btchd

As Gore Vidal said once, “we are the United States of Amnesia.” We are. We don’t read. We don’t know other languages. We don’t study our own history. Our history is the history of an idea – an imperfect idea.

Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines hosted a fantastic debate of various experts discussing the Bush legacy of torture.

The panel includes:

Michael Scheuer – Former CIA Analyst
Jumana Musa – Human Rights Lawyer
Larry Wilkerson – former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell
Jim Moran – US Congressman

While the discussion does cover many of the things covered in the media, some of comments made by the panelists are fantastic, including Wilkerson’s explanation in response to an audience question about the implications of not doing anything:

They’re serious in terms of diminishment of our real power in the world, because our real power is as much wrapped around an idea as it is around the military, nuclear weapons or whatever. We’re unique in that  respect in the world and so many Americans seem not realize that, because they don’t know our history.

As Gore Vidal said once, “we are the United States of Amnesia.” We are. We don’t read. We don’t know other languages. We don’t study our own history. Our history is the history of an idea – an imperfect idea. Our constitution made people like you slaves, made them three fifths of a person. Our constitution has changed.

We’ve grown. We’ve moved towards that more perfect union. We ain’t there yet. We never will be there. But that idea is our most powerful weapon in the world and we have done consequential damage to that idea in the world. Our power has been diminished by doing that.

Or Michael Scheuer: Read the rest of this entry »

Anxiety continues to grow in India over the Obama presidency, says John Elliott on The Daily Beast.

Pakistan has firmly believed that India had a special place in George W. Bush’s heart from turning a blind eye to the activities in Kashmir to the nuclear deal that allowed India to buy nuclear hardware from the international community without signing the Non Proliferation Treaty. But the undertones coming out of New Delhi shows an increasing anxiety about what Obama can and will do for India.

John Elliott lays out some of India’s arguments on The Daily Beast:

India is not against Obama. It recognizes that the world should be a better and safer place with him as president, but it has lost its best foreign friend. Bush brought it out of the cold and helped to make it an international player by instigating-with Condoleezza Rice-the U.S.-India nuclear pact that scraped through just before Bush took his fingers off the levers of power. The deal enables the U.S. and other countries such as France and Russia to sell nuclear plants and allied technology to India, which had been banned for many years since India developed nuclear weapons.

A particular concern has been India’s hope that Obama will not link two distinct issues: the urgent international issue of the Taliban and al Qaeda on the Afghan-Pakistan border with far less critical India-Pakistan differences over Kashmir. For its part, Pakistan has been arguing that a settlement of the Kashmir question would allow it to move troops from the Indian border to tackle the insurgents and terrorists on the Afghan side.

After a strenuous lobbying campaign in Washington, India has successfully persuaded Obama not to include India in the Pakistan-Afghanistan brief given to Richard Holbrooke, his new special envoy to the region. The lobbying was blunt. At one meeting, India’s emissaries told Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state and a leading Obama adviser, that Holbrooke would not be welcome in Delhi if India was included in his brief. Albright apparently asked, presumably mischievously, if he would be given an Indian visa. Yes, came the reply, but not much else. Read the rest of this entry »

As the United States steps up border raids into Pakistan, troops from both countries have commenced a deadly game of brinksmanship. Although aimed at asserting each other’s military presence along the Pakistan-Afghan border, the skirmishes risk outright hostilities.

U.S. strikes in Pakistan are nothing new. Washington has conducted unilateral missile strikes since soon after its invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. American pilotless surveillance planes have been flying over the restive border with near impunity for much the same time.

From Air to Ground

But the tone of the U.S. presence changed this year. In July, President George W. Bush approved covert ground raids into suspected militant hideouts in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, much of which is a Taliban stronghold. Militants use the region as a sanctuary from which to strike foreign and Afghan troops in neighboring Afghanistan. Thus far, U.S. forces attempted at least three ground assaults. The only confirmed ground invasion of Pakistan, on September 3, led to the deaths of around 20 civilians, including women and children. No militant leaders were believed captured or killed in the raid.

This ground assault led to unprecedented rhetoric from Pakistan condemning the United States. Even Chief of Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, normally quite evasive with the media, said that the Army would defend Pakistan’s territory. The Pakistani government summoned the U.S. ambassador to the foreign office and blocked NATO supplies vital to the multinational force’s continued operation in Afghanistan.

Pakistan averted two other attempted ground raids when its border forces fired warning shots at U.S. helicopters ferrying commandos into Waziristan. On the most recent occasion, Pakistan and U.S. troops exchanged fire for five minutes. Pakistan’s government later claimed that its army fired flares, not bullets, at the helicopters, but this explanation did not sound very convincing.

Ostensibly, Washington fears that Waziristan – and other tribal regions – could become a staging area for further attacks on the United States if the Pakistani army doesn’t root out pro-Taliban forces. But Washington doubts whether Islamabad is capable of doing the job. Read the rest of this entry »

This month’s Economist announces the Terrorism Index for 2008, in which Pakistan is mentioned a few times. According to the report results, Pakistan is considered one the top nations to potential engage in the nuclear trade with terrorists, tied with North Korea, and the hands down winner on where the next al Qaeda stronghold will be.

Interesting when looking at it in the light of the Asia Times Online headline, Bush had no plan to catch Osama. Gareth Porter, an investigative journalists specializing in US national security policy, provides a very deep and disturbing look into the decision making process of the Bush administration and the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

According to the Asia Times Online story:

Top administration officials instead gave priority to planning for war with Iraq, leaving the United States with not nearly enough troops or strategic airlift capacity to close the large number of possible exit routes through the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area where Bin Laden escaped in late 2001.

Because it had not been directed to plan for that contingency, the US military was also forced to turn down an offer from then Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf in late November 2001 to send 60,000 troops to intercept the al-Qaeda leaders. As Northern Alliance troops marched on Kabul with little resistance in November 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency had intelligence that Bin Laden was headed for a cave complex in the Tora Bora Mountains close to the Pakistani border.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a National Security Council meeting that Franks “wants the [Pakistanis] to close the transit points between Afghanistan and Pakistan to seal what’s going in and out”, according to the National Security Council meeting transcript in Bob Woodward’s book Bush at War.

Bush responded that they would need to “press Musharraf to do that”.

Then after realizing that the US military wasn’t up to the task of stopping bin Laden from getting into Pakistan, General Franks ended up in Islamabad: Read the rest of this entry »

This morning’s Daily Times carried a stunning headline for Pakistanis. Asif Ali Zardari, to clarify “the President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan” stated that ”Obviously, the world is a safer place,” he said. “It could have been worse,” in an interview with the Washington Post on Saturday. Can I ask which world Zardari is talking about?

If we look at it from Pakistan’s point of view, we are under attack both from internal and external forces. Our borders are regularly being violated by US military forces and our citizens are being targeted in terrorist attacks on our own soil. The international media has made Pakistan the reason for the US failure in Afghanistan because apparently the Soviet conflict never happened and the US never left Afghanistan in a lerch after using it to defeat the Soviet Union. Yet, Zardari feels that Bush has made the world a safer place.. interesting… did you hear the dollars transferring to offshore accounts there??

More interestingly, in the same interview, Zardari refuted the fact that Pakistani forces fired on the US military on their latest incursion into Pakistan. While Admiral Michael Mullen was confirming to the media that:

“There was a cross-border fire incident yesterday,” Mullen said, corroborating reports from U.S and NATO military officials. He urged both sides not to “overreact to the hair-trigger tension we are all feeling. Now, more than ever, is a time for teamwork, for calm.”

Another interesting thought….

Zardari also contributes the Marriott bombing to the “rise of the axis of evil”:

At the same time, Zardari warned that “the axis of evil is growing.” He cited last Saturday’s massive bombing at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed more than 50 people, and pressed the Bush administration to step up intelligence cooperation with Pakistan to help confront Islamist militants. Read the rest of this entry »

Text of article in Dari entitled “Pakistan acts, America does not respond” by Afghan independent secular daily newspaper Hasht-e Sobh on 25 September.

The crash of an unmanned US drone in Pakistan’s tribal areas makes it clear enough that Pakistan will not allow American forces to continue operations against al-Qa’idah and Taleban in those areas. Meanwhile, Pakistani forces have not accepted the responsibility of bringing down the drone; American sources have also denied having information on this issue.

At a time when President Bush has issued orders sanctioning the conduct of military operations in Tribal areas, the crash of unmanned American drone shows that relations between the two countries have become extremely tense.

It is true that American has lost confidence in Pakistan in the war on terror. Therefore, it wants to pursue and target al-Qa’idah and Taleban insurgents on the other side of the Afghan border. However, angry statements by Pakistani officials, firing on an American helicopter and the recent targeting of unmanned American drone shows that Pakistan wants to hinder operations against insurgents under the pretext of defending its sovereignty and territorial integrity. In fact, it is indirectly supporting them.

There are also presumptions that some elements in the Pakistani government and the army, particularly in that country’s intelligence agency [ISI], want to harm relations between Islamabad and Washington to the point of no-return. This situation may lead to America severing its ties with Pakistan completely though it seems a distant scenario. On other hand, this situation may also make it inevitable for America to continue cooperating with Pakistan, and abandon operations against insurgents on the other side of the border.

Unfortunately, there have been numerous reports from authentic local and international sources that Pakistan is using terrorism as a strategic tool in the region. There still are many groups and extremists within the Taleban and al-Qa’idah which take orders and instructions from the Pakistani intelligence agency, they are financed and equipped by this agency. Read the rest of this entry »