Taliban
You have only those rights you're willing to enforce
--Jean Luc Piccard
Afghanistan is not only the mirror of the Afghans:
it is the mirror of the world.
"If you do not like the image in the mirror,
do not break the mirror, break your face,"
says an old Persian proverb
--Taliban, Ahmed Rashid
“You always said about them,
‘best friend, worst enemy’ ”
--U.S. intel agent
____________________
[Today's entry is Pt. II to, "Shoot the Enemy"]
Christopher Hitchens stated the obvious today, "Pakistan is the Enemy", and so comes the second read Ranger will suggest in understanding the backfield story to Afghanistan, --Ahmed Rashid's "Taliban -- Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" (YUP, 2000).
Rashid, a Pakistani journalist, gives a scholarly deconstruction of the Taliban in three parts: The history of the Taliban; Islam and the Taliban and The New Great Game. The issue is complex and this is not a book for summary; it should be digested slowly in order for the parts to fall into place.
Studying the Taliban is like exploring the fault lines of a tectonic plate dividing the fringes of the differing civilizations of the Central Asian area, with a shift in one area felt hundreds of miles away. Likewise, the shifts caused by the U.S. interventions are affecting the solidity of life within the U.S. borders. The earth is shifting beneath our feet as our foreign policies add pressure to our own deep fault lines.
The violent kingmakers of the Haqqani tribe -- the "Sopranos of Afghanistan" -- are closely allied with Pakistan's ISI and the Taliban ("Brutal Haqqani Crime Clan Bedevils U.S. in Afghanistan"). Taliban leader Mohammed Mullah Omar stated recently he has no interest in a monopolization of power. These groups reject the imposition of a western concept of centralized government. Q.E.D.
The present war is just as much about us as it is about them.
Labels: afghanistan, ahmed rashid, pakistan, phony war on terror, PWOT
posted by rangeragainstwar at 11:23 PM
7 Comments:
Pakistan is the enemy of whom, jim?
The U.S.?
Hitchens certainly thinks so, but that old drunk has been wrong about the Middle East since before he ranted about invading Iraq. He's...well, he's a drunk.
They're certainly the enemy of India. And because of that, they're the enemy of our proxy in Kabul, Karzai, because Karzai had cozied up to the Indians. I've got a post up at GFT stating the obvious; the Pakis will not stand for a government in Kabul that doesn't have their back 100%. Tha Talibs did, the Karzaites don't.
It's really not that complex. Yes, the story of the Taliban IS twisted, but this isn't.
1: The rivalry with India is THE most important Pakistani foreign policy issue.
1: Pakistan will use anything - including Taliban allies - to pressure any neighboring powers not favorably aligned with them on the above, and they consider the Karzai government soft on India.
2: We support the Karzaites, therefore, as such we are a potential target for the Pakistani foreign policy objective of replacing the current regime in Kabul with one that they like.
1+1=2
So the earth is shifting beneath out feet not because of any sort of new movement, but because we have based our Afghan strategy on a buttery slope; the notion that the Pakistanis will support our actions if they negatively impact their military/political position re: India.
They haven't changed; it was our assessment of the politics of the region that has always been fucked up.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica
and
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/mcchrystal-network/all/1
Hmmm.
And here's another way of looking at this;
Right now we're all in a fluster about AfPak.
But the big-picture geopolitics of the southcentral Asian region is that India is and probably always will be a bigger, more important player than Pakistan.
So to piss the Indians off by installing a virulently anti-Indian regime in Kabul isn't really in the U.S.'s long-term interest there.
But...it IS in Pakistan's best interests.
So we're faced with two mutually exclusive things; we either torque Kabul into rejecting any accomodation with India to placate the Pakis to gain a short-term advantage over the Talibs in Afghanistan (which is really strategically insignificant as a factor in southcentral Asia) and irritate the Indians over the long term...or we stand by as/encourage our Kabul proxy deals with India and accept that this means the Pakis are going to use whatever means they can lay their hands on to effect regime change in Kabul.
Ergo, I don't see any neat way out of this. Certainly I don't see us with enough leverage to force the Pakis into accepting the status quo, which is clearly unfavorable to their immediate best interests as they see them.
Chief,1500,
Here we are 10 years in and the Chairman/JCS can't figure out who is the enemy!!!!Read all the op-ed pieces this week id'ing PAK as the enemy ,AND NOT ONE THING HAS CHANGED IN THE LAST 20 YEARS. Give or take.
Strange days.
jim
Anon,
per your 2nd link on McC i cannot ever accept the truth of the statement that ANY MILITARY UNIT is the best defense against any T atk.
I also do not believe that killing Talibs or any Irq'is is preventing any future terror atks.How did it ever come to this.
The McC template follows the SS and makes US SOC a criminal organization. IMO.
jim
Chief,1100,
Your analysis sums it up very succinctly.
It's rather evident that the neocons just didn't do their homework.
jim
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