Pakistan Foreign Minister: U.S. raids hurt terrorism fight.

This is from wiredispatch.
Ground attacks seem to have ceased for now although the U.S. still seems to reserve the right to attack without permission or even notification. Also, drone attacks continue and they no doubt also cause considerable anger in the tribal areas. Pakistan is supposed to devote all its attention to the war on terror or else risk U.S. intervention even though the present level of intervention is destabilising to such a degree that there could be civil war.


U.S. raids hurt terrorism fight-Pakistan minister
Jon HurdleReuters North American News Service
Oct 01, 2008 19:48 EST
PRINCETON, NJ (Reuters) - U.S. military raids against militants inside Pakistan threaten to hurt progress being made against them by Pakistani forces and are an intrusion on Pakistan's sovereignty, the country's new foreign minister said Wednesday.




Shah Mehmood Qureshi said recent attacks by U.S. forces on Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents in tribal areas on the Pakistan side of its border with Afghanistan may set back the government's efforts to fight terrorism there.
"I'm afraid that a relatively recent element in this already difficult war threatens to undo what we have already achieved," Qureshi said in a speech at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. "I am referring to U.S. attacks in Pakistani territory."
Relations between the United States and Pakistan have been strained since the attacks. U.S. officials say Taliban and Al Qaeda-linked fighters use the tribal regions as a base to launch attacks into Afghanistan.
The U.S. actions risk further alienating the population of the tribal areas and the wider populace, Qureshi said.
"The Pakistan public rightly sees such attacks as a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty," he said. "We must not take any action that hardens the resolve of those already committed to violence."
He said Pakistan's fight against terrorism has been further damaged because the raids have been carried out by its ally.
"It hurts us even more when the transgressor is our friend and ally, the U.S.," he said. "If there are actions to be taken, those actions will be taken by Pakistan."
He said Pakistani government forces have been fighting militants in the remote and rugged border areas since 2004 and suffered hundreds of casualties.
But he said military force alone cannot win the war there or in Afghanistan where governments, including the United States, must win support of the people through other means.
"Force must be complemented by political, economic and social engagement," Qureshi said. "Force alone is an insufficient objective to win the hearts and minds of the populace."
Qureshi said he was "bewildered" that Pakistan is seen by some Americans as a source of terrorism rather than a partner in the war against it. He acknowledged the presence of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in the border areas but rejected that there were safe havens there.
The minister called on the United States to provide more night-time fighting equipment, and urged Afghanistan to add hundreds more military posts along its side of the border to match those installed by Pakistan. (Editing by Vicki Allen)
Source: Reuters North American News Service

Tariq Ali: The American War Moves to Pakistan

Both Obama and McCain are onside about this. There seems to be no intelligent discussion of this issue at all in the mainstream US media as far as I have seen. This is a very serious extension of American power and threatens to create chaos in Pakistan. There is not the least concern for Pakistani sovereignty or even the effect these actions will have on a government that is already weak. Support for Zardari may quickly evaporate.
This article does not say much about US aid to the Pakistan military. This aid and dependence upon the U.S. may not be enough to prevent a turn away from the U.S. Russia or China may be willing to help fund the Pakistani military, especially Russia as it now seems more inclined to compete with rather than co-operate with the U.S. This is from antiwar.com.

The American War Moves to Pakistan
Bush's war widens dangerouslyby Tariq Ali
The decision to make public a presidential order of last July authorizing American strikes inside Pakistan without seeking the approval of the Pakistani government ends a long debate within, and on the periphery of, the Bush administration. Sen. Barack Obama, aware of this ongoing debate during his own long battle with Sen. Hillary Clinton, tried to outflank her by supporting a policy of U.S. strikes into Pakistan. Sen. John McCain and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin have now echoed this view, and so it has become, by consensus, official U.S. policy.
Its effects on Pakistan could be catastrophic, creating a severe crisis within the army and in the country at large. The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis are opposed to the U.S. presence in the region, viewing it as the most serious threat to peace.
Why, then, has the U.S. decided to destabilize a crucial ally? Within Pakistan, some analysts argue that this is a carefully coordinated move to weaken the Pakistani state yet further by creating a crisis that extends way beyond the badlands on the frontier with Afghanistan. Its ultimate aim, they claim, would be the extraction of the Pakistani military's nuclear fangs. If this were the case, it would imply that Washington was indeed determined to break up the Pakistani state, since the country would very simply not survive a disaster on that scale.
In my view, however, the expansion of the war relates far more to the Bush administration's disastrous occupation in Afghanistan. It is hardly a secret that the regime of President Hamid Karzai is becoming more isolated with each passing day, as Taliban guerrillas move ever closer to Kabul.
When in doubt, escalate the war is an old imperial motto. The strikes against Pakistan represent – like the decisions of President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to bomb and then invade Cambodia (acts that, in the end, empowered Pol Pot and his monsters) – a desperate bid to salvage a war that was never good, but has now gone badly wrong.
It is true that those resisting the NATO occupation cross the Pakistan-Afghan border with ease. However, the U.S. has often engaged in quiet negotiations with them. Several feelers have been put out to the Taliban in Pakistan, while U.S. intelligence experts regularly check into the Serena Hotel in Swat to discuss possibilities with Mullah Fazlullah, a local pro-Taliban leader. The same is true inside Afghanistan.
After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a whole layer of the Taliban's middle-level leadership crossed the border into Pakistan to regroup and plan for what lay ahead. By 2003, their guerrilla factions were starting to harass the occupying forces in Afghanistan and, during 2004, they began to be joined by a new generation of local recruits, by no means all jihadists, who were being radicalized by the occupation itself.
Though, in the world of the Western media, the Taliban has been entirely conflated with al-Qaeda, most of their supporters are, in fact, driven by quite local concerns. If NATO and the U.S. were to leave Afghanistan, their political evolution would most likely parallel that of Pakistan's domesticated Islamists.
The neo-Taliban now control at least twenty Afghan districts in Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan provinces. It is hardly a secret that many officials in these zones are closet supporters of the guerrilla fighters. Though often characterized as a rural jacquerie, they have won significant support in southern towns and they even led a Tet-style offensive in Kandahar in 2006. Elsewhere, mullahs who had initially supported President Karzai's allies are now railing against the foreigners and the government in Kabul. For the first time, calls for jihad against the occupation are even being heard in the non-Pashtun northeast border provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan.
The neo-Taliban have said that they will not join any government until "the foreigners" have left their country, which raises the question of the strategic aims of the United States. Is it the case, as NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer suggested to an audience at the Brookings Institution earlier this year, that the war in Afghanistan has little to do with spreading good governance in Afghanistan or even destroying the remnants of al-Qaeda? Is it part of a master plan, as outlined by a strategist in NATO Review in the Winter of 2005, to expand the focus of NATO from the Euro-Atlantic zone, because "in the 21st century NATO must become an alliance … designed to project systemic stability beyond its borders"?
As that strategist went on to write:
"The center of gravity of power on this planet is moving inexorably eastward. As it does, the nature of power itself is changing. The Asia-Pacific region brings much that is dynamic and positive to this world, but as yet the rapid change therein is neither stable nor embedded in stable institutions. Until this is achieved, it is the strategic responsibility of Europeans and North Americans, and the institutions they have built, to lead the way. … [S]ecurity effectiveness in such a world is impossible without both legitimacy and capability."
Such a strategy implies a permanent military presence on the borders of both China and Iran. Given that this is unacceptable to most Pakistanis and Afghans, it will only create a state of permanent mayhem in the region, resulting in ever more violence and terror, as well as heightened support for jihadi extremism, which, in turn, will but further stretch an already over-extended empire.
Globalizers often speak as though U.S. hegemony and the spread of capitalism were the same thing. This was certainly the case during the Cold War, but the twin aims of yesteryear now stand in something closer to an inverse relationship. For, in certain ways, it is the very spread of capitalism that is gradually eroding U.S. hegemony in the world. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's triumph in Georgia was a dramatic signal of this fact. The American push into the Greater Middle East in recent years, designed to demonstrate Washington's primacy over the Eurasian powers, has descended into remarkable chaos, necessitating support from the very powers it was meant to put on notice.
Pakistan's new, indirectly elected president, Asif Zardari, the husband of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto and a Pakistani "godfather" of the first order, indicated his support for U.S. strategy by inviting Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai to attend his inauguration, the only foreign leader to do so. Twinning himself with a discredited satrap in Kabul may have impressed some in Washington, but it only further decreased support for the widower Bhutto in his own country.
The key in Pakistan, as always, is the army. If the already heightened U.S. raids inside the country continue to escalate, the much-vaunted unity of the military High Command might come under real strain. At a meeting of corps commanders in Rawalpindi on Sept. 12, Pakistani Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani received unanimous support for his relatively mild public denunciation of the recent U.S. strikes inside Pakistan in which he said the country's borders and sovereignty would be defended "at all cost."
Saying, however, that the Army will safeguard the country's sovereignty is different from doing so in practice. This is the heart of the contradiction. Perhaps the attacks will cease on Nov. 4. Perhaps pigs (with or without lipstick) will fly. What is really required in the region is an American/NATO exit strategy from Afghanistan, which should entail a regional solution involving Pakistan, Iran, India, and Russia. These four states could guarantee a national government and massive social reconstruction in that country. No matter what, NATO and the Americans have failed abysmally.
Tariq Ali, writer, journalist, filmmaker, contributes regularly to a range of publications including the Guardian, the Nation, and the London Review of Books. His most recent book, just published, is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (Scribner, 2008). In a two-part video, released by TomDispatch.com, he offers critical commentary on Barack Obama's plans for Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as on the tangled U.S.-Pakistani relationship.
Copyright 2008 Tariq Ali

Raids into Pakistan: What U.S. Authority

Pakistan has suffered much more than the U.S. from the effects of terrorism and continues to do so. Pakistan is also supposedly an ally of the U.S. in the war against terror and receives large amounts of military aid. Surely if the U.S. expects continued co-operation it would not unilaterally attack within Pakistan borders without Pakistani permission. The Bush doctrine is a recipe for unilateral intervention and violation of basic norms for international peace. The attacks in Pakistan make little sense even in terms of the basic doctrine enunciated by Bush since Pakistan certainly has been battling against terrorists within its own borders. What Bush requires of Pakistan is not just fighting terrorism but fighting it to a degree that satisfied Bush even if that should mean civil war and be against the advice of US intelligence reports.
THis is from the CSMonitor.








Raids into Pakistan: What U.S. authority?
Bush's orders to send special forces after Taliban militants have roots in previous presidencies.
By Howard LaFranchi Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the September 15, 2008 edition
WASHINGTON - Orders President Bush signed in July authorizing raids by special operations forces in the areas of Pakistan controlled by the Taliban and Al Qaeda and undertaking those raids without official Pakistani consent, have roots stretching back to the days following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
In an address to a joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11, President Bush said, "From this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."
But even before that declaration, two key steps had been taken: One, Congress had authorized the use of US military force against terrorist organizations and the countries that harbor or support them. Two, Bush administration officials had warned Pakistan's leaders of the dire consequences their country would face if they did not unequivocally enlist in the fight against radical Islamist terrorism.
What Mr. Bush's July orders signify is that, after seven years of encouraging Pakistan to take on extremists harbored in remote areas along its border with Afghanistan and subsidizing the Pakistani military handsomely to do it, the US has become convinced that Pakistan is neither able nor willing to fight the entrenched Taliban and Al Qaeda elements. Indeed, recent events appear to have convinced at least some in the administration that parts of Pakistan's military and powerful intelligence service are actually aiding the extremists.
"We've moved beyond the message stage here. I think the US has had it with messages that don't get any action, and that is why the president authorized this," says Kamran Bokhari, director of Middle East analysis for Stratfor, an intelligence consulting firm in Washington. "This says loud and clear, 'We're fed up.' "
Even before the July order, the US had undertaken covert operations in Pakistan's tribal areas. Moreover, the CIA over the past year has stepped up missile attacks by the unmanned Predator drones it operates to hit targets in the region. That increase has coincided with a deterioration of the war in Afghanistan, where the Afghan Army and NATO forces have come under increasing attack from militants crossing over the rugged and lawless border from Pakistan.
But Bush's orders, first reported in The New York Times Thursday, mean that operations against insurgent sanctuaries will become overt and probably more frequent. A Sept. 3 ground assault involving US commandos dropped from helicopters targeted a suspected terrorist compound. Missile attacks by the CIA's unmanned drones, including one Friday reported by Pakistani officials to have killed at last 12 people, are also on the rise.
Precedence for the orders authorizing the attacks on terrorist havens can be found in President Bill Clinton's authorization of retaliatory attacks in 1993 (against Iraqi intelligence facilities) and in 1998 (against terrorist camps in Afghanistan and Sudan), and in President Ronald Reagan's bombing of Libya, legal scholars say.
The administration has debated the use of commando raids in Pakistan for years, but the tipping point came in July, as relations with Pakistan's civilian and military leaders deteriorated, intelligence sources say. The "kicker," according to one source who requested anonymity over the sensitivity of the issue, was two July events: the bombing of India's embassy in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, an act that US intelligence officials concluded was aided by Pakistani intelligence operatives; and a July 13 attack on a US military outpost in eastern Afghanistan that killed nine US soldiers. The outpost attack was carried out by Taliban militants who had crossed over the nearby border from Pakistan.
The evolution of operations in Pakistan from covert to overt actions is reminiscent of a trajectory followed in some aspects by the Vietnam War, some analysts note.
Patrick Lang, a former Middle East analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, says the evolution in Pakistan is similar to what occurred in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, when US operations against Vietcong sanctuaries there were initially covered up.
"We initially crossed into Cambodia as covert forces, but that changed," says Mr. Lang, who was part of special forces that carried out the Cambodia operations. By 1970, cross-border operations against enemy sanctuaries were being carried out in the open. Looking at the evolution in operations in Pakistan, the national security analyst says, "We are letting [Pakistanis] know this could evolve into bigger things."
Adds the intelligence source who requested anonymity, "The message is to the new civilian leadership and the military, 'We have bought all these toys for you – if you don't use them and do things in these areas that are causing us problems, we'll do them for you.' "
The new orders reflect flagging confidence in Pakistan's civilian and military leadership to address the problem of the Taliban and terrorist havens, which are thought to harbor Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. For seven years the Bush administration focused its Pakistan policy on President Pervez Musharraf and his assurances that he was battling the militant sanctuaries. But Mr. Musharraf was forced to resign last month after suffering a crushing electoral defeat earlier in the year, and the US appears to have little confidence in the new civilian and military leaders.
"Musharraf was a one-stop shopping center for US relations with Pakistan, but that no longer exists," says Stratfor's Mr. Bokhari. Senior State Department officials have met with Pakistan's new civilian leaders, he notes, while top Pentagon officials have met with the military leadership including Army chief of staff Gen. Ashraf Parvez Kayani, the top military commander.
"The sense I get is they were given the runaround, and they came away from all these meetings convinced the leadership structure has become much more complex at a time when the Taliban are becoming stronger and the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating," Bokhari says. "The feeling was the US couldn't sit by and see how the leadership sorts itself out."
Bush's orders authorizing cross-border incursions into Pakistan mean in a sense that the rules governing US special operations have shifted from yellow to green. The military will no longer need a presidential "finding" for each operation – and that, military analysts say, means the handling of forays into Pakistan will fall increasingly into military rather than CIA hands.
That has some intelligence officials worried that the consequences of stepped-up US operations in Pakistan – in terms of Pakistani public opinion and the stability of the government – will get short shrift. According to intelligence sources, officials from the National Intelligence Council recently briefed the Bush administration's national security team on the potentially dire consequences of US actions that could destabilize the government of a country with nuclear weapons.



Find this article at: http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0915/p02s01-uspo.html