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by Peter Symonds
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Global Research, September 5, 2008
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A ground assault by US Special Forces troops on a Pakistani village on Wednesday threatens to expand the escalating Afghanistan war into its neighbour. Pakistan is already confronting a virtual civil war in its tribal border regions as the country’s military, under pressure from Washington, seeks to crush Islamist militias supporting the anti-occupation insurgency inside Afghanistan.
The attack, which left up to 20 civilians dead, marks a definite escalation of US operations inside Pakistan. While US Predator drones and war planes have been used previously to bomb targets, Wednesday’s raid was the first clear case of an assault by American ground troops inside Pakistani territory. The White House and Pentagon have refused to comment on the incident but various unnamed US officials have acknowledged to the media that the raid took place and indicated that there could be more to come.
The attack was unprovoked. US troops landed by helicopter in the village of Jalal Khei in South Waziristan at around 3 a.m. and immediately targetted three houses. The engagement lasted for about 30 minutes and left between 15 and 20 people dead, including women and children.
A US official acknowledged to CNN that there may have been women and children in the immediate vicinity but when the mission began “everyone came out firing from the compound”. Even this flimsy justification for a naked act of aggression is probably a lie. “It was very terrible as all of the residents were killed while asleep,” a villager Din Mohammad told the Pakistan-based International News.
The newspaper provided details of the dead and injured: nine family members of Faujan Wazir, including four women, two children and three men; Faiz Mohammad Wazir, his wife and two other family members; and Nazar Jan and his mother. Two other members of Nazar Jan’s family were seriously wounded.
The US and international media have described the Angoor Adda area around the village as “a known stronghold of the Taliban and Al Qaeda” but offered no evidence to support the claim. A villager, Jabbar Wazir, told the International News: “All of those killed were poor farmers and had nothing to do with the Taliban.”
In comments to the International Herald Tribune, a senior Pakistani official branded the raid a “cowboy action” that had failed to capture or kill any senior Al Qaeda or Taliban leader. “If they had gotten anyone big, they would be bragging about it,” he commented.
The attack has provoked outrage in Pakistan. Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement branding the attack as “a gross violation of Pakistan territory” and summoned US ambassador Anne Patterson to provide an explanation. North West Frontier Province (NWFP) governor Owais Ahmed Ghani declared that “the people expect that the armed forces of Pakistan would rise to defend the sovereignty of the country”. He put the number killed at 20.
Pakistani military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said the raid was “completely counterproductive” and risked provoking an uprising even among those tribesmen who have previously supported the army’s operations in the border areas.
The International News reported: “Angry villagers later blocked the main road between Pakistan and Afghanistan in Angoor Adda by placing the bodies of their slain tribesmen on the road. They chanted slogans against the US and NATO military authorities for crossing the border without any provocation and killing innocent people.”
The US raid has compounded the political crisis inside Pakistan, where the selection of a new president is due to take place tomorrow. The ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) has been engaged in a delicate balancing act—continuing to support US demands for a crackdown by the Pakistani military along the border with Afghanistan, while trying to defuse widespread anger and fend off accusations that it is a US puppet.
Reaffirming his support for the Bush administration’s bogus “war on terror”, PPP presidential candidate Asif Ali Zardari declared in a column in yesterday’s Washington Post: “We stand with the United States, Britain, Spain and others who have been attacked.” Zardari went on to promise that he would ensure that Pakistani territory would not be used to launch raids on US and NATO forces inside Afghanistan.
However, as PPP spokesman Farhatullah Babar explained, the US attack was politically compromising. “We have been very clear that any action on this side of the border must be taken by Pakistani forces themselves,” he told the Associated Press. “It is very embarrassing for the government. The people will start blaming the government of Pakistan.”
An expanded war
The decision to launch Wednesday’s attack was undoubtedly taken at the top levels of the White House and Pentagon. As the New York Times reported in articles earlier this year, a high-level debate has been taking place in Washington over the use of US Special Forces inside Pakistan as well as the intensification of existing CIA operations, which include Predator missile strikes.
A meeting in early January involved Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and top national security and intelligence officials advisers. According to the New York Times on January 6, options discussed included “loosening restrictions on the CIA to strike selected targets in Pakistan” and operations involving US Special Operations forces, such as the Navy Seals.
The Times reported on January 27 that then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf rejected proposals put by US Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael Hayden for an expanded American combat presence in Pakistan, either through covert CIA missions or joint operations with Pakistani security forces. While apparently accepting the refusal, the US intensified pressure on Pakistan to bring its border areas under control.
As the anti-occupation insurgency has expanded in Afghanistan, claiming a growing number of US and NATO casualties, Pakistan has become a convenient scapegoat. Washington has repeatedly accused the Pakistani military of failing to suppress Islamist militia and alleged that Pakistani military intelligence is actively supporting anti-US guerrillas inside Afghanistan.
Admiral Mullen has held five meetings since February with his Pakistani counterpart, army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to press for tougher action. The most recent took place last weekend aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, stationed in the Arabian Sea. In comments to CNN, a US official “declined to say” whether there were any new agreements for US troops to operate inside Pakistani airspace or on the ground to attack Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Whether the Pakistani military quietly approved Wednesday’s attack or not, the Bush administration is making clear that it intends to extend the war into Pakistan. Citing top American officials, the New York Times reported on Wednesday that the raid “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 Defence Secretary Robert Gates has been advocating for months within President George W. Bush’s war council”.
This utterly reckless policy, which risks the eruption of a US war against Pakistan, is bipartisan in character. In fact, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has repeatedly declared his support for broadening the “war on terror” through unilateral US attacks on insurgents based inside Pakistan. His candidacy has been strongly backed by sections of the US establishment that have been critical of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq for undermining US interests. Far from opposing aggressive US military action, Obama has become the political vehicle for shifting its focus to Afghanistan and Pakistan as the means of advancing US strategic interests in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent.
The US attack on the village of Jalal Khei is another demonstration that the shift in policy, with all its potentially catastrophic consequences, is already underway.
Peter Symonds is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Peter Symonds
Peace and Justice Post 
Mad and bad – but the West will turn a blind eye
September 7, 2008Dogged by allegations of crime and corruption, Pakistan’s new president could lose power to his army if he fails his restive people
Jamima Khan | The Independent, Sep 7, 2008
President Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, formerly known as Mr Ten Per Cent because of kickbacks received during his wife’s time in office, has become one of the most powerful and potentially dangerous men in the subcontinent. Mad and bad. And now omnipotent. He is head of state, supreme commander of the armed forces, has the power to dismiss parliament, appoint the heads of the army and election commission – and, as chairman of the National Command Authority, has the final say in the deployment of nuclear weapons.
Earlier Zardari vowed to relinquish the executive powers that Pervez Musharraf gave to the originally ceremonial presidency. Now he’s evasive. Despite the fact that he has little public support (14 per cent, according to a recent poll), holds no seat in parliament and has no mandate other than his association with the Bhutto name, he had every right to nominate himself or anyone else as President. His party – inherited from his late wife – was democratically elected in February and has the largest number of seats in parliament.
The man who now has his finger on the nuclear button was only last year declared unfit to stand trial in a UK court on account of multiple mental problems. According to court documents filed by his psychiatrists, he suffers from dementia, major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress after spending 11 of the past 20 years in jail in Pakistan. According to their testimony last year, he found it hard even to recall the names of his wife and children.
He has long had memory problems. In the past he has been unable to recall whether he was the owner of a multimillion-pound Surrey estate (he thought not, but later took possession of it) or if $60m (£34m) in a frozen Swiss bank account was actually his. He also thought that he had graduated from the London School of Economics, or was it the London School of Business Studies? There are no records of his doing either.
The doctors’ diagnoses of severe mental ill-health rid Zardari of his corruption case in the UK. Last November’s National Reconciliation Ordinance, brokered by the Americans to allow Bhutto’s return to Pakistan and passed by Musharraf, rid him of the rest. It also guaranteed him lifelong immunity from prosecution for corruption. He appears to have made medical history and rid himself of his dementia in time to become President. The only thing he can’t shake off is his appalling reputation.
Zardari has long been dogged by allegations of crime and corruption. In 2003, a Swiss magistrate found him guilty in absentia of laundering $10m. Musharraf’s National Accountability Bureau estimated that he had looted up to $1.5bn from the treasury during his wife’s two terms in office. In 1990, he was in trouble for allegedly tying a remote-controlled bomb to the leg of a businessman and sending him into a bank to withdraw money from his account as a pay-off. More sinisterly, he was charged with complicity in the murder of his brother-in-law Murtaza Bhutto, but the case was never tried. He was also implicated in the 1996 murder of a judge, Justice Nizam Ahmed, and his lawyer son.
Even if Zardari is given the benefit of the doubt and has changed after his wife’s assassination and his many years in jail, his behaviour in the run-up to his election as President proves he still can’t be trusted. He has already reneged on several written agreements made with the coalition, including his pledge to field a non-partisan candidate for president, as well as his pre-election promise to reinstate the judges deposed by Musharraf. If reinstated, they could repeal the amnesty granted to him and reopen corruption investigations.
Inside Pakistan, people are despondent. The economic situation is worse than ever, with inflation at almost 25 per cent. Outside Pakistan, despite his reputation, he is tolerated. He’s seen as pro-West. He will be another “key ally in the war on terror”.
America is stepping up its military campaign in the region, not least because George Bush wants Osama bin Laden’s grizzled head before the US presidential election on 4 November. Strikes against Pakistan’s tribal areas by US/Nato forces are not uncommon, but on Wednesday, for the first time, ground forces attacked a village on the Pakistani side of the border, in South Waziristan, killing 20 innocent people. Tribesmen are up in arms – literally – and have promised revenge, and there has been widespread condemnation. If Zardari is seen to be tolerating such attacks by foreign troops inside Pakistan, a violent backlash is likely.
On Friday, he pledged to eliminate the Taliban. A tall order. Since Musharraf joined the “war on terror” at US bidding and expense and sent Pakistani troops into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Pashtun tribesmen have been falling over their Kalashnikovs to join the Taliban. With hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people from Bajaur as a result of conflict, weekly reports of aerial attacks and collateral damage, the Taliban movement is growing in strength by the day.
And it’s not just the formidable Pashtuns on the warpath. The Taliban is operating on fertile soil. Nationwide, 71 per cent of Pakistanis oppose co-operating with the US in counterterrorism and 51 per cent oppose fighting the Taliban at all, according to a June Gallup poll. The vast majority of Pakistan’s 190 million people may not like the Taliban, but they dislike the US and what is seen as its proxy army even more. Even within the army, there are rebels who object to being forced to kill their own people. The majority of the population is also deeply opposed to what it sees as a foreign occupation in Afghanistan, with more than 80 per cent favouring a negotiated settlement and withdrawal.
Suicide attacks within Pakistan – unheard of before 9/11 – are now so commonplace they barely make the front pages. From the wilds of the tribal areas to the mosques of west London, the war on terror has been hopelessly counterproductive, despite being fuelled by millions of dollars. Its chief beneficiaries have been the Taliban and their sympathisers who feed on the instability.
Zardari has replaced Musharraf, but their policies will be the same. He is unlikely to prove more successful at tackling extremism. His already meagre popularity rating is expected to dwindle rapidly as he is increasingly perceived as another US stooge. And despite all his powers, he is still less powerful than the army. As ever, if the politicians fail to steer Pakistan through its myriad problems, the military, which has notched up 33 years of rule in Pakistan’s 61-year history, will step in.
What is depressing is not that everything now changes with the election of Asif Ali Zardari, but that everything stays the same.
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Tags:'Mr 10 Per Cent', Asif Ali Zardari, corruption charges, economic situation, mental and health problems, power, South Waziristan, suicide attacks, Swiss magistrate, US military operations
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