No, not the one in Iraq where a senior defense department official told the NY Times that:
“The insurgency has gotten worse by almost all measures, with insurgent attacks at historically high levels.” […]
and
“[T]he insurgency has more public support and is demonstrably more capable in numbers of people active and in its ability to direct violence than at any point in time.”
That screwup was already well known, at least to perceptive readers such as those who frequent this blog. No, the SNAFU I’m referring to involves an entirely different country facing its own militant islamic insurrection. Can you guess which one?
Well, if you guessed PAKISTAN you win a prize:
(cont.)
White House backing new plan to defuse insurrection in Pakistan
By Jonathan S. Landay
McClatchy NewspapersWASHINGTON – A U.S.-backed plan to defeat Islamist militants in Pakistan’s autonomous tribal areas has backfired badly, and the Bush administration is working with Pakistan to come up with a new strategy to defuse the insurrection.
Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf “sees that what he was doing wasn’t working,” said one U.S. official who’s familiar with the new plan. “He really has a mess.”
Now Musharraf’s government is attempting to negotiate truces in the areas, expand local police forces and introduce development projects to reward tribal leaders who break with the militants. The Bush administration has pledged millions of dollars to the new effort, said the official, who, like others familiar with the plan, spoke only if granted anonymity.
Ending the uprising by Islamist militants aligned with Osama bin Laden and Taliban rebels is crucial to American-led efforts to contain the worst surge in Taliban violence in Afghanistan since 2001. The bloodshed is adding to the Bush administration’s woes in the Middle East and other fronts in the war on terrorism.
I guess sending 80,000 troops of the Pakistani army to kill and “terrorize” the locals into turning against the Taliban and Al Qaeda didn’t work out like they thought it would. What a surprise, eh? Now they go to Plan B: Bribery. For make no mistake, that’s what it is. Funny, I wonder why they didn’t try that approach in Iraq? Oh, right. I forgot. That would have really hurt Halliburton’s stock price, wouldn’t it? Thank god we didn’t harm those innocent Halliburton shareholders by doing anything silly like that. Instead, by saving all the sweetheart deals for American firms, we gave them this to crow about:
But seriously, this is very bad news, and highlights the stupidity of invading Iraq in the first place before eliminating the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, first. Now we don’t have the troops or the resources available to deal with the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan because they are tied down defending our permanent bases in Iraq in the middle of a civil war.
As for expecting the Pakistani army to deal with these autonomous tribal areas, that was another mistake. Those troops can’t have too excited about killing people that looked like them and prayed to the same God they did, just to make the infidel Americans happy. And attacking those tribes only hardened their position and their alliance with the Taliban/Al Qaeda forces.
I suspect this failed strategy also created great divisiveness among the Pakistani military leadership and officer corps, as well. We already knew that Pakistan was a hot bed of fundamentalist Islamic schools, the madrassahs, which preach jihad against the West, and that factions of the ISI (Pakistan’s powerful Directorate of Inter-services Intelligence) are believed to be aligned with Islamic militant organizations that carry out terrorist actions. Elements of the ISI were instrumental in propelling the Taliban to power in Afghanistan after the end of the Soviet occupation, and had close ties to Osama bin Laden dating back to his days as CIA sponsored jihadist against “Russian imperialism.” I doubt that those relationships have ever completely ended.
The upshot of our failed policies in dealing with the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in Northwestern Pakistan’s autonomous tribal regions? It can only have harmed the position of Pakistan’s dictator, Pervez Musharraf, due to his ties with the Bush administration. At some point the other generals who support him now are going to wonder if all the money flowing in from US coffers is worth the risk of an assassin’s bullet, or a fundamentalist coup. Many of them already have ties to extremists. Furthermore, they may view Bush’s recent nuclear rapprochement with India as a stab in the back to a country that has been an American ally in the region for a far longer period. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that plots to bring down Musharraf and his faction are already well advanced.
What does this mean for the US? Well, contrary to official White House statements on the matter, Afghanistan and Pakistan are the central front in the War on Terror, not Iraq. And it is clearly a front on which we are suffering reverses. Should Musharraf’s regime, and its nuclear weapons capability, fall into the hands of Islamic Fundamentalists, our national security will have suffered irreparable damage. Iraq had no WMD. Pakistan is loaded with them:
As the Times article made clear, what “officials call the world’s worst case of nuclear proliferation”–in which sophisticated nuclear technology was supplied to Libya, Iran and other rogue nations–never would have been possible without the support of the Pakistani military. This is the same complex and powerful organization that made Pakistan a dictatorship in a 1999 coup by Musharraf. Yet within two years of this coup, Bush dropped US sanctions against Pakistan, showing clear disregard for international nonproliferation restraints. The rationale then and now was Pakistan’s alleged support in the “war on terrorism” after 9/11.
And despite the exposure of the Khan black market ring, nothing has changed: In a White House meeting Friday, Bush honored Musharraf–who since seizing power has purged his country’s Supreme Court and rewritten its constitution–as a “courageous leader.”
Once upon a time we backed a strong man leader of a major regional power in the Middle East. That man was the Shah of Iran. And we all know how that turned out: the creation of the world’s first fundamentalist Islamic Republic and a country whose leadership is unilaterally opposed to US interests. Now imagine what could happen if the “strong man” who is our principal ally in the War on Terror met the same fate as the Shah. Not a pretty picture, is it. Indeed, it would be far worse: an Islamic Republic that hates our guts, except this time it would be on with nuclear weapons.
Yet that is exactly where Bush’s failed policies with respect to his War on Terror are leading us: utter catastrophe.
Oh, the prize you won? You can tell everyone “I told you so” when the shit hits the fan. Lousy prize, I know, but we all have to make sacrifices in a time of war.
