More on the US-Pakistan relationship

Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine who has ben reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan for the past decade, has a must-read essay on the US-Pakistan relationship, dated 6 May, in the Blog section of the New York Review of Books (see here).

Osama bin Laden’s death in a mansion in exclusive club house territory of retired Pakistani officers has exposed the terrible paradox at the heart of our war in Afghanistan—Pakistan’s hypocrisy and our acquiescence.

...

We give billions in aid to Pakistan’s military and civilian government. Yet Pakistan is harboring our enemies and even the enemies, one could argue, of its own healthy survival. Portions of our money are being funneled into the variety of insurgent networks whose fighters are killing American soldiers, Afghan soldiers, American civilians, Afghan civilians, European civilians, Pakistani civilians—mothers, fathers, children on multiple continents.

She gives first hand evidence of Taliban who would like to make a deal with the Afghan Government to get back to a life without fighting, and describes the interests that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) and the Pakistan Army have in perpetuation of the conflict.

Towards the end of the piece:

Or as an advisor to Ambassador Holbrooke told me not long before Holbrooke died: “We see Pakistan as a flawed ally and the Afghan Taliban as our enemy. The truth is the reverse.” It is the Taliban, the advisor suggested, who can be worked with; they who distrust—and in many cases despise—the ISI overlords they depend on for safe havens and support. All along they’ve let it be known through different channels that they want to talk directly to the Americans. The question is how?

Read Rubin’s report in full here.

Ray McGovern on bin Laden’s killing

In an article entitled What has bin Laden’s Killing Wrought? in the 6-8 May Weekend Edition of the  American political newsletter Counterpunch, Ray McGovern addresses the politics of assassination.

Ray McGovern was an Army officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 years. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

McGovern’s article commences:

As America's morbid celebrations over the killing of Osama bin Laden begin to fade, we are left with a new landscape of risks – and opportunities – created by his slaying at the hands of a U.S. Special Forces team at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The range of those future prospects could be found in Wednesday's Washington Post. On the hopeful side, a front-page article reported that the Obama administration was following up bin Laden's death with accelerated peace talks in Afghanistan. On a darker note, a Post editorial hailed bin Laden's slaying as a model for "targeting" Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and his sons.

So, while there is the possibility that the United States might finally begin to wind down a near-decade-long war in Afghanistan, there is the countervailing prospect of the United States consolidating an official policy of assassination and violence as the way to impose Washington's will on the Muslim world.

McGovern discusses in turn the issues raised by targeted killings, the problematical situation that emerges from the revised accounts of the assassination (clearly bin Laden was to be killed rather than captured), the dangers that lie ahead for the United States in Pakistan as a result of the killing, and the consequences of the United States passing up the prospects of questioning bin Laden about al-Qaeda in favour of killing him.

He observes that the killing of bin Laden might offer the United States the opportunity to retrace its steps from the “dark side” of the wholesale assault on its own civil liberties, “enhanced interrogation” and pre-emptive war, but concludes:

Only with strong grass roots pressure, including nonviolent civil disobedience when appropriate, will there be any real hope that the demon of "terrorism" periodically resurrected by the politicians can be exorcised. That, in turn, could bring an early end to the squandering of $2 billion a week into the stalemate in Afghanistan; the allocation of those resources to job creation and educational opportunity for tens of millions of Americans; and stanching the alarming erosion of the liberties the Constitution was carefully crafted to guarantee and the President solemnly sworn to enforce.

Read McGovern’s full article here.

Pakistan’s policy on apprehending Osama bin Laden, 1998

The following text is taken from an email bulletin from George Washington University’s National Security Archive:

National Security Archive Update, May 5, 2011

PAKISTAN'S BIN LADEN POLICY

Declassified Documents Show Pakistani Refusal to Help Apprehend Terrorist before 9/11

For more information contact:
Barbara Elias - 202/994-7000
belias@gwu.edu

http://www.nsarchive.org

Washington, D.C., May 5, 2011 - As the discovery of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, raises fresh questions about U.S.-Pakistan relations, newly released documents show that as early as 1998 U.S. officials concluded the Government of Pakistan "is not disposed to be especially helpful on the matter of terrorist Usama bin Ladin." According to previously secret U.S. documents, Pakistani officials repeatedly refused to act on the Bin Laden problem, despite mounting pressure from American authorities. Instead, in the words of a U.S. Embassy cable, Pakistani sources "all took the line that the issue of bin Ladin is a problem the U.S. has with the Taliban, not with Pakistan."

The documents in this compilation -- part of the National Security Archive's developing Osama Bin Laden File -- were obtained by the Archive through the Freedom of Information Act. They reveal a history of "disappointment that Pakistan ... a good friend of the U.S., was not taking steps to help with Usama bin Ladin (UBL)."

As an ally to both the Taliban and the United States, Pakistan was balancing conflicting policies towards the Bin Laden question. Islamabad continued to support the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, an organization protecting the al-Qaeda leader, while simultaneously promising U.S. leaders it was "taking the bin Laden matter very seriously" and would cooperate with U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Portending momentous events to come, U.S. officials in 1998 lamented that getting Pakistani help in apprehending bin Laden would be "an uphill slog."

See the complete posting on the Archive's web site http://www.nsarchive.org

The direct link to the post and six declassified US Embassy cables is

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB344/index.htm

How different history might have been if bin Laden had been apprehended in 1998.

Why are we in Afghanistan?

In this morning’s edition of The Sunday Age, 11 July 2010, Prime Minister Gillard was quoted as saying, in relation to the death of yet another Australian soldier:

There will be Australians who are asking themselves in the face of this loss why as a country do we continue to pursue our mission there.

We pursue that mission because Afghanistan is a safe haven for terrorists. I believe Australia, while mourning these losses, will understand our continuing determination.

 She had better reconvene the focus groups and get a better line on Afghanistan than that one.  The fact of the matter is that, while some terrorists have had training at Afghanistan during a certain period of history, Al Qaeda can do very nicely without Afghanistan, thank you very much – they have “moved forward” into the tribal areas and the big cities of Pakistan. If we want to eliminate terror cells in our ally Pakistan, with its almost 200 million people, we have a big job ahead of us.

Afghanistan was never more than a convenient base of operations for a certain number of the world’s disparate terror groups. Carlos the Jackal didn’t need it, Osama bin Laden operated from Somalia for a time, the Lockerbie bombing was hatched in Hamburg, a number of terror episodes have emanated from the Yemen, and the bombers of the London Underground were home-grown. To the extent that Afghanistan ceases to be convenient to them the terror cells will move somewhere else. To imagine that we make progress in suppressing international terrorism by “winning” in Afghanistan is akin to imagining that one can make progress in a mice plague by killing all the mice in one room.

The fact that no-one can articulate a coherent statement of why we are in Afghanistan is an important part of the problem.  It is very difficult to plan to accomplish an objective when you do not know what the objective is.

There are no good reasons for being in Afghanistan (we went along for the ride because the Americans were going) but there are good reasons not to pull out – it is much harder to disengage than it is to refrain from going in in the first place.  The reasons to think very hard before pulling out are:

 - Management of the alliance: we did commit to this and there is a cost in alliance relationship terms in announcing that this is all too hard and we are going home.

-  There are very important ethical considerations which counsel against walking away – considerations which apply more to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) as a whole rather than to any individual participant.  The lesson of our own experience in Timor in 1942, the French withdrawal from Algeria in 1962, and the American withdrawal from Vietnam, is that the local people who have worked with us in good faith face a very bleak prospect at the hands of the other side when we walk away. If it ever gets to the stage where US helicopters are plucking people from Kabul rooftops, Afghan President Hamid Karzai had better make sure that he is one of them.

My best reason for our staying there is to try to work towards calming the situation to the point where a sustainable solution can be negotiated between the Afghan parties themselves.  That involves making an honest statement to the peoples of the ISAF participating states that we will be there for at least another decade, and that we are going to match the military effort with a much better resourced civil program.  I don’t see either Barack Obama or Julia Gillard doing that.

The release of Abdel Baset el-Megrahi

There is widespread anger at the 20 August decision by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill to release convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset el-Megrahi from prison, on compassionate grounds. Megrahi was convicted in 2001 of the bombing of Pan-American flight 103 above the Scottish town in 1988, causing the death of 270 people, 189 of them Americans.

Understandably there is anger; official anger, clearly expressed, on the part of the United States Government, and personal fury on the part of bereaved family members. FBI Director Robert Mueller, who was the assistant attorney general in charge of the investigation and indictment of Megrahi in 1991, wrote to MacAskill saying that the decision makes a mockery of the rule of law and gives comfort to terrorists around the world. “I am outraged at your decision”, he said – unusually strong language for official correspondence between agencies of friendly countries.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that she was “deeply disappointed”, and President Barrack Obama denounced the decision as "a mistake".

While the anger is understandable, the insistence that Megrahi should die in a Scottish prison smacks more to me of vengeance than of justice, and given that in making his decision MacAskill was exercising a power available to him under Scottish law, it is preposterous to claim that the decision somehow undermines the rule of law, however much the complainant might dislike the law. To keep Megrahi in prison in response to political representations would be more undermining of the rule of law.

Perhaps more interesting is the entirely separate question of whether Megrahi’s conviction was a safe one in the first place. A Scottish judicial inquiry decided two years ago that there was enough doubt about the justice of the original trial to allow Megrahi a fresh appeal, and the trial and conviction certainly have their disturbing aspects. In this Radio National Rear Vision program broadcast on 2 September you can hear the views of the Scottish lawyer who proposed the framework for the original trial, Professor Robert Black QC FRSE FFCS of the Edinburgh Law School, and the UN's special observer to the proceedings, Dr. Hans Köchler, Chairman, Department of Philosophy, University of Innsbruck, as well as the latest from Megrahi's solicitor. You will also hear the views of Dr Jim Swire of UK Families-Flight 103 (UK Lockerbie relatives' group), who

“went into the court thinking these must be the guilty guys who blew up my poor daughter, and I came out of thinking ‘Well these clearly were not the guys, so who the heck was it who did do it and why am I being mistakenly led to believe that these two were responsible when clearly they weren't?’ ”.

The program may be accessed here as streaming audio, audio download or transcript.