The Af-Pak war is no longer about Al-Qaida, although you would not know that from main media reporting. It looks like the goal has morphed into a doomed desire to get access to oil and gas. Not so hard to believe when you consider that the US was planning to attack Iraq before 9/11, in order to secure oil supplies, no matter what they said publicly. This year, Greenspan admitted that the invasion was about oil.
After the initial invasion of Afghanistan, Al-Qaida moved out and the Afghans were not pacified. The objective is now to secure a route to central Asia either through Iran or through Pakistan & Afghanistan. The basic desire is to halt China’s growing influence in the region. Look for US-aided demands from minority groups to split up Pakistan, in particular the large southern province of Balochistan that has a brand new deep water port, connected to nowhere and only used by the US Navy. It is reported that the US is supplying Baloch guerillas on both sides of the Af-Pak border, who are used to fight the Pakistan army and stir up trouble in Iran.
At the same time, the US (and Israel) is citing the danger of nuclear arms, trying hard to mobilize international sentiment against Iran, and planning to “secure” Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. The excuse to redraw borders will probably come from fixing supposed “humanitarian crises” such that the long desired pipeline to central Asia can finally be built. The wars of the future will be about both land and resources.
China is winning the battle with capitalist investment that is much more attractive than America’s vaporware promises of freedom. American activities are ineffective, costly and brutal. America’s strategy of managed chaos is in tatters. The objectives of the US military are at odds with our myriad intelligence agencies and any coherent strategy. If the US doesn’t even know what its own forces (including private contractors) are doing what hope is there of knowing about the mercurial enemy? The secular Baloch movement has been supplied with arms, money and intelligence by the US and instructed to take the war to Tehran. Ironic that America complains of Iran’s terrorist activities.
As Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, University of California, Berkeley writes:
So, what does even a small snapshot of a multi-dimensional proxy war look like? The algebra is bewildering: The US funds the Pakistan army to eliminate the Taliban that they themselves created a little more than a decade ago; the same weapons are used against Baloch nationalists; the US also supplies weapons to the Baloch nationalists to kill the same Punjabi soldiers that are trying to annihilate the Taliban; the Baloch are funded by India against Iran; the US supplies Iranian Baloch with money and weapons to destabilize Tehran; the US humiliates the Pakistani Army and drives a rift between the military and the citizens; the Chinese and the Russians supply the Af-Pak Taliban against the US; Saudi Arabia funds the (Sunni) Af-Pak Taliban and the Baloch nationalists to weaken Shi’i Iran. Much to the chagrin of the Pakistani public and the Pakistani army, the United States’ security interests result in a deal whereby it gains control over Pakistan air bases at Pasni, Panjgur, and Dalbadin. The bases sit on a straight line from Gwadar going north into other US controlled bases in Afghanistan—it’s another straight line to Turkmenistan. The railway links proposed in the Gwadar Port Authority’s master-plan go through all three bases, right up to Helmand Province, where an additional 30,000 U.S soldiers will soon land to perform what one New York Times journalist called the “hammer and anvil” operation to exterminate the border-crossing tribesmen. [Scott Shane, “The War in Pashtunistan,” NYT, December 6, 2009.] Much like the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, no one really knows who is responsible for the urban “terrorist” attacks. Meanwhile, the Chinese quietly continue to fund and build their mega infrastructural projects in the north, mine copper in Afghanistan and extract minerals in Balochistan.
So it is small wonder that Representative Joe Sestak hasn’t answered the question “Why are we in Afghanistan?” I suppose his office will send me a package of our government administration’s boiler plate about democracy in a month or two. Meanwhile our soldiers, sitting in air conditioned offices in Phoenix, operate drones to kill the “bad guys” before going home to their families at the end of the day. Who knows or cares how many we have killed or wounded? By any metric, deaths, wounded or destruction, America is the number one terrorist.
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