TARIQ ALI: “Obama’s Afghan-Pak Syndrome"

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2009/12/7/tariq_ali_obamas_afghan_pak_syndrome

Condi Rice Talks More Shite

In a new interview with Fortune Magazine, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced the idea of withdrawal from Afghanistan with typical illogic heavily tainted with fear-mongering.

"The last time we left Afghanistan, and we abandoned Pakistan," she said, "that territory became the very territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th. So our national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan fail again and become a safe haven for terrorists.
"It's that simple," she declared, "if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan."

Codswallop, horsefeathers, hogwash, claptrap and poppycock!

What Ms Rice is adroitly dissembling is the role the CIA and Rep. Charlie Wilson, that woefully misguided naïf, (to be kind) played in arming, funding and training the mujahidin ‘freedom fighters’ which were to be thorns in the side of the Soviet bear. These selfsame mujahidin then known as ‘the Network’ – and included Saudi millionaire, Usama bin-Laden - morphed with little effort into a larger movement to rid Muslim countries of all Western influence. That movement is now referred to as ‘Al Qaida’.

This bit of essential back-story skirts the larger issue, though. Ms Rice, like all neo-cons and many who sit on both sides of the aisles of Congress, wears the stripes of international interventionism whereby the belligerent presence of US military might is the righteous base-line upon which all foreign policy decisions are made.

Our ‘national security interests’ as Ms Rice and her ilk would have us believe would be solved by the further expansion of US military forces to encircle the globe and control by threat of force the policies of every nation and region on earth to suit the perceived needs of the United States and US-based multi-national corporations.

If one were seeking a more truthful observation of reality, it would much more appropriate to paraphrase Ms Rice’s neo-conic cant to state “Unless you want another terrorist attack in the US, abandon the policies of empire and hegemonic military dominance that breed exasperation, hopelessness and fanatical hatred of the US policy of global intervention.”

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/22/condoleezza-rice-if-you-w_n_294755.html

http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/21/news/economy/condoleezza_rice_gop.fortune/?postversion=2009092209

They're At It Again!

Like murderous 2-year olds, you can't take your eyes off of them for a moment. They're making war with an ally, now!

The Bush and Cheney Gang - who else!? While the ridiculous spectacle of personality politics in the US distracts us, Bush/Cheney are attacking Pakistan.

Again and again!

Killing hundreds of men, women, children and - oh, by the way, the occasional member of Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

My, my. Do tell! There are Taliban and Al-Qaeda member in Eastern Afghanistan and Northwest Pakistan? In the Tora Bora Mountains! There!?

This is not news. This is the same old info we’ve had since before the Russians bailed on their Afghani adventure. The CIA and the ISI recruited and hired those thugs to harass the Ruskies. The thugs did a pretty good job and they continue to do a pretty good job at harassing occupying forces. And they’re still in the same area of the world where the USA armed them.

Of course, with the Bush/Cheney eyes on a different prize, they were not so interested in finding some Arab with bad kidneys in a cave and bringing him to trial. (What would you imagine we could all learn from several days of Bin Laden’s testimony in a witness box?)

A third of world oil reserves! Makes your head spin! Bush could revive Arbusco Oil (and probably run it into the ground)and Cheney would probably get free virgins and a gazillion bucks a month in retainers from Halliburton just for his rolodex.

But I digress…

US forces are attacking our ‘key partner in the War on Terror’! What the f… is with that? I suppose Bush/Cheney and their round-table of socio-paths figured the Pakistanis wouldn’t mind if the US killed a few dozen people in the Tribal Areas for a ‘good cause’. Of course, they were advised against such an insane, immoral action by the Intelligence Community, but did they listen? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

You’ve got to give credit where it is due, though. This is a tried and true tactic for winning the war on terror; it’s proven successful in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a nutshell, here’s the plan: make every person in the region hate the US for brutally murdering a family member or loved one. Then everybody in the region, man, woman and child, will share a culturally rooted vow to affect terrible, bloody vengeance on the USA.

That will take care of ‘collateral damage’ for good; whoever’s on photo-op detail at the White House will simply read the teleprompter and sign the executive order making ‘them’ all terrorists.

Ipso facto…

Presto change-o! Nobody’s an innocent because they’ve all been defined as ‘evil terr’rists’ by Imperial decree.

Then we just nuke ‘em all and take the oil.

Kissinger, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Iran's Nuclear Program

Those beating the drum about Iran’s nuclear program should be made aware that the United States has been complicit in the Iranian program since the Ford administration. Then Secretary-of-State, Henry Kissinger offered a ‘strange deal’ to Pakistan that had been formulated by Richard Cheney, Ford’s Chief -of-Staff and Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s Defense Secretary according to an extremely well-researched and copiously foot-noted book by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark entitled, ‘Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons’.

While focusing on Pakistan’s nuclear program and the Reagan administration’s turning a blind eye to it and General Zia’s blood-thirsty military rule while recruiting and funding the Afghani Freedom Fighters (better known as the mujahedeen, a.k.a. Al Qaeda), ‘Deception’ references the unlawful proliferation of nuclear technology by the United States to Iran under the Shah.

The ‘strange deal’ that Cheney and Rumsfeld devised and which Kissinger offered to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s Prime Minister (before Zia had him executed), was an effort to persuade Pakistan to forego its plans to pursue a nuclear program. In 1976, Kissinger begrudgingly proposed that if Bhutto terminated Pakistan’s own nascent uranium enrichment project, the United States would arrange to supply Pakistan with its needed enriched materials from a facility, funded and supplied by the US, and based in Iran.

Cheney and Rumsfeld had master-minded the scheme, arguing that Iran – even though awash in oil and gas - would need a nuclear program to meet its future energy needs. This plan was to be the first nuclear deal with Iran and would have been extremely lucrative for US corporations such as Westinghouse and General Electric “which stood to earn $6.4 billion from the project”. (The plan to lead Iran into the Nuclear Age was supported by Kissinger although the offer to involve Pakistan was not to his liking, hence his reluctance to propose the plan to Bhutto.)

Furthermore, according to an article in the Washington Post, written by Dafna Linzer, published on March 27, 2005, confirms “US involvement with Iran’s nuclear program until 1979” which involved “large-scale intelligence-sharing and conventional weapons sales”. The Linzer article goes on to assert that “Even with many key players in common” (editor’s note: such as Cheney and Rumsfeld), “the U.S. government has taken opposite positions on questions of fact as its perception of U.S. interests has changed.”

The compete Washington Post article can be read at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3983-2005Mar26.html

Although publicly opposed to President Bush’s hard-line stance on Iran and while favoring diplomacy over force of arms, the Honorable Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, has voiced her dismay over Iran’s nuclear program. It has been reported by Cheryl Biren-Wright at OpEdNews.com that Madam Pelosi stated at a recent event that Iran has received "a lot of technology from China, from Pakistan, probably from Russia and other places…”.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/2/Nancy-Pelosi-Book-Signing-by-Cheryl-Biren-Wrigh-080807-772.html

It would be very surprising, indeed, ludicrous to think Madam Speaker was not aware that the United States – one of those ‘other places’ - had initiated the proliferation of nuclear technology in Iran. Moreover, it is not surprising that Ms Pelosi purposely omitted reference to the US role in the unlawful proliferation of nuclear technology. By avoiding a mention of the US complicity in Iran’s nuclear program, Pelosi avoided the obvious pit-falls of obfuscation and deflected attention to tried and true adversaries past and future; the People’s Republic of China, Pakistan and the Russian Confederation.

Once again, the chickens - hatched by brood hens obsessed with imperial foreign policies - are coming home to roost. What is more, they once again carry nuclear eggs in flimsy baskets.

Post Script: A truly illuminating speech given at the World Affairs Council of Northern California by ‘Deception’ co-author Adrian Levy can be viewed at FORA.TV. http://fora.tv/2007/10/30/Pakistan_and_the_A_Q__Khan_Network

Dubya in Bucharest

Is this just more unbridled hubris, simply another case of sheer stupidity or both? Perhaps it’s just a grandstand move, like the recent Mid-East ‘Peace’ effort to try to balance the historic record of Dubya’s administration.

Bush went to the NATO summit in Romania to campaign for the admission of the former Soviet states, Ukraine and Georgia, into the ranks of NATO and to pressure allies to increase troop commitments in Afghanistan.

First of all, the war there should have been resolved years ago. With the full assistance of the UN and NATO and clear, concerted attention to the stated objective of capturing Bin Laden and neutralizing Al-Qaeda, it quite probably could have been.

The grand distraction of the illegal war in Iraq allowed the primary mission to fail as it was turned over to Pakistan to fulfill; Pakistan which had fully supported the Taliban before and after 9-11. That failure allowed the Taliban and Al-Qaeda to become resurgent by escaping, regrouping, rearming and reinforcing in the Tribal Areas along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border from which they launched a campaign to re-take Afghanistan. (Mullah Rashid Akhond, the overall military commander of the Taleban in Wardak, a central province bordering Kabul, claims to have 2,000 active fighters ready for a spring offense.) Hence, Bush is using what little clout is left him as an out-going president at his last NATO summit to insist on additional military assistance from NATO countries.

In his own little world of Biblical import, Bush also chose to take several punches at Putin, the out-going president of Russia by promoting missile bases and radar installation in Russia’s front yard and the pushing for the admission of two former Soviet states, Ukraine and Georgia, as NATO members.

Putin, obviously not understanding that Bush serves a higher power, counter-punched with a combination of logic and reason. He first questioned the reason for the very existence of NATO, saying the purpose of the alliance was to counter the perceived threat during the Cold War of a country which doesn’t exist anymore, the Soviet Union. He added, "This thesis is rather strange – if one is a member of NATO, there is democracy, and if not, no democracy. This is nonsense. NATO is not a democratizer," he said.

But Bush is the ‘Democratizer’ bunny who has never let reason or logic stand in his way and he wants the Ukraine and Georgia to join the ranks of the newly ‘democratized’ NATO countries which were formerly Warsaw Pac members. There are already ten such members and two more waiting in queue. Bush would like to ask them all to supply troops to the fight in Afghanistan.

Evidently, he and his advisors have forgotten what took place in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. It is unlikely that the people of the Ukraine, Georgia, Romania and the other former members of the Soviet bloc which are now NATO members have forgotten.

Nearly 14,000 Soviet soldiers and officers were killed and nearly half a million suffered wounds, injury and debilitating illness before Moscow withdrew its forces in defeat. It is generally accepted that the collapse of the Soviet Union, at least in part, came as a result of that war.

I would doubt that any of the former Soviet Bloc would want to go through that again, especially given the dire situation in Iraq and the state of the US economy. The fact that the hat-in-hand request is coming from Dubya, the lame duck would be enough to give them pause. Time will tell.

NATO, responding to the strong objection from Moscow, rejected the admission of Ukraine and Georgia. More troops from Canada, Spain and France will be headed to Afghanistan, though, so the quagmire will mire on. That should make Dubya and the other remaining neo-cons happy; two never-ending wars spiraling out of control at the same time. That must be an historical first.

http://www.newssafety.com/hotspots/documents/AKEAfghanistan27.03.2008.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7327944.stm

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,544189,00.html

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080401/nato_afghanistan_080401/20080401/?hub=Specials

http://www.thestar.com/World/Columnist/article/410713