Even Netenyahu could not have predicted this mess:
Our supply lines for Afghanistan run through Pakistan!
The German weekly Der Spiegel reported in mid-December that at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Allied Joint Force Command in Brunssum, the Netherlands, and at NATO military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, top-secret strategy games have been held about worst-case scenarios in Afghanistan.
That may turn out to be smart forward thinking. The computer simulations assumed that if the situation in Pakistan were to spin out of control, the Taliban would get a free run on the border regions with Afghanistan, and NATO’s supply lines through Pakistan might be jeopardized.
snipOne of the NATO strategy games apparently simulated the withdrawal of the troops from Afghanistan that had been cut off from supplies.
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In November, USA Today quoted Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell as saying that the US military was reviewing contingency plans in case unrest in Pakistan began to affect the flow of supplies for American troops fighting in Afghanistan. He underscored that the supply lines were “very real areas of concern”, since three-quarters of the supplies for the 26,000-strong US military deployment in Afghanistan flowed via Pakistan by land and air. “Clearly, we do not like the situation we find ourselves in right now,” Morrell commented.
No wonder we were really to put a tribal dynasty, supportive of Israel and Netenyahu’s war on terror, in charge of Pakistan.
When it rains it pours….call it BLOWBACK!
The summit is expected to focus on Afghanistan. A troop surge in Afghanistan is most likely in the cards.
snipOn the other hand, NATO allies stubbornly refuse to pay heed to Washington’s calls for increased troop contributions. European opinion is steadily turning against the war in Afghanistan.
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But where will the additional troops come from?
snipNATO allies stubbornly refuse to pay heed to Washington’s calls for increased troop contributions. European opinion is steadily turning against the war in Afghanistan. In Germany, the latest opinion polls, in December, indicated that half the population favored withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. The same is the case in Canada. In the event of an opposition victory in this year’s parliamentary election, a withdrawal of Canadian troops will be likely. The Dutch have already decided to pull out. It may trigger a domino effect. The Czech Republic, Denmark and Norway are already in the process of withdrawing their troops from northern Afghanistan.
NATO’s difficulties mounting
All signs are that the war effort is deteriorating. What is taking place is the syndrome in which the Soviet occupying troops in the 1980s found themselves trapped – tactical achievements but a potential strategic failure.
Contrary to NATO propaganda, the Taliban seem to face no difficulty in recruiting new volunteers from a vast pool of disaffected Afghans. This is quite understandable, since, as an Asia Foundation survey in December assessed, some 80% of Afghans are disillusioned with the Kabul government.
snipThe Washington Post has separately reported that planning for the proposed US military deployment in Pakistan is already underway at the headquarters of the US Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida. The report characterized the proposed counterinsurgency campaign as a “vivid example of the American military’s asserting a bigger role in a part of Pakistan that the Central Intelligence Agency has overseen almost exclusively since September 11”.
This can’t possibly help oil prices.
Just in case you have not seen this:
Since her death at an assassin’s hands last Thursday, former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto has been virtually canonized by politicians and pundits alike.
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Nowhere to be found in these paeans is any acknowledgment of the slain politician’s far more ambiguous record, a close examination of which reveals the saint to have been all too human: specifically, as authoritarian and venal as any run-of-the-mill Third World despot. During Bhutto’s second government (1993-1996), for example, the human rights advocacy group Amnesty International had cause to publish reports with titles like “Pakistan: Use and Abuse of the Blasphemy Laws”, “Pakistan: The Pattern Persists; Torture, Deaths in Custody, Disappearances and Extrajudicial Executions under the PPP Government”; “Pakistan: Executions under the Qisas and Diyat Ordinance” and “Pakistan: Appeal to Ban Public Flogging.”
With its feudal levy of sharecropper-voters, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) headed by Bhutto (and her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, before her) has never exactly been a model of democratic practice. As for personal mores, there are the charges of corruption which have persistently dogged both Benazir Bhutto and her plutocratic husband (and environment minister), Asif Ali Zardari, and led to her government falling constitutionally not once, but twice.
Incidentally, the new widower, who will now share the leadership of the PPP with the couple’s 19-year-old son, Bilawal, is still the subject of court proceedings not just in Pakistan but also in England (where a High Court has uncovered ownership of a 365-acre Surrey estate that his family long denied possessing) and Switzerland (where magistrates have frozen more than US$13 million in allegedly illicit proceeds).
The point of recalling these sordid details is not to highlight Bhutto’s political and personal shortcomings, but rather to observe that they produced not insignificant consequences. Without making excuses for President Pervez Musharraf’s less-than-stellar record with respect to dealing with Islamist extremists – much less for the motivations of Bhutto’s assassin – there is no denying that the failure of Benazir Bhutto’s two administrations to make real progress on factors which mattered was a major sin of omission – an oversight that contributed its share to the crisis currently faced by Pakistan and the world.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/S...
And
Bhutto tribe fighting over the leavings:
The elevation of Benazir Bhutto’s husband and teenage son to replace her as leaders of Pakistan’s largest opposition party is reopening fissures that have divided the powerful political family for decades.
To Mumtaz Bhutto, the septuagenarian patriarch of the 700,000-strong Bhutto tribe, Asif Ali Zardari and his son, Bilawal, are interlopers. He said the leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party should have gone to “a real Bhutto”.
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Mr Bhutto’s comments reflect the important roles that family, tribe and ethnicity continue to play in Pakistani politics 60 years after independence from British colonial rule, and one reason why democracy has failed to put down strong roots.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/...