THE ROVING EYE For CIA drone warriors, the future is death
By Pepe Escobar
Forget the iPad; the ultimate icon of fetishized commodity is the drone.
Israelis do it - and sell them like hot cakes. Mexicans do it - to patrol their
side of the border. Brazilians wanna do it - to patrol the Rio favelas.
Saudis wanna do it. Uzbeks wanna do it. Everybody's singing: Let's do it. Let's
fall in love (with the drone).
Furthermore, abandon all hope those who enter (the doors of misperception):
Afghanistan is now officially just a lowly, troop-infested sideshow to the
AfPak war. The real thing is an illegal drone war against Pakistan. Viva
Richard Nixon. As much as Tricky Dick annexed Cambodia to the Vietnam War, the
Barack Obama administration pulled a Nixon regarding Pakistan. And the great
thing is that no one needs another WikiLeaks "dump" to know this. It's out
there in the open.
Tricky Dick's tricks paved the way to Year Zero for the Khmer
Rouge. Obama's throw of the dice may be paving the way to a Year Zero for the
Pashtun brotherhood. The 16-agency US intelligence establishment says the
Afghan adventure is doomed. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is somewhat
gloomy. But the surge-addicted White House - in a stark reminder of those
George W Bush-era reports about Iraq - says it's all swell (Taliban "momentum
has been arrested in much of the country"). Pentagon supremo Robert Gates says
Washington now controls more Afghan territory than a year ago; maybe in terms
of Kabul shopping malls - and that's already a stretch.
Taliban momentum, anyway, is just an afterthought. What matters for the White
House is to smash ("significant progress") al-Qaeda, allegedly holed up not in
Afghanistan but in Pakistan's tribal areas. Take them Pakistani Talibs out from
the air, with the CIA playing Ride of the Valkyries, just like in an
orgiastic Facebook-friendly remix of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now,
with all those US Marine tanks rolling along in Helmand province offering a
cute counterpart. I love the smell of a burning Talib in the morning. Makes me
think of ... re-election.
But what about collateral damage? Tough guys of the "real men go to Tehran"
type say this is for sissies (the New America Foundation says around a third of
drone deaths are civilians, but that's hugely underestimated, according to
Pakistani sources.) Blowback, anyway, is guaranteed to last until the 22nd
century.
Faster CIA, kill, kill
So it's not the Pentagon but the CIA that is showering Death from Above over
dirt-poor mud-hut villages in a country against which the US is not at war.
Things may change - witness the frenzy to legally nail "terrorist" Julian
Assange - but US law does not exactly condone mass assassination campaigns.
The CIA drone war is obviously secret and illegal. That can be fixed with the
incoming chairman of the US House Armed Services Committee updating the
congressional authorization for this extended war on al-Qaeda. As for Pashtuns
collaborating with the CIA, they are technically Afghans, not Pakistanis, from
different tribes; that will foster centuries of subsequent tribal trouble once
the families of the dead ascertain who the snitches are.
Whatever the rhetoric emanating from Washington in 2011, the game will keep
being duly played according to only one plot-advancing script; American
Pentagonists visit Islamabad/Rawalpindi to warn the Pakistanis of Washington's
perennial "strategic impatience" with what they're doing, while their
military/intelligence establishment go live to spin they're doing all they can,
but also need to be watchful of Pakistan's own interests.
In a nutshell: expect for 2011 an endless parade of Predators and Reapers
firing barrages of missiles at the usual "suspected militants" in North
Waziristan, Khyber or anywhere else in the tribal areas; and forget about
Islamabad/Rawalpindi sending their army into North Waziristan to fight
"al-Qaeda" or even the local tribes.
What this essentially means is that the nebula/myth conveniently branded
"al-Qaeda" remains in the clear. There's no way its few dozen invisible jihadis
can be crushed by the CIA's illegal air war, not to mention troops from
Islamabad/Rawalpindi. And even supposing they were, the "franchises" would
still be in business - as in AQAP, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula/Yemen.
Drone Eye for the Straight Guy
Who cares about Don't Ask, Don't Tell? The new hit in all things AfPak is Drone
Eye for the Straight Guy. The next chief of the CIA's National Clandestine
Service - that is, the CIA's new top spy - is John D Bennett, none other than
the former head of a drone-infested CIA paramilitary wing. An Associated Press
story even claimed that he directed the drones in Pakistan during the Bush era.
Even the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General "Hoss" Cartwright,
has totally gone Drone Eye for the Straight Guy. As he sees it, COIN is now
history; the hip thing to do is "counter-terrorism", as in drone-saturated air
war. Consider the drone war as Washington's premier stimulus package to Central
Asia.
Progress in over-stimulated Afghanistan, according to the Obama
administration's year-end report, is "frail and reversible". This means in
practice that for all the spin, missile-saturated Kandahar is not becoming
Orange county anytime soon.
The Afghanistan plot won't thicken; it will dilute in the usual diarrhea.
Afghans will keep saying over and over again they are not exactly Taliban fans
- but they hate the corrupt Hamid Karzai gang and Washington even more, for
allowing their occupied country to be controlled by gangsters and warlords.
Washington will keep tweaking its losing "strategy" of smashing the Taliban
with extreme firepower. The Taliban for their part have already fine-tuned
their own strategy of "flee the south-go north". All the roads in Afghanistan
lead to Kabul; not by accident, all are intercepted or under Taliban attack.
Karzai rule stops abruptly at the last rickety police station south of Kabul,
on the road to Kandahar. It's as if Kabul was enveloped by an eerie Titanic
feeling - that pampered, gated-condo isolated neo-colonial coterie of generals,
diplomats, non-governmental organizations and security contractors partying
hard as in before the fall of Saigon.
But soon anyway a "new" narrative will be taking over - the snail-pace North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) "drawdown" from 2011 to 2014. But does that
mean the beginning of the endgame - no more war? Rather it's back to the
beginning, as in "abandon all hope those who enter (the doors of
misperception)". To (literally) thunderous applause by a coterie of neophyte
neo-jihadi bombers, the Obama White House has explicitly emphasized "NATO's
enduring commitment beyond 2014".
A key feature of this "enduring commitment" is that the Afghan army soldiers
and cops NATO is training (supplemented by US private contractors of the
Dyncorp/Blackwater mould) will need no less than US$6 billion a year, every
year, till probably eternity, from the usually euphemistic "international
donors", key among them US taxpayers.
It's a gas, gas, gas
And here's where The Year of the Drone merges with what the late, great
deconstructionist Jacques Lacan would qualify as "the unsayable": the
invisible, dangerous liaisons between the "war on terror" and the energy war,
as in the topography of the war on terror matching all the key 21st-century
sources of energy from the Middle East to Central Asia.
This implies a key Pipelineistan chapter - the never-ending saga of the
Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, which has been at the
very core of the troubled Washington-Kabul marriage since the mid-1990s.
The TAPI inter-government agreement was finally signed in mid-December. Make no
mistake; this is Washington in overdrive. The Washington-backed Asian
Development Bank is to come up with the bulk of the $7.6 billion (and counting)
financial package. The 2,000 kilometer-long TAPI - to be built by an
international consortium - should snake through a very dodgy 735 kilometers of
Afghanistan and 800 kilometers of Pakistan.
Hype apart, there's no hard evidence that TAPI will "stabilize" Afghanistan or
contribute to India and Pakistan trading kisses instead of insults. AfPak in
this case are both transit countries. Most of the Afghan stretch will be
underground - much as the US-supported BTC from Baku in Azerbaijan to Ceyhan,
Turkey. In theory, local villages will be paid to guard the pipeline. But that
still does not guarantee security to a steel serpent crossing western
Afghanistan and then going east through Kandahar.
Once again in theory, TAPI is indeed a steel Silk Road between Central and
South Asia. If TAPI is ever built - and that's still a big "if" - certainly it
will mark a monster crossover of Pipelineistan with the US Empire of Bases.
Because none other than the Pentagon and NATO will provide the overall
security. And that means the Atlanticist West forever embedded in AfPak. One
can imagine what the Taliban on both sides - not to mention disgruntled
Pashtuns in general - will make of that.
And even if TAPI is built, this still does not mean that its key competitor,
the $7.3 billion Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, also known as the "peace
pipeline", has lost the battle - much to Washington's horror. The Indians have
said that much - they are now chasing insurance giants of the Lloyds variety.
And Pakistan definitely wants both TAPI and IPI.
TAPI theoretically should be finished by 2014. Surprise! That's exactly the
deadline year (for now ...) for American troops to exit Afghanistan. No one
will be exiting anything. Finally, the whole AfPak imbroglio will be revealed
for what it is; a Pipelineistan gambit.
Meanwhile, enjoy the Year of the Drone. And while we're at it, here's some
breaking news. The 2011 Pentagon/NATO strategy for AfPak is already
established: wait for the Taliban spring/summer offensive to see where they're
at. And then drone them to death. Call it Drone Eye for the Bad Guy.
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