The Changing Face Of War.
But for public relations purposes inside the US, Petraeus' "by his book" approach works wonders. The Pentagon can spin to oblivion to a cowered media that US deaths are falling. Who cares what the Nuri al-Maliki "sovereign" Iraqi government says? Maliki is nothing but the mayor of the Green Zone anyway. Who cares what the "fish" - who support the "sea" of the resistance, Sunni or Shi'ite - feel? 80% of them are unemployed anyway - and they merely struggle to survive as second-class citizens in their own land.
There's hardly any electricity, fuel or food in Baghdad - everything is rationed - for anyone who's not aligned with a militia-protected faction. The only other option is to flee. With at least a staggering 4.4 million, according to the United Nations, either refugees or internally displaced, options are dwindling fast. There may be as many as 2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria alone. Damascus, in despair, has tightened its visa rules: only academics and businessmen are now entitled. No less than 14% of the entire Iraqi population has been displaced - courtesy of the Bush administration.
Oh, but the Bush administration is "winning" the war, of course. Counter-insurgency doctrine rules that the enemy must be controlled with social, political, ideological and psychological weapons, and risks have to be taken so civilians can be protected.
The surging Petraeus turned that upside down. Or maybe not - he's just providing his own scholarly follow-up to the indiscriminate bombings of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s. Petraeus, His master's voice, might as well call an air strike over the whole of Mesopotamia and then call it "victory".
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
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