In a campaign speech last August Barack Obama said, “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will.” He was criticized for the statement by Pakistanis and Americans. Hillary Clinton and her many supporters cited it as further evidence that Obama didn’t know what the hell he was talking about when it came to foreign policy. Bomb a sovereign nation? An ally, no less? How uncouth.
Over the last few months we’ve seen that Bush the Younger isn’t above appropriating bad ideas from his political opponents. Starting with the US airstrikes that killed 11 Pakistani troops at the beginning of June and followed shortly thereafter by rocket and artillery attacks going back and forth over the Afghan-Paki border it has been a summer of violence. (To illustrate just how absurd this all is, consider that the 11 dead were part of the Pakistani Frontier Corps, which the Pentagon has supplied to the tune of $25 million so far, with $75 million more on the way.) With the installation of the new civilian president Asif Ali Zardari things have recently escalated along the Afghan-Paki border. Before we get into that though, a little background.
Last year Pervez Musharraf began to lose his grip on power in Pakistan. Musharraf had originally supported the Taliban government in Afghanistan but abandoned them after the 11 September 2001 attacks. Between that time and his resignation last month, a span of almost seven years, Musharraf was Bush the Younger’s Pakistani buddy. But it was Musharraf, not Bush, who bore the political costs of this arrangement; all Bush the Younger had to do was ladle out a few billion per year from the Pentagon money barrel. Musharraf’s fall had a lot of causes that had nothing to do with the US, but being seen as an American lapdog certainly didn’t help him stay in power. Pakistan’s newly elected civilian government has no desire to repeat the mistakes of its now reviled predecessor.
That brings us up to this month when the violence on the Afghan-Paki border has begun to spike. On September 3rd a story in The New York Times headlined American Forces Attack Militants on Pakistani Soil contained this prescient sentence:
But the commando raid by the American forces signaled what top American officials said could be the opening salvo in a much broader campaign by Special Operations forces against the Taliban and Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, a secret plan that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has been advocating for months within President Bush’s war council.
Since that time there have been reports of two separate incidents in which American helicopters have turned back from crossing the border after coming under fire from Pakistani forces. Two weeks ago 12 people were killed by missiles fired from an American drone. As per usual there were conflicting reports over whether or not anything or anyone of value was hit, but Pakistani media reported that at least some of the dead were women and children. Just today another American drone went down in Pakistan; both governments deny that it was shot down, insisting instead that a malfunction caused it to crash; that it was flying low and slow over a heavily armed war zone at the time is mere coincidence.
Earlier this week, of course, was the massive truck bomb in Islamabad. Fingers are already pointing towards the ongoing trouble along the border as a motivation. Just as under Musharraf the real costs of fighting in and around the border area are being borne by Pakistanis, not Americans. Unlike under Musharraf though, the Pakistani government is now beholden to its people and one suspects that they won’t be willing to fight a war which is plainly not their own in exchange for a few billion dollars in aid, of which most of them will never see a penny.
The US and NATO are in a bind in Afghanistan. The situation is getting worse and not just along the Pakistani border. Airstrikes and treating the border of a sovereign (nuclear armed) nation as little more than an inconvenience have run their course as policy options. Whatever small and temporary military gains they may produce (if any) are massively outweighed by the damage they do to Pakistani society, the new civilian government, and our diplomatic reputation in the region. At least if Barack Obama gets to the big chair he won’t need to find that out for himself. Bush the Younger has amply demonstrated the folly of that course of action, hopefully Obama will take heed.
