© 2007-2008. All rights reserved. The News International & AhmedQuraishi.com.

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And Now Downsizing Pakistan’s Military

 

By AHMED QURAISHI

Wednesday, 5 November 2008.

WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM

 

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—So our people missed all the signs, trusted the Americans and never doubted for a second that our ally will do us in.  Pakistan’s political and intelligence communities woke up late, discovering sometime late last year that our American ally has been working on bringing the war to Pakistan from the start.  Knowing Pakistani strategic concerns, it installed a decidedly pro-India setup in Kabul to our west while cultivating India as a check from the east.  Adm. Mike Mullen is even contemplating inviting the Indian army to Afghanistan to patrol our western border.

 

Ever wonder why the American drones attacking Pakistan are manned by CIA and not the U.S. military?  That’s because there is a plan. And the plan now is to carefully eliminate pro-Pakistan Pashtun tribal leaders and leave Islamabad with a civil war and maybe a Pashtun separatism while the Americans allow themselves the right to offer peace to Mullah Omar in Afghanistan.  Maybe the CIA is upset at Pakistani military’s recent successes against shadowy ‘Rebel Mullahs’ who only fight the Pakistani State and whose supplies never end. These are the same rebels that CIA drones have strangely been ignoring for the past year or so.

 

But our troubles appear to be only starting. Bruce Riedel, who retired from CIA in 2006, is Barrack Obama’s adviser on Pakistan.  Such is his obsession with Pakistan that he wrote a memo to President Clinton in 1998 designating Pakistan as the most dangerous country in the world and recommending that it be fixed.  Today, Mr. Riedel is preparing a President Obama for a war with Pakistan, camouflaged in the usual American doublespeak about freedom, terrorism and stability.

 

Even some Americans are alarmed at the ideas of Mr. Obama’s pointman on Pakistan. This is how Thomas Houlahan, a Washington-based expert on Pakistani military affairs, described Mr. Riedel on Geo News over the weekend:  

 

 “Barrack Obama’s South Asia advisor Bruce Riedel is dangerously misinformed on Pakistan, sees the Pakistani army as the source of all evil in the [region], and thinks it needs to be cut down to size to essentially a glorified police force, which is essentially what they are talking about when they say we need to steer [Pakistani military] away from fighter jets and tanks and turn it into a counterterrorism force. And it doesn’t seem to occur to these geniuses that having a glorified police force with nuclear weapons might not be a good idea.”

 

No matter how harsh the political polarization in Washington, everyone seems to be on board on Pakistan: denuclearizing the country, forcing the Pakistani army to forget about Indian water blocking and Kashmir and restructure the army to fight insurgents and buy only those weapons that serve this purpose.

 

Mr. Obama is impressed with his adviser’s ideas. Over the weekend he picked another longtime Riedel theme:  that resolving Kashmir is essential to fighting terrorism. But before someone in Islamabad gets excited about this, Mr. Riedel – and now his boss Mr. Obama – are basically talking about ending Pakistan’s excuse of the lingering dispute of Kashmir which stands in the way of accepting Washington’s desire to see India walk all over Pakistan, open direct trade links to Afghanistan and central Asia and play a major role in securing Afghanistan and the region in the face of Russian and Chinese influence.

 

To face the expected escalation in the U.S. war ‘expansion’ plans after the presidential election, Pakistan needs to start talking.  And it needs to do this now.  While Washington has the benefit of a loud and noisy media to convey its interest and expectations, Islamabad continues to be shy about speaking publicly and bluntly about what it wants.  Pakistan is not sufficiently defending at a high level, that of President or Prime Minister, its right to protect its interests.  Influential policy advisers like Mr. Riedel are effectively undermining Pakistani position by portraying Pakistani policy as ‘obsessive’ about India.  What both Riedel and Pakistani officials are failing to highlight is that Pakistan has its own vision for peace in the region that includes Pakistan’s own interests.  The Pakistani interest does not match that of Washington and New Delhi when it comes antagonizing Russia and China. Pakistani interest is also undermined by U.S. support for warlords and officials in the Karzai government who are too close to New Delhi and hostile toward Pakistan. And above all, our threat perception toward India is proving correct with the Indian blockade of Pakistani water flowing from Indian-controlled areas of Kashmir and the evidence that Washington is quite aware of now about Indian involvement in terrorism in southwest Pakistan.

 

We must tell our friends in Washington publicly and openly that Pakistan’s military orientation is our prerogative, not America’s.

 

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