Obama to extend US attacks in Pakistan

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Obama to extend US attacks in Pakistan
By James Cogan
8 December 2009

President Obama’s deployment of 30,000 additional American troops to
Afghanistan will be accompanied by increased US attacks inside
Pakistan. According to the New York Times, the White House is
pressuring the Pakistani government to allow US forces to assassinate
alleged Taliban leaders in the province of Balochistan. The US claims
that Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, is directing the insurgency
against the US-led occupation of Afghanistan from the city of Quetta,
the provincial capital.

The US military has been using unmanned Predator drones to kill
Islamist militants in Pakistan’s tribal area bordering Afghanistan
since 2001. After Obama took office, the attacks became more frequent.
Of the estimated 80 strikes since mid-2008, most were ordered by
Obama. At least 400 alleged Islamist militants have been killed and an
unknown number of civilians. The Pakistani government publicly opposes
these covert operations but makes no attempt to prevent them and its
intelligence agencies are believed to collaborate with the CIA in
identifying targets.

The attacks to this point have been limited to the tribal agencies,
which are remote border areas thinly populated by predominantly ethnic
Pashtun subsistence farmers. Generally, there is no on-the-spot media
coverage of the results of Predator strikes. Quetta, by contrast, has
a population of some 800,000 people and is one of the country’s most
important urban centres. Any US attack inside the city would be highly
publicised and provoke nationwide outrage. Most Pakistanis oppose the
US occupation of Afghanistan and sympathise to some extent with the
armed resistance against it.

The Obama administration is nevertheless intent on pursuing this
reckless and politically explosive course of action as part of its
escalating AfPak War.

Various press reports indicate that Pakistan was a central issue in
the protracted White House discussions over how to respond to the
burgeoning Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. Afghan guerillas use
Pakistani territory as a safe haven, training area and recruiting zone.

An unnamed US official, cited in an article in the Washington Post on
November 30, stated: “We can’t succeed without Pakistan.” Another told
the New York Times on November 25: “We agree that no matter how many
troops you send, if the safe haven in Pakistan isn’t cracked, the
whole mission is compromised.”

According to the Washington Post, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
delivered a message to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari during her
visit to Islamabad last month that the White House wanted his
government to give greater cooperation in fighting five organisations
that the US claims are involved in the Afghan insurgency.

The organisations named were Al Qaeda; the Afghan Taliban led by
Mullah Omar; the militias commanded by Jalaluddin Haqqani, which
control much of the tribal agency of North Waziristan; the Pakistani
Taliban or Tehrik-e-Taliban which was largely based among the ethnic
Pashtun tribes in South Waziristan; and the militant Islamist
movement, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is blamed for the 2008 terrorist
attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai that killed 173 people.

The Pakistani military, under US pressure, has already conducted major
operations against Tehrik-e-Taliban in South Waziristan, other tribal
agencies and areas of North West Frontier Province. In the past few
months, hundreds of alleged Islamist militants have been killed and
over 400,000 tribal civilians forced to flee their homes.

However, no move has been made against the Haqqani network and the
Afghan insurgent bases in North Waziristan. In US military circles,
the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has been
repeatedly accused of maintaining close relations with the Afghan
Taliban and Haqqani. The ISI actively assisted the Taliban to come to
power in Afghanistan between 1994 and 1996 and supported its
government until the eve of the US invasion in late 2001.

There are even greater suspicions of links between sections of the
Pakistani military and Lashkar-e-Taiba. The ISI sponsored
Lashkar-e-Taiba in the 1990s when it was primarily focused on waging a
guerrilla war against Indian rule in Kashmir. Its militants are
believed to be concentrated in areas of Pakistan’s main province, Punjab.

US demands for the destruction of the Islamist networks were spelt out
in a two-page letter from Obama that was delivered to Zardari by
National Security Advisor and former marine general James Jones.

The web site Stratfor, which has links to US intelligence agencies,
reported on December 1 that it had been told by reliable sources that
the “Obama administration’s tone toward Pakistan’s current civilian
government resembles the tone adopted by the Bush administration
toward the Musharraf regime in the aftermath of September 11”.

By “tone”, Stratfor is referring to ultimatums. Former Pakistani
dictator Pervez Musharraf revealed in 2006 that he was told in 2001 by
Richard Armitage, Bush’s Deputy Secretary of State, that Pakistan
would be bombed “back to the Stone Age” if his government did not
cooperate with the overthrow of the Taliban.

Eight years later, the White House can deliver somewhat more nuanced
threats. The Pakistani state is on the brink of bankruptcy and depends
upon the regular injection of emergency funds from the International
Monetary Fund and directly from the US. Summing up the relationship
between Pakistan and the US, Zulfiqar Magsi, the governor of
Balochistan province, told the Daily Times: “You cannot oppose someone
who pays you money. The US is paying money to Pakistan. How can we
oppose it? It will do whatever it pleases.”

Obama has essentially told Islamabad that it must allow the US to even
more flagrantly violate Pakistan’s national sovereignty. It has been
instructed to launch a costly and unpopular military offensive in
North Waziristan, crack down on Islamist activity in the major cities
and submit to Predator strikes in Balochistan.

There are some signs that the entry into Pakistan of US special
forces’ hit squads, to hunt down and execute Taliban leaders, has also
been discussed. American ground troops have only crossed the border on
one known previous occasion. In September 2008, an alleged militant
compound was stormed in the tribal agency of South Waziristan. The
result was the death of an estimated 20 civilians, including women and
young children.

Zardari’s collaboration with Obama’s escalation of the AfPak War is
certain to provoke intense opposition within the Pakistani military
and the population more broadly. The president is already deeply
unpopular due to the catastrophic state of the Pakistani economy. The
value of the currency has plunged by 35 percent, triggering massive
price rises for essential goods and services. Electricity and petrol
prices have doubled in the past two years.

In a bid to stave off a move against him over long-standing corruption
allegations, Zardari last month handed over control of the country’s
nuclear arsenal to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani and is promising
to give back other powers that were taken from the parliament during
Musharraf’s dictatorship. The extension of US strikes to Balochistan,
however, may well be the final straw that leads to the fall of his
administration, barely 15 months after it came to power.

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/paki-d08.shtml

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