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Neocons Press Pakistan Endgame
Monday July 23rd 2007, 2:30 pm

Ah, yes, another clueless political hack, this one who works for a dictator. “It would be ‘completely counterproductive’ for the United States to launch military strikes in the Pakistani tribal regions where al Qaeda and Taliban militants have created safe havens, Pakistan’s foreign minister said Sunday,” reports CNN.

It is “completely counterproductive” because Pakistan’s ISI has spent a lot of time and money reconstituting the Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or FATA of Pakistan. “The ISI quietly allowed free passage within the Waziristans to Afghan Taliban commanders Jalaluddin Haqqani and Mullah Dadallah. These leaders’ task was to marshal the different tribal Taliban chieftains into a movement coherent enough to abide by a truce. But the price for peace was Talibanization. It was pronounced in a communiqué issued by Haqqani in May 2006,” writes Graham Usher for the Middle East Report. Of course, as we know, the process of talibanization was a collaborative effort between the CIA and the ISI. CNN, of course, does not bother to inform us of this crucial fact.

Usher fills in the egregious memory holes left behind by CNN:

For the last 30 years, FATA’s isolation has served another purpose: The state has used the region as the launching pad for Pakistan-inspired insurgencies in Afghanistan, with the first coming after the communist coup in Kabul in 1978. Fueled by CIA and Saudi money, but engineered by Pakistan’s premier Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) directorate, the militias incubated in the tribal areas became national, regional and ultimately global Islamist movements, of which al-Qaeda is only the most notorious. Amidst penury grew a war economy driven by opium, guns and God, while jihad was first taught, then waged, by generations of young men, dislocated and orphaned in Afghan refugee camps, but schooled in madrassas allied to one or another of Pakistan’s Islamist parties or sponsored by states like Saudi Arabia.

According to the estimate of Pashtun nationalist politician Afrasiab Khattak, as many as 500,000 young men were thus socialized during the Afghan wars. Overwhelmingly Pashtun, they were bound by tribal codes of honor, loyalty and revenge. But, uprooted from their villages, they were also susceptible to new idioms of Islam, whether the Deobandi strain peddled by the Pakistani madrassas or the austere Wahhabism of the Saudi Arabians and other “Afghan Arabs” who had come to fight the Soviets. In many cases, faith became a demotic cocktail of the two.

It is precisely this “demotic cocktail,” engineered by the CIA and boasted to be its most successful operation, we are now told threatens our way of life. “Job No. 1 is to protect the American people. There are no options off the table,” declared Frances Townsend, the neocon Homeland Security advisor.

As should be expected, the neocons don’t give a whit about Pakistan’s dictator, Pervez Musharraf, who has served more or less as an obedient vassal for his back-stabbing boss and his clash of civilization minions. If indeed there “are no options off the table,” i.e., the Pentagon attacks FATA, there is a good chance Musharraf will be toast.

“A strong action in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan by beleaguered Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf could lead to a spilt in the army, a media report said on Saturday,” reports the Times of India. “Detailing a multitude of troubles that Musharraf faces at home, Time magazine quoting a former head of the powerful intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence said many foreign observers believe that his days are numbered as leader of Pakistan…. in an interview … Hamid Gul, former head of ISI, has warned that if Musharraf does take both gloves off in tribal areas, it would just increase the likelihood of a split in army.”

According to Gul, the “officer cadres are liberal, secular, they come from the elite classes. But the rank and file of the army were never secular, they were always religious. If there is a face-off between the army and people, the leadership may lose control of the army. The army does not feel happy. They are from the same streets, the same villages, the same bazaars of the lower and middle classes, and they want the same thing (Islamic law) for their country.”

Thus, considering Musharraf’s precarious situation, it is quite natural for Khurshid Kasuri, Pakistan’s foreign minister, to publicly bristle over the neocon plan to strike “actionable targets” in Pakistan. Kasuri and Islamabad have characterized the neocon threats as “irresponsible and dangerous.” Pakistani Foreign Office spokeswoman Tasneem Aslam added: “…we have stated in the clearest terms that any attack inside our territory would be unacceptable” and any “such action would be deeply resented in the tribal areas and generally in Pakistan.”

Kasuria and Aslam, however, are missing the point, or at least are not admitting it during press conferences.

Earlier this month, the boy wonder of the neocons, Bill Kristol, told Fox News the neocons will “take military action [against Pakistan] … over the next few weeks or months…. Bush has to disrupt that sanctuary.” In fact, according to Kristol, “we won’t even tell Musharraf…. We’ll do what we have to do in Western Pakistan and Musharraf can say, ‘Hey, they didn’t tell me.’”

In other words, Kristol and the neocons will not lose any sleep over the Pakistani military deposing Musharraf or the fact hundreds, possibly thousands of Pakistanis will be slaughtered, the latter just another day in the neocon neighborhood.

Kristol’s bright idea “would lead to major riots throughout Pakistan and the Arab world, and it would lead to certainly a major insurgency against US forces,” Seth Jones, a South Asia specialist at the RAND Institute, told Australian Broadcasting Corporation last week, according to Jim Lobe.

It would be another egg in the basket for the neocons, as they are determined to agitate Muslims across the board and force them to confront the United States, preferably at home through some terrorist attack, either real of contrived by the CIA or the neocon infested side of the Pentagon. Kristol and the neocons understand all too well the heat must be turned up if they are going to realize their objectives before the commander and decider guy leaves office next year.