Are We Headed for War with Pakistan? (Special Report)

by Jack Lee

SPECIAL REPORT ON PAKISTAN

In order to understand our situation with Pakistan you have to break it down piece by piece, see what we’ve got and what we don’t.

But, before we go there let’s take a brief look at our geo-political standing. President Obama went around the world apologizing for America’s arrogance. Once done, he proclaimed America now had a far better standing among the nation’s of the world – only we didn’t. It was worse. Look, we’re a super power, the greatest super power on earth, and as such we have two predetermined relationships with other nations. They either respect us or they fear us. The apology tour made us look weak and foolish. It was a blunder of monumental proportions and it has compromised our ability to negotiate. The ripples from the apology tour will haunt us for many years to come.

Now back to Pakistan. In part, as a result of the latest Afghan border firefight where we took out 24 Paki soldiers firing on our soldiers, Pakistan has decided to withdraw from the peace conference in Bonn, Germany. That event was intended to serve as an international consensus for ending the Afghanistan war through a political accord. In order to achieve a negotiated solution with the Taliban Pakistan was going to act as the go between. Obama needed Pakistan there!

However, Pakistan is a dysfunctional peace broker that can barely keep it’s own people from civil war. They are the Taliban’s chief sponsor, allowing them sanctuary in a certain tribal region. Many of their people have gone over to the Taliban. So, they should be in a position to negotiate with them. On the other hand the Pakistani government has their own problems with extremists and they need to keep the Taliban contained and pacified so they don’t destabilize Pakistan’s fragile internal peace, which is somewhat akin to keeping a rabid dog as a pet….you’re likely to get bit, if not mauled.

Make no mistake, this border skirmish was not the sole cause of the meltdown in US – Pakistan relations. This has been building for a long time. After all, it was Pakistan’s military that created, armed and trained the Taliban. They helped install them in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, they have protected Al Qaeda (including Osama bin Laden) and they backed the infamous Haqqani and Hekmatyar terrorist groups that were held responsible for assassinations, suicide bombings and high-profile acts of terror such as the assault against India’s capital and the Indian embassy in Kabul.

Pakistan’s boycott of the Bonn meeting is blow to the Obama Administration that has set a time table for withdraw from Afghanistan. But, it gets worse.

Yesterday Pakistan announced they would close their borders to NATO supply missions, something the Taliban has wanted for years. In addition Pakistan has ordered that a secret airbase inside Pakistan be closed. We’ve been using that base to fly Predator and Reaper drone assaults on Al Qaeda, Taliban and allied targets in Pakistan’s tribal areas, especially in South Waziristan.

Tensions rise: Up to this point Pakistan and its pro-Taliban, anti-India, ISI intelligence agency has been content to keep Afghanistan on low boil, awaiting the inevitable defeat and withdrawal of NATO. The army junta that now rules Pakistan is no longer content with waiting and h seems ready to dramatically escalate things into a shooting war, as evidenced by the border skirmish. But, was it really their doing or was this an accident?
The details are still coming forward and there’s a good chance both sides are willing to chalk it up to an accident whether it was or wasn’t.

Now this intel from the book “Devil’s Game” by Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance investigative journalist: “Ambassador Haqqani is a long-time opponent of Pakistan’s military and of its Islamists. (His book, Between Mosque and Military, lays out the sad story of the army’s infatuation with hard-core Islamist militants going back to the 1970s and the rise of General Zia ul-Haq, the murderous dictator who hanged his predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and imposed a benighted version of Islam on Pakistan. (That was fine for the United States when, in the 1980s. Washington backed Zia in the jihad, pouring billions into the pockets of people like Haqqani and Hekmatyar.) I know from personal conversations with Ambassador Haqqani (no relations to the bloody Haqqani gang led by Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani) that the ambassador is a true moderate and democrat. He was a professor at Boston University.

After the killing of bin Laden, the Pakistani army was rumbling about making a coup d’tat against Pakistan’s weak and corrupt civilian government, led now by President Asif Ali Zardari, who was married to the murdered political leader Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the hanged former president. Apparently, though details are murky, Ambassador Haqqani and Zardari not only sought American help to forestall the coup but they promised to reform and remake Pakistan’s foreign policy in a radically different direction. They planned to oust the chief of staff and the head of the ISI, replacing them with anti-Taliban actors, and to launch a true campaign to uproot the Taliban from its protected headquarters in Quetta and go after its allies Haqqani and Hekmatyar. When the story was revealed, Haqqani resigned.

There’s no doubt that the Pakistan army is enraged over the reported Haqqani-Zardari countercoup plot. They’ve been angered by a steady stream of actions and accusations by the Obama administration for more than a year: the January killings of Pakistani operatives by a CIA officer, the killing of bin Laden, cross-border drone strikes, the charge by the chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff that Haqqani’s gang was a “veritable arm” of the ISI and–worst of all, by far–the deaths of the twenty-five soldiers at the border this week. Now, it appears, the military is making its move to hit back.”

Journalist Elizabeth MacDonald reported in May of this year, that the U.S. gave $18 billion to $19 billion in foreign aid to Pakistan since 9/11.

She said those figures actually underestimate what U.S. taxpayers really spent on Pakistan.

The U.S. gave $20.7 billion in military and economic development aid to Pakistan from fiscal 2002 through fiscal 2011, according to a new report that FOX Business has obtained that was issued by specialists in South Asian Affairs for the Congressional Research Service [CRS] to Congress on May 6.

The report also shows that the U.S. gave Pakistan $1.3 billion in 2003 and 2004 to help cancel an earlier $1.5 billion debt Pakistan owed U.S. taxpayers. The U.S. gave $4.46 billion to Pakistan in fiscal 2010. The Administration purportedly wants to lift Pakistan’s 2012 total aid to $3.4 billion from the $2.96 billion CRS says has been requested for 2012.

I hope this information has been helpful to understanding the complexity of our relationship with Pakistan, which is now tenuous at best.

So what would you do next, if you were the president?