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Posted by admin in American Empire & Neocon Jews on August 14th, 2021
We continue the publication of Thierry Meyssan’s book, « Before Our Very Eyes ». In this episode, he exposes the transformations of the American Empire thanks to 9/11: the creation of a system of internal surveillance of the civilian population and, externally, the launching of the endless war in the wider Middle East. He also looks at the posthumous influence of the philosopher Leo Strauss in removing any scruples that US and Israeli leaders might have had about implementing such a programme.
Voltaire Network | Damascus (Syria) | 10 August 2021
Admiral Arthur Cebrowski divided the world into two: the globalised states and all the others. The latter are condemned to be mere reservoirs of natural wealth and labour. The Pentagon’s post-9/11 mission is no longer to win wars, but to deprive non-globalised regions of state structures and to install chaos there
Let us return to our narrative. By 2001, Washington had become intoxicated and convinced itself of an imminent shortage of energy sources. The National Energy Policy Development (NEPD) Task Force, chaired by Dick Cheney, had heard from all the private and public officials responsible for hydrocarbon supply. Having met the secretary-general of this body, which the Washington Post called a “secret society”1, I was impressed by his determination and his plans to deal with the shortage. So, knowing nothing about the issue, I bought into this Malthusian vision for a while. In any case, Washington concluded that it needed to seize known oil and gas reserves as soon as possible to keep its economy going. This policy was abandoned when the US elite realised that other forms of oil than Saudi crude, Texas oil or North Sea oil could be exploited. By taking control of Pemex2, the US will seize the reserves of the Gulf of Mexico and proclaim its energy independence by hiding its failure behind the promotion of shale oil and gas. Today, contrary to Dick Cheney’s predictions, oil supply has never been so large and remains cheap.
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In order to control the “wider Middle East”, the Pentagon demands to have full latitude and to distinguish its strategic objective from the wishes of the oil companies. Based on British and Israeli work, it plans to reshape the region, i.e. to disrupt the borders inherited from the European empires, to eliminate the large states capable of resisting it and to create small, ethnically homogeneous states. In addition to being a project of domination, this plan deals with the whole region without taking into account local specificities. Although the populations are sometimes geographically distinct, they are also totally intertwined, making it illusory to separate them except by carrying out vast massacres.
According to the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine, no more wars
to be won in a few weeks, are still going on.
In fact, the team that organised the 9/11 attacks – of which Dick Cheney is a member – knows all this and thought about it long before. It is therefore implementing a vast reform of the armed forces based on the model of Admiral Arthur Cebrowski. This man has already transformed US military practices according to the new computer tools3. He has also developed a strategy to destroy states as political organisations and allow large computer companies to run the globalised world in their place4. The very next day after 9/11, the Army magazine Parameters5 outlined the plan to reshape the ’wider Middle East’ and said that it would be particularly bloody and cruel. It states that crimes against humanity will have to be carried out and may be outsourced to third parties. Then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gives Admiral Cebrowski an office in the Pentagon to oversee it all. September 11 was therefore not only a means of urgently adopting an anti-terrorist code, the USA Patriot Act, drafted at least two years in advance but also of undertaking a vast reform of institutions: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the creation of clandestine Special Forces (within the armies)
The Department of Homeland Security is not only an umbrella for various agencies such as the Coast Guard or the immigration services. It is also a vast system for controlling the US population, employing 112,000 full-time ’domestic spies’6. The clandestine Special Forces are an army of 60,000 highly trained men, acting without uniform in defiance of the Geneva Conventions7. They can assassinate anyone the Pentagon wants, anywhere in the world. And the Pentagon will not hesitate to make the most of this investment in the greatest secrecy. The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq Operations began with the war against the Taliban, in application of the Cheney doctrine after the breakdown of negotiations to build a pipeline through Afghanistan in mid-July 2001. Ambassador Niaz Naik, who represented Pakistan in the Berlin negotiations with the Taliban, had returned to Islamabad considering the US attack inevitable8 . His country had begun to prepare for its consequences. The British fleet had deployed to the Arabian Sea, NATO had sent 40,000 troops to Egypt, and the Tajik leader Ahmed Shah Massoud had been assassinated two days before the attacks in New York and Washington. The US and UK representatives at the UN, John Negroponte and Sir Jeremy Greenstock, insist that President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair are applying the right of self-defence in attacking Afghanistan. However, all the chancelleries know that Washington and London wanted to wage this war independently of the attacks. At best, they conclude that they are instrumental in the crime of which only the former was a victim. However, I manage to cast doubt worldwide on what really happened on 9/11. In France, President Jacques Chirac had my work evaluated by the DGSE. After an extensive investigation, the DGSE found that all the elements on which I based my work were true, but it could not confirm my conclusions. The daily newspaper Le Monde, which had launched a campaign to discredit me, mocked my predictions that the United States would attack Iraq9. Yet the inevitable happened. Washington accused Baghdad of harbouring members of al-Qaeda and of preparing weapons of mass destruction to attack the “land of the free”. So it would be war, as in 1991. To accuse Iraq of possessing chemical weapons, Donald Rumsfeld relied on those he had sold to President Saddam Hussein during the the war against Iran. But he had used them all.
Everyone is then faced with a case of conscience. By persisting in turning a blind eye to the 9/11 coup, one is prevented from challenging the US discourse and is forced to approve the next crime: the invasion of Iraq in this case. Only a senior international official, Hans Blix, decided to defend the truth10. This Swedish diplomat is the former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). He chairs the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which is responsible for monitoring Iraq. Standing up to Washington, he asserted that Iraq did not have the resources it was accused of having. He was soon under unprecedented pressure: not only the US Empire, but all his allies were pressuring him to stop his childishness and let the world’s leading power destroy Iraq. He would not give in, even when his successor at the IAEA, the Egyptian Mohamed el-Baradei, pretended to play the conciliator. On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell delivered a speech to the Security Council, the text of which was drafted by Cheney’s team. He accused Iraq of all the evils, including protecting the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and preparing weapons of mass destruction to attack Western states. In passing, he revealed the existence of a new face of Al-Qaeda, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
But Jacques Chirac, in turn, refused to join in the crime. He did not imagine that he would denounce Washington’s lies. He sent his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, to the Security Council. He left the DGSE reports in Paris and focused his intervention on the difference between an imposed war and a chosen war. It is clear that the attack on Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11, but is an imperial choice, a conquest. Villepin will then underline the results already obtained by Blix in Iraq. He then deflated the US accusations to show that the use of force was not justified at this stage and concluded that there was no evidence that the war could achieve better results than continuing the inspections. Believing that this intervention would provide a way out for Washington and that war would be avoided, the Security Council applauded it. This was the first time that diplomats had applauded one of their own in this room. Not only would Washington and London impose their war, but forgetting Hans Blix, the US would undertake all sorts of operations to ’make Chirac pay’. The French President would soon let his guard down and serve his American overlord more than necessary.
We must learn from this crisis. Hans Blix, like his compatriot Raoul Wallenberg during the Second World War, refused to accept that Americans (or Germans) were superior to others. He decided to try to save men who had committed no other crime than being Iraqis (or Hungarian Jews). Jacques Chirac would have liked to be like them, but his previous mistakes and the secrets of his private life exposed him to blackmail that left him with no choice but to step down or submit. Washington plans to place in power in Baghdad Iraqis in exile whom it had selected from a British association, the Iraqi National Council, chaired by Ahmed Chalabi. The fact that Chalabi was considered an international fraudster after his conviction in the bankruptcy of Jordan’s Petra Bank was not taken into account. The aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin created a Committee for the Liberation of Iraq11, of which the former Secretary of State and mentor of Bush Jr, George Shultz, took the chair. This Committee and the Chalabi Council sold this war to the American public. They assured that the US would only assist the Iraqi opposition and that it would not take long. Like the attack on Afghanistan, the attack on Iraq was prepared before the attacks on New York and Washington. Vice President Dick Cheney had himself negotiated the establishment of US military bases in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in early 2001 as part of the development of the Central Asia Battalion (CENTRASBAT) arrangements of the Central Asian Economic Community. Planners anticipated that the war would require 60,000 tonnes of equipment per day, so the Military Traffic Management Command (MTMC) was tasked with starting to move logistics there in advance.
The training of the troops only took place after the attacks. These were the largest military manoeuvres in history: “Millennium Challenge 2002”. This war game mixed real-life manoeuvres with staffroom simulations made with the technological tools used in Hollywood for the film Gladiator. From July 24 to August 15, 2002, 13,500 troops were mobilised. The islands of San Nicola and San Clemente, off the coast of California, and the Nevada desert were evacuated to serve as the theatre of operations. This debauchery of means required a budget of 235 million dollars. For the record, the soldiers simulating Iraqi troops were commanded by General Paul Van Riper; using an unconventional strategy, they outperformed the US troops so well that the staff stopped the exercise before it was completed12. Ignoring Hans Blix’s reports and French objections, Washington launched “Operation Iraqi Liberation” on March 19, 2003. Given the meaning of its acronym, OIL, it was renamed “Operation Iraqi Freedom“. Fire of unprecedented power rained down on Baghdad, causing ’Shock and Awe’. Baghdadis were dazed as the US and its allies took over the country.
The government was first taken over by a Pentagon office, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), then after a month by a civilian administrator appointed by the Secretary of Defense, L. Paul Bremer III, Henry Kissinger’s private assistant. He soon assumed the title of Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority. However, contrary to what the name suggests, this Authority was not created by the Coalition, which never met and whose composition is not known13. For the first time, a body has appeared that depends on the Pentagon but does not appear on any US organisation chart. It is an offshoot of the group that took power on September 11, 2001. In documents released by Washington, the Authority is referred to as a Coalition body if the document is intended for foreigners, and as a US government body if it is intended for Congress. With the exception of one British official, all the Authority’s employees are paid by US administrations but are not subject to US law. So they take their cues from the Government Procurement Code. The Authority seizes the Iraqi treasury, i.e. $5 billion, but only one billion appears in its accounts. What happened to the remaining $4 billion? The question was asked at the Madrid conference for reconstruction. It would never be answered.
Ambassador Peter W. Galbraith, who invented the myth of
President Saddam Hussein as a genocidist of Kurds, was tasked
Paul Bremer’s deputy is none other than Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK representative on the Security Council who justified the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. During the occupation, the United States examined the possibilities of reshaping Iraq, in this case the partition into three states, according to the plan of Democratic Senator Joe Biden. So Bremer sent Ambassador Peter Galbraith – who had organised the partition of Yugoslavia into seven separate states – to advise the Kurdish Regional Government.
Bremer works directly with the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, who defined the future US strategy upon the dissolution of the USSR. He is a Trotskyite Jew who was trained in the thought of Leo Strauss. He has installed many followers of the German philosopher in the Pentagon. Together they form a structured, very coherent and united group. According to them, learning from the weakness of the Weimar Republic in the face of the Nazis, Jews cannot trust democracies to protect them from a new genocide. Instead, they must side with authoritarian regimes and place themselves on the side of power. In this way, the idea of a world dictatorship is legitimised in a preventive way14. Wolfowitz set the broad lines of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s work, namely the de-Baathification of the country – i.e. the dismissal of all civil servants who are members of the secular Baath Party – and its economic plunder. On his instructions, Bremer awarded all public contracts to friendly companies, usually without competitive bidding; this excluded, as a matter of principle, the French and Germans who were guilty of opposing this imperial war15. The entire membership of the Project for a New American Century, the think tank that prepared 9/11, is incorporated, directly or indirectly, into or works with the Coalition Provisional Authority. From the outset, these people raised a lot of eyebrows. First, that of the representative of the UN Secretary General, the Brazilian Sérgio Vieira de Mello. He was assassinated on August 19. 2003, allegedly by the jihadist Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, whom Powell had denounced to the UN. The diplomat’s relatives, on the contrary, underline the conflict that opposed him to Wolfowitz and directly accuse a US faction. Then, it was General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, who worried about the disastrous consequences of the de-Baathification. He eventually fell into line. Carried away by their successes in the United States, Afghanistan and Iraq, the men of 9/11 direct their country towards new targets. Theopolitics From October 12 to 14. 2003, a strange meeting was held at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. According to the invitation card: « Israel is the moral alternative to Eastern totalitarianism and Western moral relativism. Israel is the ’Ground Zero’ of our civilisation’s central battle for survival. Israel can be saved, and the rest of the West with it. It is time to unite in Jerusalem. »Several hundred personalities from the Israeli and US far right are being entertained at the expense of the Russian mafia. Avigdor Lieberman, Benyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert congratulate Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle and Daniel Pipes.
Professor Leo Strauss taught his disciples that theopolitics
All of them share the same belief: theopoly. According to them, the ’End of Days’ is near. Soon the world will be ruled by a Jewish institution based in Jerusalem16.
This meeting worried the Israeli progressives, especially since some speakers referred to Baghdad, which had been conquered six months earlier, as the ancient “Babylon”. It is obvious to them that the theopolitics that this congress claims to follow is a resurgence of Talmudism. This school of thought – of which Leo Strauss was a specialist – interprets Judaism as a thousand-year-old prayer of the Jewish people to avenge the crimes of the Egyptians against their ancestors, their deportation to Babylon by the Assyrians and even the destruction of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis. He considers that the “Wolfowitz doctrine” prepares the Armaggedon (the final battle) which will be the establishment of chaos first in the wider Middle East, then in Europe. A general destruction that will mark the divine punishment of those who made the Jewish People suffer.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak realises the mistake he made in refusing the peace he himself had negotiated with Presidents Bill Clinton and Hafez al-Assad; a peace that would have preserved the interests of all the peoples of the region and that the the0-politicians did not want. He began to gather the officers who would try in vain to prevent the re-election of Benyamin Netanyahu, in November 2014, within the Commanders for Israel Security. He would continue his fight until he delivered his speech in June 2016, at the Herzliya conference, in which he denounced Netanyahu’s policy of the worst and his desire to institutionalise apartheid. He would call on his compatriots to save their country by blocking these fanatics.(To be continued…) Thierry Meyssan
Posted by farrukh in Zionist Enemy, Zionist Paranoia, Zionist-Hindutva axis of evil on January 16th, 2018
The US ignores its own human rights violations and also looks the other way to massive human rights abuses committed by Israel, India, Egypt and other dictatorial regimes towing its agenda. Washington, however, has no tolerance for democratic regimes that refuse to make their countries compliant States and opt to pursue independent foreign policy best suited for their national interests. Various excuses are manufactured to bring suchlike defiant States in line. The more often dirty tactics in use are sanctions, orchestrated political turmoil and chaos, coercion, threats, proxy war, psychological operations, propaganda, regime change, and if needed, physical assault and occupation of the targeted country.
The Indo-US-Israel nexus is adept in contriving a false narrative to build a case against a country. Going by the dictum of Joseph Goebbels, the trio repeatedly utter lies and half-truths to convert falsehood into truth and convincing the audience to accept black as white. The targeted ruling regime is demonized and discredited under a well-planned media campaign to justify intervention and a regime change.
Since 9/11, the US has used proxies, terrorism, sedition, propaganda war and coercive tactics as tools to destabilize the targeted country. It has meddled in internal affairs of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. All are Islamic countries and their peoples are all Muslims.
After enacting Osama bin Laden led Al-Qaeda drama to validate invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in October 2001, Iraq was occupied in May 2003 on fake charges of WMDs. Arab Spring was fomented by the CIA-MI-6-Mossad combine in 2011 to destabilize the Middle East and weaken stronger Arab nations. ISIS was created to incite sectarianism and help the US in changing the boundaries of Middle East and let Israel fulfil its dream of ‘Greater Israel’.
Regimes were changed in Tunisia and Egypt by inflaming street protests. Qaddafi was demonized as a monster to affect a forcible regime change. The civil war was fomented in Syria to boot out Bashar al-Assad regime but so far it has miraculously survived due to Iranian and Hezbollah support and intervention of Russia. Arab Peninsula Al-Qaeda threat was sensationalized to drone Yemen and stir civil war.
The civil war in South Sudan was further stirred up and President Gen Bashir was declared a war criminal and hounded with a view to making the task of bisecting Sudan easy. Democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood regime under Morsi was ousted from power within one year of its rule and replaced by the military regime of Gen Sisi, which up surged extremism and divided the country into religious lines.
As regards Pakistan, this is not the first time that it is on the brink of being abandoned and punished by the US. Pakistan had become a staunch ally o the USA in 1955 after joining SEATO and CENTO to contain Communism was thoroughly disappointed when the US stopped all military and economic aid for going to war against India in 1965. This act favoured India which was fully supported by USSR. But for the US betrayal, Pakistan could have clinched the victory. It impelled President Ayub Khan to tilt towards China and to write a book titled ‘Friends Not Masters” in 1967.
Ayub’s tilt infuriated the USA and it retaliated by fomenting protests and riots in Pakistan through Mujibur Rahman led Awami League in East Pakistan and ZA Bhutto led PPP in West Pakistan, forcing Ayub to resign in March 1969 and handing over power to Gen Yahya Khan. When East Pakistan was being annexed by the Indian military backed by USSR in 1971, the US played no role to prevent the tragedy in spite of Pakistan’s role in bringing China closer to USA which enabled US troops to exit from Vietnam. The US looked the other way when India carried out the weaponized nuclear explosion in 1974, but put Pakistan under sanctions in 1979 on the mere suspicion that it had embarked upon a nuclear program.
Pakistan was taken on board by the USA in mid-1981 to mount a biggest proxy war against the occupying Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan faced turbulent Afghanistan in the northwest and stormy Iran in its southwestern backyard engaged in war with Iraq throughout the 1980s. Internally, it had to cope with KGB-RAW-KHAD-Al-Zulfiqar terrorism. Once Pakistan and the Afghan Mujahideen achieved the miracle of the 20th century by pushing out Soviet forces in February 1989 after paying a very heavy price, and paved the way for fragmentation of USSR and for the US to become a sole superpower, the US not only ditched them, but made India its strategic partner. President Bush senior stopped all US military and economic aid to Pakistan invoking the Pressler amendment in October 1990 charging Pakistan with crossing the nuclear red-line. In May 1998, President Clinton imposed additional sanctions invoking the Glen amendment punishing Pakistan for the May 1998 nuclear tests.
By the time the decade of the 1990s had ended, Pakistan — the most allied ally of the US during the Cold War — had become the most sanctioned country in the world after Libya. And the Kargil misadventure had carried its own penalties. And in October 1999, the US imposed sanctions related to Musharraf’s military takeover.
At about the same time even the multilateral aid agencies led by the World Bank had effectively turned off for Pakistan their concessional assistance tap on the plea that the newly independent Eastern European countries, as well as the Central Asian countries, needed the help of these aid agencies more than countries like Pakistan. Japan perhaps was the only country out of all the members of the Paris Club that had continued to donate about $500 million annually to Pakistan during the period.
Still, Pakistan negotiated the 1990s not only with composure but had waged during this period two low-intensity 10-year-long wars — one on the side of the Afghan Taliban against the Northern Alliance led by Ahmed Shah Masood and assisted by India and Iran, and the other on the side, the Kashmiri freedom fighters pitched against over 700,000 occupying Indian troops in Indian-Occupied Kashmir. At the behest of India, Pakistan was put on the watch list of terror abetting States by the USA and was accused of manufacturing an Islamic bomb likely to fall in hands of radical Arab countries. Pakistan had to bear the load of 3.5 million Afghan refugees, and cope with looming Indo-Israeli threat to Kahuta, and heightened sectarianism stoked by Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Governance became a real challenge for the elected governments of PPP and PML-N in the face of two wars and Pakistan’s economy being denied the usual quantum of international assistance and when the domestic tax-to-GDP ratio had dipped to an abysmally low point? In those critical times, Saudi Arabia came to the rescue of Pakistan which started giving oil on deferred payment. After nuclear blasts, oil was provided gratis. Foreign remittances from most of the Muslim countries, especially from the Middle East all through the 1980s and 1990s saved Pakistan from defaulting.
On the face of it, the 1990s in retrospect appear to be a lost decade in economic terms. The country had experienced a decade-long shrinking of economic growth and the three unfinished IMF programs that it had entered and exited in quick succession during this period further curtailed the growth in the name of the Fund imposed austerity.
Meanwhile, the debt-to-GDP ratio had escalated to a depressing 103%. Because of the military takeover of October 1999, even the helping hand of the IMF was not available to Pakistan, as under their respective laws both the UK and US representatives sitting on the Fund board were obliged to vote against the application of a country under military rule.
The second Afghan war that immediately followed the 9/11 brought back Pakistan in the good books of the US and it was quickly made a non-NATO ally. This was, however, a deception since Pakistan was, in reality, a target and was to be destabilized, denuclearized and Balkanized covertly.
After brewing up the war on terror in FATA, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Baluchistan, Pakistan was subjected to cooked-up allegations that it was in cahoots with the militants and that its nukes were unsafe. The hidden objective of the US was exposed in 2006 after the publication of an article in US Defence Journal titled “Blood Borders” written by Lt Col Ralph Peters. The map showed changed boundaries of Middle East, and Baluchistan a separate state.
The ‘Do More’ mantra introduced in 2005/06 was meant to brew political stabilization, bleed economy and foment insecurity. Indo-US-Israel-Western media campaign demonized Pakistan that it’s Army and ISI were supporting terrorism. Idea was to discredit the Army, brand Pakistan a terror abetting State and Pak Army/ISI rogue outfits. A narrative was built that Pakistan was collapsing, the nuclear arsenal was unsafe and its nukes might fall into wrong hands (Islamic extremists). The objective was to give an excuse to the USA to declare Pakistan a failed State and to occupy Islamabad and the provinces of Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan and seize nuclear arsenal.
This notion was penned in a 2007 article published in London Guardian, titled, “Bush handed blueprint to seize Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal,” behind which was Fredrick Kagan, member of American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The AEI’s board of trustees include war criminal Dick Cheney, warmongers Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, Richard Perle, John Yoo, and Paul Wolfowitz.
Fredrick Kagan wrote another Pakistan focused article in 2009 in New York Times, co-authored with Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon, titled, “Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem.” It described the complete collapse of the Pakistani government, overrun by “extremists.” It went on to describe “Pro-American moderates” within the Pakistan Army in need of US forces to help them secure Islamabad and their nuclear arsenal. Several options were given for storing the nuclear weapons safely. Various contingency plans of swooping away the nukes by the US Special Forces were also publicized.
Selig Harrison of the Soros funded Center for International Policy called for carving off Pakistan’s Baluchistan province not as part of a strategy to win the “War on Terror,” but as a means to thwart growing relations between Islamabad and Beijing.
In “Free Baluchistan,” he explicitly called to “aid the 6 million Baluch insurgents fighting for independence from Pakistan in the face of growing ISI repression.” Giving merits of his idea he stated, “Pakistan has given China a base at Gwadar in the heart of Baluch territory. So an independent Baluchistan would serve U.S. strategic interests in addition to the immediate goal of countering Islamist forces.” The US Congressmen Ted Poe and Dana R0hbachar have consistently backed the Baloch separatist agenda.
In another article titled, “The Chinese Cozy Up to the Pakistanis,” Harrison stated, “To counter what China is doing in Pakistan, the US should play hardball by supporting the movement for an independent Baluchistan and working with Baluch insurgents to oust the Chinese from their budding naval base at Gwadar. Beijing wants its inroads into Gilgit and Baltistan to be the first step on its way to an Arabian Sea outlet at Gwadar.”
In line with Harrison’s suggestion, RAW placed serving Indian Navy officer Commander Kulbushan Yadhav at Chahbahar under fake name of Mubarak Hussain Patel as early as 2003. Later on, he was given $400 million by RAW to destabilize Baluchistan with the help of Baloch rebel groups, and Karachi through MQM, scare away the Chinese, gain knowledge of Makran-Karachi seacoast for amphibious landing, disrupt work in Gwadar and scuttle CPEC. Shamsi airbase was used by CIA and Blackwater to provide funds and arms to the rebels in interior Baluchistan, and for drones. NATO containers were also used for supplying arms.
Af-Pak doctrine announced by Obama regime in March 2009 followed by passage of Kerry Lugar Bill (KLB) in end 2009 authorizing $7.5 billion economic/military assistance to Pakistan spread over 5 years were Pakistan specific with a dangerous agenda of stepping into FATA and Baluchistan under the garb of hot pursuit operations, or raiding a target based on actionable intelligence, harnessing nuclear arsenal of Pakistan, clipping the wings of armed forces and paving the way for balkanization.
That would have given the US an ideal geopolitical scenario that would permanently Balkanize the country along Pashtun, Baluchi, and other ethnic minority lines, and result in a permanent Western presence inside the country. In their view, seizure of FATA would benefit American efforts in Afghanistan by depriving terrorists of the sanctuaries they have long enjoyed in Pakistan’s tribal and frontier regions.
The then Army chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani rejected the idea of making Durand Line redundant and insisted on fighting independently on either side of the border based on strategy of ‘anvil and hammer’.
Drone campaign in FATA was stepped up to stir up the Pashtun minority against the government and the Army and to breakup peace deals. $1.5 billion was allocated for Pakistani media to step up 5th generation war in Pakistan. Rabid haters of Pak Army like Hussain Haqqani and Tariq Fateh; and anti-Pakistan runaways like Altaf Hussain and his cronies, Brahamdagh Bugti, Suleman Dawood, Harbyar Marri etc were made full use of to malign Pakistan and its premier institutions. Blackwater and CIA agents were inducted in 2008-10 in big numbers to spread flames of terrorism into urban areas.
In a 2009 article by Seymour Hersh titled, “Defending the Arsenal,” high intensity suspicion and distrust of Pakistan against America was underscored. This distrust was based on America’s obsession with “defending” Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. The US had repeatedly sought joint Pak-US control of all nuclear sites. It was clear that the US under the pretense of “helping” Pakistan if ever it fell into chaos, was all along trying to ascertain the location of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons as well as the trigger assembles kept separate as a security measure.
Arrest of Raymond Davis in January 2011, CIA sponsored polio vaccine campaigning by Dr Shakil Afridi which facilitated stealth attack in Abbottabad in May 2011 to get Osama bin Laden, and the Memogate scandal in October 2011 spilled the beans. Later on, arrests of Kulbushan on March 3, 2016, and TTP key leaders Latif Mehsud and Ehsanullah Ehsan removed all doubts of deep rooted involvement of RAW and NDS in Pakistan.
America’s continued presence in Afghanistan as well as its increasingly aggressive “creep” over the Afghan-Pakistani border has been justified under the ambiguous and omnipresent threat of “terrorism.” In reality, the true goal is to contain the rise of China and other emerging economies using the pretense of “terrorism.” China’s One-Belt-One-Road (OBOR) project and particularly fast developing CPEC has unnerved USA and India and has become one of the compelling reason for the US to extend its stay in Afghanistan. The US is also making concerted efforts to make India the key player in Afghanistan.
Pakistan-China ever growing strategic relationship in the wake of $62 billion worth CPEC, and China’s commitment to build Gwadar Seaport, with another next door port at Jeewani possibly as a Naval Port, dams, roads, nuclear plants, and military technology, are giving nightmares to US and India. The only cards America seems to have left in its hand to counter this growing relationship are threats of destabilization, the subsequent stripping of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and Pakistan’s Balkanization into smaller, feeble states. This option is scandalous, and reveals the absolute depths of depravity from which the imperialist powers suffer from.
It is quite clear that the “War on Terror” is but a pretense to pursue a policy of regional hegemony with the expressed goal of containing China. This in turn, is part of a greater strategy covered in the 2006 Strategic Studies Institute report “String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China’s Rising Power across the Asian Littoral.”
The corporate-financier oligarchs obsessed with their money game are quite willing to destabilize Pakistan, and risk war with nuclear overtones, and a possible confrontation with China and Russia. These oligarchs, hawks within Trump’s administration, American-Jewish lobby, Israel, India and the puppet regime in Kabul are all egging on Donald Trump to strike Pakistan and he seem to be dancing to their tunes. Since August 22, 2017, he and senior US leaders have adopted a highly belligerent posture against Pakistan. Series of threatening statements have been issued and Pakistan put on notice.
Pakistan’s response that it has done enough and will not do any more, and that it is now the turn of USA and Afghanistan to do more is rational and logical. It has rightly rejected the US paltry aid, stressing it needs respect and acknowledgement of its sacrifices, and adding that it can keep fighting terrorism at its own without American assistance. Pakistan has discontinued military cooperation and intelligence sharing with USA, and has other effective options to exercise in case the US opts for a unilateral punitive action. Pakistan’s principled stance seem to have mellowed down the jingoism of hawks in USA and they have started giving reconciliatory feelers.
China and Russia are asserting themselves as security and economic alternatives to the US unilateralism since former two are ascending powers and USA is a descending power. Europe is still grappling with economic challenges. The Muslim world hate interventionism of USA and Israel, while majority of Americans consider Trump to be insane. The US is stuck in Ukraine and Syria, but Afghanistan is fast turning into a graveyard for USA. With its prestige badly soiled, the US is scapegoating Pakistan to hide its blunders. With no exit strategy, it is foolishly hoping that Pakistan will fight its war and convert its defeat into victory.
Asia-Pacific strategy coined by Obama has been abandoned by Trump and so is Trans-Pacific-Partnership, while the new Indo-Pacific policy still stands on slippery ground. Whereas the reputation of NATO stands tarnished, unity regime in Kabul and ANSF have become liabilities for USA. Hope of making India policeman of the region is getting dimmed. The Middle East will remain in turmoil. North Korea, Iran and now Pakistan are not getting intimidated by the US bullying tactics and are determined to face the intimidator.
2018 will be a crucial year for USA, China and Russia rearing to undercut each other, while Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran will remain vigilant to avoid getting trampled under the feet of prancing elephants.
The writer is a retired Brig, war veteran, defence analyst, columnist, author of five books, Vice Chairman Thinkers Forum Pakistan, Director Measac Research Centre, Chief Editor Better Morrow magazine. [email protected]
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