The 92,000 American classified military documents released by WikiLeaks add to
the evidence that Pakistan's intelligence service backs the Taliban, to the
point of helping the Taliban plan assassinations of American and Afghan
officials.
This raises the question: Who covered up a scandalous arrangement known to
everyone with a casual acquaintance of the situation? The answer is the same as
in Agatha Christie's 1934 mystery about murder on the Orient Express, that is,
everybody: former United States president George W Bush and vice president Dick
Cheney, current US President Barack Obama and Vice
President Joe Biden, India, China and Iran. They are all terrified of facing a
failed state with nuclear weapons, and prefer a functioning but treacherous
one.
The released papers - described as one of the biggest leaks in US military
history - detail military operations between 2004 and 2009. Some of the
documents published on July 25 disclose how North Atlantic Treaty Organization
forces have killed scores of civilians in unreported incidents in Afghanistan.
The documents claim that 195 civilians have been improperly killed and 174
wounded. Many are motorcylists or drivers shot after being suspected of being
suicide bombers.
The White House has condemned the publication, saying it threatened the safety
of coalition forces, while Pakistan's ambassador to the United States said his
country was committed to fighting insurgents. Husain Haqqani called the release
"irresponsible", saying it consisted of "unprocessed" reports from the field.
The "everybody" involved in this case seems to exclude whomever actually leaked
the documents, presumably some element of the US military, which has to absorb
the effect of Pakistan's double game in the region in the form of body bags for
enlisted men and shattered reputations for commanders. Like the Rolling Stone
magazine interviews that led to the firing of General Stanley McChrystal, the
America commander in Afghanistan, the WikiLeaks documents suggest a degree of
disaffection of the American military with civilian leaders deeper than
anything in living memory.
To exit the Afghan quagmire in a less than humiliating fashion, the United
States requires Pakistani help to persuade the Taliban not to take immediate
advantage of the American departure and evoke Vietnam-era scenes of helicopters
on the American Embassy roof. The politicians in Washington know they have lost
and have conceded to the Taliban a role in a post-American Afghanistan. They
can only hope that once the country plunges into chaos, the public will have
moved onto other themes, much as it did after the Bill Clinton administration
put Kosovo into the hands of a gang of dubious Albanians in 1998.
India does not want America to call Pakistan to account. In the worst case,
Pakistan might choose to support the Taliban and other terrorist organizations
- including Kashmiri irredentists - openly rather than covertly. Indian Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh, of whom the Economist on July 25 wrote "the strength
of his coalition depends largely on how weak he is as Prime Minister", does not
want to confront Pakistan. If Pakistan's support for anti-Indian terrorism
became undeniable, India would have to act, and action is the last thing the
Congress party-led coalition in New Delhi wants to consider.
China has no interest in destabilization in Pakistan; on the contrary, Beijing
lives in fear that radical Islamists in Pakistan might infect its own restive
Uyghurs. And Iran, which shares the fractious Balochis with Pakistan on their
common border, lives in terror that a destabilized Pakistan would free the
Balochis to make trouble.
Balochis comprise little over 2% of Iran's population, but they have
demonstrated their talent at bomb-making on several recent occasions, including
the bombing this month of a Shi'ite mosque in southeastern Iran in which 28
people were killed and hundreds wounded. Iran has accused Pakistan of
sponsoring Balochi terror attacks, but intelligence community sources in
Washington insist that the Pakistanis would never be so reckless as to put
bombs into Balochi hands.
With 170 million people - more than Russia - and a nuclear arsenal, Pakistan is
too big to fail, that is, too big to fail without traumatic consequences for
its neighbors. Whether it can be kept from failure is questionable. Half its
people live on less than a dollar day, and half are illiterate. It is riven by
religious differences - a seventh of Pakistanis are Shi'ite - as well as ethnic
ones.
The government's desultory campaign against pro-Taliban elements on the Afghan
border comes down to Punjabis killing Pashtuns. To drive the Taliban in earnest
out of the Pashto-speaking frontier in the Waziristan tribal areas would risk
tearing the country apart. It is also the case that Pakistan wants the Taliban
as a bulwark against India. But it is misleading to separate Islamabad's
foreign policy objectives from the requirements of domestic cohesion, since
irredentist agitation against India is part of the glue that holds together a
fractious and fanatical collection of tribes.
Pakistan's claim on the support and forbearance of its neighbors, and its
foreign sponsors, the United States and China, is its propensity to fail.
American policy still wants to maintain a balance of power between India and
Pakistan. That is an act of extreme folly. The longer the regional powers delay
a reckoning with Pakistan, the more damaging the outcome. As I wrote in my
year-end review last December 29:
There is one great parallel, but also
one great difference, between the Balkans on the eve of World War I and the
witch's cauldron comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and contiguous
territory. The failure of the region's most populous state - in that case the
Ottoman Empire, in this case Pakistan - makes shambles out of the power
balance, leaving the initiative in the hands of irredentist radicals who
threaten to tug their sponsors among the great powers along behind them. But in
1914, both France and Germany thought it more advantageous to fight sooner
rather than later. No matter how great the provocation, both India and China
want to postpone any major conflict. The problem is that they may promote minor
ones. [1]
Given the overwhelming evidence that Pakistan is
taking American aid while helping the Taliban kill American soldiers, perhaps
by providing its Afghani friends with shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles,
the Obama administration has done the only thing it can: deny that the 92,000
documents contain any new information, while insisting that its November 2009
"review" of Afghan war strategy is an appropriate response to the problems
detailed in the documents. The Obama administration has a story, and it is
sticking to it. The White House stated after the documents were published on
July 25:
Since 2009, the United States and Pakistan have deepened our
important bilateral partnership. Counter-terrorism cooperation has led to
significant blows against al-Qaeda's leadership. The Pakistani military has
gone on the offensive in Swat and South Waziristan, at great cost to the
Pakistani military and people. The United States and Pakistan have also
commenced a Strategic Dialogue, which has expanded cooperation on issues
ranging from security to economic development ... yet the Pakistani government
- and Pakistan’s military and intelligence services - must continue their
strategic shift against insurgent groups. The balance must shift decisively
against al-Qaeda and its extremist allies. US support for Pakistan will
continue to be focused on building Pakistani capacity to root out violent
extremist groups, while supporting the aspirations of the Pakistani people.
That this is nonsense, Obama knows, along with the whole world. At some point
the charade must come to an end, and it would be a novelty in world affairs if
the reluctance of American commanders to feed the charade with American blood
were the proximate cause of its termination. The United States would be better
advised to stop the game now and seek an open alliance with India, the world's
largest democracy and America's natural partner in Central Asia.
Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman senior editor at First Things
(www.firstthings.com). His essay "The Morality of Self-Interest", an argument
for a new "Augustinian realism" in American foreign policy, appeared in the May
issue of First Things.
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