Provocative (?) week ends
with a bang: Unhappy Paki campers capture Army HQ.
“Yankees come on down?”
An ugly bloody week over there — now capped by an assault on a Paki Army headquarters.
From the London Daily Telly:
The daring assault, a few miles from the capital, was the third significant terrorist attack in Pakistan this a week. A suicide bomb attack on a UN headquarters killed five, and more than fifty people died when a huge car bomb exploded in a bazaar in the city of Peshawar.
Saturday’s attack seemed intended to show that the Taliban can still strike at the very heart of Pakistan’s security apparatus despite recent military operations against their forces and the killing of Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in a drone attack in August.
The attackers may have been trying to kill army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who was inside the complex on Saturday, although it was not clear whether he was there during the attack. Military statements said he attended meetings there and at the president’s office in nearby Islamabad during the day.
It’s as if the so-called Pakistan Taliban, campers unhappy with the feebly pro-Western central government, don’t want the Yankees to go home after all.
For it’s the best guess, stateside, that this week’s attacks will support Pentagon and CIA warmakers in their recently convened public debate with the White House — especially if the Paki Army now throws up its hands and shouts to Stanley McChrystal across the border, Heck, come on down and we’ll kick some rebel ass!
From an Associated Press story:
The government said the assault on the headquarters …had strengthened its resolve to push into South Wazristan — a mountainous region where security forces have been beaten back by insurgents before.
The spasm of violence was confirmation that the militants had regrouped despite recent military operations against their forces and the killing of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in a CIA drone attack in August. His replacement vowed just last week to step up attacks around the country and repel any push into Waziristan.
Sounds like something that could snowball into the party war I’d imagined was in the works last December when erstwhile CIA Director General Michael Hayden declared war on/in Pakistan.
Perhaps this week’s attacks are expressions of native alienation from Islamabad pure and simple, and nothing more.
Or perhaps there’s bona fide provocation at work, maybe by American warmakers looking to win the debate and close the deal, or merely by Moscow, smiling on the sidelines like a Cheshire cat as it arms the resistance, turnabout being fair play and revenge a dish best served cold.
It may be worth recalling: Bush-Cheney called Mullah Omar and his merry band on the carpet in January and (if memory serves) May of 2001 — trying to get them to work with Houston’s Unocal on the Caspian basin pipeline, rather than Argentina’s Bridas.
But Omar grew sullen. And in midsummer (as voices from Tony Blair’s gov’t have reported) Bush-Cheney told the NATO folk to saddle up for the ride into Kabul.
It seems fair, then, to say that we did not go to Afghanistan to Get Osama. Our reasons for remaining there remain obscure. No good reasons are evident.
If this week’s attacks are native affairs, let the Paki apparatus, half of which hates Uncle Sam’s guts, handle them.
And if the attacks are more than meets the eye? Then all the better for the American President to resist the mousetrap cheese.
Neither the various forces labelled Taliban nor the meeting of minds referred to as al Qaeda are things a Pentagon can dismantle. Wars on terror are won or lost largely between the ears.
Obama knows this. Evidence: The Cairo and recent UN speeches. That he initiated the current public debate — saying Woah on a Sunday talk show — remains hopeful.
But whether he has the power and the nerve to turn off the Aimless war he cheerleaded and then inherited is far from clear.
He strode during the campaign last year, smiling and waving, into a near perfect trap, like Jesus entering Jerusalem on his ass. There are certainly elements of tragedy in this, but also of Obama’s particular great-souled naivete.
Hillary (whom I also admire) was the one to feed to this sausage grinder. She was ready for battle and knows how to take a bullet. Romney seems a good bet to be president four years hence: a time and place I don’t want to be.
ed says:
Wow. A boffo Times puff piece on Mullah Omar, the Come Back Taliban Kid in Afghanistan:
High concept, Bruce! — Bonaparte, MacArthur and the Mullah O– hey I got the freakin’ poster!
Omar will always lack Osama’s elegance and mystery for the american audience.
But in a pinch he will do.
October 10th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
ed says:
And from Counterpunch, details again eerily reminiscent of Ed Lansdale and company in Vietnam:
“Better Killing” — Anthropology Goes to War in Afghanistan.
Petraeus is indeed the geophilopolitical godson of Lansdale.
October 10th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
ed says:
Frank Rich in the Sunday Times blasts the Surgemeisters and their flacks:
QUOTE
The measure [Sen. Joseph] Lieberman endorses — Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s reported recommendation of 40,000 additional troops — is … counterinsurgency light.
In his definitive recent field manual on the subject, Gen. David Petraeus stipulates that real counterinsurgency requires 20 to 25 troops for each thousand residents.
That comes out, conservatively, to 640,000 troops for Afghanistan (population, 32 million). Some 535,000 American troops couldn’t achieve a successful counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, which had half Afghanistan’s population and just over a quarter of its land area.
END QUOTE
October 11th, 2009 at 12:03 am
ed says:
The Cockburn piece here makes the case that Obama surrendered to the militarists before the battle began.
October 11th, 2009 at 12:36 am
ed says:
Al Jazerra reports Paki SWATters have stormed the HQ and put an end to the business. Four hostages killed, 25 freed.
QUOTE
They’re not yet sure “who was behind the attack.”
But, nevertheless, an invasion of Warizistan is now called for. ??
If Stanley joins the hunting party, then …
But surely that won’t happen. The Pakis hate the Yankees and have told them to go home innumerable times. Surely Stanley stays put. Surely …
October 11th, 2009 at 1:47 am
ed says:
Paul Street complained in articulate fashion about the Prize and Obama’s war-making trail so far.
I replied:
Nevertheless, he did say Woah on a Sunday talk show a few weeks ago, triggering the current Pakghanistan policy debate — and outing McChrystal.
My blog the past 11 months is full of disapppointed rants re the people Obama kept on or hired atop the Nat’l Security Apparat, including one headlined with Orwell’s name after the surreal scene in Strasbourg.
But to think Obama had much of a choice about, eg, Stanley Mac’s appointment is perhaps to overestimate a callow president’s power to reject the truths and advice of the Briefers of the Apparat.
His chief failing, it seems to me, is that of an ingenue, not a Kissinger; and those of us who elected the ingenue bear some responsibility.
During the campaign I thought Hillary was the better choice to feed into this sausage grinder. She was ready for battle and knows how to take a bullet. Obama seemed better suited as her successor.
One goes to peace with the President one has. The policy at this moment is in the air, and for the first time since Gates-Mullen picked up pieces post Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz. If Obama fails to make this opportunity a turning point, I’ll jump on the wagon damning him simply.
But I’m hoping he manages to execute a change in rough accord with the Cairo speech that will mark the end of the beginning of his foreign policy odyssey.
October 11th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
ed says:
Events tumbling upon one another in Pakistan:
Terror bombs kill 26 and wound over 100 in Ramadi, a provincial capital.
Islamabad hits South Waziristan (that was quick) (almost too quick) along the Afghan border with aircraft, tenderizing, reports say, for a ground invasion.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:39 am
ed says:
Here’s a thread to follow the Paki invasion of South Waziristan — coupled, days later, with the shocking suicide bomb attack not far across the border (and south) in Iran.
And let’s go to a new thread to continue following the Pakghanistan policy debate in Washington.
If Obama caves in here and escalates — after saying Woah weeks ago and marshalling the forces for orderly withdrawal — he crosses his Rubicon, almost surely.
And hands the next election to Romney, ala mode LBJ to Nixon.
October 15th, 2009 at 12:43 am