by efarmer » Fri 01 Oct 2010, 12:48:54
The Pakistani ISI intelligence service has been the money behind the Taliban and played al Qaeda as a chess piece to suit their purposes. This is why the Taliban offered Bush bin Laden early on in the fiasco on the condition that he be delivered to Pakistan and that they would provide a fair hearing for him and broker any evidence presented by America that he was involved in 911, it was of course refused.
Central to their thinking is an extreme fear and paranoia about India and the Taliban was a very cheap way of making sure Afghanistan remained on ice for anyone but Pakistan to use as a buffer zone.
Typical of geopolitics.
When Bush chickened out on his promise to seek out al Qaeda no matter where they were, the die was cast, he then transferred billions to the military dictator of Pakistan to buy cooperation and funded his own opposition in Afghanistan as well as spread money around to all the elite of Pakistan who double gamed America up until now. In 2008, the dictator went into exile in London, leaving a hand picked yes man in charge of the nation, and producing a puppet government to pretend they call the shots. Obama has made aid conditional to the puppet government on it not just being pilfered off by the ruling elite and military. To insure the puppet government did not negotiate peace with India, the Pak military and ISI seems to have engineered the Mumbai massacre to make sure the civilian government does not gain any real power or progress for Pakistani citizens outside of military authority.
Right now, the Pak dictator is in London, and all the wealthy elite in Pakistan are calling for his return to run the nation.
So you have a civilian government in Pakistan that has major decisions taken by the military instead of it, has a military that is hedged among every terrorist group of any importance, and has all the concentrated wealth and power in the nation calling for a return to military dictatorship. You have an Afghan leader who is so hopelessly corrupt and seen as useless by his citizens, that he is merely an installed puppet of George Bush and now Obama. (Which he is.) You have an American President who has touched the third rail in America, that is, attempting to wind down lucrative and open ended warfare for our military industrial complex. This American president is under political threat at home by groups that demanded immediate end to military action and those who wish it to continue on it's merry way for as many lucrative decades as it possibly can. And now we have a crisis.
Obama has the leverage to make huge demands on Pakistan as well as to pursue new military operations within a Pakistan that has played out a very naked double game for 9 years, and to do so before they can have a military coup or during one and reassemble a credible response.
The advantage will circulate due to passage of time and events, I assume that while Obama has most of the leverage, he will use it to extricate America from bleeding out in the Hindu Kush and under a scenario that American citizens will accept. The annihilation of al Qaeda and the Taliban in the Hindu Kush, and leaving Pakistan as screwed up as it has been for decades. Their arch rival India, has only upside from all of this, and has absorbed the Mumbai atrocity without retaliation.
