Ignoring Pakistan Puts America In Peril

Posted by Cernig

John McCain would have it that the tiny Al Qaeda in Iraq is more of a threat to U.S. national security than that represented by the resurgent core of Al Qaeda and the Taliban under the direction of (at least) elements in Pakistan's intelligence community. These are the same people who carried out the 9/11 attacks - those who struck today at the Indian embassy in Kabul, killing over 40 people.

A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabiullah Mujahed, denied responsibility. “The suicide bomb attack was not carried out by Taliban, we strongly reject that accusation,” he said by telephone. “We don’t know who carried it out.”

The Taliban frequently disavows knowledge of attacks that cause heavy civilian casualties.

Pakistani intelligence has had a long history of supporting militant groups fighting in Afghanistan and Kashmir, officials here said, and has regarded Afghanistan as its backyard. It fiercely resents the growing influence there of regional rival India. The Afghan Interior Ministry said it believed the attack was carried out in collaboration with “an active intelligence service in the region.”

The ministry did not elaborate on the identity of that service. But relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan have become so strained after a series of attacks that Mr. Karzai has threatened to send troops across the border to attack militants operating from bases in Pakistan.

Pakistani intelligence was also implicated in the bomb attacks in Mumbai that killed over 160 in 2006. That involvement of Pakistan's spies in terrorism is perhaps the greatest threat U.S. national security now faces but McCain wishes to relegate it to second class status at best. 

It seems to me to stand to reason that the prospect of an actual nuclear conflict is more of a threat to world stability, and thus U.S. national security, than the prospect of one which is as yet entirely hypothetical. Yet while shills like Joe Lieberman are hyperventilating over the imagined threat of as-yet-unbuilt Iranian nukes to Israel and the Mid-East, two powers already armed with nukes - one a sponsor of terrorists and the world's greatest ever nuclear proliferator - are facing off on the sub-continent. Pakistani involvement in terror attacks have already brought it to the brink of all-out war with neighbour India twice in the last decade and may well do so again.

McCain's answer to the problem? Follow the Bush line of continued military aid to Pakistan as well as to India, selling to both sides and pouring gasoline on the already raging regional arms race. Back in 2006 I described the situation as "America's Next Big Foreign Policy Disaster", and that's exactly how it is turning out.

The beginning for any effort to roll back that disaster is ending military aid to Pakistan. It loses all the paperwork for the money it demands for waging the "war on terror" then redirects those billions to buy weapons designed to counter India, makes accomodations with the terrorists because it set them up in business and still keeps them on some kind of string, Pakistan is no kind of good-faith ally.

The next stage is redirecting America's emphasis and resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. That theatre has become more and more deangerous, not less so - and is now four times deadlier for U.S. troops. The outgoing US commander, Dan McNeill, says Afghanistan needs 400,000 troops to guarantee stability, by Petraeus' own COIN manual. Right now, counting every nation's soldiers, forces there are 260,000 short. Petraeus went ahead anyway with the Surge in Iraq despite having fewer troops than the manual said should be used - but there's a problem with him ordering the same now that he is the guy in charge at CentCom and understands that Afghanistan, not Iraq, is the "central front". There are no troops to surge.

"I don't have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq," Admiral Michael G. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon last week. Mullen said the Afghanistan campaign has been running short of troops since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"Afghanistan has been and remains an economy-of-force campaign," he said, "which by definition means we need more forces there."

One of the latest rationales, in a very long and shifting list, for staying in Iraq is to contain Iran. How much more important is it to contain Pakistan, the progenitor of America's attackers and of nuclear proliferation to the "axis of evil" alike? Yet McCain's entire plan consists of more of the same failed strategy that has brought about the current awful situation.

Comments

[Follow the Money]

What's Patreus up to these days, is he a wabbit in Obama's many many hats?

[Klaus]

And one must not forget that most of ISAF's supplies come through Pakistan, which makes for an interesting geopolitical situation...