Excellent post with many valid points. Thanks for not being confused on the issue, as most of the fashionable liberals are.

The relations between Pakistan and America hit new nadirs every week. The stoppage of $500 million of funds to the Pakistani military was inevitable, especially since General Kayani had already asked the military aid to be diverted to civilian usage. The expulsion of 100 US “trainers” was demanded by the Corp Commanders and General Kayani and General Pasha had to acquiesce to the demands of rank and file of the Pakistani Army. The US has also halted the $300 million in coalition support funds which are being withheld as retribution for lack of progress in attacking North Waziristan. The bottom line is that the US has reached its limits in persuading the Pakistanis to do what they want. Holding back funds is the only leverage the US has. It has now played that card. When General Kayani announced that the Pakistani military will not use US funding, they had already calculated the consequences of denying food and water to the Shamsi Air Base, ostensibly leased out by the UAE to the USA.

The ISI now is hunting down and breaking up the CIA network. The lowest the CIA could ever go was to use Polio eradication for its nefarious purposes. This is a crime against humanity. The tribals have already been suspicions of the Polio drives. The disease has almost been eradicated from the planet. It survives in the remote parts of Pakistan. The CIA has used doctors and the Polio drive for its own profit. This is a huge setback to the Polio drive.

Using doctors to try to get the DNA samples of the OBL compound failed, but it now has grave consequences for world health and US Pakistan relations.

The security outlook for Afghanistan faces unsurmountable issues. In retaliation for the blocked U.S. aid, Pakistan will be obliged to follow through with its threat to withdraw some of his soldiers from the border areas and dismantle more than one thousand border sentry posts. With Leon Panetta taking over as defence secretary the Pakistani military is wary of his new team. The Pakistan military following an independent and more nationalistic strategy against the militants will begin to drawdown its forces in Fata and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

This de facto ceding of territory to the Afghan Taliban has consequences for American war planners. The US is the occupying power in Afghanistan. It has inadvertently or by design left a vacuum in the border area. The Pakistani government suspects US complicity with the TTP and most analysts think that the US forces have given space to the TTP so that it can launch attacks on Pakistan from Afghan soil. Over the past six weeks, the Pakistan army has fired over 760 rockets and artillery shells into three Afghan provinces, killing at least 60 people. This is retaliation for the cross-border terrorism from Afghanistan. As the US attacks areas in FATA, the Pakistani Army will continue to retaliate against the foreign sponsored TTP.

The decision to sanction the Pakistani Army has long term consequences for America. Policymakers in Washington have to live with the risks invloved in alienating a new generation of Pakistan Army officers.

So the game on the chess board continues. As General Petraeus begins his counter-insurgency campaign inside Pakistan, the ISI has been gearing up to thwart that war. Hundreds of US spies have been rounded up.

The covert war in in full gear. President Barack Obama is turning to the CIA director Gen. David Petraeus to implement more quasi-military JSOC type of operations. The CIA’s decade old presence in Pakisan is now being overtly challenged by the ISI. THe CIA director will feel the pressure. Intensifying the covert war and increased drone attacks will have serious consequences of US-Pakistani relations.

General Petraeus is now leading an illegal war. He will be a battlefield commander of a robotic air force and a small army of U.S. and Afghan paramilitaries, many of whom are former special operations soldiers. General Petraeus’s campaign in Pakistan will be a civilian-led covert action, authorized under Title 50 of the United State Code. To Pakistan, it will look a lot like war.

There are international consequences of this illegal war. Beijing overtly and covertly will be the biggest impediment to US machinations. The ocnsistent
Chinese message to its neighbors has been that the US cannot be trusted. They will continue to say “I told you so”.

Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while on a tour to China was given unprecedented access to some of China’s most important military capabilities. –including a visit to the HQ of China’s Second Artillery Corps, the unit responsible for China’s nuclear deterrent and many of its rapidly-growing missile forces. Admiral Mullen allowed him to sit in the cockpit of a J-11, one of China’s most advanced operational jets, and to inspect a late-model diesel-electric submarine. As America’s banker the Chinese General Chen Bingde, chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army, offered some stinging unsolicited advice for policymakers in Washington. This is just the beginning. As a representative of the country that holds one Trillion Dollars of US debt, the caustic remarks must have pouring sulphuric acid on US sensitivities.

“I know the U.S. is still recovering from the financial crisis,” Chen said. “Under such circumstances, it is still spending a lot of money on its military and isn’t that placing too much pressure on the taxpayers? If the U.S. could reduce its military spending a bit and spend more on improving the livelihood of the American people … wouldn’t that be a better scenario?” General Chen’s carefully crafted message was undoubtedly designed to reinforce doubts about the Pentagon’s ability in the long run to fulfill its security commitments to the region. In other words, Beijing has told Washington, your war efforts in Afghanistan are unsustainable. China already has great friends in the neighborhood. That message resonates in the region.

US officials may choose to ignore Chen’s remarks and carry on with business as usual. However this will have long-term consequences for the region–already a playground for various powers. While China will reassert its right to own the South China Sea, it will continue to thwart US effort to encircle it from the Pamirs.

The Recent visit of President Zardari to Tehran cannot be billed as a routine trip. In the aftermath of US sanctions on the Pakistani military, Tehran has offered to stop in and provide Pakistan with financial and energy help. Tehran has built the IP pipeline right up to its border, and this pipeline needs to be hooked up the Pakistani gas grid at Sibbi. Tehran has also offered 1000 MW of electricity at subsidized rates. There is talk of cooperation on Afghanistan and resistance to the CIA. THe two countries will probably form joint networks to weed out CIA spies from both countries.

The Pakistan military is in the process of initiating peace deals with the militants. With a chagrined China, an angry Iran, an upset Pakistani military “and a despondent President Karzai, the shattered US exit strategy in Afghanistan is in pieces. If the US cannot count on Pakistani help in disengaging from Afghanistan, it will be stuck in the quagmire-— and this may as well cost Mr. Obama his elections.

As Confucius said–”we live in interesting times”

Drone attacks are wrong and cowardly, regardless
by Ethan Casey

Drone attacks are wrong. I’m sure to be called an appeaser of terrorists for saying that, particularly in light of the latest events in Mumbai. But I think it’s important for Pakistanis, who are on the receiving end of the humiliation and much worse that drone attacks inflict, to hear an American say it. Hopefully some Americans will read this, too. First and foremost, whatever the official pablum or even the truth about “suspected militants” or “alleged al Qaeda leaders,” innocent civilians are being killed.

Sometimes it’s important to start from first principles, and I think one of those is that it’s wrong to terrorise women and children with unmanned aircraft piloted remotely from the other side of the planet. In the dark calculations of a flawed political world, even something that’s clearly wrong can be justified, if not truly justifiable, if it has good results. The philosophical school that makes such arguments is called utilitarianism, and its adherents – such as, I suppose, the Obama administration – could say drone attacks are necessary because they somehow protect Americans. That argument is marketable to the US public, precisely because it’s vague and plays on people’s fears and ignorance. And, from a Machiavellian point of view, it has the merit of being unfalsifiable: If terrorist attacks don’t happen in America, the US administration can say that’s because of drone attacks in Pakistan.

But meanwhile, actual, non-hypothetical life in Waziristan and beyond is being severely disrupted. When we hear about drone attacks at all in the American media – which we often don’t – it’s usually either asserted or simply assumed that they’re necessary and having the right results. The experts assured us that we were winning in Vietnam, too. I wish we would stop taking their word for it. One US military officer in Vietnam said something that became infamous as a symbol for that entire doomed war effort: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” Is that what America is doing all over again in Waziristan?

I don’t know, because I haven’t been there. But when I traveled in Pakistan in 2009 for my book Overtaken By Events, I made a point of seeking out people who had lived there or in Dera Ismail Khan, a city that has become all too frequent a dateline.

My Pakistani-American friend Dr. Shahnaz Khan urged me to try to go there, but acknowledged that it might not be safe for goras to visit. “It’s a small, sleepy town,” she told me. “People were minding their own business, [didn’t] want to get in any trouble, to the point of being lazy, frankly. Since all this happened, a lot of people have migrated into Dera Ismail Khan. … [The] cantonment is right next to the river, and people used to go out and walk by the river. And now they have bunkers, and it’s very difficult for people from the city to go there. My mother lives there and now, we have friends, and it’s really hard for them even to visit her.” All the displaced people fleeing the drone attacks were disrupting life in Dera, Shahnaz told me. “They don’t have any permanent places to live, and they have a different language, different culture,” she said.

An urbane young businessman I met in Islamabad, Faiysal Ali Khan, echoed Shahnaz. Refugees from the drone attacks, he told me, “have had a huge, huge impact on our culture, our society, our people. All these things got disturbed. They brought in the guns, the narcotics, all the illicit trade. Not that I’m saying that they’re bad or anything. They’re refugees; what are they supposed to do?” I asked him about the loyalties of the general public in Waziristan. “On one side, the drone strikes are happening,” he said. “On the other side, Pakistan Army is also bombing you. Americans also bombing you. International community in Nato, ISAF; they’re also bombing you. Everyone is bombing. They’re bombing, bombing, killing innocent people, everything. Why should we have any feeling towards any of these?”

In Karachi, I met a 15-year-old Waziri refugee. “Most of these drone attacks kill innocent people,” he told me through a translator. “They ask our government to tell the people that all of the people who are killed are foreigners. But that is not the case. Most of them are innocent people. Every person has now become a victim of the US, from these drone attacks. What the US is doing by these drone attacks is creating more problems for themselves, rather than solving problems. Every person now that did not want to carry weapons, now wants to carry a weapon, because his children have died in these US attacks. They’re just making it worse for themselves.”

That was more than two years ago. Have things gotten better since then?

I don’t believe there’s any big conspiracy in the US to disregard voices such as these; it’s just that no one here wants to hear what they’re saying. A few of us are trying to get others to listen. I’m doing what I can, through my writing and public speaking, not only for the sake of suffering Waziris and other Pakistanis, but for the good of my own country. America is damaging not only its soul, but also its already badly compromised national economy. And – notwithstanding any circumstances or excuses – attacking people from afar, at no immediate risk to oneself, is cowardly.

Defeat of the drones
by Rafia Zakaria

‘GAMING in Waziristan’ is an art exhibition taking place in London’s Beaconsfield Gallery from July 19 to Aug 5.

Using the archives of the UK-based charity Reprieve, documents from 2007-2011 and the work of three artists, the exhibition is an attempt to give visual reality to a war that is largely invisible.

Photographs from North Waziristan, often taken in the moments after a drone strike, are a pictorial attempt at dislodging the reputation of the drone as a tool of sterile, precise and perfect extermination.

The attempt is commendable, particularly in a world where the unseen is summarily relegated to the unreal and consequently goes un-mourned.
Particularly apt is the western venue, a milieu where many have settled on drone warfare as the solution to the rising cost of producing a human soldier, the terrorist jargon and target-sterilising the messy business of killing.

But the defeat of drones as the antidote to fears of a terror-filled world is not being effected by art alone (although such a route would indeed be ideal). The recipe for taking out militants in Pakistan has been quite simple: drones — marvellous inventions that can kill but not be killed, that can fly for hours, whose anonymous operators can strike from the silent comfort of an anonymous control room.

The landscape they mapped was stark, the mobility of a single human visible against the relative immovability of mud-coloured infinity. Men and militants could be tracked and hunted, and a single moment of foolhardy repose could mean the elimination of an important leader like Baitullah Mehsud.

But warfare, even this new robotic version of it, is always messy and some others, nameless and faceless from their lack of lethality, were killed — their mourners limited by the sealed-off terrain to those unfortunate enough to be left behind. These supposed militant leaders or those mistaken for them, or living near them, soon numbered hundreds of thousands, forming caravans of hopelessness on the move.

While US officials touted the wonders of drones, those who knew them best turned south to cities away from the constant deathly buzz — away from the prospect of appearing lethal to some distant, unknown persecutor, away from the only landscape they knew how to survive in. The defeat of the drone, an instrument of warfare that played on dated definitions of borders and perpetrators, has resulted from the demographic changes spawned by its own famed efficiency. What the drowned-out wails of powerless victims could not accomplish, the shifts in population have done instead.

As droves of refugees empty out of the drone-ravaged tribal areas, and filter into crowded urban areas, the calculations of the best place to set up your militant shop or jihadi outlet also change. As any mischievous five-year-old will inform you, the worst place to hide is the most obvious one, where everyone looks first.

The limits of the drone then have been spelt out by a change in strategy, a move to new hiding places where teeming millions provide the camouflage that terrain and tribal intrigue once did.

Newly minted AfPak strategists, long-time lovers of drones, are trained to sniff out the singular sin of global jihad in the mutations of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. When ‘ethnic’ warfare appears in the think-tank teacup, eyes begin to glaze over, and attention flags. Those were the old wars, petty post-colonial squabbles over slums and survival, or the right to live in a little less squalor — all missing the neat labelling crying out ‘Islamist global jihad lies here’.

But in war calculations that do persevere, the boredom of one side is always an opportunity for the other. As the violence in Karachi, whose many million fragile egos are also armed and unforgiving, amply testifies, a little local knowledge can go a long way, ignite long-festering faultlines and destabilise not a remote tribal area but a city.

In its calculations, the architects and the executors may never be known and are largely irrelevant; the end result is lawlessness, chaos, a terrified population and the ability to do whatever, wherever and whenever. Through this trajectory, the mutation of the ‘war on terror’, its urbanisation, causes foes to proliferate, making recognition nearly impossible and life for those seeking secrecy near perfect.

As is the case with other abandoned instruments of mass killing, the decreasing strategic value of drones is unlikely to be accompanied with notes of apology or admissions of inertia. In the afterglow of their imagined perfection, drones are likely to continue to ply the skies over abandoned hideouts and once-familiar hangouts yielding ever fewer heads to stake on the posts of victory.

As the US wraps up its operations in Afghanistan, and constructs a victory over terror on Osama bin Laden’s ‘missing’ corpse, it withdraws into the amnesic reclusion that lies between episodes of imperial expansion.

Perhaps in the soul-searching born of sombre parting moments, American lawmakers orchestrating the final exit will pause at the idea that drones do not defeat terror and possibly only displace it, enabling a murky metamorphosis that will continue to terrify.

Drones, even if they disappeared tomorrow, have left Pakistan forever changed, demographically altered, its nascent democratic institutions flailing. It is these urban, dread-darkened streets that those left behind must continue to ply, after the drones, defeated or merely redundant, are finally gone.

Photo exhibit shows alleged US drone strike deaths

http://www.dawn.com/2011/07/19/photo-exhibit-shows-alleged-us-drone-strike-deaths.html