The United States, for the most part, regards Pakistan as little more than a sordid stage on which the West is forced to act out one of the central dramas of its epic War on Terror. However, Pakistan, a nation of 180 million people, is a lot more than that. It is a fragile aggregation...
Read More“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” wrote Karl Marx. Exhibit A: look at Pakistan this week where former dictator Pervez Musharraf’s monkeyshines made a laughing-stock of the nation created in 1947 to be a model of good government for the world’s Muslims. The former self-styled “president-general returned from exile last month to...
Read MoreConstruction is nearing completion on a natural gas pipeline linking Iran and Pakistan, a project that portends a huge geopolitical shift. As regional powers strengthen ties in this key energy market, they’re looking to China, and away from the West. Since the early 2000s, analysts and diplomats across Asia have been dreaming of a future...
Read MoreISTANBUL - Reports of fighting along Kashmir’s cease-fire line don’t normally receive much attention in the western media. Last week, for example, saw a series of clashes on 8 and 10 January that killed both Pakistani and Indian troops. One of the Indian soldiers was decapitated, provoking fury across India and calls from its extremist...
Read MoreBy the time her season’s greeting card and a handwritten note arrived in my office, my old friend Benazir Bhutto was already dead. The card mailed in Pakistan days before her murder, remains on my desk to this today, a touching last link from this remarkable lady. So, too, the names of the men who...
Read MoreWASHINGTON – I was visiting Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States when the phone on his desk rang. “The hot line,” he said. “Sorry I have to take this call.” As he listened, his face grew darker and darker. Finally, he banged down the phone and exploded: “Another US drone attack that killed a score...
Read MoreKelley has raised the necessary question of what kind of activity an intelligence agency can engage in before it steps over a line and does far more harm than good, a process sometimes referred to as “blowback.” Her analysis of CIA use of a Pakistani doctor ostensibly involved in an eradication program to collect DNA...
Read MoreAssassination Campaigns Do Not Win Wars, and They Create as Many Enemies as They Destroy
As the US and its allies ponder what to do about Syria, one suggestion advanced by the protagonists of armed intervention is to use unmanned drones to attack Syrian government targets. The proposal is a measure of the extraordinary success of the White House, CIA and Defense Department in selling the drone as a wonder...
Read MoreBets are off on which is the great story of 2011. Is it the Arab Spring(s)? Is it the Arab counter-revolution, unleashed by the House of Saud? Is it the "birth pangs" of the Greater Middle East remixed as serial regime changes? Is it R2P ("responsibility to protect") legitimizing "humanitarian" bombing? Is it the freeze...
Read MoreThere has been remarkably little US media coverage of the situation in Pakistan, which could, at a stroke, cause Washington’s policy in central Asia to implode. The silence might be because the US media attention span runs to about thirty seconds while the situation in Pakistan is quite complicated. For those who haven’t been following...
Read MoreThe US is now risking a military confrontation with old ally Pakistan that is both highly dangerous and unpredictable in the extreme. It’s awfully hard for the world’s greatest power to admit its high-tech military forces are being beaten in Afghanistan by a bunch of lightly-armed mountain tribesmen that we dismiss as "terrorists." But that’s...
Read MoreSyria will have to wait. The next stop in the Pentagon-coined "long war" is bound to be Pakistan. True, a war is already on in what the Barack Obama administration named AfPak. But crunch time in Pak itself looms closer and closer. Call it the "no bomb left behind" campaign. Al-Qaeda is a thing of...
Read MoreIt’s awfully hard for the world’s greatest power to admit its high-tech military forces are being beaten in Afghanistan by a bunch of lightly-armed mountain tribesmen. But that’s what’s happening. Washington is blaming everyone else for the bloody fiasco in Afghanistan, the “Graveyard of Empires.” Right now, the chief whipping boy for US fury is...
Read MoreDoes anyone remember Kashmir? Well, we certainly should. If nuclear war ever breaks out, the most likely place would be in Kashmir. The fabled state of Kashmir lies in majestic isolation amid the towering mountain ranges of the Himalayas and Karakoram that separate the torrid plains of north India from the steppes and deserts of...
Read MoreBefore the end of 2011, Pakistan will start working on its stretch of the IP (Iran-Pakistan) gas pipeline - according to Asim Hussain, Pakistan's federal minister for petroleum and natural resources. The 1,092 kilometers of pipeline on the Iranian side are already in place. IP, also known as "the peace pipeline", was originally IPI (Iran-Pakistan-India)....
Read MoreThe US government just decided Islamic shariah law is not so bad after all – at least not in the case of jailed CIA agent Raymond Davis. The burly Davis, an ex-US Special Forces soldier, former Blackwater gunman, and now CIA “contractor” (jargon for mercenary) was jailed in Pakistan after shooting dead two Pakistanis, who...
Read MoreThe Case Against Raymond Davis
When CIA-agent Raymond Davis gunned down two Pakistani civilians in broad daylight on a crowded street in Lahore, he probably never imagined that the entire Washington establishment would spring to his defense. But that's precisely what happened. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mike Mullen, John Kerry, Leon Panetta and a number of other US bigwigs have...
Read MoreThe ability of the United States to dictate the actions of foreign governments appears to be unravelling worldwide. The increasingly strange case of US embassy officer Raymond Davis in Pakistan is reportedly about to lead to a virtual suspension of relations between Washington and Islamabad. Davis, an employee of the Consulate in Lahore, shot and...
Read MoreThe Demon in Pakistan's Soul
To say that Punjab Governor Salman Taseer was equally controversial and courageous when he expressed his views is an understatement. The story of his assassination reads truly like a chronicle of a death foretold, and brings to the fore the demon that’s been eating away at the soul of Pakistani society: religious intolerance. It was...
Read MoreForget 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...
Read MoreThe story about the departure of the CIA Station Chief from Pakistan is interesting because it reveals that Washington has few friends there, only fair weather accomplices. It is being reported that the Pakistani intelligence service ISI might have leaked the man's name to get even for a court case in New York involving the...
Read MoreAs clinically on target as a pat-down in a major United States airport, the Pentagon got a fabulous box of chocolates - and then some - from its 27 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies at last weekend's Lisbon summit. The chocolates come in a full spectrum of flavors. One: NATO's new "Strategic Concept", complete...
Read MoreWhere Stories Acquire a Life of Their Own
Is Pakistan disintegrating? Are the state and society coming apart under the impact of successive political and natural disasters? The country swirls with rumors about the fall of the civilian government or even a military coup. The great Indus flood has disappeared from the headlines at home and abroad, though millions of farmers are squatting...
Read MoreThis writer has been warning for years that US and NATO efforts to defeat resistance to Western occupation by Afghanistan's fierce Pashtun tribes would eventually lead to spreading the conflict into neighboring Pakistan, a nation of 175 million. We've seen it all before in Vietnam. It was then called, "mission creep." The focus of the...
Read MoreBob Woodward, the investigative reporter of Watergate fame, has a new book, Obama's War, that gives new insights into the White House's struggle over Afghan War policy. Woodward's most interesting revelation: the US Central Intelligence Agency is operating a secret, 3,000-man Afghan mercenary force whose mission is assassinating Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. The hunter-killer force...
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