[R-G] The secrets of Obama's surge

Wed Apr 1 14:32:03 MDT 2009

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KD02Df03.html

Apr 2, 2009
THE ROVING EYE
The secrets of Obama's surge
By Pepe Escobar

Is United States President Barack Obama telling it like it is as far  
as his new strategy for the Afghanistan and Pakistan war theater -  
AfPak, in Pentagonspeak - is concerned? There are reasons to believe  
otherwise.

Obama's relentless media blitzkrieg stressed the new strategy is  
refocusing on al-Qaeda. Washington, we got a problem. Why deploy  
17,000 troops against "the Taliban" in the poppy-growing province of  
Helmand, not in the east near the Pakistani tribal areas, where "al- 
Qaeda" is holed up, plus 4,000 advisers to train the Afghan Army, when  
Washington actually wants to fight no more than 200 or 300 al-Qaeda  
jihadis roaming in Afghanistan, plus another 400 maximum in the  
Pakistani tribal areas? And by the way they are not Afghans - they are  
overwhelmingly Arabs, with a few Uzbeks, Chechens and Uyghurs thrown in.

President Hamid Karzai, the puppet in Kabul which has left Washington  
beyond exasperated, loved Obama's plan to "disrupt, dismantle and  
defeat" al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Especially because it involves the  
improbable "hunt for the good Taliban" (always bribable by loads of US  
dollars) mixed with Special Ops inside Pakistan, and not Afghanistan.

Former Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto's widower, President Asif Ali  
Zardari, the puppet in Islamabad, loved it too. But as the Pakistani  
daily Dawn revealed, his Foreign Office diplomats definitely did not.

The Afghanistan-Pakistan war has got to be 2009's prime theater of the  
absurd. It took the New York Times and the usual "American officials"  
something like 13 years to "discover" that the Pakistani Inter- 
Services Intelligence (ISI) - a Central Intelligence Agency twin -  
helps the Taliban. And this while the CIA, alongside their ISI pals,  
is compiling a mega hit list in the Pashtun tribal areas inside  
Pakistan. Maybe this is what US Central Command supremo General David  
"I'm always positioning myself for 2012" Petraeus means by a  
"trilateral" love affair, as he told CNN's State of the Union.

The Pentagon's preferred pal is doubtless Pakistani Army Chief General  
Ashfaq Kayani, who happens to approve of what's not in Obama's  
presentation of the surge: the relentless drone war - with inevitable  
"collateral damage" - over what is for a fact Pashtunistan. As for the  
Pakistani masses, which have no say in all of this, they see the whole  
thing as a charade, and al-Qaeda as a threat to the US - not to  
Pakistan.

Obama is selling the surge basically as nation building, based on  
trust. A hard sell if there ever was one - as Washington cannot trust  
the ISI or the Pakistani government, while the Pakistani masses don't  
trust Washington.

Insistent rumors in Washington point to a troika - Holbrooke-Petraeus- 
Clinton - finally being able to convince Obama that the surge should  
be just the first step towards long-range nation building. Anyone with  
minimal familiarity with Afghanistan knows this is an impossible  
strategic target.

The Salvador option
And then Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to AfPak, finally  
let it slip on CNN: the "people we are fighting in Afghanistan" are  
essentially ... Pashtuns. This was followed by a stark admission: "In  
the informational side ... we don't have a strong enough counter- 
informational program to combat the Taliban and al-Qaeda."

So this amounts to the State Department admitting that the Pentagon/ 
Petraeus "humint" (human intelligence) component of counter-insurgency  
in AfPak, hailed as a gift from the Messiah all across US corporate  
media, is essentially useless. This also means there's no way of  
winning local hearts and minds.

In the absence of "humint", what prevails is inevitably The Salvador  
option, performed by a Dick Cheney-supervised-style "executive  
assassination wing", as investigative icon Seymour Hersh first  
revealed in a talk at the University of Minnesota on March 10, "going  
into countries, not talking to the ambassador or to the CIA station  
chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving".  
The "assassination wing" is in fact the Joint Special Operations  
Command (JSOC) - a shadowy, ultra-elite unit including Navy Seals
and Delta Force commandos immune to Congressional investigations.

So if you have such a unit killing "al-Qaeda" jihadis at random from  
Iraq to Kenya, from Somalia to countries in South and Central America  
(these are not necessarily "al-Qaeda"; let’s say they are inimical to  
"US interests"), why not let them loose in Afghanistan and the  
Pakistani tribal areas? Instead of a $5 million bounty on his head,  
why not send a crack JSOC commando to South Waziristan and take out  
Pakistani Taliban superstar Baitullah Mehsud, who has just boasted his  
outfit will "soon launch an attack on Washington that will amaze  
everyone in the world?"

Well, maybe because US "humint" on South Waziristan is negligible -  
and even JSOC cannot infiltrate. JSOC by now should have been more  
than fully equipped to find Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.  
Anyway, Vice-President Joseph Biden, to whom the unit would have to  
answer to, could at least come clean and state the "Salvador option"  
is not on the cards anymore. Or maybe it still is. The Obama  
administration is mum about it.

A priceless, self-described "hip pocket" manual prepared by the US  
Army Training and Doctrine Command - TRADOC, one more wonderful,  
Pentagon acronym to memorize - and available only to "US government  
personnel, government contractors and additional cleared personnel for  
national security purposes and homeland defense
" spells out what's (visibly) going on. On page 5, one learns this is  
a US war against, yes, Pashtuns, as Holbrooke said on CNN. The  
overwhelming majority of the "insurgent syndicate", they are funded by  
drug smuggling and US allies in the Gulf such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait  
and the Emirates, and are trained and assisted by, yes, the ISI, with  
some - in fact marginal - al-Qaeda assistance.

Al-Qaeda is a detail here. TRADOC does not seem to understand that al- 
Qaeda has a pan-Islamic agenda while the various groups bundled as  
"Taliban" are essentially in a war against foreign occupation and  
interference, with no dreams of establishing a Caliphate.

On page 7, TRADOC estimates the Taliban in Afghanistan to be around  
30,000, half of them Pakistani, and supported by the ISI. That's  
correct. But they overestimate al-Qaeda to be 2,000; these "Arab- 
Afghans" plus some recently arrived "white moors" (European Arabs) are  
probably no more than 700.

On page 10, TRADOC finally admits that Karzai in Kabul is supported by  
a myriad of "warlord militias" profiting from crime, narco-trafficking  
and smuggling. The key element here is not "terrorism" - but regional  
wars for control over ultra-profitable poppy/heroin manufacturing and  
smuggling routes.

Then there's this stark admission, by former Taliban commander Mullah  
Abdul Salam, currently governor of a town in poppy-infested Helmand  
province. He told Reuters that the Taliban are not the real enemy. If  
Kabul was not so corrupt, and capable of providing security to the  
rest of the country, most Pashtuns would not even be Taliban. No  
wonder the Obama administration has stacks of reasons to get rid of  
Karzai.

An opening in The Hague
Asia knows this whole thing is upside down. The crucial Shanghai  
Cooperation Organization (SCO), grouping China, Russia and the Central  
Asian "stans", all concerned neighbors of Afghanistan, met in Moscow  
last Friday to discuss it, ahead of the North Atlantic Treaty  
Organization (NATO) meeting in The Hague this Tuesday privileged by  
the US.

This is how Asia sees it - and that's an absolutely taboo issue for  
Obama to touch upon every time he faces American public opinion:  
Asians simply don't want US military bases in Central Asia. No wonder  
Iran, which is currently an observer, and soon to become a full  
member, officially said the SCO is the right forum to solve the Afghan  
tragedy, not NATO. A minimum of 40% of Afghans are either Shi'ites or  
they speak Dari, a Persian language.

Well, at least Holbrooke admits "the door is open" for Iran to have a  
say on Afghanistan, but always with conditions attached ("plus our  
NATO allies"). If Holbrooke is clever, he should immediately buy  
dinner for legendary mujahid Ishmail Khan, the Lion of Herat, in  
Western Afghanistan. Khan, a complex mix of feudal warlord and  
economic developer, told al-Jazeera English "friendship between Iran  
and America" is essential to solve the Afghan riddle.
What Washington has to admit is that Iran has been deeply involved for  
years in visible, post-Taliban reconstruction in Afghanistan - from  
roads and railroads to restoration of mosques, financing of libraries  
and madrassas and the provision of electricity. The Iranian Consulate  
in Herat, for instance, houses no less than 40 diplomats. Khan - the  
key Iranian liaison in Herat - was so successful in spite of Kabul  
that Karzai, under US pressure, stripped him off his enormous powers  
as local governor and gave him an innocuous ministry in Kabul.

At the UN-sponsored, US-backed international conference on Afghanistan  
this Tuesday in The Hague, Mohammad Mehdi Akhundzadeh - one of Iran's  
deputy foreign ministers - officially broke the ice, offering to help  
the rebuilding and stabilization of Afghanistan, something that Iran  
is already doing anyway.

Akhunzadeh was specifically referring to projects fighting drug  
trafficking - which badly affects Iranian society. But he was also  
very clear on how Iran views NATO: "The presence of foreign forces has  
not improved things in the country and it seems that an increase in  
the number of foreign forces will prove ineffective, too."

But, significantly, he tipped his hat to Obama's decision to send  
those 4,000 trainers for the Afghan Army, when he stressed  
"Afghanization should lead the government-building process". As for US  
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she described corruption in the  
Kabul government, ie Karzai and his gang, as a "cancer" as threatening  
to Afghanistan as the Taliban. One more sign from Washington that  
Karzai’s days may be numbered.

Follow the money
Did Obama's "strategic reviewers" read this Carnegie Endowment report (http://carnegieendowment.org/files/afghan_war-strategy.pdf)? 
  Apparently not. It states flatly "the mere presence of foreign  
soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most  
important factor in the resurgence of the Taliban".

So the question Americans must ask themselves is this: Would you buy a  
used car - sorry - war from people like Mullen, Petraeus, McKiernan?  
Well, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who's seen them all since John  
F Kennedy, wouldn't. For him, "they resemble all too closely the  
gutless general officers who never looked down at what was really  
happening in Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the time have been  
called, not without reason, 'a sewer of deceit'."

So what if the AfPak quagmire had nothing to do with "terrorists" but  
with these facts:

1. A Cold War mentality in action still prevailing at the Pentagon.  
That explains a Vietnam-style surge - expanding the war to Cambodia  
then, expanding it to Pakistan now. As University of Michigan's Juan  
Cole has pointed out, the rationale is the same old fallacious domino  
theory (communism will take over Southeast Asia, terrorism will take  
over Central/South Asia). The Taliban are simply not able to take over  
and control the whole of Afghanistan (they didn't from 1996 to 2001).  
Al-Qaeda simply can't have bases in Afghanistan: they would be bombed  
to smithereens by the 80,000-strong Afghan Army plus Bagram-based US  
air strikes.

2. The US Empire of Bases still in overdrive, and in New Great Game  
mode - which implies very close surveillance over Russia and China via  
bases such as Bagram, and the drive to block Russia from establishing  
a commercial route to the Middle East via Pakistan.

3. The fear of a spectacular NATO failure. NATO Secretary General Jaap  
de Hoop Scheffer, absolutely despised by progressives in Brussels and  
assorted European capitals, is pressuring everyone for more troops to  
avoid what he calls the "Americanization" of the war. No one is  
impressed - especially because Scheffer himself was forced to admit  
troops will have to stay on the ground "for the foreseeable future".

4. Last but not least, the energy wars. And that involves that occult,  
almost supernatural entity, the $7.6 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan- 
Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, which would carry gas from eastern  
Turkmenistan through Afghanistan east of Herat and down Taliban- 
controlled Nimruz and Helmand provinces, down Balochistan in Pakistan  
and then to the Pakistani port of Gwadar in the Arabian Sea. No  
investor in his right mind will invest in a pipeline in a war zone,  
thus Afghanistan must be "stabilized" at all costs.

So is AfPak the Pentagon's AIG - we gotta bail them out, can't let  
them fail? Is it a Predator drone war disguised as nation building?  
Will it become Obama’s Vietnam? Whatever it is, it's not about  
"terrorists". Not really. Follow the money. Follow the energy. Follow  
the map.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is  
Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a  
snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama  
does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com.