Pakistan wagging the dog; Al Qaeda for Bush; tidbits

There have been a lot of strange reports from the wasteland of mirrors lately. Some of these are in registration-required type websites like the LA Times. Therefore as a handy tool for everyone I suggest BugMeNot.com, a repository of logins for news sites that should let everyone duck the hassle of giving those shady corps our email addresses. I have not looked at my server traffic logs in a while, but I suspect things have slacked off during this low-volume time of mine, and that's fine with me. I have been trying to get some exercise, get a life, get outside while the weather's good, and take two classes and work. So sue me.

I've got a lot of stuff referring to the CIA's Anonymous man. He's one solid character. Angry, yes, but clear enough to understand what a crazy detour Iraq was...

On a random note, keep reading Prof. Juan Cole every day.

Pakistan asked to wag the dog during Dem convention

Perhaps at the beginning should be this new report from the New Republic, which describes how Bush folks have been prodding the Pakistanis to go after al-Qaeda right during the Democratic convention, yet another marvelous example of Republican political expediency through rather oddly timed, symbolic decisions. But will capturing OBL or Zawahiri wag the dog hard enough, or will Pakistan's restive cross-border tribes whack back when they realize they are being manipulated for the American elections??

The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs [high-value targets] by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, "The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections."

A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
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But there is a reason many Pakistanis and some American officials had previously been reluctant to carry the war on terrorism into the tribal areas. A Pakistani offensive in that region, aided by American high-tech weaponry and perhaps Special Forces, could unite tribal chieftains against the central government and precipitate a border war without actually capturing any of the HVTs. Military action in the tribal areas "has a domestic fallout, both religious and ethnic," Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri complained to the Los Angeles Times last year.

Some American intelligence officials agree. "Pakistan just can't risk a civil war in that area of their country. They can't afford a western border that is unstable," says a senior intelligence official, who anonymously authored the recent Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and who says he has not heard that the current pressures on Pakistan are geared to the election. "We may be at the point where [Musharraf] has done almost as much as he can."

The point here, assuming this is even close to true, is that the Bush administration--shockingly--views the war on terror as an ATM machine, where they can buy votes by withdrawing from the Pakistan account. The country is teetering on some sort of tribal war, but the administration's persistent evasion of really dealing honestly with the problems in that country has been put off for so long that when they try to symbolically whack the hornet's nest again because of domestic politics, what kinds of things might fly out?

In any case this one will come to a head in a few weeks. More on how Iraq situation puts a "squeeze" on Musharraf. And Iraq is "A failure without borders" according to William Lind, who if I recall is a deserter of the neocon movement. This article describes the key idea of dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, or the abode of Islam and the abode of war as elements in Islamic 'fundamentalist' thinking, although Lind relishes his own rhetoric a little too much:

It is all one war, one battlefield. State boundaries mean nothing. Of course, it is not going very well on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan either. But in this war, events in those places are in effect merely tactical. The strategic centers of gravity are in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt. Al-Qaeda, I think, understands this. Washington does not. That fact alone suggests we have only seen the opening moves in what promises to be a very long war.

The latest from Dr. Khalidi: in an excellent piece condensed from his remarks at the UCLA International Institute, Rashid Khalidi describes something I've personally heard before from other experts, that the Bushies told all the real regional experts to go straight to hell:

Everything taking place in U.S. policy in the Middle East since 9/11 is not grounded in real knowledge about the Middle East. Without a knowledge of resistance to Western control over two centuries, America cannot know how our policy is viewed in the region. We are seeing the dismissal of real history in favor of crude stereotypes.

Those who attacked the United States are very smart people who have played on real grievances in a very expert way. The Bush administration has not used the informational resources at its disposal to respond appropriately. The U.S. attack on Iraq was accompanied by an insidious attack on domestic Middle East experts. Experts can be wrong, but the dedicated professionals have often been prescient in their warnings.

And of course if you haven't read it, check out my exclusive Mac Weekly interview with Dr. Khalidi from last fall. Talk about prescient warnings...

Cross border cash money against U.S.

Via the NYTimes wire services we find that Saddam's clan has been moving arms and money for the insurgency around. That is not very surprising, as it seems more and more that the Iraqi rebels were prepared to fight the occupation for a long time, regardless of the political arrangements imposed by the U.S. I remember feeling chilled when they showed the huge caches of weapons that kept turning up, then hearing of how we lacked enough personnel to guard the caches, so all manner of bandits and crazy folk could saddle up on as much weaponry as they could carry--a disaster for Iraq from every perspective. Despite the handover, the attacks drag on and on. "Now it's a nation of law & disorder," in so many words. TIME report on the 'new jihad,' Chris Albritton contributed to this article.

Fareed Zakaria talks some sense, simply saying "Reach Out to the insurgents;" in other words the end of the CPA has opened an opportunity to define a new relationship with the opposition groups. I always firmly believe that we can't just classify such characters as "the terrorists" and leave the situation at that, for then you get nowhere. Instead, engagement... dialectic... other hopeless hopes.

The Iraqi Baathists in exile are considering forming an Iraqi government-in-exile to offer the Iraqi people. Or it could be a framework to propel a civil war. We would just need names for the sides. A basic argument from Charley Reese on the compatibility of Islam and democracy, and in particular mentioning where the U.S. recently sided with a military government against some elected Islamists in Algeria, sparking a civil war.

Once again I will cite this very fascinating up-to-the-minute perspective on the insurgents, and how well armed they are. Seems the daring journalist went out and actually talked with them for three hours. It's quite dramatic, including a rendezvous at Hotel Babel, swarming with foreign mercenaries. Take what they say with a grain of salt, but its surprisingly plain in a way:

"The Americans have prepared the war, we have prepared the post-war. And the transfer of power on June 30 will not change anything regarding our objectives. This new provisional government appointed by the Americans has no legitimacy in our eyes. They are nothing but puppets." Why have these former officers waited so long to come out of their closets? "Because today we are sure we're going to win."
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We knew that if the United States decided to attack Iraq, we would have no chance faced with their technological and military power. The war was lost in advance, so we prepared the post-war. In other words: the resistance. Contrary to what has been largely said, we did not desert after American troops entered the center of Baghdad on April 5, 2003. We fought a few days for the honor of Iraq - not Saddam Hussein - then we received orders to disperse." Baghdad fell on April 9: Saddam and his army where nowhere to be seen.

"As we have foreseen, strategic zones fell quickly under control of the Americans and their allies. For our part, it was time to execute our plan. Opposition movements to the occupation were already organized. Our strategy was not improvised after the regime fell." This plan B, which seems to have totally eluded the Americans, was carefully organized, according to these officers, for months if not years before March 20, 2003, the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The objective was "to liberate Iraq and expel the coalition. To recover our sovereignty and install a secular democracy, but not the one imposed by the Americans. Iraq has always been a progressive country, we don't want to go back to the past, we want to move forward. We have very competent people," say the three tacticians. There will be of course no names as well as no precise numbers concerning the clandestine network. "We have sufficient numbers, one thing we don't lack is volunteers."
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Essentially composed by Ba'athists (Sunni and Shi'ite), the resistance currently regroups "all movements of national struggle against the occupation, without confessional, ethnic or political distinction. Contrary to what you imagine in the West, there is no fratricide war in Iraq. We have a united front against the enemy. From Fallujah to Ramadi, and including Najaf, Karbala and the Shi'ite suburbs of Baghdad, combatants speak with a single voice. As to the young Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, he is, like ourselves, in favor of the unity of the Iraqi people, multiconfessional and Arab. We support him from a tactical and logistical perspective."
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"The attacks are meticulously prepared. They must not last longer than 20 minutes and we operate preferably at night or very early in the morning to limit the risks of hitting Iraqi civilians." They anticipate our next question: "No, we don't have weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, we have more than 50 million conventional weapons." By the initiative of Saddam, a real arsenal was concealed all over Iraq way before the beginning of the war. No heavy artillery, no tanks, no helicopters, but Katyushas, mortars (which the Iraqis call haoun), anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other Russian-made rocket launchers, missiles, AK 47s and substantial reserves of all sorts of ammunition. And the list is far from being extensive.

But the most efficient weapon remains the Kamikazes. A special unit, composed of 90% Iraqis and 10% foreign fighters, with more than 5,000 solidly-trained men and women, they need no more than a verbal order to drive a vehicle loaded with explosives

A little from Asia Times Online via their mideast page: More on the five key actors: Israel, the U.S., Iran, Turkey and the Iraqi insurgents. What will sovereignty mean to each? A moment for the great Mr. Negroponte and his Battalion 316 death squad. A fairly even look at the moral shell games being played with Saddam's trial. A book review of "Exiting Iraq: Why the US Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War against al-Qaeda," written by Chris Preble.

Highly worth reading is a very lengthy piece on Al Qaeda by Craig Hulet looks at the CIA agent 'Anonymous' on why Al Qaeda would benefit from Bush's reelection:

The most profound assertion the author made (Anonymous), who published an analysis of al-Qaeda last year called "Through Our Enemies' Eyes", thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place. Bush is good for the Islamists the world over who want to make war on America and the West. Anonymous again:

I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now. One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president. In every age ... the ultimate sources of war are the beliefs of those in power: "their idea about what is of most fundamental importance and may therefore ultimately be worth a war." - Evan Luard, International War
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One must question not only what the administration is doing presently but what it will do should it return to office after the November elections; upcoming wars against other nation-states (which clearly have been targeted) are on the Pentagon's desk. Further evidence that the latter is officially on the agenda is below: This was dated Monday, February 17, 2003:

US Under Secretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials on Monday that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq, and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards. Bolton, who is under secretary for arms control and international security, is in Israel for meetings about preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In a meeting with Bolton on Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that Israel is concerned about the security threat posed by Iran. It's important to deal with Iran even while American attention is turned toward Iraq, Sharon said.
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Paul R Pillar, whose book Terrorism and US Foreign Policy was a staple for reading in counterterror circles and private security specialists like myself, pre-September 11. He notes this regarding the afore mentioned arguments:

More than anything else, it is the United States' predominant place atop the world order (with everything that implies militarily, economically, and culturally) and the perceived US opposition to change in any part of that order that underlie terrorists' resentment of the United States and their intent to attack it.
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The Defense Science Board's 1997 Summer Study Task Force on "Department of Defense Responses to Transnational Threats" notes a relationship between an activist American foreign policy and terrorism against the United States:

As part of its global power position, the United States is called upon frequently to respond to international causes and deploy forces around the world. America's position in the world invites attack simply because of its presence. Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.

More on Moore and tidbits

"The master demagogue an age of demagoguery made" by Todd Gitlin on OpenDemocracy.net. Seemed pretty valid. Australian perspective on the 'polemical film.' USA Today on Ms. Lipscomb. Movie buzz shake election? Nooo...

Apparently more Democrats are being hired as lobbyists. Should I be happy?

To hell with global Social Democracy, they say....

Ick, a National Review hack defending the torture scandal. Just here for color. Yes in fact, Cheney is a 'mixed blessing' at best. Ha.

Posted by HongPong at July 8, 2004 02:52 AM
Listed under Campaign 2004 , Iraq , War on Terror .