IPS-English POLITICS-US: War on Terror Moves East
 
Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:26:43 -0800

 
Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 15  (IPS)  - The Pentagon's announcement here Tuesday
that it is dispatching some 3,200 marines to Afghanistan underlines
both Washington's mounting concern about the strength of the Taliban
insurgency and the growing sense here that the central front in its
nearly six-and-a-half-year-old ”war on terror” has moved back to its
South Asian roots.

The deployment, which will take place over the next three months,
will bring the total number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to a record
level of some 30,000 -- still significantly less than the 160,000
in Iraq but nonetheless an implicit admission that U.S. and NATO forces
have not been able to subdue the largely Pashtun rebels.

Indeed, on the eve of the Pentagon's announcement, a suicide bomber
penetrated a luxury hotel in Kabul itself, setting off a blast that
killed more than half a dozen people, including a U.S. citizen and
a Norwegian reporter covering the visit of his country's foreign minister,
in what the New York Times called ”one of the most brazen assaults
by the Taliban in the heavily protected heart of the Afghan capital...”

The still-shaky security situation in Afghanistan, however, is not
Washington's only concern in the region. 

Continuing political uncertainties in the wake of former Prime Minister
Benazir Bhutto's assassination in neighbouring Pakistan, where a number
of disparate Islamist and Pashtun militias have recently united under
the leadership of a Pakistani Taliban commander closely allied with
al Qaeda, have propelled that nuclear-armed nation to the top of Washington's
national security agenda.

Indeed, the assertion that ”Pakistan is the world's most dangerous
place” has become a new cliche of foreign policy discourse here in
recent weeks. 

Last month, Defence Secretary Robert Gates highlighted that concern,
noting that ”Al Qaeda right now seems to have turned its face toward
Pakistan and attacks on the Pakistani government and Pakistani people,”
he asserted, just a week before Bhutto's assassination.

Her killing, as well as indications that Pakistan's deeply unpopular
president and former army chief, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was manoeuvring
to first delay and then to manipulate elections now scheduled for
next month, renewed a growing policy debate over what conditions,
if any, Washington should attach to its nearly 1.5 billion dollars
in mainly military aid to Pakistan this year.

Indeed, the Pentagon's quiet announcement late on Dec. 31, just two
days after Bhutto's assassination, that it had approved the transfer
by defence giant Lockheed Martin of 18 F-16 warplanes to Pakistan
fueled criticism that the administration's priorities were badly skewed.

”The decision to go ahead with a half-billion sale of advanced fighter
aircraft to Pakistan shows how dangerous misguided President Bush's
policy is: How can the White House even think of green-lighting such
a sale at such an incredibly sensitive time,” said the chairman of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden.

”It sends exactly the wrong message to the Pakistani generals, and
to the Pakistani people. This is the time we should be putting the
pressure on the government and military to fully investigate the assassination
of Benazir Bhutto and to hold free and fair elections -- not let them
off the hook,” he said.

And while Biden and others argued that military aid should be conditioned
on political reform, other critics have focused on recent reports
that most of the 11 billion dollars the U.S. has provided Pakistan
over the past five years has been used to buy conventional weapons
systems more appropriate for war against India than the increasingly
powerful Pakistani Taliban based in the Pashtun-dominated Federally
Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Northwest Frontier Province
(NWF).

”The F-16s really can't be used for counter-insurgency in FATA,”
according to Steve Coll, author of the prize-winning history of the
CIA, Afghanistan, and al Qaeda from 1979 to 9/11, ”Ghost Wars” and
president of the New America Foundation (NAF). ”The F-16s are a symbol
of what has been wrong with U.S. aid to Pakistan.”

Increasingly worried about the advances made by the Pakistani Taliban
under Baitullah Mehsud -- whom Musharraf blamed for Bhutto's assassination
-- and the ineffectiveness of the Pakistani military in fighting it,
top U.S. officials have been discussing plans to authorise the CIA
and Special Operations Forces (SOF) to mount cross-border operations
from Afghanistan against key Taliban and al Qaeda targets.

Such actions, however, would trigger a severe backlash against both
the U.S., whose popularity in Pakistan, like Musharraf's, is at an
all-time low, and any Pakistani leader who was seen as condoning the
raids, according to regional specialists. Musharraf himself has publicly
denounced the idea, although he has occasionally permitted missile
strikes against specific targets by U.S. aircraft based in Afghanistan.

”It would be political suicide for a Pakistani leader to permit (such
operations),” said Peter Berger, the co-director with Coll of the
NAF's Terrorism and Counter-Insurgency Initiative and a well-regarded
expert on al Qaeda and the region. 

”(Popular) approval for (Osama) bin Laden goes up to 70 percent in
FATA and the Northwest Frontier,” he added noting that one recent
survey showed that three out of four Pakistanis nationwide oppose
U.S. intervention.

The administration is also reportedly mulling plans to try to replicate
what it considers a success in Pakistan -- supporting Pashtun clan
militias that are willing to take on Mehsud and his Taliban, although
scores of clan leaders who might have taken up arms were executed
or replaced by various Taliban factions over the last several years.


A related option -- which appears to be the operational strategy
at the moment -- is to ensure that at least some U.S. military aid
is tied to specific performance, step up counter-insurgency training
for the army and the paramilitary Frontier Corps, and provide 750
million dollars in development aid to FATA over five years as part
of a long-term effort to weaken the insurgency.

But Christine Fair, a regional specialist at the Rand Corporation,
has argued that such a plan is ”four years too late” given the degree
to which radical forces have taken control of the region. ”I'm not
sure who we would spend it on,” she said at a recent briefing.

U.S. officials are also hoping that next month's elections will produce
a large moderate and secular majority in parliament, oust the radical
coalition of Islamist parties that currently control regional governments
in the Pashtun belt, the NWF, and Baluchistan, and help restore confidence
in the central government which has been badly battered by Musharraf's
efforts over the past year to remain in power.

Meanwhile, Washington hopes that the additional troops next door
will help both stabilise Afghanistan and shame its reluctant NATO
allies into sending more troops to the same end. Of the 3,200 new
troops, about 1,000 will be used for training the Afghan Army, and
the rest will be deployed to southern Afghanistan to fight the Taliban
alongside British, Australian, Dutch and Canadian troops, who have
taken record casualties during the past year. 



*****
+ PAKISTAN: Beset By Multiple Crises (http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40791)
+ RIGHTS: Afghan Prison Looks Like Another Guantanamo (http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40786)
+ Afghan Divide (http://www.ipsnews.net/afghanistan/index.asp)


(END/IPS/NA/AP/IP/HD/BW/AN/PK/JL/KS/08)


 
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