Hassanwazir's List: AF PAK US

• Writing shortly after the September 2001 attack on the Twin Towers, New York, Noam Chomsky, the legendary intellectual of the present era, wrote: “We should not forget that the US itself is a leading terrorist state. What about the alliance between the US, Russia, China, Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, all of whom are delighted to see an international system develop sponsored by the US which would authorise them to carry out their own terrorist atrocities? Russia, for example would be very happy to have US backing for its murderous war in Chechnya … as would perhaps India, in Kashmir. Indonesia would be delighted to have support for its massacres in Aceh.”
• The number of American interventions is hugely on the rise. The instances of the use of the US armed forces outside America, according to the United States Congressional Research Service, were six in number in the 1970s. In the 1980s, the number of countries alleged by the US as a menace to its interests and requiring armed intervention jumped to 16. In the 1990s, US forces intervened in 34 countries. And now, after 9/11 the entire globe has become a theatre of war. No country of the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa is fully safe.
• Pakistan will have to show exceptional understanding, fortitude and patience. The debris of 63 years of failures will take time to be cleared

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• The Council has achieved little, but as its head and for the respect he enjoyed, Rabbani symbolised the idea and the process of reconciliation. His assassination is meant to kill the process. The crime is a stubborn and disdainful rejection of peace on the part of its perpetrators
• Reaction to Rabbani’s assassination includes calls within the Kabul establishment to end the reconciliation process. The media have reported views that, being a Tajik, Rabbani was not the right person to head the process which cost him his life or that the assassination demonstrated that this is not the time for reconciliation which must await the withdrawal of the US/Nato forces
• The US/Nato military presence has become part of the problem, and a clear US commitment to limit and withdraw military presence is necessary for the eventual balance and stability of Afghanistan.
• Realistically, however, the drawdown and withdrawal of US forces will be eased by progress towards reconciliation and reduction of violence. Those wishing to force the US military exit, recalling the fate of the Soviet intervention, need to bear in mind the difference.
• A large section of the Afghans and almost all countries of the world are comfortable with the US military presence as long as it is seen to be combating the Taliban and extremism
• . Arguably, domestic pressures within the US are building to bring the troops back home, but that opinion will not countenance a retreat. On the other hand, the Taliban, their extremist creed and linkages with Al Qaeda are universally viewed as an abomination. Many countries including Afghanistan’s neighbours and most Afghans will oppose and resist any return of the Taliban rule, even if supposedly the US military presence were to end precipitously.

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• The timing of the pact, and its focus on security cooperation, intimates Pakistan’s nightmare scenario of encirclement by India
• Most political dynamics in South Asia are seen through the bilateral lens of tense India-Pakistan relations
• two other pacts signed by India and Afghanistan last week. One MoU calls for enhanced cooperation in the exploration and production of hydrocarbons, primarily oil and gas. A second MoU, signed between the Indian and Afghan ministries of mines, calls for promoting mineral exploration and investment in Afghanistan’s mines.
• These MoUs were signed in the same week that it was revealed that the China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) — the largest state-owned Chinese company — has won the rights to explore and develop oil fields in Afghanistan’s Amu Darya basin.
  Writing in Foreign Policy, Alexander Benard and Eli Sugarman explain that Amu Darya contains five known fields containing 80 million barrels of crude oil, which amounts to 11,000 barrels per day for 20 years
• . In 2007, China won another major tender for the Aynak copper deposit, estimated to be worth $80bn
• Chinese government covets Afghanistan’s natural resources
• China does seven times more trade with India than it does with Pakistan, and is India’s largest trading partner, even over the US

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• WASHINGTON and Islamabad are embroiled in a blame game yet again. This time they are fixated on the Haqqani network.
• The overbearing emphasis on Pakistan’s role in targeting the network in its Fata-based sanctuaries then is much more attractive.
• They are convinced, rightly or wrongly, that obliging Washington would result in an internal backlash as the Haqqani network would seek to raise the costs of the Pakistani state.
• As some within the policy enclave have put it to me rather simplistically, it is seen as a trade-off between security of Pakistan’s heartland which is likely to see resurgence of violence and the security of the Isaf forces.
• issue of leverage in the ‘endgame’. Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy has remained myopic for the longest period of time and the state feels it has few partners other than the Taliban to bank on to prevent an antagonistic Kabul from emerging. To be sure, this makes Pakistan’s stance extremely unpopular, but again popularity is hardly a consideration in Machiavellian politics.

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• But like star-crossed lovers, their intimate dalliance portended ill tidings.
• Like a buzzing bee though, the stench would just not go away.
• In just two decades, the appetite of India’s politicians had become so gargantuan that just imagining the number of zeroes was well beyond most everyone.
• Obama was facing his own travails. The economy refused to budge, and the war in Afghanistan was going nowhere.
• In 2010, his party lost control of the US Congress, a result he bewailed as a ‘shellacking’
• many Republicans always regarded Obama as an interloper, and now saw their chance to impose their own vision on the country
• governance almost ground to a halt. The economy went into freefall and the war in Afghanistan from bad to worse.
• A people’s campaign against corruption, led by Anna Hazare, has been bungled by Singh & Co.
• Pranab Mukherjee, accusing Home Minister P. Chidambaram, of having condoned, if not connived in, the looting
• trying to douse flames.
• Congress party, know that if national elections were held now, they will get obliterated.
• With the Taliban so ascendant now, it appears that only Pakistan, perceived as their foremost ally, can help stabilise Afghanistan. Over a decade of relentless warfare has drained the American treasury and sapped the will of its people. If Pakistan were to induce a peaceful Afghanistan where future 9/11s would not be spawned, it would earn the gratitude of many.
• they will not stir the Afghan pot to each other’s detriment
• Singh still retains vestiges of personal credibility to sell his country an accord with Pakistan. And that might just be enough for him to extricate himself from his current quagmire.

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• The withdrawal of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from Afghanistan cannot properly be described as international, an exit, or a strategy. The so-called transition to Afghan leadership by the end of 2014 is a timetable driven largely by U.S. domestic politics. When this timetable is complete, Afghanistan will still be at war.
• The most striking feature of this policy is the treatment of al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a single and uniquely dangerous threat. This is not because it is an ungoverned space. Large areas of Somalia and Yemen also fit this description. Nor is it because the population has ideological sympathy for al Qaeda. Pockets of support for al Qaeda can be found elsewhere, including in the West. And it is also not the only staging ground for attacks on the West. Al Qaeda’s affiliates in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa have, in recent years, proven more lethal than the core of al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.
• nstead, the region presents a pressing danger due to the unique confluence of radical ideology and nuclear weapons within it. Adherents to radical ideology are spread throughout the globe, and at least nine states have nuclear weapons. However, only in southern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan are there adherents to al Qaeda’s radical ideology less than a day’s drive from the world’s least secure nuclear arsenal. Moreover, al Qaeda does not need Afghanistan to achieve its goal of acquiring one or more nuclear weapons for use against the West. Even if Afghanistan were perfectly stable, the danger of al Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons in Pakistan would remain. Without the threat of nuclear terrorism, the insurgency in Afghanistan would be no more important to the West than are similar threats around the world.

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