While dozens of innocent people continue to die each week in the political and sectarian violence unleashed in Iraq by America's invasion and continuing occupation, the main attention of the bipartisan Terror Warriors in Washington – and their sycophantic outriders in the corporate media – continues to be what they call, in the imperial jargonizing that lumps the vast complexities of myriad human communities into reductive, thought-killing soundbites, the "Af-Pak" front.

This, as we all know, is the "good war," the one that most "serious" progressives touted for years as the healthy alternative to the "bad war" that George W. Bush got us into in Iraq, where his "incompetence" and "failures" tarnished the exalted ideal of "humanitarian intervention." (Known in the trade by the acronym "KTC-STC" – "Kill the Children to Save the Children.") . If only we could get out the quagmire in Iraq, cried the serious progs, and do the Terror War "right" in Afghanistan! Well, their wish has come true (except of course for the 130,000 American troops and equal number of mercenaries still prowling around in Iraq; but that's OK, because Obama is in charge now, and what ser-progs once vehemently denounced as a blatant, bloody war crime can now be described, in the immortal words of the president himself, as "an extraordinary achievement"). The Obama Administration is throwing billions of new dollars and thousands of more troops into the eight-year-old conflict, while greatly expanding the cross-border attacks on the sovereign soil of America's ally, Pakistan. And while Obama has retained the core of the Terror War directorate that Bush installed – notably Pentagon warlord Robert Gates and the surgin' general, David Petraeus – he has now put his own man in charge of the "good war": longtime "dirty war" and death squad maven Stanley McChrystal. (Expertise in rubouts, snatches and "strenuous interrogation" is obviously what you need to win "hearts and minds" in humanitarian interventions.)

So here we are, with the imperial mind bent at last on the "Af-Pak" front. But where, exactly, are we? What is the real situation on the "Af-Pak" ground? Two natives of the Terror War targets give us a view from the ground. First, Malalai Joya, from Afghanistan:

In 2005, I was the youngest person elected to the new Afghan parliament. Women like me, running for office, were held up as an example of how the war in Afghanistan had liberated women. But this democracy was a facade, and the so-called liberation a big lie....

Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.

You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during the civil war of the 1990s.

For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts. The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the "democracy" backed by Nato troops....

So far, Obama has pursued the same policy as Bush in Afghanistan. Sending more troops and expanding the war into Pakistan will only add fuel to the fire. Like many other Afghans, I risked my life during the dark years of Taliban rule to teach at underground schools for girls. Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists. A growing number of women, seeing no way out of the suffering in their lives, have taken to suicide by self-immolation.

This week, US vice-president Joe Biden asserted that "more loss of life [is] inevitable" in Afghanistan, and that the ongoing occupation is in the "national interests" of both the US and the UK.

I have a different message to the people of Britain. I don't believe it is in your interests to see more young people sent off to war, and to have more of your taxpayers' money going to fund an occupation that keeps a gang of corrupt warlords and drug lords in power in Kabul.

What's more, I don't believe it is inevitable that this bloodshed continues forever. Some say that if foreign troops leave Afghanistan will descend into civil war. But what about the civil war and catastrophe of today? The longer this occupation continues, the worse the civil war will be.

Next, Tariq Ali reports from Pakistan:

This is a country whose fate is no longer in its own hands. I have never known things so bad. The chief problems are the United States and its requirements, the religious extremists, the military high command, and corruption, not just on the part of President Zardari and his main rivals, but spreading well beyond them.

This is now Obama’s war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan. The dead included women and children, whom even the BBC would find it difficult to describe as ‘militants’. Their names mean nothing to the world; their images will not be seen on TV networks. Their deaths are in a ‘good cause’....

In May this year, Graham Fuller, a former CIA station chief in Kabul, published an assessment of the crisis in the region in the Huffington Post. Ignored by the White House, since he was challenging most of the assumptions on which the escalation of the war was based, Fuller was speaking for many in the intelligence community in his own country as well as in Europe. It’s not often that I can agree with a recently retired CIA man, but not only did Fuller say that Obama was ‘pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush’ and that military force would not win the day, he also explained to readers of the Huffington Post that the Taliban are all ethnic Pashtuns, that the Pashtuns ‘are among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalised and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader’ and ‘in the end probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist’. ‘It is a fantasy,’ he said, ‘to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.’ And I don’t imagine he is the only retired CIA man to refer back to the days when Cambodia was invaded ‘to save Vietnam’....

[U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne] Patterson can be disarmingly frank. Earlier this year, she offered a mid-term assessment to a visiting Euro-intelligence chief. While Musharraf had been unreliable, saying one thing in Washington and doing its opposite back home, Zardari was perfect: ‘He does everything we ask.’ What is disturbing here is not Patterson’s candour, but her total lack of judgment. Zardari may be a willing creature of Washington, but the intense hatred for him in Pakistan is not confined to his political opponents. He is despised principally because of his venality. He has carried on from where he left off as minister of investment in his late wife’s second government. Within weeks of occupying President’s House, his minions were ringing the country’s top businessmen, demanding a share of their profits.

Take the case of Mr X, who owns one of the country’s largest banks. He got a call. Apparently the president wanted to know why his bank had sacked a PPP member soon after Benazir Bhutto’s fall in the late 1990s. X said he would find out and let them know. It emerged that the sacked clerk had been caught with his fingers literally in the till. President’s House was informed. The explanation was rejected. The banker was told that the clerk had been victimised for political reasons. The man had to be reinstated and his salary over the last 18 years paid in full together with the interest due. The PPP had also to be compensated and would expect a cheque (the sum was specified) soon. Where the president leads, his retainers follow. Many members of the cabinet and their progeny are busy milking businessmen and foreign companies. ‘If they can do it, so can we’ is a widely expressed view in Karachi, the country’s largest city. Muggings, burglaries, murders, many of them part of protection rackets linked to politicians, have made it the Naples of the East....

These rumours came into the open at the end of June, when the head of the Bhutto clan, Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, chairman of the Sind National Front, publicly accused Zardari at a press conference, alleging that ‘the killer of Murtaza Bhutto had also murdered Benazir . . . Now I am his target. A hefty amount has been paid to mercenaries to kill me.’ (Zardari is generally regarded as having ordered his brother-in-law Murtaza’s death. Shoaib Suddle, the police chief in Karachi, who organised the operation that led to Murtaza Bhutto’s death, has now been promoted and is head of the Intelligence Bureau.)

You should read both pieces in their entirety to get the bigger, grimmer picture. So here we are -- in bed with extremists, misogynists, kleptocrats and killers.

But wait a minute: isn't this where we came in?

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Comments (8)

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Alaya said:

	... Is Mumtaz's subtext that Zardari murdered his own wife? Has this been reported on elsewhere?
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July 28, 2009
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scott douglas said:

	... Chris, just to clarify for myself as well as your new readers -- am I right in assuming that the EMKK is a slightly more conservative offshoot of the CKK? But that they both pursue, basically, the same policies...?
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July 28, 2009
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yankee 30 said:

	... It's not all bad... WASHINGTON — The US government has pulled the plug on its electronic news ticker outside its mission in Havana because it was not helping improve long-strained bilateral ties, the State Department said.(AFP) Let's give them a C...for cha·me·leon.
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July 28, 2009
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Jimmy Montague said:

	As far as I know -- As far as I know, Barack Obama WAS born in the United States and no member of Uncle Sam's foreign policy team is victimized by tertiary syphilis.
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July 28, 2009 | url
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Ryan Hartman said:

	What's the difference Are we really looked at any different by the rest of the world with Obama as our leader, as opposed to Bush?
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July 29, 2009 | url
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Jimmy Montague said:

Hint for Ryan Hartman Ryan, my post was supposed to be a snide joke. The lead clause "As far as I know" implies that I don't know everything (and I don't) and inflicts a degree of uncertainty onto the two independent clauses, "Obama WAS born. . ." and "no member of. . . ." The implication was that Obama might not be a U.S. citizen and there might be some violently wacko sumbitches plotting U.S. foreign policy. Nuff said? Jimmy

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July 29, 2009 | url
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lonl said:

This just in (and believe it or not): The most germane news about Pakistan on 7/27 was in the New York Times! The NY Times article "Landowners Still in Exile From Unstable Pakistan Area" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07... 27&st=cse for once tells more real truth of the situation than pages and pages of commentary about which politician schemed to murder which ever could. As we'd discussed before, Chris, all ruling political groupings in Pakistan represent some segment of feudal land ownership, a pillar of this semi-feudal, semi-colonial state. While Tariq Ali's article does the service of exposing the US Ambassador's Vice-Regal function in Islamabad, The Times article goes into why the Taliban may be a bigger threat to stability in Pakistan than a lot of people seem to think (e.g. Juan Cole, who poo-poos the notion that Pakistan is unstable in his current posting on Alternet). The Times writers' point is that the Taliban in Swat have driven out the landlords, dissolved their militias, and set about dividing up their holdings among the peasantry and that the landlords are afraid to go back. The big concern expressed in the article is that the Punjab (48% of the population), where ownership of the land has the same character as in Swat, would be susceptible to the appeal of this kind of politics (ie. expropriation of the landlords and land to the tillers). To me, the actual news is just how frank and clear the Times' understanding and reportage is: let there be no doubt that it's dangerous to both the US agenda and the Pakistani state for any amount of settled land there to be subjected to disruption of those semi-feudal relations that are both endemic and generally ignored by our media throughout the subcontinent. Perhaps this article gives a bit clearer picture of why this is regarded by our ruling class as a "good" war: at least in part, it's to protect feudal land relations, a mainstay of the Pakistani vassal state! And - wait a minute - no wonder the Taliban is so routinely demonized: Not only don't they shave, they seem to be implementing land reform! Anti-imperialists should be 'grateful' to the NY Times for its rare moment of candor, exposing some workings of imperialism, as well as what gives it the willies.

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July 30, 2009
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Sean O'Neil said:

good post, Loni thanks for that. it is a rare moment of candor for the NYT. and it's not fully exhausting the truth, is it? but it's better than not mentioning it at all, I suppose. the NYT has always been a limited hangout vector -- enough info to inflame and titillate, not enough to inform reasonably. what info it does provide is nearly always tilted in favor of US hegemony and imperialism. the swings and drifts of American propaganda can be tracked by following the subtleties of what the NYT endorses and supports... what it reports on, basically.

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August 01, 2009
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