This is not our war (Syria edition) – by Ahsan Butt
Editor’s Note: Otherwise a well written and perhaps well intentioned article, the author falls into the naive trap of the false Shia Sunni binary. Here are some guidelines for young writers who are willfully misled by their seniors in the media:
This article is about those well-meaning and peace-loving journalists who believe that the Shia genocide is evil, but who still see it as a Shia-Sunni problem and thus when they write, they call it just that: Shia-Sunni problem. Such journalists include both Shias and Sunnis.
Well if things weren’t bad or stupid enough, they’re about to get worse and stupider.
Here’s a graph of Muslim countries, ordered by the percentage of their population that is Shia (I averaged the numbers here, here, and here).
What you will see is that of the countries that have non-trivial numbers of Shias (above 15%), they are either majority Shia or are oil-rich rentier authoritarian states or have experienced massive sectarian based civil wars (not all mutually exclusive). Except Pakistan. For now.
What Pakistan is doing vis-a-vis Syria is one of the dumbest things Pakistan has done in a long time, and that’s really saying something. The Syrian civil war, tragic as it is, has nothing to do with Pakistan. Pakistan has no interests in that conflict. None.
Last summer, in the course of interviewing Islamists for a project, I heard an ASWJ rep go on about Syria and what a tragedy it is blah blah. What struck me at the time was how weird it was to hear him talk about Syria — not because it was weird for him per se, but because I was so unused to hearing about Syria in Pakistan. It wasn’t on the news. No politicians or generals talked about it. No typical drawing room stuff either. It really wasn’t an issue anyone cared about. Only ASWJ.
Well, it appears the ASWJ logic has worked its way up the food chain, thanks to some friendly prodding from the Saudis. The developments here mirror a bad horror movie, where you can see where the plot is going thanks to a very stupid protagonist who doesn’t know any better, and yet one is powerless to stop it because, duh, that’s what happens in horror movies. And evidently Pakistan’s foreign policy.
First, the Saudis came by for a chat, and this happened:
The two sides signed agreements under which the latter will provide a total of around US $183 million for the import of urea fertiliser from Saudi Arabia and the construction of a hydro-power project in Chitral.
The signing ceremony held at the PM House and was witnessed by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Saudi Crown Prince and Defense Minister Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud.
Vice Chairman, Managing Director Saudi Development Fund, Yousef Bin Ibrahim Al-Bassam and Secretary Economic Affairs Nargis Sethi signed the agreements on behalf of their respective sides.
Under the first agreement, Saudi Arabia will provide a credit facility of US $125 million for the import of Urea fertiliser from Saudi Arabia.
Whereas under the second agreement, Saudi Arabia will provide an additional loan of $57.8 million for the construction of a 106MW Golen Gol hydro-power project at River Mastuj in Chitral.
At the same time, the following statement was released, Pakistan’s first tip-toe into the Syrian civil war ocean:
The two sides reiterated the need for finding of a quick solution of the existing conflict in Syria according to Geneva I Resolution in order to restore peace and security in Syria and prevent bloodshed of the brotherly Syrian people.
In this regard both sides called for the following:
– Importance of immediate withdrawal of all foreign armed forces and elements from Syrian territory.
– Lifting siege of the Syrian towns and villages and stopping aerial and artillery bombardment.
– The setting up of safe corridors and regions to deliver food and humanitarian aid to besieged Syrian citizens, under international supervision.
– The formation of transitional governing body with full executive powers enabling it to take charge of the affairs of the country.
Sure enough, a few days later, it appears that Pakistan is agreeing to arm the Syrian rebels, and not just with night-vision goggles either.
DUBAI: Saudi Arabia is in talks with Pakistan to provide anti-aircraft and anti-tank rockets to Syrian rebels to try to tip the balance in the war to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, a Saudi source said Sunday.
The United States has long opposed arming the rebels with such weapons, fearing they might end up in the hands of extremists, but Syrian opposition figures say the failure of Geneva peace talks seems to have led Washington to soften its opposition.
Pakistan makes its own version of Chinese shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, known as Anza, and anti-tank rockets — both of which Riyadh is trying to get for the rebels, said the source, who is close to Saudi decision-makers, requesting anonymity.
The source pointed to a visit to Riyadh earlier this month by Pakistan’s army chief of staff, General Raheel Sharif, who met Crown Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz.
Meanwhile, in what appears to be an unrelated development, the Iranian consulate in Peshawar was attacked yesterday by a group called “Mast Gul”, which I must confess I had never heard of before until today Mast Gul, a former HuM militant with a Kashmir focus.
Is it wise and advisable to wade into a sectarian civil war two thousand miles away? Obviously not. Some states can afford to do so, and bless their heart, they are intervening to their heart’s content. So be it. We do not have to join them. Just examine the trajectory of sectarian violence over the last decade (data source).
Up till now, one could plausibly argue that the arms of the state, both political or military, were not directly involved in the wave of sectarian violence. Notwithstanding local-level alliances between powerful parties and sectarian parties such as ASWJ and Sunni Tehreek, the Pakistani state has essentially had a hands off/see no evil/Don’t Ask Don’t Tell type of policy regarding sectarian issues.
Such a policy will no longer be possible in a world in which Pakistan is arming Syrian rebels to the teeth and dancing to the Saudi tune. The questions our decision-makers should be asking themselves are:
1. What are the possible ramifications for such a policy on sectarian violence in Pakistan? Is it likely to exacerbate and make more deadly sectarian cleavages or the opposite?
2. What are the possible benefits that will accrue to Pakistan following a rebel victory in Syria?
3. What are the possible costs of this policy to Pakistan’s relationship with Iran? Is it still interested in, say, the gas pipeline that’s supposed to solve the energy crisis in one fell magical swoop? Does Pakistan want to be a in a position where three of its four neighbors do not like Pakistan?
4. Has Pakistan considered the possibility that despite (and maybe because of) the myriad foreign interveners in the conflict, that Assad somehow muddles through, and doesn’t actually lose power? What then?
If Saudi Arabia and Iran want to play proxy war in Syria, that’s their prerogative. I really don’t see the logic of why Pakistan should join them — it is not a majority Shia state like Iran, nor a major Sunni power like Saudi, nor does it have any pressing geostrategic interests in Syria. The clarion calls of “this is not our war”, well-rehearsed and inaccurately applied over the last decade, are now more apt than ever. Pakistan should stay out.
Source :
http://fiverupees.com/2014/02/24/this-is-not-our-war-syria-edition/
The article gets the premise wrong entirely. Therefore all the follows is misperceived. All wars are our wars, but not as is defined by the primary narrative of empire. This website simply refuses to carry my articles which counterpoint 100% of the narrative here. So I include my analysis as comment. Thank you. Zahir Ebrahim,
The Saudi-Salafi-Wahabi-Deobandi and Taliban-Al-Qaeda Terrorists or Imperial Surrogates in Disguised Uniforms Executing Operation Gladio?
By Zahir Ebrahim | Project Humanbeingsfirst.org
Tuesday, February 25, 2014 | Last Updated March 2, 2014 02:10 pm
This article continues my previous analysis of understanding Operation Gladio of yesteryear as the template for perceptively understanding worldwide terror today similarly being inflicted from continent to continent by well-trained Western surrogates disguised in Islamofascist uniforms and blamed on Islamofascist patsies to similarly keep fueling World War IV.
Some of the following passages are excerpted from my 2009 essay: Reflections on Modernity.
My all time favorite physicist of Pakistan, the MIT literate prodigy, Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, the scholar who contributed his own punditry to the mantra of Islamism in dialectical penmanship to Daniel Pipes’ in erudite prose like “Between Imperialism and Islamism” and “The Threat From Within”, once wrote me in response to my trying to get him to see that Bin Laden couldn’t have done 911 as WTC collapses looked like controlled demolition and that he, Hoodbhoy, was failing to connect all the dots which clearly lead to puppetmasters, saying something to the effect: ~ “remember how our ancestors connected the dots in the sky and saw all those shapes as their gods…”.
So henceforth, Pervez Hoodbhoy judiciously avoided connecting the dots lest he too be misled into seeing things that aren’t there, while of course finding it infinitely pleasurable to continue echoing the mantras and axioms of empire. Not only MIT trained scientists, but apparently almost all major scientists and scholars of any IVY and other lofty pedigree are pregnant with imperial wisdom in that way.
These brilliant scholars only see puppetshows, and painstakingly describe them, but never go towards uncovering the forces which drive them. Since I have already described their salient characteristics in detail before, let me just reproduce it here as its worthwhile to relate that to the topic at hand:
None of them betray that they possess long term memories, or any comprehension of even recent history that can be contextualized to the present.
None of them seem to have heard of ‘covert-ops’, ‘black-ops’, and ‘false-flag operations’; none of them have read the shrewd analysis of the imperial thinkers themselves of the necessity of real mobilizing pretexts such as the “New Pearl Harbor” and “clear and present danger” as otherwise “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization“.
None of them apparently understand that covert-ops while they are operational and active, are meant to be secretive and mendacious, which is why they are called ‘covert’, and that their unraveling necessitates perceptively seeing beyond what’s being deliberately made manifest and what’s being insisted upon as ‘two plus two equals five’ – for hard receipts for them will only be uncovered by historians through the famed declassification process post faits accomplis. The visible effects of these covert-ops and false-flag operations blamed on patsies is however commented upon with most erudite sophistication.
Thus all of these ‘astute’ thinkers, commentators, and media pundits none too miraculously reach the same minimal and common conclusion space regardless of their own starting thesis, or the circuitous routes taken in their analysis and speculations, that at the bare minimum, the scourge of ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘militant Islam’ needs to be checked with renewed commitment in the global ‘war on terror’, or else no one in the ‘civilized world’ would remain safe from these antiquated Taliban style ‘evil jihadis’ and ‘al qaeeda’. That root of terror has now been successfully showcased as residing in Pakistan – the ‘Terror Central’!
The root of terror is further determined to be funded by Saudi Arabia, which is itself visibly seen to be pushing its Salafi-Wahabi-Deobandi brand of antediluvian terror upon its surrounding nations, from Syria to Pakistan, in cahoots with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda; in fact, it is variously argued that Saudi Arabia is largely behind the resurgence of the latter “insurgency” throughout the world.
It is indeed deemed a ‘clash of civilizations’, not of the East and the West titans, but of ‘radical antiquated militant Islam’ and the rest of civilized humanity! That “Today [even] if one could wipe America off the map of the world with a wet cloth, mullah-led fanaticism will not disappear”, as the distinguished native-informant par excellence, the world class physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy, has conclusively observed in his latest analysis of the matter in “Preventing More Lal Masjids”, and which he had earlier explored in great analytical depth in “The Threat From Within”. And none [too] surprisingly, echoing the same mantra of Pakistan becoming a ‘terrorist sanctuary’ [as] CNN a few days ago [which] aired the documentary by Nick Richardson “Pakistan – The Threat Within”. The unanimity of this conclusion space is scary to say the least – at least for us Pakistanis.
It would appear that the world’s leading thinkers, journalists, newsmedia, scholars and leaders “united we stand” that Pakistan poses a serious threat to world peace! Not the hectoring hegemons who have cleverly utilized 911 “to goosestep the Herrenvolk across international frontiers” in what only appears to be another ‘operation canned goods’ or the ‘Reichstag fire’ or the much coveted ‘New Pearl Harbor’ to achieve the ‘transformation of [its] forces’ to achieve ‘full spectrum dominance’ over the planet and outerspace, but my wretched lands of the ancient Indus valley, and my wretched peoples – we are the world threat! – Saving Pakistan from Synthetic ‘Terror Central’ – Orchestration of ‘Lal Masjid’ – a precursor to ‘shock and awe’? July 13-23, 2007.
In the light of what is transpiring in Pakistan today, it is not at all prescient that Pervez Hoodbhoy should have written the following in his ode to Daniel Pipes: “The Threat From Within”. In response to it, I had been compelled to write to dissent-specialist Hoodbhoy that had there not been an author’s name in that document and someone had asked me to guess who had written it, I would have easily guessed Daniel Pipes. Take a look at the following passage for instance:
‘Is Radical Islam Inevitable?
With the large and growing popular sentiment against Musharraf and his army, one cannot rule out the possibility that in the years ahead nuclear armed Pakistan may fall under a neo-Taliban style Salafi-Wahabi-Deobandi leadership allied with conservative senior military leaders. If it does, then Pakistan could become the world’s most dangerous state. But, although possible, it is certainly not inevitable – countervailing forces work against this nightmare scenario.’ —— Pervez Hoodbhoy, Pakistan – The Threat From Within, Pakistan Security Research Unit (PSRU), Brief Number 13, 23rd May 2007.
The crafty Machiavellian omissions present in that saintly expression of fear by uber physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy: “in the years ahead nuclear armed Pakistan may fall under a neo-Taliban style Salafi-Wahabi-Deobandi leadership allied with conservative senior military leaders. If it does, then Pakistan could become the world’s most dangerous state”, was once again most recently dismantled in Response to ‘Wahabization- Salafization of Pakistan and Muslim Ummah : Fighting the Terrorists But Supporting Their Ideology. In that article in 2009, I had again explained to the Muslim public mind that:
The Muslim mind grossly misperceives the difference between gardeners and weeds. Focussing on weeds, no matter how eruditely, is inconsequential if the diabolical gardeners who secretly water it without revealing their role (wit Brzezinski “God is on your side”), and often also manufacture it (wit Zionism, Islamism), are not dealt with first. Their ‘ubermensch’ mind will always cultivate or synthesize newer varieties as deemed necessary for “imperial mobilization”.
The first order problem is not the weeds, which is only the effect. The first order problem is their first-cause, the gardeners. These “weeds” do not grow to this level of social and political penetration all by themselves.
The weeds are “tickled” into existence, fertilized, nurtured and harvested by the gardeners for crafting a perpetual enemy to fight against, often times as red herrings.
While the unsuspecting public attention remains focussed on the weeds’ attention-grabbing plays in the left-field, the real game of “imperial mobilization” goes on in the right-field in the guise of countering the terror being continually manufactured by these weeds; at times naturally by the very fact of their continually fertilized existence and the “doctrinal motivation” fed to them; at other times on demand as targeted false-flag operations blamed on the weeds who often die in the process; and always by the power of myth construction of an elusive all powerful Ali Baba and his rapidly multiplying surrogates in the now well-fertilized terrain of “militant Islam” who not only threaten all of Westerndom, but the entire civilized world.
The modern uniforms of this Western manufactured terror are those of the Salafi-Wahabi-Deobandis-Taliban-Al-Qaeeda et. al. motif.
These vile surrogates and their sub surrogates work for empire no differently than NATO’s Stay Behind Armies did, through layers of compartmentalized handlers.
The fact that “Saudi petro dollars” are only in proxy service to their masters’ voice is no state-secret.
The modern uniforms of this Western manufactured terror base are those of the Salafi-Wahabi-Deobandis-Taliban-Al-Qaeeda et. al. motif. Only the label and color of uniform changes to give the illusion of multiplying weeds.
Cut off the gardeners resupply lines to the weeds, and the weeds will not only die their own natural death, but that fate can now finally be accelerated by judicious use of RoundUp!
These vile surrogates and their sub surrogates work for empire no differently than NATO’s Stay Behind Armies did, through layers of compartmentalized handlers. The Saudi government itself which is often fingered by the useful idiots as the terrorists’ principal godfather, is merely the prostitute of empire that is kept in power by empire as their own front-man controlling Islam’s holiest sites. It is in fact empire’s own sacred authority over the Muslims. By having the Saudis control Mecca and Medina, and by destroying all of Islam’s archaeological vestiges from existence in the name of expansion and development, Saudi Arabia can be made an easy target of anger for Muslim masses whenever empire is ready to eject that surrogate. The public anger can easily be channeled to their expendable dogs when the time comes.
It is my sad and sorry prediction that this artificial country called Saudi Arabia which was diabolically engineered out of the grand chessboard of the twentieth century by the British Empire in collusion with its Anglo-American allies, will similarly be bombed to smithereens like Iraq sometimes in this twenty-first century — to once again save the Muslims of the world from the Saudi-Salafi-Wahab tyranny. Just as Iraq was bombed to save the Iraqis from Saddam’s tyranny! The oil control will simply pass over to new surrogates.
That is the twisted reality of the matter. It is called Hegelian Dialectic. And it relies principally upon the control of the public mind to engineer their consent. That requires full control of the narrative. But of course professors of political science, brilliant physicists, religious pontiffs, distinguished politicians, think-tankers, and other assorted opinion-makers who participate in controlling that narrative as stooges and assets of empire have never heard of it. Who is a witting stooge and who isn’t is besides the point — all who participate in echoing the core lies of empire work for it.
Identify the real enemy, and its real agenda, and the beleaguered nations of the world, especially Pakistan, Iran, the Middle Eastern nations along the “arc of crisis” in the “global zone of percolating violence” as drawn by Zbigniew Brzezinski, will have the first real opportunity to wage a genuine war on terror against the principal prime-movers of global terror.
But keep deflecting attention to the surrogates and to their barbaric bulldogs, and the distorted narrative alone will ensure that the disease will continue to be improperly diagnosed.
And hence, the proposed global dystopic treatment, the Global War on Terror with drone attacks, police-states, and military invasions, as the World War IV replacement of the Cold War, will be kept going by public consent for a generation and preferably longer.
Is this rocket science?
Those unable to call a spade a spade who continue to control the narrative by echoing the empire’s core lies, are the first cause of evil from which all the rest of the evils of war naturally follow. These vulgar propagandists are no ordinary evil-doers. They are supreme evil-doers differing from all other evil-doers in that their core lies contain within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. Refer to a similar statement made by Robert Jackson at Nuremberg for defining the supreme international crime. It is these controllers outside Plato’s cave who must be unmasked and neutered first. Without their control of the narrative, the public mind simply cannot be engineered to agree upon the synthetic reality of “militant Islam”.
Authors, media commentators, politicians and academics spinning reports of terrorism without tracing the source of terror back to the primary forces of imperial mobilization, forces which directly benefit from the existence of these “insurgents” who continually lend more and more shocking pretexts for empire’s ongoing “counter-insurgency” operations both directly, and through their state surrogates worldwide, as the global war on terror are just as guilty of propaganda warfare as Goebbels and his surrogates. Their fate is captured in these photographs:
‘Don’t Be Afraid’
Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels with his six children Image source Der Spiegel
Magda Goebbels poses with her children Image source Der Spiegel
The Goebbels’ innocent children paying the ultimate price Image source Der Spiegel
Caption The Goebbels family — evidently, only defeat or victory adjudicates who is a propagandist and who isn’t, not evidence. Hitler had asserted at the eve of World War II from his mountain top in Bavaria to his generals that he would ‘give a propagandist reason for starting the war’ and admonished them not to ‘mind whether it was plausible or not’. ‘The victor’, he had told them, ‘will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not the right that matters, but victory.’ That unexpected “victory” of hubris eventually caught up with the propagandists. Source of quote is William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
“May 1, 1945, in the evening. The daughters and the son were already in bed, but were not asleep yet. “Don’t be afraid,” their mother said. “The doctor is going to give you a shot now, one that all children and soldiers are getting.” She left the room, and Kunz injected the morphine, “first into the two older girls, then the boy and then the other girls.” Each child received a dose of 0.5 cc. It “took eight to 10 minutes.”
When the children had fallen asleep, Magda Goebbels went into the room, the cyanide pills in her hand, as Kunz testified. She returned a few seconds later, weeping and distraught. “Doctor, I can’t do it, you have to do it,” she said. The dentist replied: “I can’t do it either.” “Then get Dr. Stumpfegger,” she said. Ludwig Stumpfegger, who was slightly younger than Kunz, had been one of SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s personal doctors.
A week later, Russian coroners performed autopsies on the bodies of the children and concluded that their deaths had “occurred as a result of poisoning with cyanide compounds.” The Goebbels themselves had committed suicide outside the bunker, and Stumpfegger died while attempting to break through the Russian lines in Berlin.” — Source Der Spiegel
Thank you.
Further study
[1]: Insurgency vs. Counter-Insurgency By Zahir Ebrahim
[2]: Understanding Self-Inflicted Terror
[3]: How Manufactured Dissent contributes to War Crimes – Sibel Edmonds Revisited
Source URL: http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2014/02/imperial-surrogates-operation-gladio.html
The Saudi-Salafi-Wahabi-Deobandi and Taliban-Al-Qaeda Terrorists or Imperial Surrogates in Disguised Uniforms Executing Operation Gladio? By Zahir Ebrahim
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