Text Fwd: Afghanistan-Pakistan: Woodward's Ominous Narrative 아프가니스탄-파키스탄" 우드워즈의 불길한 서술

Stop NATO

Pakistan Observer
[Afghanistan-Pakistan]Woodward's Ominous Narrative
October 16, 2010
Mohammad Jamil

Bob Woodward’s book “Obama Wars” in general offers an account of President
Barack Obama’s national security team’s flawed decision-making practices,
yet there is malicious intent behind raising the points of Quetta Shura, the
Haqqani network in North Waziristan, and ISI’s support to the Taliban.

Even if one presumes that there is some truth in these allegations, it is not
understandable as to why hundreds of CIA agents and Blackwater mercenaries who
are running around in FATA and Balochistan have not been able to either arrest
or kill the top Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders despite the fact they are equipped
with sophisticated equipment and gadgetry.

Osama bin Laden may be dead or may have been killed a long time ago, but the US
wants to keep him ‘alive’ so that it can use it as justification for its
presence in the region and advancing its global interests.

In Bob Woodward’s book "Obama Wars," the author wrote: “Once Zalmay
Khalilzad brushed off Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari’s claim that the US
was arranging the (suicide) attacks by Pakistani Taliban inside his country, as
madness, and was of the view that both Zardari and Afghan President Hamid
Karzai, who believed in this US conspiracy theory, were dysfunctional
leaders”.

He also quoted President Zardari having said that this was a plot to destabilize
Pakistan so that the US could invade and seize its nuclear weapons. But it is
not President Zardari or Karzai’s perception, as there have been statements
from the US think tanks, analysts and members of Obama administration about
Pakistan’s ‘double game’ and they suggesting attack on the Haqqani network
in North Waziristan.

Before the drone attack in South Waziristan on Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan had
many a time provided information to the US about TTP leaders holed in South
Waziristan. It was against this backdrop that President Zardari had said: “We
give you targets of Taliban leaders you don’t go after. You go after other
areas”. Khalilzad is reported to have responded that the drones were primarily
meant to hunt down members of al Qaeda and Afghan insurgents, not the Pakistan
Taliban. This showed the liaison between the CIA and Baitullah Mehsud, as the
‘Frankenstein monster’ was killed in a drone attack along with other
militants in March 2009. It has to be mentioned that Baitullah Mehsud had
arsenal and night-vision equipment which the Pakistan army did not have at that
time.

The book also revealed that CIA chief Leon Panetta and National Security Adviser
Jim Jones were sent by Obama to Pakistan to talk to President Asif Ali Zardari
and COAS Ashfaq Pervez Kayani after the failed Faisal Shahzad bombing at Times
Square in New York.

Woodward wrote that CIA chief Leon Panetta told President Zardari: “If, God
forbid, Shahzad’s SUV had blown up in Times Square, we wouldn’t be having
this conversation. The president would be forced to do things that Pakistan
would not like. The president wants everyone in Pakistan to understand if such
an attack connected to a Pakistani group is successful there are some things
even he would not be able to stop. Just as there are political realities in
Pakistan, there are political realities in the US. No one will be able to stop
the response and consequences. This is not a threat, just a statement of
political fact.”

American leadership does not realize that Pakistan is not a banana republic but
a nuclear state with the delivery system. Though Pakistan’s political
leadership dithers while taking decisions, and does not have the guts to give an
adequate response, the military leadership has the spine to respond adequately.
Anyhow, when Jim Jones and Leon Panetta met General Kayani privately, Jones
reportedly told the army chief that the clock was starting now on all four of
the requests. Obama wanted a progress report in 30 days.

“But Kayani would not budge very much. He had other concerns. I’ll be the
first to admit, I’m India-centric,” Woodward quoted him as saying. After the
London Conference on Afghanistan last year, there was positive change in
America’s attitude, and it tried to address Pakistan’s concerns vis-à-vis
Indian influence in Afghanistan. But India has been successful in reversing the
situation, and American political leaders and especially military leaders who
had pro-Pakistan stance, and now they have suspicious about Pakistan’s
intelligence agencies supporting the Taliban.

A few months ago, through WikiLeaks an effort was to put Pakistan on the
defensive, though out of more than 92,000 reports only 180 related to Pakistan.
Though it was admitted in the report that there was “low-level assessments
about Pakistan’s ISI secretly supporting Taliban insurgents, which was based
on Afghan intelligence”, yet they insisted that the evidence was credible.

Americans doublespeak was obvious from the fact that whatever was mentioned in
the reports regarding Pakistan they said the evidence was conclusive, whereas
about American and NATO forces’ brutalities and war crimes they said that
evidence was not conclusive. Anyhow, the major focus of reports was on brutal
military actions involving the United States and the NATO forces, intelligence
information, and reports of meetings with political figures. It was also
admitted that the report regarding Pakistan was mainly based on the information
of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, which was under Tajik
Amarullah Saleh – a pro-Indian, a CIA asset and diehard anti-Pakistan.
....
[T]he Guardian had called the material “one of the biggest leaks in US
military history - devastating portrait of failing war in Afghanistan; revealing
how coalition forces killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents;
Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and
Iran are fuelling the insurgency”.

All this disinformation was being spread to pressurize Pakistan into launching
military operations in North Waziristan, where they say the Haqqani group is
holed up in. But it is a flawed perception that the Haqqani group is based in
Pakistan, because American and NATO forces know full well that the Haqqani
network is in Afghanistan and giving them a very tough time.

—The writer is Lahore-based senior journalist.
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