US
Steps Up Plans For Military Intervention In Pakistan
By Bill Van Auken
20 November, 2007
WSWS.org
In
the midst of public statements of support for “democracy”
in Pakistan and the recent visit to Islamabad by the American envoy
John Negroponte, Washington is quietly preparing for a stepped-up military
intervention in the crisis-ridden country.
According to the New York
Times Monday, plans have been drawn up by the US military’s Special
Operations Command for deploying Special Forces troops in Pakistan’s
frontier regions for the purpose of training indigenous militias to
combat forces aligned with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Citing unnamed military officials,
the newspaper reports that the proposal would “expand the presence
of military trainers in Pakistan, directly finance a separate tribal
paramilitary force that until now has proved largely ineffective and
pay militias that agreed to fight Al Qaeda and foreign extremists.”
American military officials
familiar with the proposal said that it was modeled on the initiative
by American occupation forces in Iraq to arm and support Sunni militias
in Anbar province in a campaign against the Al Qaeda in Iraq group there.
According to the Times report,
skepticism that the same strategy can be adapted to the deteriorating
situation in Pakistan centers on “the question of whether such
partnerships can be forged without a significant American military presence
in Pakistan.” The newspaper adds that “it is unclear whether
enough support can be found among the tribes.”
While the Pentagon admits
to only about 50 US troops currently stationed in Pakistan as “advisors”
to the Pakistani armed forces, that number would swell substantially
under the proposed escalation. The Times cites a briefing prepared by
the Special Operations Command that claims the beefed-up US forces would
not be engaged in “conventional combat” in Pakistan. It
quotes unnamed military officials as acknowledging, however, that they
“might be involved in strikes against senior militant leaders,
under specific conditions.”
In other words, American
Special Forces units would be used to carry out targeted assassinations
and attacks on strongholds of Islamist forces.
In addition to the plan to
recruit and train new paramilitary militias in the frontier region,
Washington has developed a $350 million program to train and equip the
existing 85,000-member Frontier Corps, a uniformed force recruited from
among tribes in the Pakistan border region.
There is also considerable
skepticism about the prospects for this program. “The training
of the Frontier Corps remains a concern for some,” the Times reports:
“NATO and American soldiers in Afghanistan have often blamed the
Frontier Corps for aiding and abetting Taliban insurgents mounting cross-border
attacks. ‘It’s going to take years to turn them into a professional
force,’ said one Western military official. ‘Is it worth
it now?’”
There are growing concerns
in Washington that the martial law regime imposed by the Pakistani president,
Gen. Pervez Musharraf, at the beginning of this month might unleash
revolutionary convulsions that could topple the military regime, which
has served as a lynchpin for American interests in the region.
The Bush administration has
repeatedly demanded that Musharraf take action against Al Qaeda and
Taliban fighters in the areas bordering Afghanistan. Residents on both
sides of the border are ethnic Pashtuns. The latest US National Intelligence
Estimate released last July charged that Al Qaeda had reestablished
“safe havens” in Pakistan’s Federally Administered
Tribal Areas (FATA).
Taliban-aligned forces have
been able to extend their influence from the Waziristan region along
the Afghan border further into Pakistan, establishing control to the
north over a large portion of the Swat valley in the North West Frontier
Province.
According to press reports,
over 1,000 civilians, members of the security forces and Islamist fighters
have been killed in fighting in the region over the past five months.
Senior Pakistani military
officials announced over the weekend that the army had massed nearly
20,000 troops backed by tanks and artillery for a major offensive in
the Swat district aimed at wresting control from militias loyal to Mullah
Maulana Fazlullah, a pro-Taliban cleric.
Such offensives have proven
ineffectual in the past, however, in no small part due to the support
that the Islamists enjoy within influential sections of the Pakistani
military and intelligence apparatus, a relationship that was solidified
during the CIA-backed war against the Soviet-supported regime in Afghanistan
in the 1980s.
These forces have also gained
strength as a result of popular hostility to the slaughter unleashed
by the US occupation in neighboring Afghanistan, combined with resentment
over the poverty and social inequality produced by the economic policies
of the Pakistani regime.
A clear indication of the
depths of concern in Washington over the unraveling of its client regime
in Pakistan came Sunday in the form of an op-ed piece published by the
New York Times under the bylines of Fred Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon.
Kagan, a member of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, is
a longstanding supporter of the US war in Iraq and was a signatory of
the Project for a New American Century letter in 2001 demanding that
the Bush administration invade the country in response to 9/11. He drafted
a document that served as a blueprint for the recent “surge”
that sent 35,000 more US troops into Iraq.
O’Hanlon, a member
of the supposedly more liberal and Democratic-oriented Brookings Institute,
has also emerged as a prominent supporter of the “surge”
in Iraq and last April co-authored a paper with Kagan setting out a
“grand strategy” for US imperialism. This envisioned a war
against Iran as well as interventions in North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia and elsewhere. The document urged “finding the resources
to field a large-enough standing Army and Marine Corps to handle personnel-intensive
missions.”
The Times piece, entitled
“Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem,” advocates the
immediate consideration of “feasible military options in Pakistan.”
It states: “The most
likely possible dangers are these: a complete collapse of Pakistani
government rule that allows an extreme Islamist movement to fill the
vacuum; a total loss of federal control over the outlying provinces,
which splinter along ethnic and tribal lines; or a struggle within the
Pakistani military in which the minority sympathetic to the Taliban
and Al Qaeda try to establish Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism.”
The article cautions against
complacency that the Pakistani military command and the country’s
ruling elite will manage to maintain stability. “Americans felt
similarly about the shah’s regime in Iran until it was too late,”
it warns.
The two military analysts
lay out alternate “scenarios” for US interventions. The
first, consisting of a full-scale intervention and occupation, would,
they say, require more than a million troops, making it politically
and militarily unfeasible.
Instead, they suggest a possible
Special Forces operation aimed at seizing control of Pakistani warheads
and nuclear materials.
They put forward an additional
“broader option” that would involve the deployment of “a
sizable combat force” with the mission of propping up the Pakistani
military and waging war on the pro-Taliban forces in the border regions.
“So, if we got a large
number of troops into the country, what would they do?” the article
asks. “The most likely directive would be to help Pakistan’s
military and security forces hold the country’s center—primarily
the region around the capital, Islamabad, and the populous areas like
Punjab Province to its south.”
It adds: “If a holding
operation in the nation’s center was successful, we would probably
then seek to establish order in the parts of Pakistan where extremists
operate. Beyond propping up the state, this would benefit American efforts
in Afghanistan by depriving terrorists of the sanctuaries they have
enjoyed in Pakistan’s tribal and frontier regions.”
Whatever limited lip service
the US State Department gives to the call for ending the martial law
regime imposed by Musharraf in Pakistan, the real aims and methods of
the American ruling establishment—Democratic and Republican alike—emerge
clearly in the Kagan-O’Hanlon article.
What is now being seriously
contemplated is yet another colonial-style war in a region that stretches
across the Middle East and Central and South Asia, from Iraq to Pakistan,
with the objective of salvaging, with or without Musharraf, the Pakistani
military—the corrupt and repressive instrument with which Washington
has been aligned for decades.
The crisis in Pakistan is
symptomatic of the ever-widening instability created by the two wars—in
Afghanistan and Iraq—which Washington has waged to tighten the
US grip over the region’s energy resources.
Now, with open and simultaneous
discussions of possible military interventions in Iran and Pakistan,
what is emerging is the growing threat of a global military conflagration.
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