Grisly foundations
Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur
July 31.2007
The US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates told a congressional panel in May that the US has military missions in the tribal area to go after al Qaeda leaders hiding there. At a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Mr. Gates said al Qaeda had established training facilities in Fata and the extremist leaders based there also had links to terror cells in other parts of the world. ?We know that al Qaeda has re-established itself in Fata on the western border of Pakistan where they are training new recruits. But we do have military operations that are planned?not just in North Waziristan and Iraq, but in other places as well, to go after the al Qaeda leadership,? he added. And Frances Townsend, Homeland Security Adviser to President Bush has said, ?Our job No 1 is to protect the American people. There are no options off the table.?
So the recent US pronouncements about striking ?actionable targets? in Pakistan at their discretion cannot be ruled out as empty threats or simply attempts at putting pressure on Musharraf to do more to destroy the bases in which the Taliban find succour and refuge. It is an integral part of their strategy and they are as serious as serious can be for the simple reason that they are bogged down in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, a future that gets bleaker by the day. Friends and allies don?t figure much in US strategy when it sees its interests taking a pounding at the hands of the rag-tag Taliban, which it had presumably defeated and dispersed with the high tech air war after 9/11 and who it thought would be drowned in the billions that Karzai would get.
The big question is when and if the US will actually carry out its threat of such drastic measures. If we look at history we see that this action is not only possible but is inevitable. We could see the US attacking these ?safe havens? very soon. Why? Simply because the US is afflicted by what Hannah Ardent has said in her book, Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers, and is quoted by Noam Chomsky in his book, For Reasons of State. He says, ??in which she has discussed a variety of rather different irrational factors that impelled policy makers in Vietnam.? ?The ultimate aim,? she concludes, ?was neither power nor profit.... [Nor] particular tangible interests,? but rather ?image making, something new in the huge arsenal of follies?. Now it is the neo-con image which is being made and this is vastly more dangerous than the 70s.
And what was the cost of that image making? Arundhati Roy in her foreword to Chomsky?s book tells us, ?It was a war that lasted more than twelve years. Fifty eight thousand Americans and approximately two million Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians lost their lives. The US deployed half a million ground troops, dropped more than six million tons of bombs.?
Why were Cambodia and Laos destroyed although they were not involved in fighting and were neutral? Only because they were considered sanctuaries for the Vietnamese fighters. Similarly today, FATA and Waziristan are considered active sanctuaries for the Taliban. The Pentagon Papers tell us: ?In January 1967 the Commander in Chief in Pacific expressed his concern to the Joint Chiefs of Staff over the infiltration through Cambodia and the importance of the ?sanctuary? as source of supplies, particularly rice.? The sanctuaries here are more than just rice suppliers. In the same year the Chief of Staff of the Republic of Vietnam said, ?We have to solve the problem of Laos and Cambodia and the sanctuaries or the war might last 30 years.? I suppose the advice of the Afghan government and army won?t be different and neither will be the US reaction.
My prediction that we could see action very soon is based on the history of the US approach to a ?lost war? as it had done in Cambodia and Laos during its mauling by the brave Vietnamese people in the 60s and 70s. The military minds at the Strategic Command have always failed to consider the ?human factor? in wars. They grossly miscalculated in Vietnam and now in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US thinks it is losing the war in Afghanistan due to the ?safe havens? that exist in FATA and Waziristan in the same way that it thought that they were losing the Vietnam War due to the ?safe havens? in Cambodia and Laos at that time. The US thinks the same solution will solve the problem though it hadn?t then.
The result of indiscriminate and brutal bombing of those countries didn?t affect the final outcome of the war in Vietnam as the images of fleeing US personnel from the roof of the US Embassy are one of the most telling images of the past century. And neither will it affect the outcome here. However the countries that came under its classification of ?safe havens? are still suffering due to the ravages of its military and political strategies; here too sufferings will be on an unheard of scale. Cambodia eventually ended up with the likes of Pol Pot. The fate that awaits this region could be even more terrifying.
Cambodia or Kampuchea and Laos were neutral and yet couldn?t avoid US aggression. We on the other hand are at an absolute disadvantage because the government here has sold its right to resist US aggression for the few measly dollars that have reluctantly left Uncle Sam?s pocket. They have paid only when certain conditions have been met or certain actions carried out; the payments have been performance related. The right to resist was forfeited with the threat from Armitage and the phone call from Colin Powell. The suddenness and comprehensiveness of submission and capitulation had left even that incorrigible bully flabbergasted and stupefied.
They have already gauged our responses and plumbed our depths by bombings innocents in Damadola and Bajaur. They know that Tasnim Aslam will politely ask them to refrain. They have never cared a whit for people anywhere and when they have ?to protect the American people? they stop at no frontiers. So we will soon have open season in the areas they have earmarked for destruction.
The frontier region and parts of Balochistan are littered with al Qaeda ?safe havens? and sanctuaries, of which the Pakistan government has been in constant denial. The US will have no second thoughts about bombing ?actionable targets? that it considers al Qaeda hideouts. It should be pointed out that the US always uses innocuous terms for targets that are very much flesh and blood. They also invent terms like ?collateral damage? to deprive the human casualties of humanness and just make them a technical irrelevance.
Abdullah Mehsud?s being killed in Zhob is an indicator of the fact that the militants in Fata know that US is very soon going to start a war of drones, Predators and Hellfire missiles. Recent news reports reveal the exodus of people from Fata: ?Thousands of villagers streamed out of Macha Mandakhel village, 40 km west of Miranshah, after the army warned it would be cracking down in the wake of an attack on a convoy which killed 12 soldiers last week. There are also reports that soldiers, fearful of suicide attacks, have opened fire on cars approaching their check posts too fast.?
National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and Ms Townsend have both expressed the desire to first back Pakistan?s efforts to force the extremists out of the tribal region. This policy will leave the army embroiled in a war of attrition against people it claims to be its citizens, just to keep the US from carrying out strikes against targets here. And if these actions are not deemed sufficient for their needs, they will do the needful. If all the fighting and killing there to date has failed to appease Washington, logically nothing less than total annihilation of people in the border region will be deemed sufficient by them.
Pakistan is caught between the US and the militants who were first trained and nurtured by the US to fight against the Soviet Union. It has no space to manoeuvre itself out of the fix it finds itself in, which is mostly of its own making. Even before they could initiate any action against the militants, the militants went on the offensive with a spate of suicide bombings aimed specifically at the armed forces.
This will be a long drawn out war, with the US using its high tech air power to dent and damage al Qaeda, but the brunt of the militants? attacks will be borne by the Pakistan Army at a huge human cost because the militants will not keep the theatre of war confined to the frontier regions alone. They will certainly try to demoralize the army by attacking it and civilian populations in cities of its choice. It is a ?no win? situation for Pakistan right from the beginning and for the US in the long run.
Arundhati Roy has forcefully expressed her views in her foreword to For Reasons of State to show the real face of the US and what it is capable of doing. She says, ?After announcing air strikes against Afghanistan Bush had said, ?We are a peaceful nation.? He went on to say, ?This is the calling of the USA, the most free nation in the world, a nation built on fundamental values that reject hate, reject violence, reject murderers, reject evil. And we will not tire.??
Arundhati Roy says, ?The US empire rests on grisly foundations: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, stealing their lands, and following this, the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle across continents. Stolen from Africa, brought to America ? Bob Marley?s Buffalo Soldier contains a whole universe of unspeakable sadness. It tells of the loss of dignity, the loss of wilderness, the loss of freedom, the shattered pride of a people. Genocide and slavery provide the social and economic underpinning of the nation whose fundamental values reject hate, murderers and evil.? The writer has been associated with the Baloch national struggle |
