The Most Dangerous Country in the World

In an exclusive interview with the controversial group AfPax (see NYT article, Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants,” March14, 2010) the Pakistan Pakistani Taliban Movement’s (TTP) second in command, Faqir Mohammad, maintained that once the people and government of Pakistan come to understand the true cause of the TTP, they will cede control of the country to them.
Mohammad stated that the aim of the TTP was to protect Pakistan and defend Islam. He also acknowledged that the TTP would inaugurate Sharia Law in Pakistan, which is a reflection of the fact that Pakistan was founded in the name of Islam and for the purpose of defending Islam against the provocations of non-believers, primarily the US and allied forces.
Mohammad asserts that such a scenario would not amount to an occupation of Pakistan, because the country belongs to all Pakistanis alike. Upon learning of the true and righteous goals of the TTP, the people and the army would demand the adoption of Taliban policies. Of course, a primary aspect of their plan is to rid Pakistan of the influence of non-believers, that is, of the US and other Western countries. The TTP maintains that these forces are not engaged in a battle against the Taliban or any other Islamic organization, but against Islam itself. Of course, this is a claim that is not entirely without justification, given the Bush Administration’s rhetoric of Crusades and a clash of civilizations. Indeed, such counterproductive tropes constitute a real and growing danger of the further radicalization of Islamic populations throughout the world. Moreover, the arguably legitimate invasion of Afghanistan and the blatantly illegal war against Iraq has significantly contributed to the effectiveness of the message of such groups as the Taliban, both that of Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as Al Qaeda in their efforts to convert formerly mainstream Muslims to their cause of destroying the “devils” who would love nothing more than to eliminate Islam as a viable political force throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
The US and its allies are playing a dangerous game here. Their strident insistence that the Pakistan government and Army reassert control over the Federally Administrative Tribal Areas (FATA) has done nothing to help the situation. Neither, of course, have the casualties of innocent civilians largely as the result of misguided attacks by drones done anything to alleviate this danger.
It is clear that Pakistan’s civil and military authorities are reluctant to carry out these wishes. After all, they constitute nothing less than a state of civil war within the country. This is a sure recipe for disaster and perhaps the most significant threat to the US. Far from ensuring the protection of the country against attacks on the homeland, it is more likely that the US has increased this threat.
It is a well known fact that Pakistan’s army and intelligence agency, the ISI, are the real powers of the country. If they were to decide to assert the full extent of their control, there is no doubt but that the political landscape of the country would be transformed with little hope of civil authorities maintaining control of the country. It is essential to bear in mind that these groups were the primary supporters of the Taliban’s political ascendency in Afghanistan. They provided both moral and material support to that effort, one which the US initially supported. This is just one more example of the fundamental failure of US leader’s understanding of the cultural and political dynamics of the region, as testified to by the fact that no sooner did the Taliban gain control over Afghanistan than Al Qaeda found a new safe haven in that country. No one in this country can forget the disastrous results of this move. It was precisely from their training grounds in Afghanistan that Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda planned the attacks of 9/11.
What’s more, the West, and primarily the US, destroyed any possibility of what could potentially have been a golden opportunity to establish no small amount of good will within Muslim communities by its misguided invasion strategy of Afghanistan. Ideally, the money that was squandered in the initial invasion of the country would for the purpose of increasing the standard of living in one of the poorest countries in the world. For example, our forces could have been employed in an effort to rebuild the all but non-existent infrastructure in a country that has essentially been in a state of war in one form or another for the past 20 plus years. By assisting in efforts to rebuild the country with such initiatives as the construction of schools, the offering legitimate alternatives to the cultivation of poppies with assurances to those whose only chance at even a bare bones existence was to engage in this enterprise, which made Afghanistan the leading exporter of heroin in the world that their meager standard of living could be improved, the enforcement a policy of ridding the country’s new power elite of widespread corruption, and acting as the catalyst for the creation a viable security force within the country, it is far from inconceivable that a the now ubiquitous opposition to the West could have been averted. Of course, we now know that such an initiative had never even been considered.
Instead, it is clear that the US had altogether different plans from the outset, namely, the invasion of Iraq under blatantly false pretences. It has been widely reported that as early as the initial meeting of US civilian and military leaders following the attacks of 9/11 the plan for the invasion of Iraq became an obsession of the administration. Under the false pretenses of the existence of massive stockpiles of mythical WMDs, the putatively advanced state of Iraq’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, and Saddam Hussein’s support for and even complicity in the attacks of 9/11, the US undertook one of the most boneheaded foreign policy initiatives in its history. It is clear that Iraq’s military had never been able to reconstitute itself after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In short, the main target of Bush’s infamous “axis of evil” was the one that posed the least threat to our national security. As a result of this fiasco—to borrow the title of Thomas Rick’s excellent book on the failure of the US military’s failure to make even the pretense of Phase IV post invasion plans—our nation has never faced a greater peril.
The most significant aspect of this danger is the aforementioned possibility that Pakistan’s civil authorities could be overthrown, or, worse yet, the Pakistan could become a failed state. The reasons for this danger are clear. Pakistan has a large cache of nuclear missiles. The US was already had knowledge that the father of that country’s nuclear program, A. K. Khan who is a national hero, had peddled his knowledge of the production of this technology to various regimes throughout the world. Rather than exert pressure on President Musharraf to punish these transgressions, the Bush administration quietly allowed for him to be placed under house arrest and subsequently pardoned.
As a cover of Time magazine proclaimed, Pakistan is consequently the most dangerous country in the world. What precisely is the great danger in this? It is the danger, a very real danger, that Pakistan’s ruling authority may then be willing to unload one of their nuclear devices to a non-state actor, or to a nation such as Iran. (As long as there is some remnant of civil society, which remains, the country is not about to rid themselves of many of their devices. After all, the most likely circumstance under which a nuclear exchange may take place under current conditions is an escalation of the tensions between Pakistan and India over Kashmir. The Indian government seems rather resistant to US attempts to have them deescalate the tensions between the two countries, each of which claim Kashmir as their rightful territory. It is a place in which Muslims and Hindus traditionally lived together peacefully, as Salmon Rushdie’s book Shamalan The Clown nostalgically recounts. One of the reasons for Pakistan’s toleration of terrorist groups in FATA is that it is the primary base of groups who are engaged in active terror campaigns against India.
If, by chance, Pakistan were to offer a nuclear weapon to some non-state actor, most likely Al Qaeda there can be little doubt as to the fact that detonation, preferably, from their point of view in the US, would be inevitable. After all, there is no deterrence whatsoever for any such group with the determination to destroy the Great Satan. This is doubly the case given the fact that US authorities refused urgent calls by SOGs and CIA paramilitary operatives to provide them with urgently requested additional troops, 10,000 members of the elite 101st Air Born Division forces to exact, so as to be able to close the loop against members of the Taliban and especially Al Qaeda during the Battle of Torra Bora. There was definitive proof that Bin Laden was in the area, as the result of numerous communications intercepts. The failure of indigenous Mujahidin forces, under the control of various of the nation’s notorious warlords, to fight after dark contributed to the failure to capture or kill those holed up in this treacherous mountain range. Thus the call for more US troops, which were to have been employed to block the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The result was that Bin Laden and at least 3,000 of his Al Qaeda followers, in addition to the majority of the Taliban’s high command, most notably Mullah Omar presumably simply walked over the border into the FATA, where they began their campaign of terror against the Pakistani government, with such consequences as the TTFs takeover of the SWAT region, which lay just beyond FATA designated borders and dangerously close to the capital. The US had the perfect opportunity to cut significantly limit Al Qaeda’s operational abilities and to kill or capture Bin Laden—who was after all responsible for the attacks against the homeland—and lost it as the result of Rumsfeld’s egoistic refusal to appear as if his goal of stream lining the military and leaving a “small footprint” on the ground. This refusal borders on the criminal and may without too significant a stretch be characterized as an all but treasonous act.
While there is no doubt that the Obama Administration has a great deal to lose in the current efforts against the resurgent Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Blame for the current situation must be laid squarely at the feet of the previous administration. Had Bush not been so hell bent on one-upping his father in Iraq—it is notable that Bush 41 quietly opposed this operation and even sent various envoys to his son in an attempt to dissuade him from his delusional notions that the Iraqi people would throw flowers at the feet of the forces of the US and the ridiculously named “Coalition of the Willing—and completed the mission in Afghanistan the current situation there would not be what it is today. Obama essentially inherited Bush’s failed policy in the country. One thing is certain, this failure will pale in the face of potential consequences in neighboring Pakistan.