Pakistan, Taliban & Iran v. USA

Today, as I was reading my daily dose of blogs, I came across a post by Henry on Crocked Timber , in which he quotes a Financial Times story on Pakistan and the precarious situation the country finds itself in at the moment. Dictating President General Musharraf just dismissed the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Chaudhary, a move which sparked widespread opposition and protests. The reason for his suspension are most likely some of the judge's recent court rulings, which have the potential to turn out uncomfortable for Musharraf. This was a political hatchet job, and the press / people smelled the roast.

The political climate in Pakistan has been shaky at best since General Musharraf's coup 8 years ago, pitching the pro-democracy civilians against the country's military rulers. This article on Asia Times Online tries to analyse the recent history in Pakistan and comes to the following conclusion:

The military establishment faces the choice of clamping down hard on opposition or allowing the protests to run their course.

"There is undoubtedly a political eruption after a prolonged political lull in the country, and if it is sustained it could go a long way. However, there is always a threat from the establishment that it will make some moves to divide the politicians and lawyers," commented retired Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, a former head of the Inter-Services Intelligence.

"Musharraf created the situation where a clash of the military establishment and civil society seems to be imminent. There is .... anger among the masses towards the present military rulers," Gul said.

Militants feed off such anger, so once again Washington is pondering whether Musharraf may be more the problem than the solution.

From what I can gather, Musharraf has been walking on rather thin ice for quite a while. He was lucky to survive three assassination/coup attempts since taking over in 1999, the last one just recently was foiled and has shown that his own military is infiltrated by Al-Quaida supporters. Which sort of explains why he has no sympathy for them, catch 22 so to say, but demonstrates at the same time his weakness of being undermined from within his own supposed powerbase.

For the last 5 years Musharraf has found himself in a US - Taliban sandwich. It appears that he is trying to hedge his bets both ways.

With the Taliban as his proxy army he is trying to grind of the thorn of an India friendly Kabul. Pakistan is the vital logistics and hardware supplier the Taliban needs to have a fighting chance against the US & Nato forces in Afghanistan (which helps appeasing the Muslim Pakistani population at home). Afghanistan's mujaheddin have been receiving strong support from Pakistan during the Soviet days 20 years ago, an alliance which is still honored and deemed existing in sections of Pakistan's military and religious establishment.

At the same time he must continue to appease the US by giving Al-Quaida as hard a time as possible in its heartland in the Afghan/Pakistani border region. Since the relationships between Al-Quaida and the Taliban aren't as rosy anymore as they used to be, Musharraf seems to think he can solve the conundrum of how to support the force of Muslim guerilla warriors in Afghanistan whilst simultaneously keeping the US happy by fulfilling his role as reliable ally of the US administration's WoT, by sending his own army after their common foe, the Al-Quaida gang.

For instance, the alleged chief operations manager of AQ, who is currently in the news with his astounding admissions of having orchestrated if not even executed most of AQ's terrorist attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was hunted down and arrested in Pakistan 4 years ago.

Since Pakistan has also a border with Iran, its role as a US ally becomes even more important. With Pakistan being largely Sunni, one would think that not a great deal of sympathy exists between the people of these two countries, but quite contrary, according to this story from Asia Times large portions of the Pakistani population would not support any US attacks on its Shia neighbors. Unlike the man at the helm, General Musharraf, who sees Pakistan in matters Iran firmly on the West's side, in line with other Sunni leaders eg. the House Saud or Mubarak et al.

But Tehran probably has fresh grounds to reassess Musharraf's intentions. Or, it is running out of patience. Last month, terrorists killed 13 officials of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Zahedan. Last week, in another incident in the town of Negor in Sistan-Balochistan, four Iranian policemen were killed, one abducted and another wounded. The perpetrators fled across the border into Pakistan.

Iran last week announced its intention to erect a 3-meter-high concrete wall reinforced with steel rods along its border with Pakistan. Islamabad put on a brave face, with the Foreign Ministry maintaining, "The fence is on the Iranian side of the border, and we have no problem with that." But Tehran calculates that the sheer humiliation of being treated as an infectious gangrene by all its neighbors - Afghanistan, India and Iran - should eventually begin to tell on the Musharraf regime...

What I found most interesting though in the above quoted AT article were the the last 4 paragraphs, where the author, M K Bhadrakumar, a former Indian Foreign Service diplomat, is suggesting that the real issue for America in the US-Iran-Pakistan politics triangle is, surprise surprise, natural resources and their distribution, as in pipelines and US access to them:

...there is a sideshow to these happenings that is no less profound. US intelligence operatives must be laughing all the way to Washington that they could manage with such ease what their suave diplomats (and wily Congress members) have had a hard time achieving in recent years - arresting Islamabad and New Delhi from finalizing the $7 billion Iran-Pakistan-India gas-pipeline project. In geopolitical terms, the project holds the definite potential to forge a unified Asian energy market, with deep implications for US energy security.

Washington was increasingly finding it counterproductive to resort to arm-twisting New Delhi and Islamabad into putting the project on the back burner until such time as US-Iran relations were normalized and Washington, too, could dip into Iran's energy reserves.

Now, just as it was becoming clear that the three regional capitals were inching toward finalization of the project at a trilateral meeting in Tehran in June, the high volatility in the security situation in the Iran-Pakistan border region puts question marks on their energy dialogue. To be sure, the pipeline project is predicated on a climate of trust and confidence prevailing among the three parties.

There was much merit in US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent fulsome praise that "this has been a stalwart fighter, Pakistan's Musharraf, in this fight". Those in Washington who insinuated that he deserved "an unusually tough message" over the "war on terror" have since hastily beaten a retreat. They didn't know what they were saying.

Should Musharraf be ousted and Pakistan find its way back to a democratic system, the US would probably loose in the medium to long-term an important ally in the region. 90% of todays 165 million Pakistanis are Muslims (20 Shia, 70 Sunni), of whom many would certainly vote for parties which express the anti-western views many muslims hold.

The US can't afford to loose Pakistan's cooperation, thus any US plans to influence events and outcomes there are probably based on the switch module, replacing one dictator with another, one who'll be grateful for any assistance in overthrowing Musharraf. Straight after the motto "He might be a bastard, but he is our bastard."
.

Exit Under Construction

…If you stand up and say your policy is to bring about a withdrawal of all combat units by March 2008, that is noted by terrorist leaders. It is a source of encouragement and comfort,…

PM John Howard
Hansard
12th February 2007

What a classic, the COW will stay till the insurgency disappears, just like when one pushes a red hot iron in ones eyeball long enough the pain will go away.

The so popular coalition troops have to watch every step they make outside their fortresses, fear almost every person they meet on the streets. The hearts and minds who haven’t been won or arrested yet (lets say the insurgents and their supporters within the Iraqi population) are numbering in the millions.

The enemies of our troops have lived in that country/trench for generations and will do so for generations to come. US forces come for 6 monthly stints, with their wives and children back home in the U Safe America. They operate on a complete different time scale than the Iraqi population. For the COW soldiers to “wait out” the insurgency would mean they’d have to move there, probably forever.

Military counter-insurgency measures against an enemy who actually lives in the warzone is like punching your fist into a bucket of water, the moment you pull it out its back to how it was. I guess that is what the huge permanent bases are for, to leave the fist in the bucket (if permanent military bases in Iraq are such a good idea, maybe Australia should build one too), although I suppose they are seen by many Iraqis as ulcers with all the ugly consequences this will entail.

Despite the good intentions the troops have, their daily efforts to rebuild the country and finding the alleged bad guys, I am afraid to say, if anything, the US presence fuels the enemy’s recruitment drive. Been fighting the "enemy" now for 4 years in Iraq, but they don't seem to get less.

To stay the course as suggested by John Howard, to stick with the US till "the Iraqi people can look after their own security" or along those wishy washy lines, underlines the lack of strategies to deal with the current scenario.

Cheney, Howard and their ideological associates, who want to keep combat troops in Iraq till the day when US soldiers on leisure time can peacefully sit in a suburban café in Baghdad and mingle with the locals, till the day when the last "terrorist", militia man and insurgent has been captured or killed by Iraqi troops, envision a day that is as likely to arrive in Iraq as the Titanic in NY. No waiting will change this. Too many mistakes have been made by the captain and the guys on the lookout.

And still, in John Howard's support it is argued that the whole issue of deadlines for withdrawals is meant to make us feel better, the US and Australian electorate, rather than the Iraqi people themselves.

According to their way of thinking it is Senator Obama and Kevin Rudd and other friends of this withdrawal idea who should examine their motivations a bit more carefully.

However, many polls and surveys show that a lot of Iraqis want the US troops to leave, and I can almost guarantee that’s not because they want to make us feel better. More likely it’s because in a lot of areas living conditions have gotten progressively worse since the invasion, and that not just in terms of security.

If one actually examines the reasons for why the US troops are in Iraq, one might want to consider this:

…Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas -- reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to…

Kenneth T. Derr
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer
Chevron Corporation
Speech To the Commonwealth Club of California
San Francisco, California
November 5, 1998

And, voila, 9 years later they have, more access than most other countries would give private corporations. Comments by analysts to the newly approved Iraqi National Oil laws:

…Iraq will not be capable of controlling the levels -- the limits of production, which means that Iraq cannot be a part of OPEC anymore. And Iraq will have this very complicated institution called the Federal Oil and Gas Council, that will have representatives from the foreign oil companies on the board of it, so representatives from, let’s say, ExxonMobil and Shell and British Petroleum will be on the federal board of Iraq approving their own contracts.

…the law certainly opens the door to US oil companies and the Bush administration winning a very large piece of their objective of going to war in Iraq, at least winning it on paper. The law does almost word for word what was laid out in the Baker-Hamilton recommendation, which I discussed previously on your show, which is, at the very basic level, to turn Iraq's nationalized oil system, the model that 90% of the world’s oil is governed by, take its nationalized oil system and turn it into a commercial system fully open to foreign corporate investment on terms as of yet to be decided...

IMHO, the motivations for the invasion are the determining factor for the time of withdrawal. The exit strategy for Iraq hinges on the original objectives being achieved. From the initial US support of Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran, to the harsh sanctions against Iraq after the Kuwait invasion, to Operation Shock and Awe, to Fallujah, to Abu Ghraib, I get the impression that the well being of the common Iraqi was never really the main concern of the West's engagement in that country. The primary objective appears to be more of economic and geo-strategic nature, oust Saddam Hussein and secure Iraq's oil supply for western oil cos, and whilst there establish some bases near Iran, Russia and Israel.

Saddam is dead, the oil laws are almost passed and the bases are as good as finished. And so, should the surge fail, which it is bound to do, the US military is according to Sec Def Gates planning to pull out some of its contingent fairly soon. Well, better see what Cheney and Howard have to say about that.