It is absolutely confounding how liberals have repeatedly fallen for this president. He has thrived off of vague pronouncements and innuendo, only making concrete political promises on issues with overwhelming popular support, at which point he generally manufactures some semblance of fight before rolling over dead in quick order. How many years of this before the Michael Moores of the world get it? The problem is not that the president’s hands are tied by an overzealous Republican establishment; rather, he is confined to a contrived role in a rigged political act designed to mimic representative democracy. The script goes like this: he postures as the people’s president, while the opposition scolds him as being a liberal elitist. Then, they bicker about all things innocuous, while carrying on unabated with the core business of shredding the constitution, stifling dissent, and maintaining the Empire. Obama’s new vaguely populist rhetoric and seemingly forceful tone is all a bad rerun. The Washington Post declared this to be the emergence of “Obama 2.0,” , but they got it wrong. It’s all the same Hope and Change Pony Show.

With each year of Obama’s successful duping of the liberal establishment, the center-point of accepted political opinion gets driven further to the right. In this address, he bills his two greatest accomplishments as getting Bin Laden and saving GM: an extrajudicial murder and a bailout conditioned with wage and benefit reductions for future employees. He blithely touted his circumvention of international law and due process in the bin Laden killing. Meanwhile, he goes on to trumpet his saber rattling vis-à-vis Iran, and his illegal use of drones in Pakistan and Yemen, while speaking of an “ironclad – and I mean Ironclad” relationship to the contemptible regime in Israel. It is quite disconcerting to know that respected “liberal” commentators could characterize a speech as “populist” despite all of this dastardly retrograde rhetoric.

The praise did not stop with Michael Moore. David Corn from the once respectable Mother Jones had this to say: “Obama is pitching a patriotic, quasi-populist progressivism (while conceding the need for deficit reduction and government cost-efficiencies).:  Either he doesn’t quite get the concept of “quasi” or we can count him in the ranks of the duped. In his coverage on Twitter he said: “Progressives can get too bogged down in critique. Obama showed how to criticize while reaching higher.” While it is difficult to discern from a 140-letter tweet, the thrust of this statement seems to be that far-reaching critiques are not acceptable. His reasoning goes that ideologues are archaic and inherently divisive. Anyone who breaks with the theme of unity is a party pooper. In taking this line, the president and his supporters conflate reasoned dissent with the knee-jerk rejectionist posture of the outrageous Republican establishment. Those that demand “too much” of the president are viewed with equal contempt by the increasingly base liberal establishment.

What these candy-ass liberals fail to understand is that we cannot be united with a 1% whose recklessness and avidity knows no bounds. The super-rich have unequivocally demonstrated that their interests lie elsewhere. They have spent decades lobbying for deregulation and trade “liberalization” that has allowed them to displace millions of American jobs while reducing the quality of millions of others. Meanwhile, they preyed on working Americans with their sub-prime and Adjustable Rate Mortgages, and then shook the whole house of cards by repackaging those lousy investments into fancy financial instruments, thus provoking a recession that is ongoing for most of the 99% of us. The Occupy Movement grew out of rage against these monsters, not out of any desire to move in with them. A responsive and thoughtful president would be railing against them, not tidily talking about a “togetherness” that the 1% has incessantly rejected.

Nonetheless, liberals will argue that the president adequately addressed inequality with his token references to economic fairness and his advocacy of a Buffet Tax. The latter proposal is quite clearly a ploy on his part, as he knows the Republican congress would never seriously consider it. He gets to posture as a liberal without ever having to actually enact a progressive measure, per the norm. If he really had any desire to equalize the tax code, he could have done it during his first two years, when he had a strong party majority in both houses of Congress. Meanwhile, if he had the determination, he could ram through such legislation in the current climate of populist upheaval, despite the current Congress of stooges and charlatans. However, it would be extremely naïve to expect the president to suddenly cease being the servile sort that he is.

One could reasonably argue that the proposal to establish a “Financial Crimes Unit” amounts to a progressive initiative that is praiseworthy. Indeed, one cannot imagine a Republican president bothering with such a measure. However, Obama is merely building on what has been a very minimal response to the financial crisis thus far. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill barely began to scratch the surface: its primary purpose so far being that it provides government with alternative avenues to taxpayer bailouts should banks face liquidity issues in the future. The more far-reaching and prescient reforms, such as resurrection of Glass-Steagall and breaking up the monolithic corporate banks, have not been serious policy considerations by this administration.

That makes two progressive-leaning proposals, delivered in the president’s typically vague form, all set for future abandonment. Meanwhile, you can add his support for fracking and “school choice” to the list of regressive positions in this State of the Union. On the former issue, he calls for an ambitious increase in the refinement of natural gas. Despite widespread documentation of the hazards  posed to drinking water and the preponderance of disease in and around gas fields, Obama decided to tell the nation:

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.

On “school choice,” a moniker for school privatization via charters or vouchers, he elicits inspiration from his home-state’s treasured political icon: “I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States.” Here, he is merely repeating talking points directly from corporate lobbyists that have used school choice as cover for their efforts to attack public schools, break up teachers unions, and to maliciously profit from the newly burgeoning education “industry.” Obama does suggest willingness to “stop teaching to the test,” though this is probably more of his vacuous pandering to common progressive causes.  He might make a half-hearted effort at some aesthetic change, but will do nothing to stave off the ongoing looting of the public schools. With Arne Duncan, the old Chicago Charter School champion, still serving as Secretary of Education, it is tough to imagine any diversion from the current privatization thrust.

The only rational conclusion from this year’s speech is that this is, indeed, the same old Obama. This is the same unrepentant militarist that was elected in 2008, the same prosecutor of illegal wars in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen; the same authoritarian that signed the NDAA, thus codifying his immoral and unconstitutional detention powers; the same murderer of American civilians: the president who has dutifully played his role as supervisor of this descendant and morally decaying power. As this has yet to become a full-fledged dictatorship, the president must appeal to his subjects’ finer sensibilities on occasion. In this, he excels. Even after three years of the same old dog and pony show, he is still proving adept at duping the diffident liberal mainstream.

The long-expected rejoinder, made public Monday, charged that 28 of its soldiers at two border bases were killed one by one long after the U.S. military had been told about the attack on a Pakistani base.

The Pakistani critique questions the claims that the U.S. did not know about the Pakistani border posts, that the combined U.S.-Afghan Special Forces unit believed it was under attack from insurgents when it called in air strikes against the two border posts, and that a series of miscommunications prevented higher echelons from stopping the attacks on the border posts.

Revelations in the Clark report – as well as what it omits – support the Pakistani contention that the U.S. investigation covered up what actually occurred before and during the attack. Information in the report suggests that the planners of the Special Forces operation the night of November 25-26 may have known about the two Pakistani border posts that were attacked while feigning ignorance to the commander who had to approve the operation.

It also portrays a military organisation that was not really interested in stopping the attack on the border posts even after it had been told that Pakistani military positions were under fire.

The Pakistani analysis does not repeat the assertion made by Gen. Ashfaq Nadeem, the director general for operations, in the aftermath of the attack that the coordinates of the two Pakistani border posts had been given to the U.S. military well before the incident of November 25-26.

The analysis leaves no doubt, however, that the Pakistani military believed the United States was well aware of the two posts. It said each of the posts had five or six bunkers built above ground on the top of a ridge and clearly visible from Maya village about 1.5 kilometres away.

The Pakistani critique asserts that two or three U.S. aircraft had been operating in the area daily, and that U.S. intelligence had questioned Pakistani officials in the past even about changes in weaponry in its border posts.

The Pakistani military document highlights the revelation in the Clark report that Maj. Gen. James Laster, the commander of the “battlespace” in which Operation SAYAQA was to take place, had demanded that the planners of the operation “confirm the location of Pakistan’s border checkpoints”.

The most recent map of Pakistani border positions available at the time, according to the Clark report, was dated February 2011. The obvious intent of the demand by Gen. Laster was that the planners find out if there were any new border checkpoints that needed to be added to update the map.

The Clark report reveals that “pre-mission intelligence analysis” had indicated “possible border posts North and South of the Operation SAYAQA target areas….”

That intelligence was obviously relevant to Gen. Laster’s order, but those border posts did not show up on the map produced November 23. The planners had decided not to check on those “possible border posts” by asking a Pakistani border liaison officer or investigating unilaterally.

The Clark report tiptoes carefully around the implications of that fact, saying the operation’s planners “did not identify any known border posts in the area of Operational SAYAQA”.

The point of requiring confirmation of a new map would presumably have been to go beyond border posts that were on the available map.

Air crews planning for the operation also knew about the “possible border posts”, according to the report, but didn’t include them in their “pre-mission planning packages”, because “they were data points outside the Operation SAYAQA area.”

U.S. investigators showed no apparent curiosity about what appears to have been the deliberate exclusion of the two new border posts from the map given to Gen. Laster.

The Pakistani critique charges that it is “not possible” that the failure to check on the Pakistani posts was “an innocent omission”.

A second point made by the Pakistani military is that the U.S. attack on its “Volcano” base by U.S. helicopter gunships continued for “as long as one hour and 24 minutes” after the U.S. side had been informed of the attack on its post.

Despite the fact that U.S. and ISAF officials had already been informed about the assault on the Pakistani bases “at multiple levels by the Pakistan side”, the Pakistani analysis charges, “every soldier in and around the posts…was individually targeted.”

The Clark report’s account of U.S. responses to being informed by Pakistani officials that their bases were under attack does nothing to allay Pakistani suspicions about the claim that the attack was unintentional.

It confirms the earlier Pakistani claim that its border liaison officer at the ISAF Regional Command East (RC-E) had informed the U.S. officers in charge of “deconfliction” with Pakistani positions on the border minutes after the attack had begun at 23:40 hours that Pakistani Frontier Force soldiers were being “engaged” by U.S.- coalition forces coming from Afghanistan.

The exchange over the news from the Pakistani officer was testy. Gen. Clark recalled in his press briefing on the report December 22 that the Pakistani liaison officer had been asked where the border posts were located, and had not given the coordinates, but had responded, “Well, you know where it is because you’re shooting at them.”

Clark suggested that there was “confusion” about where the attack was taking place, but there was only one place where U.S. forces were firing at positions inside Pakistan that night, and RC-E’s border confliction cell could have easily identified that place quickly enough with one or two calls.

Neither the text of the report nor the detailed time line in an annex show any effort to contact the Special Forces Task Force or Task Force BRONCO, which had approved the operation, about the report that they were attacking Pakistani border posts. The report offers no explanation for the absence of any action on that report, saying only that it “could not be immediately confirmed”.

Twenty minutes before the information had arrived, according to the Clark report, Task Force BRONCO told the Special Operations Task Force in the region it was still waiting to get confirmation from the Border Coordination Center for the area that there were no Pakistani troops near the operation. It added that RC-E was not tracking any PAKMIL border posts on its computerised map of the area.

The Special Operations Task Force then then sent out a message system saying, “PAKMIL has been notified and confirmed no positions in area.”

In yet another suspicious episode, instead of asking the Pakistani liaison to the border coordination commission whether Pakistan had any posts or troops in the area of Operation SAYAQA, RC-E give him a general location that was 14 kilometres away from that area and asked if Pakistan had troops nearby.

The misdirection of the Pakistani liaison officer, which ensured the response that there were no Pakistani troops in the area, is explained in the Clark report as having been caused by a “misconfigured electronic map overlay”.

Asked in his press briefing why the RC-E had refused to provide precise grid coordinates under circumstances in which it was supposed to be determining whether U.S. forces were firing at Pakistani forces, Clark cited “the overarching lack of trust”.

Nearly 40 minutes after the attack on border post “Volcano” began, according to a time line in the report, the U.S. Liaison officer to Pakistan’s 11th Corps reported to the Special Operations Task Force that U.S. helicopters and a drone had been firing on a Pakistani military post.

But the Task Force waited for at least 10 more minutes, according to the timeline, before informing the Special Forces Unit.

Meanwhile Pakistani troops were being hunted down one by one.

In recent years, particularly since the onset of the Great Recession, it has become clear to many Americans that their country is composed of two different societies with clashing interests — a very small minority in possession of great wealth and power, and everyone else, with some getting by and many falling by the wayside.

As a consequence, large numbers of people now perceive to one degree or another that big money not only manipulates most elections but influences a great many of the politicians and bureaucrats who craft legislation and execute the policies of the U.S. government. Awareness is spreading that crony capitalism —the corporations, banks and Wall Street — controls the economic system which shapes the political system where decisions are made.

But the beat goes on, of course, until mass consciousness transforms into mass action.

In domestic politics, 2012 opened with the Republican Party’s three-ring circus in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the initial contests  to select a presidential nominee. On display is the most bizarre collection of clowns in recent political history. At this stage the battle is between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, who is still favored for now. The struggle within the GOP between ultra right and ultra right “lite” will be determined soon, signaling the start of the best election money can buy.

Which ever party wins in November — and we think President Barack Obama will be reelected — the contest is not between right and left but between right/far right and center right. No matter what the result, progressive change will not be the product. The best outcome might simply be keeping the crazies at bay.

In international affairs, the year opened with U.S. cannon shots aimed just above the heads of America’s multifarious enemies, identified as being mainly in Asia and the Middle East, warning them not to mess with Uncle Sam, as though they were about to.

As the shots reverberated, the American people were told:

Good morning, everybody. The United States of America is the greatest force for freedom and security that the world has ever known. And in no small measure, that’s because we’ve built the best-trained, best-led, best-equipped military in history — and as Commander-in-Chief, I’m going to keep it that way….

These “reassuring” hyper-nationalist words from the Commander-In-Chief were expressed January 5 during a visit to the Pentagon to explain Washington’s dangerous new war policy. A secondary purpose of the plan is to facilitate Pentagon spending cuts in the next decade, but future allocations will not drop one penny below George W. Bush’s bloated war budgets.

Abruptly, the U.S. is supposed to be confronted with a “threat” from China, necessitating that the Pentagon surround that country with even more of its far superior  weaponry, more troops, battle fleets heading in closer proximity, surveillance aircraft, space weapons and long range nuclear missiles.

All this is part of Obama’s recent “pivot” to Asia, as though we ever left, the main goal being to weaken China within its own natural sphere of interest in order to secure Washington’s need to remain global top dog. China is no military threat to the U.S. today or in the future, given the Pentagon’s two-decade head start in all the technologies of conflict, and the fact that America’s war budget is, and will remain, many times that of China.

In addition, there seems to be an imminent “threat” to our way of life from Iran, as well as the continuing “threat” to U.S. democracy from some poor tribes in Afghanistan.

Actually, according to “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” the document explaining the new war plan, the U.S. faces additional “threats” throughout the world, specifically including (aside from those mentioned): Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and  “elsewhere” (our guess is Africa, where Obama’s already inserting troops). Primary regions to worry about, says the Pentagon plan, are South Asia, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Northeast Asia, Eurasia, Southeast and East Asia, plus future, unforeseen demands.

Despite all these “threats,” which are largely invented to justify war spending and keep the American people supportive of the militarism that now pervades our society, Obama twice mentioned in his speech the “tide of war” is receding. But if that is true, why station 40,000 troops in countries around Iraq after withdrawal? Why deploy attack-ready bombers and Navy aircraft carriers near Iran? Why keep nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and make demands on Kabul to allow thousands more to remain indefinitely after the planned “withdrawal” in 2014?

The U.S.-Israeli crusade against Iran may result in an attack this year. The New York Times reported January 12 on an “accelerating covert campaign against Iran consisting of assassinations and bombings. The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim January 11 when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.”

On January 14, Iran charged the U.S. and Israel were behind the scientist’s murder. That same day the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House was worried that Israel will attack Iran before the U.S. gives a go-ahead. But four days later the Times reported Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared “any decision on a possible pre-emptive military strike on Iranian targets was ‘very far off.’” Stay tuned, the year’s just started.

The American people are supposed to be safer this new year because President Obama just signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act allocating $662 billion in military spending in 2012 (plus an equal amount for other “national security” purposes in other budgets).

Civil liberties groups criticize the Pentagon bill because it also authorizes an “indefinite detention” clause that is one more step toward a police state. Obama’s civil liberties record is worse than that of his predecessor because he retained Bush’s excesses and added his own.

A few days after Obama’s bragging about the “best-trained” military, the Pentagon and the secretaries of defense and state were forced to publicly apologize in the wake of an international uproar over circulation of a video showing four U.S. Marines jovially urinating on the corpses of Taliban suspects. A couple of days later a U.S. military legal officer recommended that PFC Bradley Manning face a court martial for transferring documents including evidence of U.S. war crimes to the whistle blowing website WikiLeaks. And so it goes, day by day into 2012.

Washington maintains that the Great Recession ended in June 2009 and the economy is on the mend. Stock prices are up, corporate profits are zooming, and the wealthy are exhausting the nation’s supply of money bags.

The corporations, banks and Wall St. have been abundantly helped through the tough times by the Obama Administration, but little help has trickled down to average working families. Recession conditions will continue in 2012 for much of the “bottom” 80% of the U.S. population, including high unemployment, more foreclosures, and stagnant wages. Half the families in our Land of Opportunity are low income or poor.

Early in January, the new Pew Research Center survey of 2,048 adults contained a most unusual result. It found that 66% of the people in our “classless society” believe there are “very strong or strong conflicts between the rich and the poor” in the U.S. This is big news, evidently based on growing comprehension of what are, in fact, class differences.

The top 1% now possess more than 50% of all privately held assets in the U.S. (Assets are everything you own including cash, car and house minus debts.) The top 20% possess 85% of all assets. This means the bottom 80% of the people have accumulated only 15% of the assets (including the bottom 40%, who have no assets at all because they owe more than they own).

However, there is one aspect of our system that is said to prove beyond doubt that all Americans — rich and poor alike — are actually equal in our society where it really counts. We speak of each citizen’s right to vote in the quadrennial selection of a Commander-in-Chief, known popularly as the presidential election.

President Obama has transformed his rhetoric into that of liberal populism for the duration of the campaign. He now talks about having government intervene to help reduce inequality and help build a more “equitable” society, not that it’s going to happen. He now even tut-tuts about crony capitalism.

Obama sure sounds even more progressive than when he was a “change-we-can-believe-in” candidate in 2008. This was before governing as a center-right patron of the ruling establishment for the last three years, ignoring poor, low income and minority Americans as though they didn’t exist, initiating a completely failed program for the millions who have been foreclosed, and changing little to nothing, even in his first two years when the Democrats controlled the House as well as the Senate.

Probable opponent Romney has undergone a similar opportunist transformation in the opposite direction in order to obtain the GOP nomination. He’s now campaigning as a right/far right populist this year after governing Massachusetts as a health care moderate conservative and who earlier supported abortion, and gun control, among many flip-flops. Gingrich has always been an ultra-reactionary hypocrite going back to the early 1990s in the House, and hasn’t seen the need to adopt a new persona for 2012.

The main reason we believe Obama will be reelected has nothing to do with his record as president. It is that the Republicans have gone so far to the political right, and have acted like such obstructionist buffoons in Congress, that the crucial independent vote will lean toward the center-right. The Democratic leadership hopes Gingrich becomes the candidate because he’ll campaign as a far rightist while they fear Romney may moderate some of his rhetoric. But even so, Obama’s nearly $1 billion war chest should finish him off.

Assuming Obama does return to power, we know now, as in the 2008 campaign, that a “liberal” will not be occupying the Oval Office for the next four years. The pro-99% rhetoric will stop at the second term White House door.

American politics is quite different today than when the Democratic Party adopted a center left configuration for a few years in the 1930s and 1960s. However, in terms of the gradations of political “evil,” the center right is a “lesser evil” to the right/far right, given the two conservative options for electing a president offered the American people by those who run the show, though it’s a dismal commentary on democracy.

In the present era it is certainly legitimate to worry about the direction American politics is heading domestically, coupled with a probable global future of more wars, more poverty and environmental disaster. We worry deeply about the problems that will confront our, and all, today’s children and grandchildren.

However, we retain unshakable confidence in what the masses of people can accomplish under difficult conditions when they become united, organized, disciplined and committed to the struggle for a better, equal and cooperative society, and a peaceful, environmentally sustainable world.

This option for substantive transformation beckons. It is the objective requirement of our times if we are to avoid a catastrophe down the road. A decisive turn to the left is essential and possible. It could revolutionize society and change the world to benefit all the people.

The problem is that decisions about these vital American policies are not for mere presidents or presidential hopefuls to mull over. The one principled decision that US President Barack Obama made, his first upon coming to office, was to announce that he would close Guantanamo Bay prison within a year. After all, he had voted against his predecessor’s ill-fated invasion of Iraq, and it was on this basis that he was able to energise an otherwise disillusioned Democratic base and surge past the more acceptable white alternatives Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Obama’s record on foreign policy has been shocking in retrospect. His call from Cairo for a new dispensation in the Middle East soon after his vow to close Guantanamo, along with this vow, are now in history’s dustbin. His enthusiastic embrace of the worst of Bush’s policies, from drones, assassinations and mercenaries to Orwellian police-state security are frightening proof of the helplessness of US politicians these days.

No better evidence that this paralysis will make the next four years the most perilous in US history is found in the bloody news dripping out of Afghanistan. NATO soldiers, Afghan soldiers and police, resistance fighters, and, of course, women and children continue to be killed at alarming rates, even as the Taliban open an office in Qatar (originally denied by all parties). Peace negotiations came to a standstill last year after the assassination of High Peace Council chief Burhanudin Rabbani (Afghan president 1992-96) by a visitor posing as a peace messenger from the Taliban.

A total of 560 NATO soldiers, most of them Americans, were killed in Afghanistan in 2011, the second highest number in the 10-year war, down from a high of 711 in 2010 after the start of Obama’s surge, still higher than the 521 in 2009.

But according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “security-related events” were up by 21 per cent in 2011 compared to 2010. By this he meant attacks such as the car bombing of an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoy in Kabul last October which killed 17, the shooting down of a helicopter in Wardak south of the capital last August in which 30 US troops perished, and the explosion that killed at least 80 people in a shrine in Kabul on the Shia holy day of Ashura in early December. Many ISAF deaths are at the hands of Afghan soldiers. The recent Abu Ghraib-type scandal of US soldiers defiling Afghan dead merely ups this perverse ante.

Gung-ho military types like John Nagl, a retired lieutenant-colonel who co-wrote the US army’s field manual on countering guerrilla warfare, push counterinsurgency, where the occupiers “protect” the civilians against violence from the rebels. This was the logic of the surge which Obama grudgingly (who cares what he thinks anymore?) approved last year.

The counterinsurgency hurt the Taliban if only because the occupiers killed thousands of them. It no doubt caused splintering of Taliban forces, and contributed to the seemingly random violence. But it did little to endear the occupiers to the native population, and, according to a WikiLeak from former chairman of the US National Intelligence Council Peter Lavoy, seems to have prompted a new, less benign strategy. “The international community should put intense pressure on the Taliban to bring out their more violent and ideologically radical tendencies,” he argues, the logic being to prevent Afghans from giving up entirely on their occupiers.

Nagl and the boys are not pleased by such candor. Aghast, he told the Guardian: “It just goes completely against the ethos of the American military not to take more risks in order to protect civilians. I find it hard to believe elements of the US military would want to deliberately put more risk on to civilians.”

But he does admit the Taliban are effectively being forced by the occupiers to engage mostly in crude terrorism, stage one of Mao Zedong’s famous three phases of revolutionary warfare (phase two is larger teams of rebels taking on government forces, leading to full-blown conventional war in phase three). Still, he sees no nefarious intrigue on the occupiers’ part. “The Taliban have been knocked down to phase one and you see what you would expect to see, with the resulting risk of alienating the civilian population. If we can get the civilian population on our side in the south, in their heartlands, we can knock them back to phase zero,” enthuses Eagle Scout Nagl.

Such clever reading of Maoist tactics cannot hide the fact that US plans for Central Asia continue to stumble, stuck in the imperial groove. Looming large is Pakistan’s remarkable closure of the US drone base and its refusal to reopen supply routes after NATO killed 28 Pakistani soldiers last month. But equally foreboding is tiny Kyrgyzstan’s President Almazbek Atambayev’s quiet insistence that 2014 is the final final final date for US control of the Manas airbase, a key transfer point for Western troops and supplies to Afghanistan.

Just as Bush was boasting in 2008 of permanent US bases in Iraq, the recent Strategic Partnership agreement with the Afghan government to place permanent joint military bases in Afghanistan beyond 2024 is not a serious proposition.

Nor is the latest magic bullet — the Iron Man — being forged in NATO headquarters. The idea is to whip into shape an Afghan security force/ army and hand over nominal power by the end of 2014. But this force will be predominantly northern Tajik-speaking Afghans who make up only 28 per cent of the population and form the backbone of the current government. Less than 10 per cent of officers are Pashtun (vs 42 per cent of Afghans), and in any case the army attrition rate is 30 per cent, not to mention the infiltration rate of Taliban suicide martyrs.

Just as in 2012 in Iraq, we can expect some kind of handover in 2014 — the US people and economy simply cannot bear much more, but it will be to a chaotic police state, headed by the weak, discredited Hamid Karzai, with a confusing mix of army, police and mercenaries, much like the situation Afghanistan faced in 1993, at the end of the last US-Afghan love-in, in the 1980s. By 1996 a violent civil war had brought the country to a stand-still and the Taliban was the only way out. This scenario is about to repeat itself.

The Taliban are not the Vietnamese, with a clear, proven economic system and a powerful socialist sponsor able to help them heal. What post-2014 Afghanistan faces is less-than-friendly neighbours, including a very troubled Pakistan, with little to contribute to a post-occupation reconstruction. Perhaps the new Muslim Brotherhood governments in the Arab world will extend a more sympathetic hand, paid for by Gulf oil sheikhs. The Afghans have had quite enough of the kufars over the past three decades.

I had become gravely ill on July 26, 2006, a month and a half prior to the summit, and could barely sit up in bed. Many of the most distinguished leaders who participated in the event were kind enough to visit me. Chavez and Evo visited me several times. One afternoon four visitors came by whom I will always remember: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; an old friend, Abdelaziz Buteflika, the president of Algeria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran; and the vice minister of Foreign Affairs and current Foreign Minister of China, Yang Jiechi, on behalf of the leader of the Communist Party and the president of China, Hu Jintao. It was really an important time for me; I was in the midst of intense physiotherapy on my right hand that I had seriously injured when I fell in Santa Clara.

With all four I spoke about some of the difficulties facing the world at the time; problems that have become progressively more complex.

During our meeting yesterday, I noted that the Iranian president was absolutely calm and tranquil, completely unconcerned about the Yankee threats and, fully confident in the capacity of his people to confront any aggression and in the effectiveness of their arms —which, in large part, they produce themselves— to inflict an unpayable price on its aggressors.

In reality, we hardly spoke about the topic of war. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was focused on the ideas he had presented at the Main Hall of the University of Havana during his conference on the struggle of humankind:

Moving towards reaching and achieving peace, security, respect and human dignity as a fundamental desire of all human beings throughout history.

I am convinced that Iran will not commit any rash actions that might contribute to setting off a war. If a war were to be unleashed, it would inevitably be completely as a result of the recklessness and congenital irresponsibility of the Yankee Empire.

I believe that the political situation surrounding Iran and the associated risks of a nuclear war that involves us all —regardless of whether one possess nuclear weapons— are extremely delicate because they threaten the very existence of our species. The Middle East has become the most troubled region on the planet, the same region that produces the energy resources vital for the world’s economy.

The destructive power and the mass sufferings caused by some of the weapons used in World War Two led to a strong movement to ban weapons such as asphyxiating gas and others. Nevertheless, conflicting interests and the huge profits made by arms manufacturers led to the production of crueler and more destructive weapons; modern technology has now added the means and material to build weapons that if used in a world war would lead to extinction.

I support the opinion, undoubtedly shared by all those with a basic sense of responsibility, that no country big or small has the right to possess nuclear weapons.

They never should have been used to attack two defenseless cities such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and irradiating with horrible and long-lasting effects hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, in a country that had already been militarily defeated.

If fascism indeed forced the allied nations against Nazism to compete with this enemy of humanity in the production of such weapons, once the war ended and the United Nations was created, the first duty of this organization should have been to prohibit nuclear weapons without exception.

However, the United States, the strongest and richest power, forced the rest of the world to follow its lead. Today, they have hundreds of satellites that spy and monitor the entire world from outer space. Their naval, air and land forces are equipped with thousands of nuclear weapons; and they control the world’s finances and investments at their whim via the International Monetary Fund.

Analyzing the history of each Latin American nation, from Mexico to Patagonia, by way of Santo Domingo and Haiti, one can observe that each and every country, without exception, have suffered for 200 years, from the beginning of the 19th century up until today. And, in one way or another, they are increasingly suffering the worst crimes that power and force can commit against the rights of a people. Brilliant Latin American writers are emerging in an increasing number. One of them, Eduardo Galeano, author of the book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent that describes the aforementioned, has just been invited to open the prestigious Casa de Las Americas Awards as a recognition to his outstanding body of work.

Events happen incredibly fast; but technologies report them to the public even faster. On any given day, like today, important news comes out a dizzying pace. A cable report dated from January 11 states:

The Danish presidency of the European Union confirmed on Wednesday that a new series of more severe European sanctions against Iran, because of its nuclear program, will be discussed on January 23. The new sanctions will not only target the oil industry but also the Central Bank.

During a meeting with international journalists, Danish Foreign Minister Villy Soevndal said that “We will increase sanctions against the oil industry in addition to sanctions against financial structures.” This clearly demonstrates that, in order to impede nuclear proliferation, Israel can go on accumulating hundreds of nuclear warheads while Iran is not allowed to produce 20% enriched uranium.

Another article, from a respected British news agency, states that “China gave no hint on Wednesday of giving ground to U.S. demands to curb Iran’s oil revenues, rejecting Washington’s sanctions on Tehran as overstepping …”

The sheer tranquility with which the United States and civilized Europe carry out this campaign with incredible and systematic acts of terrorism is enough to shock anybody. Just look at these lines reported by another important European news agency:

The murder on Wednesday of Iranian nuclear specialist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan [a scientist at the Natanz nuclear plant] was the fourth attack to kill a leading scientist in the country in almost exactly two years.

On January 12, 2010:

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physics professor at Tehran University is killed when a booby-trapped motorcycle explodes outside his home in the capital.

On November 29, 2010:

Two attacks target leading Iranian nuclear scientists on the same day. Majid Shahriari, a key member of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, is killed in Tehran by a limpet bomb attached to his car. His colleague Fereydoon Abbasi Davani is also targeted by a bomb attached to his car, but escapes.

The car was parked in front of the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran where both men worked as professors.

On July 23, 2011:

Gunmen shoot dead Dariush Rezaei-Nejad, a senior scientist who is reportedly associated with the defense ministry, and wound his wife as they waited for their child outside a Tehran kindergarten.

On January 11, 2012 —the same day that Ahmadinejad travelled from Nicaragua to Cuba to give a conference at the University of Havana—, scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, “a deputy director at the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, is killed in a car bomb blast outside the [Allameh Tabatabai] University in east Tehran.” As in previous years “Iran once again accused the United States and Israel.”

The killings represent a systematic and selective slaughter of brilliant Iranian scientists. I have read articles by known Israeli sympathizers who write about crimes carried out by Israeli intelligence services in cooperation with the United States and NATO as if they were the most normal occurrence.

At the same time, Moscow news agencies report that “Russia warned that in Syria a similar scenario is developing as to that in Libya, and added that this time the attack will be launched from neighboring Turkey.

The secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said the West wants to ‘punish Damascus not as much for repressing the opposition, but because it is unwilling to sever ties with Tehran.

…NATO members and some Persian Gulf states, operating according to the Libya scenario, intend to move from indirect intervention in Syrian affairs to direct military intervention…This time the main strikes forces will not be provided by France, the U.K. or Italy, but possibly by neighboring Turkey.

Washington and Ankara are now assumed to be negotiating a “no-fly” zone over Syria, where Syrian armed insurgents can be trained and concentrated, added Patrushev.

News is not only coming out of Iran and the Middle East, but also from other parts of Central Asia near the Middle East. These reports show the great complexity of the problems that can arise from this dangerous region.

The United States has been led by its contradictory and absurd imperial policy to get involved in serious problems in countries such as Pakistan, whose borders with Afghanistan were drawn up by the colonialists without taking into account culture or ethnicities.

In Afghanistan, which defended its independence against English colonialism for centuries, drug production has multiplied in the wake of the Yankee invasion. Meanwhile, European soldiers, supported by drone airplanes and armed with sophisticated US weapons, carry out deplorable massacres that increase the people’s hatred and ward off any possibilities of peace. All this and other dirty actions are also reported by Western news agencies.

WASHINGTON, January 12, 2012 – US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called the actions of four U.S. marines who urinated on corpses in Afghanistan “utterly deplorable” The video of the act was circulated in the Internet.

I have seen the footage, and I find the behavior depicted in it utterly deplorable…

This conduct is entirely inappropriate for members of the United States military and does not reflect the standards of values our armed forces are sworn to uphold…

In reality, Panetta neither confirms nor denies the action, and anyone, including the Secretary of Defense himself, may harbor doubt.

But it is also extremely inhumane that men, women and children, or an Afghani combatant fighting against the foreign occupation, be murdered by bombs dropped by drone planes. Another very serious incident: dozens of Pakistani soldiers and officials who safeguarded the country’s borders have been killed by these bombs.

Afghani President Karzai stated that the outrage committed against the bodies was “simply inhumane.” He asked for the US government “to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

Meanwhile Taliban spokespersons declared that “over the last ten years, hundreds of similar acts have been carried out that were not reported…”

One even feels sorry for those soldiers, thousands of kilometers away from their family, friends and country, sent to fight in countries that they might not have even heard of during their school days, where they are assigned the task of killing or dying to enrich transnational companies, arms manufacturers and unscrupulous politicians who each year squander funds needed to feed and educate the uncountable millions of hungry and illiterate people around the world.

Many of these soldiers, victims of the trauma suffered, end up taking their own lives.

Is it an exaggeration to say that world peace is hanging by a thread?

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita … ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’.

— J. Robert Oppenheimer, 22 April 1904 – 18 February 1967
Scientific Director of the Manhattan Project, on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Chilling ironies surely do not come much greater than the Nobel Peace Prize winning President of the United States, in an election year, having contributed to global instability and the possibility of nuclear conflict, to such an extent that the “Doomsday Clock”, maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago, has this week been moved to five minutes to midnight.

The forward-creeping hands of the symbolic clock, maintained since 1947, two years after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, indicate the closest to global catastrophe in twenty six years, with the exception of 2007, when the hands were similarly set under the gung-ho “Bring ‘em on”, presidency of George W. Bush.

What a world away from Obama’s June 2009 speech at Egypt’s Al Azhar University, where he declared he was in Cairo: “… to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims round the world (and to) share … tolerance and dignity…”

He asserted: “There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another and to seek common ground … the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful then the forces that drive us apart.”

Tell that to the bereaved, maimed, homeless Libyans, Iraqis, Afghans, the US-menaced people of Syria, over one third of whom are  fourteen or under; the annihilation-threatened Iranian population, nearly a quarter also children, fourteen years or under.

Tell it to Iran, so demonized, yet which generously hosts one of the largest refugee populations in the world. (1999 UNHCR figures cite at a cost then, to embargoed Iran, of ten million $s a day.)

Tell it also to the droned and blown (away) of Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia.

A “ … sustained effort to listen …”, has been largely denied the untried, incarcerated, abused, tortured in Bagram and Guantanamo’s “gulags of our times”, as totally during the Obama presidency as the years before.

But back to the ticking Atomic clock. Alarmingly, the furthest from “midnight” it has ever been is seventeen minutes, in 1991, when the US and then Soviet Union, under George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (31 July), a heartening seven minute leap from the ten to midnight of 1990, even that, in spite of the onslaught of the 32 nation war on Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait. The Berlin Wall had, however, fallen and the Cold War seemed to be ending.

In 1963, 1972, both years of seemingly ground breaking arms limitation treaties between the US and Soviet Union, the clock still stood at ten minutes to midnight.

Even when India tested a nuclear device, and the US and Soviet Union both modernized their destructive potential in 1974, the clock stood four minutes further away from annihilation than Obama’s contribution – then at nine minutes to midnight.

As the United States aircraft carriers, Carl Vinson and John C. Stennis, bristling with nuclear and other holocaustal weapons,  and twitchy testosterone-fuelled troops, steam Iran-wards, to either bomb nuclear installations – with the danger of a potential nuclear winter – or bomb to keep the Straits of Hormuz open for one fifth of the world’s oil supplies – the clock is just two minutes back from when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1947, officially starting the nuclear arms race.

It is three minutes from the two minutes to midnight – the most apocalyptic ever – of 1953, when both the US and Soviet Union tested thermo-nuclear devices within nine months of each other.

There are about 19,000 nuclear weapons in the world according to the Science and Security Board. That’s enough to blow up the Earth many times over. We are really in a pickle”, says Kennette Benedict, Executive Director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, of their latest clock re-set.

“Recognizing our common humanity is only the beginning of our task”, said President Obama, in Cairo, when some believed his “Yes, we can”, meant peace, and a new dawn for the planet and humanity.

No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on any other. It’s easier to start wars than to end them.… It’s easier to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share.  But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path.

There’s one rule that lies at the heart of every religion  – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

This truth transcends nations and peoples — a belief that isn’t new; that isn’t black or white or brown; that isn’t Christian or Muslim or Jew.† It’s a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the hearts of billions around the world. It’s a faith in other people, and it’s what brought me here today”, he concluded.

Indeed! Beware of Presidents bearing Nobel Peace Prize tags.

Very few people in America are aware or informed regarding the devastation and massive loss of life which would occur in the case of a US-Israeli sponsored attack on Iran. The media is involved in a deliberate process of camouflage and distortion.

War preparations under a “Global Strike” Concept, centralized and coordinated by US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) are not front page news in comparison to the most insignificant issues of public concern, including the local level crime scene or the tabloid gossip reports on Hollywood celebrities.

The “Globalization of War” involving the hegemonic deployment of a formidable US-NATO military force in all major regions of the World is inconsequential in the eyes of the Western media.

The broader implications of this war are either trivialized or not mentioned. People are led to believe that war is part of a “humanitarian mandate” and that both Iran as well as Iran’s allies, namely China and Russia, constitute an unrelenting  threat to global security and “Western democracy”.

While the most advanced weapons system are used, America’s wars are never presented as “killing operations” resulting in extensive civilian casualties. While the incidence of “collateral damage” is acknowledged, US-led wars are heralded as an unquestionable instrument of “peace-making” and “democratization”.

This twisted notion that waging war is “a worthy cause”, becomes entrenched in the inner consciousness of millions of people. A  framework of “good versus evil” overshadows an understanding of the causes and devastating consequences of  war. Within this mindset, realities as well as concepts are turned upside down. War becomes peace. The lie becomes the truth. The humanitarian mandate of the Pentagon and NATO cannot be challenged.

When “going after the bad guys”, no options can be taken off the table.  An inquisitorial doctrine similar to that of the Spanish Inquisition, prevails. People are no longer allowed to think.

Iran is a country of close to 80 million people. It constitutes a major and significant regional military and economic power. It has ten percent of global oil and gas reserves, more than five times those of the United States of America.

The conquest of Iran’s oil riches is the driving force behind America’s military agenda. Iran’s oil and gas industry is the unspoken trophy of  the US led war.

While the US is on a war footing, Iran has  — for more than ten years — been actively developing its military capabilities in the eventuality of a US sponsored attack.

If hostilities were to break out between Iran and the Western military alliance, this could trigger a regional war extending from the Mediterranean to the Chinese border, potentially leading humanity into the realm of a World War III scenario.

The Russian government, in a recent statement, has warned the US and NATO that “should Iran get drawn into any political or military hardships, this will be a direct threat to our national security.” What this signifies is that Russia is Iran’s military ally and that Russia will act militarily if Iran is attacked.

Military Deployment

Iran is the target of US-Israel-NATO war plans. Advanced weapons systems have been deployed.

US and allied Special Forces as well as intelligence operatives are already on the ground inside Iran. US military drones are involved in spying and reconnaissance activities.

Bunker buster B61 tactical nuclear weapons are slated to be used against Iran in retaliation for its alleged nuclear weapons program. Ironically, in the words of US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Iran does not possess a nuclear weapons program. “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No.” The risk of armed hostilities between the US-Israel led coalition and Iran is, according to Israeli military analysts “dangerously close”.

There has been a massive deployment of troops which have been dispatched to the Middle East, not to mention the redeployment of US and allied troops previously stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Nine thousand US troops have been dispatched to Israel to participate in what is described by the Israeli press as the largest joint air defense war exercise in Israeli history, The drill, called “Austere Challenge 12,” is scheduled to take place within the next few weeks Its stated purpose “is to test multiple Israeli and US air defense systems, especially the “Arrow” system, which the country specifically developed with help from the US to intercept Iranian missiles.”

Reports also suggest that substantial increase in the number of reservists who are being deployed to the Middle East. Reports confirm that reservist US Air Force personnel have been dispatched to military bases in South West Asia (Persian Gulf). From Minnesota, more than 120 Airmen including pilots, navigators, mechanics, etc. departed for the Middle East on January 8. Reservist US air force personnel from bases in North Carolina and Georgia “expect to deploy with their units in coming months”.¹

Reserve units from the US Coastguard have also been dispatched to the Middle East.²

From these local reports, however, it is impossible to establish the overall (net) increase of US reservists from different divisions of the US military, who have been assigned to “operation Iran war”.

Army reservists from the UK are also been sent to the Middle East.

US Troops to Israel

Israel has become a de facto US military outpost. US and Israeli command structures are being integrated, with close consultations between the Pentagon and Israel’s Ministry of Defense.

A large number of US troops will be stationed in Israel once the war games are completed.  The assumption of this military deployment is the staging of a joint US-Israeli air attack on Iran. Military escalation towards a regional war is part of the military scenario:

Thousands of US troops began descending on Israel this week. … many would be staying up to the end of the year as part of the US-IDF deployment in readiness for a military engagement with Iran and its possible escalation into a regional conflict. They will be joined by a US aircraft carrier. The warplanes on its decks will fly missions with Israeli Air Force jets. The 9,000 US servicemen gathering in Israel in the coming weeks are mostly airmen, missile interceptor teams, marines, seamen, technicians and intelligence officers.
…
Tehran too is walking a taut tightrope. It is staging military’s maneuvers every few days to assuring the Iranian people that its leaders are fully prepared to defend the country against an American or Israeli strike on its national nuclear program. By this stratagem, Iran’s ground, sea and air forces are maintained constantly at top war readiness to thwart any surprise attack.

The joint US-Israeli drill will test multiple Israeli and US air defense systems against incoming missiles and rockets, according to the official communiqué.³

Missile defense and naval war games are being conducted simultaneously. US-Israeli war games — involving an impressive display of naval power — are slated to be held in the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, Iran has announced that it will be conducting its own war games in the Persian Gulf in February.

An impressive deployment of troops and advanced military hardware is unfolding. Britain’s Royal Navy has dispatched her newest and most advanced warship, Type 45 destroyer HMS Daring, “which has a “stealth” design to help avoid detection by radar”.

Meanwhile, The Islamic Republic of Iran is also on a war footing. Iran’s Armed Forces is in an advanced stage of preparedness to defend the country’s borders as well as retaliate against a US-Israel led attack. Iran has completed a 10-day naval exercise near the Strait of Hormuz in December. It has now announced  that it is planning new naval drills codenamed “The Great Prophet”, which are slated to take place in February. Iran’s December war games involved the test firing of two long range missiles systems, including the Qadar (a powerful sea-to-shore missile) and the Nour surface-to-surface missile. “According to Iranian state news, the Nour is an ‘advanced radar-evading, target-seeking, guided and controlled missile’.”⁴

Additionally, the Iranian military reportedly test-fired numerous other short, medium and long-range missiles…. Iranian authorities reported that they test-fired the medium-range, surface-to-air, radar-evading Mehrab missile.⁴

Iranian Missile Tests

War games by the US-Israel coalition are being held within a short distance of Iranian territorial waters. The timing of these games coincides with those of Iran.

The crucial question: Is the Pentagon seeking to deliberately trigger a military confrontation in the Persian Gulf with a view to providing a pretext and a justification to waging an all out war on the Islamic Republic of Iran?
US military strategists admit that the US Navy would be at disadvantage in relation to Iranian forces in the narrow corridor of the Strait of Hormuz:

Despite its might and shear strength, geography literally works against U.S. naval power in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. The relative narrowness of the Persian Gulf makes it like a channel, at least in a strategic and military context. Figuratively speaking, the aircraft carriers and warships of the U.S. are confined to narrow waters or are closed in within the coastal waters of the Persian Gulf. … Even the Pentagon’s own war simulations have shown that a war in the Persian Gulf with Iran would spell disaster for the United States and its military.⁵

Triggering a War Pretext Incident: Provoking Iran to “Throw the First Punch”

Is the Obama administration prepared to sacrifice one or more vessels of the Fifth Fleet, resulting in extensive casualties among soldiers and sailors, with a view to mustering public support for a war on Iran on the grounds of self-defense?

As documented by Richard Sanders, the strategy of triggering a war pretext incident has been used throughout American military history.

Throughout history, war planners have used various forms of deception to trick their enemies. Because public support is so crucial to the process of initiating and waging war, the home population is also subject to deceitful stratagems. The creation of false excuses to justify going to war is a major first step in constructing public support for such deadly ventures. Perhaps the most common pretext for war is an apparently unprovoked enemy attack. Such attacks, however, are often fabricated, incited or deliberately allowed to occur. They are then exploited to arouse widespread public sympathy for the victims, demonize the attackers and build mass support for military “retaliation.”

Like schoolyard bullies who shout ‘He hit me first!’, war planners know that it is irrelevant whether the opponent really did ‘throw the first punch.’ As long as it can be made to appear that the attack was unprovoked, the bully receives license to ‘respond’ with force. Bullies and war planners are experts at taunting, teasing and threatening their opponents. If the enemy cannot be goaded into ‘firing the first shot,’ it is easy enough to lie about what happened. Sometimes, that is sufficient to rationalize a schoolyard beating or a genocidal war.

Such trickery has probably been employed by every military power throughout history. During the Roman empire, “the cause for war” — casus belli — was often invented to conceal the real reasons for war. Over the millennia, although weapons and battle strategies have changed greatly, the deceitful strategem of using pretext incidents to ignite war has remained remarkably consistent.⁶

President Roosevelt knew that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked by Japan and did nothing to prevent it. At a November 25 1941 meeting of FDR’s war council, “Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s notes speak of the prevailing consensus:  ‘The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into … firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.’”⁷

A massive cover-up followed Pearl Harbor a few days later, … when the Chief of Staff ordered a lid put on the affair. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told half a dozen officers, ‘this goes to the grave with us.’⁸

According to Professor Francis Boyle with reference to the ongoing showdown between the US Navy and Iran in the Persian Gulf:: “Once again, it looks to me like what FDR did in 1941 when he sacrificed the Pacific Fleet and its men at Pearl Harbor—except for the carriers—in order to get the USA into World War II despite the fervent desire of the American People and Congress to stay out. Déjà vu all over again. Back to the Future ”⁹

In contrast to the events of 1941, the US Congress in 2012 is broadly supportive of waging a war on Iran and the American people are, as a result of media disinformation, largely unaware of the devastating implications of a US-Israeli attack.

Thematic Justifications: Demonizing the Enemy

Apart from the “incident” whereby the enemy is incited to “throw the first punch”, “thematic justifications” are used to demonize the enemy and justify a casus belli. WMD and regime change in the case of Iraq (2003), Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks in the case of Afghanistan (2001), “regime change” and “democratization” in the case of Libya (2011).

The thematic justifications to wage war on Iran include the following:

1. Iran is accused of developing a nuclear weapons program,  2. Iran is a “Rogue State” which defies the “international community” and constitutes a threat the Western World, 3. Iran wants “to wipe Israel off the map”, 4. Iran is responsible for supporting and abetting the 9/11 terrorist attacks,  5. Iran is an authoritarian and undemocratic country thereby justifying a “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) intervention with a view to instating democracy.

In case of a war with Iran, NATO member states as well as NATO partners of the “Mediterranean Dialogue” including the Five GCC Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Jordan would be involved.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have a formidable weapons arsenal (Made in America), which would be used against Iran on behalf of the US led coalition.¹⁰

The US has more than 30 military bases and facilities including its naval base in Bahrain, US Central command (CENTCOM) headquarters in Qatar, not to mention its military installations in Pakistan, Turkey and Afghanistan (see map)

From Washington’s standpoint, Saudi Arabia’s Royal Air Force is meant to act as a proxy for the USAF, operating on the principle of “interoperability”. Saudi Arabia’s Air Force is equipped with the most advanced combat planes including (among others) the Eurofighter Typhoons, Tornado IDS, F-15 and F-15E Eagle fighters. In October 2010, Washington announced its largest arms sale in US history, a $60.5 billion purchase by Saudi Arabia. These weapons although acquired by Saudi Arabia are de facto part of a US sponsored weapons arsenal, which is to be used in close coordination and consultation with the Pentagon.

It should, nonetheless, be emphasised that there is reluctance within the ruling Saudi and Gulf States elites, to actively participating in a regional war, which would inevitably lead to Iranian retaliatory aerial attacks.

Escalation: Towards a Broader Regional War

If aerial attacks were to be launched, Iran would retaliate with missile attacks directed against Israel as well as against US military facilities in the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iran has an advanced Russian S 300 air defense system. It is equipped with medium and long range missile capabilities: The Shahab 3 and Sejjil missiles have a range of  approximately 2,000 km, enabling them to strike targets in Israel. The Ghadr 1 has a range of 1,800 km.¹¹

The war with Iran would not be limited to aerial bombardments. A land war could follow with Turkey playing a strategic military role on behalf of the US-Israel led coalition. Turkey’s ground forces are of the order of 500,000. Iran’s are of a similar order of magnitude: 465,000 regular forces, which would immediately be deployed in border areas with Iran and Syria as well as within Syria.

Iran’s Air Force and Navy personnel are respectively of the order of 52,000 and 28,000. The Revolutionary Guards, which constitute Iran’s elite forces, are of the order of 120,000. Moreover, Iran has a significant paramilitary force called the Basij. (see Table below)

The war would also overflow into Syria (which is an ally of Iran, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan involving the participation of  Syrian ground forces as well as Hezbollah, which effectively repealed Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon. In recent developments, Iran has increased its military aid to Syria and Lebanon.

In turn, Russia has a naval base in Southern Syria and military cooperation agreements with both Syria and Iran, involving the presence of Russian military advisers. Russia is deploying warships out of its naval base in Tartus including aircraft carrying missile cruiser Admiral Kuznetsov. “The deployment … follows the US move to station the George H.W. Bush Carrier Strike Group” off the Syrian coastline.¹²

Russia’s Naval base in Tartus, Syria

Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier


Su 33 take-off from aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov in the Eastern Mediterranean

UN Security Council Resolution 1929 (June 2010) had imposed a sanctions regime on Iran which was conducive to a temporary freeze in military cooperation between Iran and Russia, as well as with China. In recent developments, it would appear that military cooperation has de facto resumed following the rebuff by both China and Russia of the December 31, 2011 economic sanctions regime imposed by Washington.

In a scenario of military escalation, Iranian troops and/or Special Forces would cross the border into Afghanistan and Iraq.

From the three existing war theaters: Afghanistan-Pakistan (Af-Pak), Iraq, Palestine, the onslaught of a war on Iran would lead to an integrated regional war.

The entire Middle East-Central Asian region extending from the Eastern Mediterranean to China’s Western frontier with Afghanistan and Pakistan would flare up, from the tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the Caspian Sea basin.

The Caucasus and Central Asia: Competing Military Alliances

What would be the involvement of America’s “partners” in the Caucasus, namely Georgia and Azerbaijan?¹³

In Azerbaijan, the government has recently distanced itself from Washington, and has turned down its participation in joint military exercises with the US. The bilateral US-Azerbaijan strategic agreement is said to be stagnating:

Baku’s desire to not to anger Moscow would seem to preclude any possibility of Azerbaijan hosting a US military facility….”¹⁴

In contrast, the Georgian government is directly supporting America’s war effort against Iran. In recent developments, the Pentagon is sponsoring the construction of makeshift US military hospitals in Georgia to be used in the eventuality of a war with Iran.¹⁵

These are 20-bed hospitals… It’s an American project. A big war between the US and Iran is beginning in the Persian Gulf. $5 billion was allocated for the construction of these 20-bed military hospitals,” Javelidze said in an interview with Georgian paper Kviris Kronika (News of the Week) … The construction is mainly paid from the American pocket. In addition, airports are being briskly built in Georgia… (Ibid)

What the military hospitals project conveys is that the Pentagon has already established detailed logistics pertaining to the transfer of wounded US servicemen from the Iran battlefield to nearby military hospitals in Georgia. These advanced preparations suggest that war plans are at a very advanced stage and that scenarios pertaining to military casualties have been established.

Military Alliances: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the CSTO

The countervailing military alliance to the US-NATO-Israel axis  is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as well as the overlapping Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). The SCO includes Kazakhstan, the People’s Republic of China, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Russian Federation, the Republic of Tajikistan and the Republic of Uzbekistan. The SCO includes seven former Soviet republics including Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Iran has observer status in the SCO.

Uzbekistan withdrew from the NATO sponsored GUUAM military cooperation agreement. In 2005, it formally evicted the US from the Karshi-Khanabad air base, known as K2.”¹⁶

Of significance, in the Kyrgyz Republic, the new elected President Almazbek Atambayev (November 2011) stated that he intends to close down the US military base at Manas when the lease expires.¹⁷

What these developments suggest is that the former Soviet republics of Central Asia have reaffirmed their relationship to Moscow, which in turn has led the consolidation of the SCO-CSTO military bloc.





Global US Military Hegemony. Russia and China

The participation of Russia and China on the side of Iran is already de facto in view of prevailing military cooperation agreements. the transfer of weapons systems and technology to Iran, as well as the presence of Russian military advisers, training personnel, in both Iran and Syria.

Russia and China are fully aware that a war on Iran is a stepping stone towards a broader war. Both countries are targeted by the US and NATO. Russia is threatened on its border with the European Union, with US-NATO AMD targeted at major Russian cities. With the exception of its Northern frontier, China is surrounded by US military bases, from the Korean peninsula to the South China Sea.

Both China and Russia are perceived by Washington as a “Global Threat”. China has been the target of veiled threats by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The recent National Defense Review announced by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, envisages an expanded defense budget, with a view to containing Russia and China.

In recent development, Russia newly appointed Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin has warned Washington and Brussels that “Should anything happen to Iran, should Iran get drawn into any political or military hardships, this will be a direct threat to our national security,”

Spiralling US Defense Spending: The Pentagon’s “Big Dog” Ideology

Washington’s objective  is to establish global military dominance. While the “war on terrorism” and the containment of “rogue states” still constitute the official justification and driving force, China and Russia have been tagged in US military and National Security documents as potential enemies: 

… the U.S. military … is seeking to dissuade rising powers, such as China, from challenging U.S. military dominance.¹⁸

Through spiraling defense spending and the continued growth of the US weapons industry, requiring a massive compression of all categories of government expenditure.

Implemented at the crossroads of the most serious economic crisis in American history, the ongoing increase in defense spending feeds this new undeclared arms race with China and Russia, with vast amounts of tax dollars channelled to America’s defense contractors.

The stated objective is to make the process of developing advanced weapons systems “so expensive”, that no other power on earth including China and Russia will able to compete or challenge “the Big Dog”, without jeopardizing its civilian economy. ¹⁹

[A]t the core of this strategy is the belief that the US must maintain such a large lead in crucial [military] technologies that growing powers [ Russia, China, Iran] will conclude that it is too expensive for these countries to even think about trying to run with the big dog. They will realize that it is not worth sacrificing their economic growth, said one defense consultant who was hired to draft sections of the document.¹⁸

TABLE 1 THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN: MILITARY CAPABILITIES

Total Population: 77,891,220 [2011]
Available Manpower: 46,247,556 [2011]
Fit for Military Service: 39,556,497 [2011]
Of Military Age: 1,392,483 [2011]
Active Military: 545,000 [2011]
Active Reserve: 650,000 [2011]

LAND ARMY
Total Land Weapons: 12,393
Tanks: 1,793 [2011]
Armoured Personnel Carrier/Infantry Fighting Vehicles (APC/IFV): 1,560 [2011]
Towed Artillery: 1,575 [2011]
SPGs: 865 [2011]
MLRSs: 200 [2011]
Mortars: 5,000 [2011]
Anti Tank (AT) Weapons: 1,400 [2011]
Anti-Aerial (AA) Weapons: 1,701 [2011]
Logistical Vehicles: 12,000

AIR POWER
Total Aircraft: 1,030 [2011]
Helicopters: 357 [2011]
Serviceable Airports: 319 [2011]

NAVAL POWER
Total Navy Ships: 261
Merchant Marine Strength: 74 [2011]
Major Ports & Terminals: 3 Aircraft Carriers: 0 [2011]
Destroyers: 3 [2011]
Submarines: 19 [2011]
Frigates: 5 [2011]
Patrol Craft: 198 [2011]
Mine Warfare Craft: 7 [2011]
Amphibious Assault Craft: 26 [2011]

SOURCES: Iraniandefence.com and Globalfirepower.com.

1. See fayobserver.com, December 18, 2011.
2. “Coast Guard Reservists Head to Middle East,” military.com, January 5, 2012.
3. DEBKAfile, January 6, 2012.
4. See “The Pentagon to Send US Troops to Israel. Iran is the Unspoken Target,” Global Research, January 4, 2012.
5. Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, “The Geo-Politics of the Strait of Hormuz: Could the U.S. Navy be defeated by Iran in the Persian Gulf?,” Global Research, January 8, 2012.
6. See “How to Start a War: The American Use of War Pretext Incidents,” Global Research, January 9, 2012.
7. See Patrick Buchanan, “Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor?” Global Research, December 7, 2011.
8. John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath, Doubleday, 1982, p. 321.
9. Francis Boyle, January 13, 2011, email communication to author.
10. See The Gulf Military Balance in 2010: An Overview, Center for Strategic and International Studies.
11. See Haaretz, September 28, 2009.
12. See M. K. Badrakumar, “Russia deploying warships in Syria,” Indian Punchline, November 21, 2011.
13. See Michel Chossudovsky, “The Iran War Theater’s “Northern Front”: Azerbaijan and the US Sponsored War on Iran,” Global Research, April 9, 2007.
14. “Azerbaijan: US Military Ties with Baku Are Stagnating – Experts,” EurasiaNet.org, April 25, 2011.
15. “Readies for War On Iran: US Builds Military Hospitals in Georgia,” Global Research, January 10, 2012.
16. U.S. Evicted From Air Base In Uzbekistan,” Washington Post, July 30, 2005.
17. Kyrgyzstan Says United States’ Manas Air Base Will Close, NY Times.com, November, 1, 2011.
18. Greg Jaffe, “Rumsfeld details big military shift in new document,” Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2005.
19. Michel Chossudovsky, “New Undeclared Arms Race,” Global Research, March 17, 2005.

Speaking January 5 alongside his Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the president announced a shift in strategy for the American military, one that emphasizes aerial campaigns and proxy wars as opposed to “long-term nation-building with large military footprints.” This, to some pundits and politicians, is considered a tectonic shift.

Indeed, the way some on the left tell it, the strategy marks a radical departure from the imperial status quo. “Obama just repudiated the past decade of forever war policy,” gushed Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, calling the new strategy a “[s]lap in the face to the generals.”

Conservative hawks, meanwhile, predictably declared that the sky is falling. “This is a lead from behind strategy for a left-behind America,” cried hyperventilating California Republican Buck McKeon, chairman the House Armed Services Committee. “This strategy ensures American decline in exchange for more failed domestic programs.” In McKeon’s world, feeding the war machine is preferable to feeding poor people.

Unfortunately, though, rather than renouncing empire and endless war, Obama’s stated strategy for the military going forward just reaffirms the U.S. commitment to both. Rather than renouncing the last decade of war, it states that the bloody and disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan – gently termed “extended operations” – were pursued “to bring stability to those countries.”

And Leon Panetta assured the American public that even with the changes, the U.S. would still be able to fight two major wars at the same time—and win. And Obama assured America’s military contractors and coffin makers that their lifeline – U.S. taxpayers’ money – would still be funneled their way in obscene bucket loads.

“Over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow,” the president told reporters, “but the fact of the matter is this: It will still grow.” In fact, he added with a touch of pride, it “will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration,” totaling more than $700 billion a year and accounting for about half of the average American’s income tax. So much for the Pentagon’s budget being slashed – like we were promised – the way lawmakers are trying to cut those “failed domestic programs.”

The U.S. could cut its military spending in half tomorrow and still spend more than three times as much as its next nearest rival, China. That’s because China, instead of waging wars of choice around the world, prefers projecting its might by investing in its own country. On the other hand, the U.S. under the leadership of Obama is beefing up its military presence in China’s backyard, more interested in projecting its dwindling power than rebuilding its economy.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower once noted that every dollar going to the military is a dollar that can’t be used to provide food and shelter for those in need. Today’s obscene amount of military spending isn’t necessary if the administration wished to pursue the quaint goal of simply defending the country from invasion. Maintaining “the best-trained, best-equipped military in history,” as Obama says is his goal? That’s a different story – for a different purpose. Indeed, as Madeline Albright observed, possessing that kind of military might is no fun if you don’t get to use it, as Obama has with gusto in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Uganda.

The truth is that the Obama administration’s “new” strategy is more of the same—a reaffirmation of the U.S. government’s commitment to militarism for the all the usual reasons: to promote American hegemony and, by extension, the interests of politically connected capital. And U.S. officials aren’t shy about that.

Indeed, throughout the strategy document the ostensible purpose for having a military — to provide national security — repeatedly takes a backseat to promoting the economic interests of the U.S. elite that profits from empire. Repositioning U.S. forces “toward the Asia-Pacific region,” for instance – including the stationing of American soldiers in that hotbed of violent extremism, Australia – is cast not just as a means of ensuring peace and stability, but guaranteeing “the free flow of commerce.” Maintaining a global empire of bases from Europe to Okinawa isn’t necessary for self-defense, but according to Obama, ensuring – with guns – “the prosperity that flows from an open and free international economic system.”

Of course, that economic considerations shape U.S. foreign policy is nothing new. More than 25 years ago, President Jimmy Carter – that Jimmy Carter – declared in a State of the Union address that U.S. military force would be employed in the Persian Gulf, not for the cause of peace, freedom and apple pie, but to ensure “the free movement of Middle East oil.” And so it goes.

Far from affecting change, Obama is ensuring continuity. “U.S. policy will emphasize Gulf security,” states his new military strategy, in order to “prevent Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon capability and counter its destabilizing policies” — as if it’s Iran that has been destabilizing the region. And as Obama publicly proclaims his support for “political and economic reform” in the Middle East, just like every other U.S. president he not-so-privately backs their oppressors from Bahrain to Yemen and signs off on the biggest weapons deal in history to that bastion of democracy, Saudi Arabia.

Obama can talk all he wants about turning the page on a decade of war and occupation, but so long as he continues to fight wars and military occupy countries on the other side of the globe, talk is all it is. The facts, sadly, are this: since taking office Obama doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan; he fought to extend the U.S. occupation in Iraq – and partially succeeded; he dramatically expanded the use of killer drones from Pakistan to Somalia; and he requested military budgets that would make George W. Bush blush. If you want to see what his military strategy really is, forget what’s said at press conferences and in turgidly written Pentagon press releases. Just look at the record.

“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.

What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of definitions maintains that internationalism is a principle of communism and socialism. It is the belief of ideological leaders such as Lenin, Fidel and Che.

Che wrote in his essay, “Socialism and Man”, that proletarian internationalism isn’t just a duty but a necessity. If revolutionary leaders forget this, Che wrote, the revolution will lose its inspiration and imperialism will benefit.

Che was also known for having severely criticized Soviet Union leadership for having lost its internationalism with the world’s proletariat and the Third World. Following up on Che’s critique, I find it important to criticize communist and socialist parties, and governments led by these parties, which let down people who are oppressed by, or invaded by, national or foreign powers.

Internationalism in action

1. Internationalists must support resistance fighters against invasions. Therefore, one must chastise political parties and groups that give political or moral support to those who call themselves the Iraq Communist Party as it is part of the Quisling government the USA terrorist state set in. ICP leaders live side by side the invaders in the Green Zone. That there are organizations in the United States, UK, Denmark and elsewhere, which call themselves communist or socialist parties and that cooperate with the world’s greatest terrorist state is incomprehensible, shameful, immoral and anti-internationalist.

2. The same applies to people who still support the Zionist state of Israel, which commits genocide against the Palestinian people. Millions of decent people have gotten together to support Palestinians in many ways, including Ships to Gaza. In Denmark, four groups of people have challenged the state’s terrorist laws by donating solidarity aid to the secular leftist PFLP which is part of the Palestinian resistance. Rebellion (Denmark), Fighters and Lovers, Horserød-Stuthoff Association (veterans of WWII resistance fighters imprisoned in Horserød and Stuthoff prisons), and TIB’s club (local carpenters near Copenhagen) have aided both PFLP and FARC, Colombian armed liberation movement.

3. Internationalist can not cooperate with US-NATO aggressive wars, which always have the goal of controlling that country’s economy and politics for capitalist profits. It is shameful that many experienced socialists and communists, as well as naïve progressive people, have backed up West’s big capitalist plans to take over Libya, and thus have bombed Libya back to the stone age. Denmark was one of only six countries that dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Libya, destroying much of it infrastructure, schools, hospitals…In fact, Denmark dropped more bombs on Libya than it has on any other country in its history, Afghanistan included. And the pilots were cowards as there was no resistance by Libya’s air force, already decimated.

This conflict has little to do with the Arab Spring movement. It is a conflict between internal war lords, with ordinary people involved who wished to increase democracy but who were misled by US-NATO whose forces seek to control Libya’s oil and avoid a gold-based currency that Gaddafi was promoting amongst all African countries. Now, US-NATO has placed a lackey government in Tripoli just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. Internationalists must also criticize comrade governments, such as Cuba and ALBA governments in Latin America, when they make big mistakes regarding internationalism. We can’t be true comrades-solidarity activists by keeping our mouths shut when this occurs. Such is the case with their support of the brutal government of Sri Lanka, which practices genocide against the minority Tamil population. Ever since independence from Great Britain, in 1947, the majority Sinhalese governments and chauvinist Buddhist monk system has discriminated against Tamils. They have constantly been treated as second class citizens, their language and religions relegated to secondary status without national recognition. Even pogroms have been employed with the brutal murder of many thousands on various occasions. And since May 2009, following the end of a 26-year civil war, ethnic cleansing in the traditional Tamil homeland in the north and eastern areas is the rule of the day.

Cuba and ALBA have spoken only positively of their historic ties with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to which Sri Lanka is a member, but so are 130 other nations. One cannot, in the name of protecting each nation’s sovereignty, avoid critique when one or more of these nations oppresses or conducts pogroms and genocide against part of the population. Nor can we accept as an excuse the immoral geo-political game that nearly all governments of whatever color play.

We shall also criticize Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments for helping the US and France in their ouster of the only decent and only democratically elected people’s president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These Latin American governments actually assist the US’s 2004 coup d´état against Aristide by placing occupying troops in the small country, seeking to dampen the people’s anger. These progressive governments should, instead, back up the people’s desire to bring their president back to state power, just as they sought to do for President Zelaya in Honduras where national capitalists and generals kicked him out of office, with background support once again by the United States government.

5. On the personal and organizational plain, internationalism operates when workers of a major firm ask people to boycott a product because of the mistreatment of the workers by the firm. This is the case with Coca-Cola whose workers in Colombia asked us to stop buying the “drink of the death squad” (David Rovics song), because it hires mercenaries to murder workers who seek to organize a union and struggle for collective bargaining. Workers in other countries, such as Guatemala, and farmers in India have asked the same.

It is with joy that I can state that here where we gather (carpenters’ hall in Valby, Denmark), this union is one of the few local unions and political or grass roots groups in Denmark that has boycotted Coca-Cola. This is something any and all individuals can do. It is just a soda drink. So drink something else. Boycotting Coca-Cola is just like boycotting all products from Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a simple act of solidarity, of internationalism.

Charlotte and I have just returned from a six week trip in India where two of my books (“Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka” and “Sounds of Venezuela”) were published by New Century Book House, Tamil Nadu. The Tamil book concerns the history and contemporary life of the Tamil people in that island-nation, and the need to act in solidarity with them. The Venezuela short book concerns this people’s efforts to create a better world for themselves and solidarity with all peoples. When people asked us where we are from we often replied that we are “internationalists”. Interestingly, many Indians understood our meaning and were pleased to think in terms of being brothers and sisters in the world.

This concept, and feeling, of brotherly love, of internationalism has taken off in a bigger way, in 2011, than in many decades. It started in Tunisia, and has expanded to the indignados in Spain, to the anti-capitalists in Wall Street and in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the West.

We have much to criticize and yet much to be glad for as 2012 opens. We must remember and appreciate those who set us off on this new anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, non-violent and democratic revolution—from the martyr in Tunisia (street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi) and his Iraqi spiritual brother a bit earlier, shoe-thrower Muntazar al-Zaidi, to Occupy Wall Street protestors to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and co-workers at Wikileaks, who helped spark it all by blowing the whistle on the war criminals. These modern-day Paris Commune resisters without arms—OWS and Occupy the World—are growing and they are presenting a vision and with it a program-in-discussion that must be studied and supported.

Internationalism is an endless struggle, an endless challenge. It does not end even when one or more of our political parties take over the governing reigns. We activists from the streets must always keep our wary eyes pinned on the leaders, regardless of their names, just as our clear eyes cast light upon humanity’s future.

The United States could manage an expression of condolences but balked at apologizing. Meanwhile the US corporate media obfuscated the matter by reporting it as a NATO mistake.¹ If it was a NATO mistake, then why should the US apologize? Is that any way to treat your allies?

The US insisted on an investigation. Why was NATO not insisting on an investigation and carrying it out?

The Pentagon issued the investigation’s report on 22 December; it stated both sides were to blame. One side was cited as US forces (not NATO), and the other side was Pakistani forces. There was no apology.²

Pakistan called the report “short on facts.”

The Pentagon did “express sincere condolences to the Pakistani people, to the Pakistani government and, most importantly, to the families of the Pakistani soldiers who were killed or wounded.”

Liberal Media Take

Democracy Now! (DN) turned to New York Times senior reporter Eric Schmitt for analysis of the US killing of 24 Pakistani troops, and they got imperialist talk. Take, for example, Schmitt’s statement “… despite the important relationship that the U.S. and Pakistan has not only over counterterrorism priorities, but also given that Pakistan is a nuclear state, and there’s a lot of concern if those nuclear weapons or any nuclear material were ever to fall into militant hands.” DN host Amy Goodman let the statement stand unchallenged.

One might naturally surmise, therefore, that Amy Goodman and DN accept the premises of the US’s “war on terror” and that the terrorists are not the US (even though the US is owning up to killings in Pakistan, and, as part of the NATO contingent, to civilian killings in Libya.)³

One might further assume that DN holds that the US has a right to nuclear weapons and the Pakistanis do not because, supposedly, there are either no militants in the US or Pakistan cannot safeguard its nuclear weapons as well as the US. The US, by the way, is a country which has lost — as in never recovered — 11 nuclear weapons.⁴

DN is a puzzling media. It claims, “We don’t take money from corporate advertisers. We rely on donations from our global audience — people like you — to maintain our editorial independence.”

“And with the corporate-owned media for sale to the highest bidder, the need for independent news has never been this urgent,” says DN.

Some criticize DN and see its independence as compromised by being in receipt of Ford and Rockefeller Foundation money.⁵ DN does not acknowledge receipt of foundation money on its donation appeal page.

At best DN can be called liberal media; nonetheless, as with any media (including this one) open-minded skepticism serves media consumers best. DN’s progressivist credentials are questionable considering its open support for the imperialist attack on Libya and its proclivity for eschewing corporate media but turning to corporate media figures as experts. In the present case DN turned to the New York Times, a newspaper that frequent DN guest Noam Chomsky calls a “masochistic exercise” in reading.

The Etiquette of Apology

If I pass by someone in close quarters, and my shoulder nudges that person, I should hope that I would immediately respond with an apology. Little incidents like that can occur in crowded confines or when one is not paying sufficient attention. A simple sorry usually smooths the situation over.

Etiquette is the art of decency; it is an essential part of the social fabric providing a set of rules/guidelines for human-human interaction. Common etiquette requires that when you wrong someone you acknowledge the wrong by apologizing for it

Furthermore, an apology should be forthcoming without prodding because an important element of the apology is sincerity. A genuine apology cannot be coerced. It is quite difficult to coerce hyperempire, and closing a border and a drone base will not cajole an apology.

Reparations would be another important element of an apology. When, through one’s wrongdoing, damage is caused, that damage should be atoned for, in an as meaningfully as possible manner, by financial compensation or other satisfactory (to the aggrieved party) compensatory manner.

Many tributaries, very tricky to navigate, flow from this main current of public avowals and disavowals; not least, must an apology lead to reparation, if it is to be to be at all meaningful? That is, without a subsequent act of reparation or restitution, can it be fully constituted as an apology? Or is the performance of a speech act something that itself makes change?⁶

Eight days had passed before US president Barack Obama called the president of Pakistan to express regret for the killing of 24 Pakistani troops by NATO forces.⁷

In his refusal to apologize, Obama fits into the company of George H.W. Bush who while vice-president said, “I will never apologize for the United States, ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”⁸

1. See Elise Labott, “Pakistan military insists NATO attack was deliberate,” CNN, 16 December 2011.
2. News Release, “Department of Defense Statement Regarding Investigation Results into Pakistan Cross-Border Incident,” U.S. Department of Defense, 22 December 2001.
3. See “U.S. Admits Fault in Fatal Bombing that Killed 24 Pakistani Troops,” Democracy Now!, 22 December 2011. “NATO Forced to Admit Air Strikes Killed Dozens of Libyan Civilians, Contradicting Initial Denials,” Democracy Now!, 22 December 2011.
4. See No. 44, “50 Facts About U.S. Nuclear Weapons,” Brookings. See also Kim Petersen, “Nuclear Tragedy; The Struggle against Colonialism and Imperialism in Kalaallit Nunaat: Part 2,” Dissident Voice, 7 May 2007 for a nuclear explosion that occurred near the US military base in Thule, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) in 1968. It was also denied by the Pentagon.
5. See bob feldman, “Alternative Media Censorship: Sponsored by CIA’s Ford Foundation?” questions, questions…
6. Marina Warner, “Sorry: the present state of apology,” Open Democracy, 7 November 2002.
7. Richard Wolf, “Obama regrets Pakistani troop deaths but doesn’t apologize,” USA Today, 4 December 2011.
8. Quoted in “Perspectives,” Newsweek (15 August 1988): 15.

How could the U.S. behave so recklessly, not realize it was responsible for the atomic arms race and for allowing and even moving others to obtain the bomb? Why does it not consider in its policies the argument that those most likely to use the bomb are more important than those who have the bomb? Answers to both these questions expose an almost purposeful U.S. policy to drive others to obtain the “doomsday explosive” and, if we concede the Islamic Republic is developing a bomb, give meaning to Iran’s determination to develop a nuclear weapon. A simple proposition can deaden that determination, and not only for Iran; the world’s major powers can give any nation that entertains a “first strike” a rethink: do it and get demolished.

The consequence of not facing down to India and Pakistan defines the real arms race; nuclear weapons in the military depots of nations that contain extremist elements who kill mercilessly and, if able to obtain the weapons, would apply them worldwide, including at the United States. Iran’s possibility of obtaining a nuclear capability is conjectural and not as significant as the actual; Pakistan has many bombs and Pakistan is politically stable. The laxity is emphasized by the lack of control on previous actions by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan’s (in)famous nuclear physicist.

In 2004, Dr. Khan indicated he had provided Iran, Libya, and North Korea with designs and centrifuge technology to aid in nuclear weapons programs. Where was the CIA when Khan roamed the world? Pondering about Iran, no doubt, and developing policies that have driven North Korea to develop a nuclear deterrent and motivating Iran to do the same.

Noting U.S. intensive hostility towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), coupled with its extensive military presence in Japan and South Korea, shouldn’t the Pyongyang leaders be apprehensive? Their apprehension inspired them to welcome previous treaties.

In October 1994, President Clinton negotiated the U.S.-North Korea Agreed Framework:

North Korea agreed to freeze its existing plutonium enrichment program and be monitored by the IAEA;
Both sides agreed to replace by 2003 North Korea’s reactors with light water reactors, financed and supplied by the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO);
The United States agreed to provide heavy fuel oil to the DPRK for energy purposes until atomic energy was available;
The two sides agreed to move toward full normalization of political and economic relations;
Both sides agreed to work together for peace and security on a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula; and
Both sides agreed to work together to strengthen the international nuclear non-proliferation regime.

What happened to this anxiety relieving treaty? The charges, countercharges, truths, and distortions are difficult to unravel.

Not debatable is that the George W. Bush administration signaled North Korea with unfriendly intentions. Despite it being the most significant milestone in the treaty, the first reactor, promised for delivery by 2003, was pushed up until 2008 at the earliest. A leaked version of the Bush administration’s January 2002 classified Nuclear Posture Review mentioned North Korea as a country against which the United States should be prepared to use nuclear weapons.

After starts and stops, self-destruction of nuclear facilities and reconstruction of the same facilities, the DPRK proceeded to definitely develop nuclear weapons. Their arguments for this posture had validity. The United States did not meet its most important commitment, President George W. Bush designated North Korea as part of an “axis of evil,” the State Department continually equated not having a peace treaty with Pyongyang violations of human rights, and Washington carelessly inferred that, if hostilities developed, North Korea could expect a nuclear attack. What did the Bush administration expect of the ‘hermit state’ leaders? The U.S. State Department evidently imagined, by being conciliatory, Kim Jong IL would take advantage and secretly develop an atomic bomb. However, by not being conciliatory, it assured the DPRK would be provoked into securing a nuclear weapon.

Except for the United States’ offensive attack against Japan, the nuclear club nations that signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty developed the weapons as deterrents. The Soviet Union needed to neutralize USA power. Great Britain and France requisitioned a nuclear arsenal to defend against the Soviet Union. China had the greatest fear; it was surrounded by a world of enemies.

Of those who have not signed the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons — India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel — all, except Israel had deterrent as an immediate reason. India feared China, Pakistan feared India and North Korea feared the United States. When Israel allegedly started nuclear weapons developments in 1963, none of its antagonists were even thinking nuclear.

The United States claims that Iran must be stopped from obtaining nuclear weapons because Iran’s developments will provoke a Middle East nuclear arms race. However, by allowing Israel to develop the weapons, the U.S. and friends already stimulated the Middle East arms race. It is mainly due to the United States, Great Britain, and France that Israel has nuclear capability. As a consequence, Middle East nations sought means to neutralize the Israel bomb.

Saddam Hussein clearly expressed this dilemma in a speech he made at al-Bakr University, 3 June 1978.

“When the Arabs start the deployment, Israel is going to say, ‘We will hit you with the atomic bomb.’ So should the Arabs stop or not? If they do not have the atom, they will stop. For that reason they should have the atom. If we were to have the atom, we would make the conventional armies fight without using the atom. If the international conditions were not prepared and they said, “We will hit you with the atom,” we would say, “We will hit you with the atom too. The Arab atom will finish you off, but the Israeli atom will not end the Arabs.”¹

France started Israel on the road to nuclear capability with the sale of a nuclear reactor and uranium fuel.

“Franco-Israeli nuclear cooperation is described in detail in the book Les Deux Bombes (1982) by French journalist Pierre Pean, who gained access to the official French files on Dimona. The book revealed that the Dimona’s cooling circuits were built two to three times larger than necessary for the 26-megawatt reactor Dimona [supplied by France] was supposed to be — proof that it had always been intended to make bomb quantities of plutonium. The book also revealed that French technicians had built a plutonium extraction plant at the same site. According to Pean, French nuclear assistance enabled Israel to produce enough plutonium for one bomb even before the 1967 Six Day War. France also gave Israel nuclear weapon design information.”²

Great Britain paved the road for Israel to reach the bomb. When he was UK prime minister, Harold Wilson supplied Israel with plutonium.

“In Harold Macmillan’s time the UK supplied uranium 235 and the heavy water which allowed Israel to start up its nuclear weapons production plant at Dimona — heavy water which British intelligence estimated would allow Israel to make ‘six nuclear weapons a year.’”³

The United States looked the other way.

“After the United States discovered the Dimona reactor in 1960, U.S. nuclear specialists inspected Dimona every year from 1965 through 1969, looking for signs of nuclear weapon production. It is not clear what they found, but in 1968 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reported to President Lyndon Johnson its conclusion that Israel had already made an atomic bomb. In 1969, Israel limited inspection visits by U.S. scientists to such an extent that the Americans complained in writing. Without explanation, the Nixon administration ended the visits the following year.”²

After tacitly agreeing to Israel’s nuclear weapon developments and permitting India and Pakistan to go nuclear, the United States engages Iran in a similar manner to its engagement with North Korea — provoking Iran to develop a bomb in another “lose-lose” situation.

Blind to the effects on Iran’s posture, the U.S. stages its military in adjacent nations to Iran, constantly harangues Iran about its human rights record and its despotic government and accuses Iran of all sorts of terrorist activities. None of the activities are specified nor does the charge consider that Iranians are mysteriously getting assassinated, their facilities are blowing up, their computers are attacked by the Stuxnet virus, and CIA spies are being uncovered and arrested by them and Hezbollah. Who are doing these nefarious activities? Aren’t they terrorists?

Although insurgents in Iraq carry U.S. weapons, the U.S., without proof, accuses Iraq of arming them. In Afghanistan, the U.S. rails against alleged Iranian assistance to the Taliban, although the Taliban is an enemy of Iran and is interfering with a myriad of business deals the Iranians are arranging with the Karzai government, with whom it is friendly. By deeds the U.S. is telling Iran: “If you want to survive, get yourself a deterrent.” The U.S. policies towards Iran, similar to most State Department policies, are counterproductive and push Iran to invest in nuclear weapons.

Shouldn’t the U.S. State Department consider in its policies the argument that those most likely to use the bomb are more important than those who have the bomb? Great Britain has the bomb, but there is no possibility it will use the weapon. There is little probability that even if about to be defeated, the DPRK will use the bomb — against whom, their own brethren? Only Pakistan radical elements and Israel can effectively use the bomb in an offensive manner; the former because they have suicidal tendencies, and the latter because it does not face nuclear retaliation.

Pakistan’s present government won’t use it, but it is entirely possible that anarchy in Pakistan can deliver bombs to radical groups that have no compunction against using the deadly weapon.

If Israel faces defeat, it could use the bomb. In several wars, especially during the December 2008 invasion of Gaza, Israel demonstrated a disregard for enemy life. Even if an engaged nation had a nuclear weapon, and presently none of Israel’s foes have a mass destruction device, Israel’s small size and closeness to Arab peoples give it an advantage in a nuclear war. The possibility of inflicting severe damage to innocent Arab populations hinders a retaliatory action. Israel’s principal reason to have the bomb is for the threat, real or imagined, it poses to any nation that counters its policies, including Iran, who is concerned about the possible loss of Muslim holy places in Jerusalem and is disturbed about Israel’s expansion and oppression of the Palestinian people.

In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israel faced possible defeat, a fear existed that unless the United States assisted Israel with more armaments, Israel might use nuclear weapons against its adversaries. A large U.S. airlift of military aid finalized the battle in favor of Israel. A French official explained the situation.

In 1986, Francis Perrin, high commissioner of the French atomic energy agency from 1951 to 1970, was quoted in the press as saying that France and Israel had worked closely together for two years in the late 1950s to design an atom bomb. Perrin said that the United States had agreed that the French scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project could apply their knowledge at home provided they kept it secret. But then, Perrin said, ‘We considered we could give the secrets to Israel provided they kept it a secret themselves.’ He added: ‘We thought the Israeli bomb was aimed against the Americans, not to launch it against America but to say ‘if you don’t want to help us in a critical situation we will require you to help us, otherwise we will use our nuclear bombs. ‘⁴

The Islamic Republic cannot use nuclear weapons for an offensive purpose. Any attempt to do that and Iran’s enemies will extinguish the Islamic Republic in a flash of the radioactive light. Its bomb can only neutralize other bombs.

Which leads to the only ways to halt nuclear proliferation in the Middle East — either dismantle all existing bombs or neutralize them.

Better yet — signal that a first nuclear strike by any nation will be met by a severe strike on that nation with conventional weapon from the great powers of the United Nations Security Council. Give them an offer they can’t refuse. Not far fetched!

1. Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) Record No. SH-PDWN-D-000-341, “Speech at al-Bakr University,” 3 June 1978
2. Israel’s Nuclear Weapon Capability: An Overview, The Risk Report, Volume 2 Number 4, July-August 1996
3. Secret sale of UK plutonium to Israel, Meirion Jones, BBC Newsnight, 10 March 2006
4. Ibid

Let’s try to clear up this fogged up situation by examining who’s killing whom, and why. The US has been butchering Pashtuns on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistani border, and the Pashtuns are fighting back because that’s their homeland. The Pashtuns have been living between the Hindu Kush and the Indus River since at least the 3rd Century, so one can reasonably say that they belong there, at least much more so than some guy from Intercourse, PA, or Walla Walla, Washington.

Go to most borders worldwide and, surprise, surprise, you’ll find more or less the same people living on both sides, often speaking the same language. This is also true in the US. In 2006, I drove 100 miles on route Farm to Market 170 in Texas, hugging the Rio Grande, and I didn’t see a single Anglo face in three hours. (Granted, there weren’t that many faces to be seen.) At Candelaria, population 75, I crossed a brief foot bridge into Mexico, then returned. Everybody else was doing it. Here, Rio Bravo was barely a trickle, so people on either side saw each other as neighbors, with the border an irrelevant fiction. To a Pashtun, then, the Durand Line, named after a British Foreign Secretary, is even more absurd.

Of course, I’m not advocating the abolishment of international borders, since large and subtle differences between populations require that they organize their societies differently, with demarcations between them, but it is ironic that the United States is chafing at the Pashtuns for crossing an arbitrary line, when America is the world’s most persistent and violent violator of international borders. As in many other cases, the only one who doesn’t belong on the map is you, Uncle Sam! Uncle Sam doesn’t know how to spell or pronounce sovereignty, at least when not talking about Israel. Sovranty. Sofarenty. Sufferenty.

Any Pashtun killed by American bombs or drones is a Pashtun wrongly murdered, be him a “militant,” as the Pentagon consistently charge, or more likely just a farmer or even a child. Imagine drones hovering over your hometown and zapping people at will, with the murdered victims being branded “insurgents.” If a Pashtun fights back, it’s because he has too. Wouldn’t you? If he dies fighting, at least he dies with honor, fighting for a just cause. The same cannot be said for American soldiers in Afghanistan. Pat Tillman realized this, but one of his own wasted him before he could tell the world about his awakening.

As a client state of America, Pakistan is being asked to kill its own citizens, Pashtuns and others, as a contribution to the petroleum fueled, natural gaseous, opium hazy and totally fogged up War on Terror. Doing Washington’s bidding, Pakistan has lost nearly 4,000 soldiers, but these needless deaths aren’t enough to appease the Washington masters of war. For brownnosing, Pakistan gets no pat on the head, but is being demonized as an “ally from hell,” to quote from the Atlantic.

With the notable exceptions of Israel and England, American allies are often betrayed. Pakistan’s being blamed for America’s ongoing troubles in Afghanistan, and for harboring Bin Laden until that much ballyhooed yet substanceless assassination, but all of the acrimonies and needless deaths could have been avoided had America never planted its XXXL rump on that corner of the world.

Using Bin Laden as a pretext, America invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and a decade later, it is still there, though its bogeyman is long gone. America never runs out of enemies, however, for it can always generate them anew, with either its bombs and guns, or through its jingoistic media. Along with Iran and Syria, Pakistan, supposedly an ally, has become a target.

Washington will always find new wars to fight and more people to kill, since that is the only task it is good at anymore. It does not know how to do anything else. Peace is not in its vocabulary, since war is how Washington and Wall Street make their money.

The White House and the military bloc are gambling that the lengthy investigation into the attack that killed 25 Pakistani troops will defuse popular Pakistani anger and that the final report will allow the Obama administration to return to a more aggressive policy toward Pakistan in 2012.

But the course Obama has chosen is likely to further aggravate the anti-U.S. sentiment [anti-U.S. policy -- Ed.] in Pakistan that has boiled over in response to the violation of Pakistani sovereignty and unprecedented number of deaths of Pakistani troops. U.S. diplomats in Pakistan and State Department officials are seriously concerned that the rejection of any acknowledgement of U.S. responsibility for nearly three weeks will push Pakistan further toward a potentially irreversible break in relations with the United States.

Pakistan has vowed to close “permanently” the U.S.-NATO logistics routes through which more than half of the supplies needed for the war in Afghanistan must pass. Despite the development of an alternative set of routes through Central Asian republics, that closure will seriously constrain the U.S. ability to wage war in Afghanistan within four to six weeks, according to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who usually reflects the latest thinking of Pentagon and CIA officials.

Although Washington hopes that decision will be reversed in the coming weeks, some U.S. officials warn that the closure could harden under popular political pressure.

Serious concern about rapidly rising anti-U.S. sentiment forcing the hand of the Pakistani government led the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, to urge the White House to move quickly to assuage Pakistani anger, according to the New York Times and the CNN security blog “Security Clearance”.

Munter reportedly told a group of White House officials that if the United States has evidence that Pakistani troops had actually fired at U.S. troops first, it should provide it to Pakistan, but that if it has evidence that U.S. forces were at fault, the White House should issue a formal apology in order to prevent far more serious deterioration of relations.

Defence Department officials argued, however, that no statement on the attack should be issued by the White House until the formal investigation is completed, and that the expression of condolences by the White House press secretary and cabinet officials was sufficient until then, according to a report in the New York Times first published November 30.

The investigation launched by CENTCOM commander Gen. James N. Mattis is to be completed and a report submitted by December 23, but the letter from Mattis states that the officer in charge may request additional time to complete it.

At the daily State Department briefing by spokesman Mark Toner Friday, a reporter referred to “concern expressed by U.S. officials in this building…that the window is rapidly closing for the United States to come up with some kind of explanation for the Pakistanis.”

The Defence Department argument that the United States can keep the Pakistani government and population waiting for more than three weeks for the results of the investigation is based in part on the longstanding assumption that the Pakistani military will be forced to accommodate U.S. interests, because of its dependence on U.S. assistance.

Decades of patron-client relations between the Pakistani military and their U.S. military and CIA counterparts have created a widespread belief in the military and CIA that Pakistan is too dependent on the United States for assistance to cut loose completely from U.S. policy.

A December 1 column by the Washington Post’s Ignatius shows that the notion of Pakistan as client state remains intact among Pentagon officials.

Ignatius suggested that the Pakistani military will soon have to wake up from its gestures of opposition to U.S. policy – especially the cutoff of NATO supplies for Afghanistan.

“Continued Pakistani reprisals make sense only (if) Islamabad is heading toward a real and lasting break with Washington,” he wrote, adding, “I don’t get the sense that’s what Pakistan’s leaders really want.”

So the Pakistanis “will need to figure out how to climb down the hill,” he wrote, “now that they have forcefully planted the flag.”

The justification for the military and DOD officials to oppose the admission of responsibility for those deaths and to express regret for it is not based on a conviction that U.S. troops were innocent in the November 26 attack. The November 30 New York Times report said DOD officials “did not deny some American culpability in the episode….”

That private admission suggests that the real reason for rejecting an apology is that it would shift the focus of media attention away from the Pakistani policy of allowing insurgents to have safe havens in Pakistan from which to carry out operations in Afghanistan.

U.S. military and Defence Department officials desperately need to make the case that Pakistani complicity in Taliban insurgent attacks across the border in Afghanistan is the primary obstacle to the success of the 10-year U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan.

That interest can only be served if the investigation ordered by CENTCOM concludes that there is no reason for the United States to apologise, because of the threat to U.S. troops from insurgents who have been protected by the Pakistani army.

The investigation would have to give credibility to the claim by the U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) unit and its Afghan counterpart that they pursued the insurgents who attacked them across the border to a location close to, if not inside, an encampment that turned out to be a Pakistani border post.

A series of news media stories in the days after the incident reported just such accounts from members of the SOF commando unit, but the Pakistani army command provided details that refuted it. The U.S. military has denied that the attack on the border posts was deliberate, but it has also acknowledged privately to the New York Times that U.S. troops were culpable in the deaths of the Pakistani troops.

The U.S. military investigation is supposed to be open to Pakistani participation, though not as an equal partner. But Pentagon spokesman George Little confirmed Friday that Pakistan has elected not to participate in it.

Maj. Gen. Ashfaq Nadeem, the Pakistani Army’s director general of military operations, has pointed to earlier “joint investigations” of U.S. violations of Pakistani sovereignty as having “come to naught”. He referred to “joint investigations” with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) into the three U.S.-NATO attacks on Pakistani troops on June 10, 2008, December 30, 2010 and July 17, 2011.

The reports generated by those inquiries “give a version not based on facts as we know them”, Nadeem said.

The appointment of Brig. Gen. Stephen Clark to carry out the investigation of the attack on the Pakistani border posts raises yet another issue: whether the investigation will hold the SOF unit involved and the helicopter pilots attached to it fully accountable.

Clark has spent virtually his entire military career in the Air Force Special Operations Command.

The helicopter pilots who made crucial decisions during the assault on the border posts were almost certainly affiliated with the Air Force Special Operations Command.

Even more than other branches of the military, Special Operations Forces officers are known for protecting other SOF personnel against any legal challenge. When he was commander of ISAF in 2010, SOF veteran Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal used two separate investigations to deflect charges that an SOF unit had covered up the killings of two pregnant women in a February 2010 night raid gone bad.

The decision to attack by helicopter gunships, which killed 24 Pakistani troops and stoked a new level of anti-U.S. sentiment feeling in the country, has caught the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in a rare defence posture, because senior officials don’t know what happened and why.

The unwillingness of ISAF, now commanded by Gen. John Allen, to comment on the episode and the swift call for a full investigation clearly reflect doubts on the part of the chain of command as to the veracity of the account given by the unnamed commander of the U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) unit who ordered the operation across the border in Pakistan.

That non-committal posture is strikingly similar to the standard ISAF response to charges by Afghan government officials of the killing of civilians by ISAF forces, whether in air strikes or in SOF night raids.

Accounts of the sequence of events leading to the attack leaked to the news media since Saturday by unnamed officials on behalf of the SOF unit in question have portrayed it in stark terms as a provocation by the Pakistani military.

The account of the attack given to Reuters the day after said a combined NATO-Afghan force seeking Taliban commanders in Kunar province near the Pakistani border came under fire “from across the border”, after which NATO aircraft had attacked the Pakistani army post.

The story was attributed to both an unnamed “Western official” and a “senior Afghan security official”, suggesting the two had briefed Reuters together. The Afghan official claimed that the combined force had been fired on from Pakistan while descending from their helicopters, and that the helicopters had then “returned fire”.

That account seemed to suggest that the same helicopters that had delivered the combined force to its target in Afghanistan had then crossed the border in pursuit of the insurgents.

The insistence that the attack had come from across the border parallels the rationale for a previous attack by helicopter gunships inside Pakistan on September 29, 2010. That attack had begun in pursuit of insurgents who were said to have attacked an Afghan army base in Khost province from across the border and killed two Pakistani soldiers after taking ground fire.

Although the normal practice in any cross-border pursuit of insurgents by U.S. forces is to inform the Pakistani military, last year’s incursion avoided such coordination based on an alleged “imminent danger to troops”. It appears that U.S. and Afghan officials were constructing a similar rationale for a surprise attack inside Pakistan in this case.

In subsequent accounts of the Saturday attack from both U.S. and Afghan officials, however, the initial claim that the forces were attacked from across the border was dropped. Associated Press, which said it had been given “details of raid”, reported Monday that the insurgent attack took place inside Afghanistan.

The revised account given to Associated Press portrayed the helicopters as having followed the insurgents in the direction of the Pakistani border outposts and spotting what they believed were insurgent encampments.

Afghan officials were continuing to insist that the insurgents were being sheltered inside the Pakistani posts. A Washington Post story Tuesday quoted a “senior Afghan police official” as saying that, after an initial gun battle, the insurgents retreated Into a Pakistani post and began firing from there.” The insurgents were “firing at the commandos,” the Afghan official was quoted as saying, “and they continued firing so the air support had to come to their defense.”

The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that “several officials” said it was “unclear whether the fire came from insurgents sheltering near the Pakistani posts or from the posts themselves.”

The shifting accounts, the ambiguity about whether the helicopter was unaware that the posts belonged to the Pakistan military, and whether insurgents were actually in the posts or not all clearly bothered the ISAF command and officials in Washington.

Meanwhile, the claim that the helicopter was firing on the posts in the mistaken belief that they were insurgent camps has been refuted in detail by the Pakistani military. Maj. Gen. Ashfaq Nadeem, the director general of military operations, who was directly involved in dealing with the attack Saturday morning, said it was “impossible that they did not know these to be our posts”, according to the Pakistani daily The News.

Nadeem and military spokesman Gen. Athar Abbas both pointed out the posts were located on the tops or ridges more than 300 metres from the Afghan border and that they were permanent structures, which would not have been occupied by insurgents. Furthemore, Nadeem said, NATO had been given the map coordinates of those posts, called “Volcano” and “Boulder”.

The head of Pakistani military operations also provided a detailed account of the events indicating that the U.S. military was aware of the fact that Pakistani posts were being attacked from the beginning.

Just minutes before “Volcano” was first attacked, he recalled, a U.S. sergeant from the “Tactical Operations Center” in Afghanistan called a Pakistani major on duty in Peshawar and told him U.S. Special Forces had taken indirect fire in an area called Gora Pahari about nine miles from the army posts.

A few minutes later, the U.S. sergeant called back and told the major, “Your Volcano post has been hit,” Nadeem said.

Nadeem said the Pakistani army informed NATO that their posts were being attacked by ISAF forces, but the attack continued for 51 minutes, then breaking off for 15 minutes, and resuming for about an hour.

U.S. officials in Washington, meanwhile, still had no clear interpretation of Saturday’s events three days later. When asked by a former U.S. official Tuesday whether the U.S. military now understood any better what had happened, an officer following the issue at the Pentagon replied, “We do not.”

Senior officers in ISAF have long lobbied for a more aggressive approach to the problem of insurgent safe havens in Pakistan, arguing that without such a change, success in Afghanistan will be impossible.

But the cross-border attack on Pakistani border posts has had exactly the opposite effect. It has united Pakistanis, both military and civilian, behind a much more nationalistic policy toward the U.S. military role in both Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

It has provoked the Pakistani government to threaten to stop NATO supplies from crossing into Afghanistan permanently, order the United States to vacate its drone base at Shamsi within 15 days, and boycott the upcoming international conference on Afghanistan in protest.

Pakistan’s minister of information, Dr. Firdous Aashik Awan, described the decision to boycott the Berlin conference as marking “a turning point in Pakistan’s foreign policy” that was supported by all parties represented in the cabinet.

A cabinet meeting held in Lahore Tuesday even discussed the expected U.S. cutoff of assistance to Pakistan and called for a detailed assessment of how that cutoff would affect different sectors.

As a show of anger, Pakistan ordered the CIA to vacate drone operations at Shamsi Air Base in southwestern Baluchistan and closed both the Khyber and Baluchistan supply routes into Afghanistan, cutting off 70 per cent of NATO’s supplies. It was the worst such incident since 9/11.

This is not the first time NATO helicopters attacked Pakistani soldiers or that Pakistan closed the Khyber Pass. A US airstrike in 2008 killed 11 soldiers and last year two, prompting Pakistan to shut the Khyber Pass for 10 days in protest against the almost daily, illegal and unsanctioned US air strikes that, since 2004, have killed 2,780 people, 83 per cent civilians, among them 72 soldiers.

However, this time the rhetoric is full blast. Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani announced Pakistan would boycott the crucial Bonn II conference on Afghanistan this week, fatally undermining it. Army Chief General Ashfaq Kayani call the attack a “blatant and unacceptable act”, and Interior Minister Rehman Malik insisted on Sunday that the “NATO supply line had not been suspended but permanently stopped.”

That is highly unlikely, but this could be the trigger for a political earthquake against a despised national government. MP Ahmed Khan Bahadur from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial Awami National Party told CNN, “This is the time to be united as a nation and to punch NATO with a fist. NATO could never dare if we were united.” Politically ambitious media star Imran Khan, who heads the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Party, said it was time for Pakistan to pull out of the US-led “war on terror”. Hundreds of thousands have rallied in Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi to protest government corruption and the alliance with the US.

To even begin to explain the mad “logic” of US world military strategy which resulted in this “blatant and unacceptable act”, we must look at the other recent NATO undertakings in the Middle East; namely, the invasion of Libya, the approaching invasion of Syria and the ongoing attempts to subvert Iran. The US-Israeli strategy of carving up the current regimes in order to leave Israel as the undisputed regional hegemon is well known. The plan is for the latest version of the Middle East to be unapologetically sectarian, based on conservative Islam and Judaism. No room for any real democracy, which could lead to socialism, or worse, nationalism, and the inevitable jihad against Israel.

The Muslim world could easily bury the Zionist state if the spark to light it were to spontaneously appear. So, just as forest rangers light strategic fires to clear brush and prevent uncontrolled fires from erupting, the US must light fires around Israel which burn themselves out. The tribes and conservative Islamists in Libya, and the Christians, Alawis and Sunnis in Syria will soon be tearing each other up, “part of the Turkish sphere of influence, aligned with NATO and non-hostile to Israel. In other words, another Pakistan,” quips analyst Come Carpentier.

The Arab Spring is the logical conclusion of the carving up of the Middle East following WWI and II, creating regimes which from the start were subservient, or, in the case of, say, Egypt under Nasser, brought into line after a brief rebellion. As for Pakistan, from the start, it too was very much an imperial-controlled forest fire. Britain’s most pressing problem following WWII was trying to control the march to independence in India, to prevent it from aligning with the Soviet Union. Sectarian India and Pakistan were created thanks to British intrigue, and the latter has been a faithful ally of empire ever since.

The 1947 founding of this unapologetically sectarian Muslim nation (just months before the founding of the sectarian Jewish nation of Israel) set the pattern that has unfolded in the region ever since: divide and rule, igniting civil wars where necessary to prevent any of these geopolitically vital nations exiting the US orbit or from threatening Israel. That millions died in the creation of these states, and in the neocon jihad against Communism from 1979 on, is not of the least importance. After all, few casualties are white Americans, and they are useful Heroes who protected Americans from Reds and Towelheads.

Thus, the cool reaction by the US to the Pakistani fury, which just barely hides the implicit racism of imperial fiat. That Pakistan is a failed state, its elite totally dependent on US handouts, means that the occasional closing of the Khyber Pass or even the attack on the US embassy in Kabul by a certain Pakistan-based (Haqqani) resistance group can be tolerated. US officials sometimes chide their Pakistani colleagues with “playing a double game”, a warning not to push the boundaries too far, but the planners on all sides know that all the players are playing at least several roles in the geopolitical play-off now underway, the winner being the one who sees that extra move ahead and is able to plan for it.

In a sense, the game has become incredibly complex, with supposed allies of empire — from Mubarak and Gaddafi to mujahideen and, increasingly, Pakistan soldiers — moving from ally to enemy in the twinkling of an eye. The Arab Spring is even now being subtlely and not-so-subtlely manipulated from Washington, with daily briefings and financial aid to Egypt’s ruling generals (“more democracy but not if it harms Israel”), daily bombings for others (Libya, Syria, Iran, Pakistan), or a blind eye to cruel autocracies which are able to crush their opposition and continue to faithfully serve the cause (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain). This apparent complexity and chaos is not complex or chaotic at all, but the realisation of contingent strategies in pursuit of clear goals. Egyptian analyst Mohamed Heikal calls it the new “Sykes-Picot agreement”.

The goals and rules of the game are, in fact, age-old. In the first place, the US dollar and profit, followed by military might and its transformation into political soft power, used to buttress the dollar and ensure the flow of profit from the colonial (now neocolonial) periphery to the imperial centre.

So the huffing and puffing of even generals in the periphery can be tolerated, since they must inevitably bite the imperial bullet so it doesn’t explode in their faces. Similarly, the tens of thousands of deaths resulting from “collateral damage” or the inevitable uprisings against the vicious reality of neocolonialism, now dubbed the Arab Spring.

Also very simple for the sports fan to understand is how the game will end. History shows conclusively that empires inevitably fall, the victims of overreach. Just as the US lost in Vietnam, leaving it bloodied and destroyed, so it will lose in Afghanistan and will eventually leave Pakistan, both devastated, but in the long run, beholden to empire. The Vietnamese communists supposedly triumphed — a rare win against empire — but three short decades later are now allying unashamedly with the empire against holdout China. The logic in AfPak is presumably to pack up and leave AfPak a series of sectarian, feuding entities (states?), whose new elites similarly will be reaching out to the empire in the face of holdout Iran.

But these holdouts — China the heir to the communist foe of yesteryear, Iran the Muslim heir to the anti-communists of yesteryear — are now key players in the game, the only ones who play to beat the imperialists, not just to a draw or stalemate. As the prospect of losing the game in Iraq and Afghanistan looms, Iran gains greater regional importance, without having to do much except survive the intense efforts by the empire to subvert it. From a distance, China similarly must only be patient, continuing to expand its economic might. Both these countries, unlike AfPak, Libya, Iraq and Syria, are much more united around a strong sense of historic destiny and national self-awareness — in the end, impossible for the empire to successfully subvert.

America’s increasingly unwilling Pakistan ally is increasingly turning to both. In the wake of the collapse of US-Pakistani relations, Pakistan confirmed its gas pipeline project with Iran would be online by 2013, flouting US pressures to nix the deal and instead wait for the trans-Afghanistan pipe dream (excuse me, pipeline). Iran need not drop bombs or invade its neighbours (it ended any imperial pretensions in the 17th century), but like China, seduce them economically. The pipeline will also export gas to Turkey, Armenia and even Iraq. Iran has excellent relations with nearby India, Russia and, of course, China. But, of course, Pakistan’s main lifeline is still the US.

Whether the Western intervention in Libya and Syria will turn them into willing (if conservative Islamic) allies of imperialism a la Saudi Arabia, Morocco or, yes, Pakistan, is yet to be seen. But this is the game plan, and the seemingly bizarre friendly fire on its lapdog ally, as happened last week, is from Washington’s point of view merely a blip in the old-fashioned regional radar it inherited from Britain. Unless, of course, Pakistan has its 25 January moment.

In response to major military and political losses as well as new opportunity, the White House is fashioning a new doctrine of imperial conquest based on intensified aerial warfare, greater extra-territorial intervention, and, when circumstances allow, alliances with collaborators.  This includes the arming and financial backing of retrograde despotic regimes in the Gulf city-states, fundamentalists, opportunist defectors, mercenaries , academic exiles gangsters and other rabble willing to serve the empire for a price.

Whether these ‘changes’ add up to a new post-colonial “Obama doctrine” or simply reflects a series of improvisations resulting from past losses (“making a virtue of necessity” remains to be seen.

We will proceed by outlining the strategic failures which set the context for the “rethinking” of the Bush-Obama policies in mid-2011. We will then point out the ‘reality principle’ – the deep crises and rising pressures – which forced the Obama regime to modify its methods of imperial warfare.  Obama’s changes are designed to retain levers of power under conditions of limited resources and with dubious allies.  The third section will describe these changes as they have occurred; emphasizing their reactive nature – improvised – as unfavorable circumstances evolve and favorable opportunities arose.

The final section will critically evaluate Obama’s new imperial policies, their impact on targeted countries and peoples as well as the consequences for the US.

The Bush-Obama Continuum 2009-2011

Obama took his lead from the Bush administration and ran with it.  He expanded war budgets to over $750 billion; increased ground troops by 30,000 in Afghanistan; expanded expenditures on base building and mercenary troop recruitment in Iraq; multiplied US air and ground incursions in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya.  As a result the budget deficit reached $1.6 trillion; the trade deficit reached unsustainable levels and the recession deepened.  Public support for Obama and the Democrats plummeted. Parallel to Obama’s skyrocketing external imperial expenditures, he spent hundreds of billions of dollars in dozens of internal security agencies further depleting the treasury.  Greater debts abroad and deficits at home were accompanied by the trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street while 10 million homes were foreclosed and  unemployment reached double digits.

Obama retained and expanded the Bush era wars, bailouts, millionaire tax exemptions and proposed draconian cuts in social security, federal funded medical programs and education.  Despite massive military commitments, Obama could not secure a single major military victory.  By the beginning of the third year of his regime, it was abundantly clear that amidst the wreckage of the domestic economy and the demise of key overseas collaborator regimes, the US Empire was under siege.

The Reality Principle

The reality of massive expenditures in losing wars and faltering support at home and abroad, finally penetrated even the most dogmatic and intransigent militarist ideologues in the Obama regime.  Nationalist Islamists were a “shadow” government throughout Afghanistan, inflicting increasing casualties on US-NATO forces even in the capital, Kabul.  In Iraq even the puppet regime rejected a minimum US military presence, as warring factions sharpened their knives, preparing for a post-colonial showdown between willing colonial collaborators, resistance fighters, sects, tribes, death squads, ethnic separatists and mercenaries.  Despite US military threats and Zionist designed economic sanctions, Iran gained influence throughout the region, eroding US influence in Iraq, Syria, western Afghanistan, the Gulf, Lebanon and Palestine (especially Gaza).

The fall of major US client regimes in Egypt and Tunisia (Mubarak and Ali), and mass uprisings threatening other puppets in Yemen, Somalia, Bahrain finally forced the Obama regime to acknowledge that the Israeli ‘model’ of war, occupation and colonial rule via puppet regimes was not viable.  The reality principle finally penetrated even the densest fog surrounding imperial advisers and strategists:  the US empire was in retreat, Obama-Clinton were not custodians of an expanding empire, but the masters of imperial defeats. The  empire-building project of the post-Cold War period, premised on unilateral action and military supremacy launched by Bush senior, continued by Clinton, expanded by Bush junior and multiplied by Obama was a total and unmitigated failure by any imperial standards.

Prolonged losing wars were accompanied by a vast wave of pro-democracy uprisings dumping prized imperial clients. As colonial wars depleted the imperial treasury, impoverished citizens and undermined the “will to sacrifice” for the chimera of Global Greatness.  The national mood was deeply disturbed by the cost of empire but also by the loss of global markets to new Asian competitors in China, India and elsewhere.  Nowhere was the decline of the US more evident than in Latin America where new nationalist reform and developmental regimes, secured divergent policies on key foreign policy issues, generated high growth, collaborated with new trading partners, decisively rejected several US backed coups and repudiated Geithner’s recycled free market dogma. There was nowhere in the world where the Obama regime could claim military victory, economic success or greater political influence.

As the reality of the deficits, losses and discontent entered the consciousness of key policymakers, a new imperial policy agenda took shape, not fully elaborated but improvised as circumstances dictated.

The Making of the “Obama Doctrine”

The first and foremost “recognition of reality” among the Obamites was that in a world of sovereign states, colonial land wars based on territorial armies of occupation were not viable.  They led to prolonged resistance, extended budget over-runs, continuing casualties and were definitely not “self-financing” as the Zionist geniuses in the Pentagon once claimed.  New forms of imperial warfare were needed to sustain the empire and destroy adversaries.

The hard choice facing the Obama regime with regard to Iraq was whether to admit defeat and retreat (in the sense that the US can not retain a colonial presence and will leave behind an unreliable military and political configuration expanding tieswith Iran and hostile to Israel), or to claim “victory´ in the sense of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and weakening Iraq’s role in the Middle East.  The retreat and defeat reality is now rationalized as a “repositioning” of 20,000 troops in the tiny city states run by despotic Gulf monarchies and the posting of war vessels in the Persian Gulf.  Obama-Clinton claim the troops, warships and aircraft carriers would re-enter Iraq if the current regime falls and a new nationalist movement comes to power.  This is a doubtful proposition – as any “re-entry” would return the US to a prolonged, costly war.  The main purpose of the repositioning is to protect the Gulf client dictatorships from their internal pro-democracy movements and to launch a joint US-Israeli air and sea attack on Iran.  In other words, troop retrenchment (as an occupying colonial power) is replaced by a build-up and concentration of air and sea power for attack and destruction of military and economic bases of the Iranian state.

The US retreat is a product of defeat; a departure under duress.  The relocation of troops to petrol-despot mini-states is a downsizing of the US presence and a move to prop-up highly vulnerable corrupt clan-based despots.  The shift from Iraq to the Gulf states is a move to small, safe, sanctuaries from a highly volatile conflictual major state, with a history of resistance and independence.  Since the US can no longer afford an unending large troop presence and cannot secure a ‘residual force’ its retreat to the Gulf states is making a virtue of necessity, a fall-back position to retain a launch pad for the next aerial war.

The Libyan war marks the key imperial formula for retaining Obama’s imperial pretensions.  The pretext for the war was just as phony as the cause bellicose in Iraq: in place of weapons of mass destruction, in Libya charges of genocide and rape were fabricated.   A UN resolution claiming the right to militarily intervene to “protect civilians” was cooked up, and NATO launched an 8 month war based on nearly 30,000 air attacks, to overthrow the established government and destroy the economy.  Obama’s Libyan policy was based on air and naval bombardment and Special Forces advisers; the use of a mercenary army and client ex-pats as the ‘new leaders’; a multi-lateral coalition of European empire builders (NATO) and Gulf state petrol-oligarchs.  In contrast to Iraq and Afghanistan sustained massive air attacks took the place of a large invasion army.  Already Obama’s military strategists have embraced and promulgated the Libyan experience as a new “Obama doctrine” for successfully rolling back independent Arab regimes and movements.  Despite massive propaganda efforts to puff up the role of the mercenary ‘rebels’, the fact is that Gaddafi loyalists were only defeated by the combined air power of the NATO military command.

Obama-Clinton’s celebration of the Libyan victory is premature:  the means to victory involved the thorough destruction of the economy, from ports to irrigation systems, to roads and hospitals; the disarticulation of the labor force, with the forced flight of hundreds of thousands of sub-Sahara African workers and North African professionals.  In other words, it was a “pyrrhic victory”. Washington defeated an adversary it has not won a viable state.

Even more serious, Washington’s client mercenary ground forces include an amalgam of fundamentalist, tribal, gangster, opportunist clan and neo-liberal operators who have few interests in common. And all are armed and ready to carve up competing fiefdoms.  The parallel is with Afghanistan where the US armed and financed drug traffickers, clan chiefs, war lords and fundamentalists to fight the secular pro-Soviet regime.  Subsequent to destroying the regime, the same forces turned against the US and proceeded to spread a kind of pan-Islamic mobilization against pro-US client states and the US military presence throughout South-Central Asia, the Gulf states, the Middle East and North Africa.

Obama’s Libyan formula of using disparate mercenaries to achieve short term military success has boomeranged. Islamic fundamentalist militias and contrabandists are sending tons of ground to air missiles, machine guns and automatic rifles seized from Gaddafi’s arms depots to Egypt, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and all points east, west, south and north.

In a word, the volatile social and military conflicts among the collaborator “rulers” in Libya has all the markings of a failed regime. Neither NATO bases nor oil companies can pretend to establish firm bases of operation and exploitation.

The resort to missile warfare, especially the drone attacks on insurgents challenging US client regimes which figure so prominently in the “Obama doctrine” have succeeded in killing a few local commanders, but at a cost of alienating entire clans, villagers, townspeople and the general public in targeted countries.  Drones’ missiles are killing hundreds of civilians, causing relatives and ethnic kinspeople to join resistance groups. Up to the present, after three years of intensified “missile air warfare” the Obama regime has not secured a single major triumph over any of the targeted insurgencies.  The data available demonstrates the opposite.  In Pakistan not only has the entire northwest tribal areas embraced the Islamic resistance but the vast majority of Pakistanis (80%) resent US drone violations of national sovereignty, forcing even otherwise docile officials to call into question their military ties with Washington.  In Somalia and Yemen, drone and Special Forces’ operations have had no impact in weakening the mass opposition to incumbent client regimes.  Obama’s long distance, high tech warfare has been an ineffective substitute for failed large scale land wars.

The third dimension of the Obama doctrine, the heavy reliance on “third party” military intervention and/or multi-lateral armed interventions, was not successful in Afghanistan and Iraq and was of limited effectiveness in Libya.  The  European multi-lateral forces retired early on in Iraq, unwilling to continue to spend on a war with no end and with virtual no support on the home front.  The same process of short-term low level military multi-lateralism took place in Afghanistan. Most NATO soldiers will be out before the US withdraws.  The Libyan experience with “multi-lateral” air force collaboration in defeating Libya’s armed forces destroyed the country, undermining any post-war reconstruction for decades.  Moreover, “aerial multi-lateralism” followed the formula of “easy entry and fast exit” – leaving the mercenary predators in control on the ground with a documented record of excelling in rape, pillage, torture and summary executions.  Only a brainless and morally depraved Hilary Clinton could sing the praises and dance a jig celebrating the victory of a knife wielding sodomist, torturing a captured President as “a victory for democracy”.

The fourth dimension of the “Obama doctrine” the use of foreign mercenary armies has been tried and failed in a number of cases where incumbent client rulers are under siege from resistance forces.  The US financed the Ethiopian dictatorship’s armed invasion of Somalia to prop up a corrupt, isolated regime holed up in the capital.  After a prolonged futile effort to reverse the tide, the Ethiopian mercenary forces  performed no better. They were followed by the entry of the US-backed Kenyan armed forces which has only led to massacres and starvation of hundreds of thousands of Somalian refugees in Northern Kenya and Southern Somalia and deadly ambushes by the Islamic national resistance. These third party mercenary invasions have totally failed to secure the puppet regime; in fact, they have aroused greater nationalist opposition.

US backed “Third Party” mercenary armed interventions in Bahrain, where Saudi Arabian military forces put down a majoritarian uprising, has temporarily propped up the despotic monarchy but without dealing with the underlying demands of the pro-democracy mass movements.

The fifth dimension of the Obama doctrine is to use highly trained heavily armed “Special Forces” (SF) contingents of 500 more to assassinate insurgent leaders, to terrorize their rural supporters and to “give backbone” to the local military officials.  Obama’s dispatch of a brigade of SF to Uganda is a case in point.  Up to now there is no reports of any decisive victories, even in this tiny country.  The prospects for future use of this imperial tactic is probably limited to locales of limited geo-political and economic significance with weak resistance movements, and only as a “complement” to local standing armies.

The final and probably most important element in the Obama doctrine is the promotion of civil-military mass uprisings and the reshuffle of elite figures to ‘co-opt’ popular pro-democracy movements in order  to derail them from ending their countries’ client relationship to Washington.

Washington and the EU have incited and armed sectarian regional mass and armed movements aimed at overthrowing the authoritarian nationalist Assad regime in Syria.  Playing off of legitimate democratic demands and harnessing fundamentalist hostility to a secular state, the US and EU, with the collaboration of Turkey and the Gulf states, have engaged in a triple policy of external sanctions, mass uprisings and armed resistance against the secular civilian majority and nationalist armed forces backing Basher Assad.  Obama policy relies heavily on mass media propaganda and the exploitation of regional grievances to gain leverage for an eventual “regime change”.

Parallel to the “outsider” political strategy in Syria, the Obama doctrine has adopted an insider strategy in Egypt and Tunisia. Faced with a nationalist-pro-democracy-pro-workers social upheavals in Egypt, Washington financed and backed a military takeover and rule by an autocratic military junta which follows the basic foreign and domestic policies sustaining the economic structures under the Mubarak dictatorship.  While cynically evoking the “spirit” of the Arab spring, Obama and Clinton, have backed the military tribunals which prosecute, torture and jail thousands of pro-democracy activists.  A similar process of “internal subversion” financed by the EU has put in place a coalition of “Islamic free marketers” and pro-NATO politicos who have more in common with the White House then they have with the original pro-democracy mass movements.

In the immediate period the Obama doctrines’ use of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ civilian-military subversion has succeeded in derailing the promising anti-imperial movements that erupted in the early months of 2011.  However, the great gulf that has opened between the recycled new client rulers and the pro-democracy movements has already led to calls for a ‘second round’ of uprisings to oust the opportunists “who have stolen the revolt” and betrayed the democratic principles of those who sacrificed to oust the client dictators.  All the conditions which underlay the “Arab spring” are in place or have been exacerbated: unemployment, police repression, crony capitalism, inequalities and corruption.  The experience of successful rebellion is still fresh and alive among the increasingly disenchanted youth.  Like all of the new Obama imperial policies, the propping up of co-opted officials does not promise a reconsolidation of empire.

Conclusion:  The “Obama Doctrine”

Reactive, improvised policies, with no overarching strategic framework, the so-called “Obama doctrine” shows few signs of reversing the decline of the US Empire.  The deterioration of US “forward positions” in the Arab heartland is not linear nor without tactical advances, especially in light of the Obama regimes’ co-optation of several Islamic leaders in Libya, Syria and Tunisia and the recycling of Mubarak era generals in Egypt.

Under cover of political euphemisms the Obama regime understates the scale and significance of its political and diplomatic losses: the forced withdrawal from Iraq is presented as a “successful mission in regime change”, notwithstanding the burgeoning civil and regime violence between rival sectarian and secular factions.  The US “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, is, in reality, a military retreat as the Taliban and related forces form a shadow government throughout the country and the huge mercenary army funded by billions of Pentagon dollars is infiltrated by Islamic Nationalist militants.

The “drone attacks” presented as a successful new counter-terror weapon crossing frontiers is hyped as an effective cost-effective alternative to large scale ground invasions subject to prolonged armed resistance.  In fact, the “drones” and killings mainly provide sensational propaganda and public relations successes – having little impact revising the larger defeatist political reality.

On the diplomatic front US imperial decline is even more dramatic. The UN General Assembly votes against the US on Cuba, and the UNESCO vote on the admission of Palestine are overwhelmingly hostile to the Obama regime.  Totally isolated, Washington’s “retaliatory” posture of cutting off financial resources further reduces US institutional leverage.

As Obama submits to greater subservience to Israel’s political arm in the US, the 52 “Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations”, and prepares a joint military attack on Iran, even NATO refuses to follow suit.

The great danger of the “Obama doctrine” is that it looks at short term ‘local’ consequences. Air and sea power can successfully bomb Iranian nuclear and military facilities, please the head of the Israeli ruling junta and guarantee American Zionist financial backing for Obama’s re-election campaign.  What is overlooked is the military capacity of Iran to close the world’s most important waterway (the Strait of Hormuz) shipping oil to Europe, Asia and the US.

Obama’s air war successes in Iran would be overwhelmed by Iranian ground and missile attacks of US forces throughout the Gulf.  All US petrol allies in the region would be vulnerable to attack.  Long range Iranian missiles would send millions of Israeli’s scurrying for bomb shelters, even before Obama’s Zionist advisers uncork their champagne to celebrate their “air victory” over Teheran.

The ‘Obama doctrine’ of extra territorial air wars with impunity turned against Iran would provoke a catastrophic conflagration, which would far surpass the disastrous outcome of the land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “Obama doctrine” is, in reality, a set of improvised policies designed to deal with specific sets of circumstances based on a common overall problem:  how to retain imperial domination in the face of failed colonial-occupation policies.  The tactical success in the air war against Libya and the opportunities opened by a Muslim led uprising in Syria has given rise to the need to formulate a new overall strategy.  Local collaborators are central, especially those with an institutional power base (Egyptian military) or with levers of regional influence in civil society (Islamic movements in Syria).

The attempt to generalize these ‘tactical’ gains into a general offensive strategy, however, flounder on the fallacy of “misplaced concreteness”.  Iran is not Libya:  it has the military power, geographic proximity and economic resources to demolish the weak and vulnerable ‘peripheral’ US client states.  Israel can start a US war against the Islamic world – but it cannot win it. Netanyahu’s losses in the UN cannot be explained away as 193 “anti-semitic” countries.  The Zionist-US-Israeli troika are mutually masturbating in a closet.  They can rant and rave and even precipitate an apocalyptic war, but Obama and Netanyahu are increasingly on the margin of world changes. Their policies are impotent reactions to popular movements envisioning historical transformations, which have even began to enter into the center of empires: Wall Street and Tel Aviv. Ultimately the “Obama doctrine” is doomed to failure as it is incapable of recognizing that the problem of decline is not simply a problem of ‘tactics’ but a basic systemic breakdown of empire building: the cracks and fissures abroad have ignited revolts at home.

1. Thomas Shanker and Steven Lee Myers “US Planning Troop Buildup in Gulf After Exit from Iraq”, New York Times, October 29, 2011.

America has, in recent years, altered its strategy in Pakistan in the direction of destabilization. In short, Pakistan is an American target. The reason: Pakistan’s growing military and strategic ties to China, America’s primary global strategic rival. In the ‘Great Game’ for global hegemony, any country that impedes America’s world primacy – even one as historically significant to America as Pakistan – may be sacrificed upon the altar of war…. Pakistan will very likely continue to be destabilized and ultimately collapse. What is not mentioned in these assessments, however, is the role of the military and intelligence communities in making this a reality; a veritable self-fulfilling prophecy.¹

American friendship is more dangerous than its publicly defined animosity. Rejecting cynicism but pondering on the US rationale of “war on terrorism”, there are ample similarities of the blueprint what happened in Iraq, the same fate could be waiting for Pakistan.

Pakistani masses appear to be daydreaming about a political future out of the ballot box, not being fully aware of what is happening around and within them. With massive presence of the US led forces on the Pak-Afghan border, daily drone attacks on the civilians killing innocent people, and the bought and bribed Pakistani intelligentsia (news media, ruling PPP party under Zardari and the Generals), all playing their roles as did the three Pakistani cricketers in London (shown in the BBC secret videos) to undermine the integrity and moral and political standing of the Muslim nation. Cricket was an inherited cultural norm of Pakistan, but what disgrace the few egomaniac players brought brought upon morally conscientious Pakistanis. One could not imagine that Pakistani sportsmen would be so mean and intellectually corrupt to accept money to throw a game. How could you blame them when the whole country is operating in a culture of institutionalized corruption, asked the BBC reporter in Pakistan.

When people live in darkness, they lose their sense of direction. Corruption could be synonymous to human activities outcome of ignorance, greed and mismanagement. No so, there is an emerging awareness of the changing realities of the landscape – masses coming out of the slumber and questioning the incompetent and corrupt politicians. But politicians are part of the problems and cannot be part of any rational solutions. Over half of a century of continued military rule has incapacitated the body politics of the nation by dismantling all public institutions. The only institution that works is the corruption and corruption across the board. One wonders, who is not corrupt in that nation? Could the institution of corruption be wiped out by the verdicts of the Supreme Court alone? The people of Pakistan need to and understand the problems as they are without illusions. Pakistan faces manifold problems within and outside for its survival. The immediate one is to disconnect its affiliation with the US led bogus “war on terrorism” and to restore a sense of normalcy by facilitating a new non-partisan government under new leadership.

The US led war has transformed its egoistic urge into a monstrous situation of unwarranted deaths and killings of the civilian population under the bogus guise of terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. American policy makers follow a double-edged strategy: they classify “Pakistan as the most dangerous state breeding terrorism,”² and continue to accelerate the terrorism of war on the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan to create more terrorism as substance for the policy rationale.

At the end of the 2010, the US’s failed strategies and military losses in Afghanistan look for face-lifting measures. The New York Times reported (12/21/2010) that senior American military commanders – meaning Gen. David Petraeus and his colleagues at ISAF – are pushing for raids into Pakistan aimed at capturing Taliban commanders and bringing them back to Afghanistan for interrogation. The intensification of drone attacks inside Pakistan has devastated the civilian lives in the border region. The corrupt Pakistani regime under Zardari has allowed the US forces to invade and kill its own people. One of the major aims of the US policy (as indicated by the NY Times), is to “disrupt the whole enterprise in Pakistan, including the civilian government.” Political opponents of the existing government would be “screaming for blood,” and the military would feel that it had to act against the government. The global news media and the NY Times (07/2007) made it known, “Pakistani Generals are paid to do the job.” These assignments included killings of their own people and destruction of the institutions and infrastructure to seek insane justification that US friends are doing the job in return for cash payments.

One of the major beneficiaries of this cruel scheme of things was General Pervaz Musharaf and some of his military-political comrades working agents of influence to counteract the US-British engineered “Islamic terrorism” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Former President Bush claimed to have invested $10 billion in General Musharaf to contain the Islamic militancy. If Condoleezza Rice (the former US Secretary of States in Bush administration), is to be believed, General Musharaf provided vital secret information on the Pakistani nuclear arsenals to the US Government. The US needed these preemptive measures to guard their short-long terms political and military interests and enhance the failing economy with new wars. General Musharaf now lives in $1.4 million bungalow in London protected by the British security services.

American friendship is more dangerous than its publicly defined animosity. Rejecting cynicism but pondering on the US rationale of “war of terrorism,” there are ample similarities of the blueprint what happened in Iraq, the same fate could be waiting for Pakistan. Saddam Hussein was a paid FBI agent for over two decades but once he challenged the US policy orientations and interests, a friend became an enemy and the US attacked Iraq under the pretext of possession of WMD, occupied its wealth of natural resources, massacred more than three million civilian Iraqis and destroyed the social and political habitat across Iraq. Isn’t the same blueprint in place working for Pakistan?

Recall, there were 22 Iraqi Generals with families (friends of the US and conspirators of Iraq) that the US occupation forces airlifted from Baghdad airport and gave asylum in the US. Now, under the Obama administration, the US government has intensified its strategy to engulf the Pakistani nation with military and psychological terrorist activities. There is Blackwater Security (now Xe) and other phony NGOs death squads active in many parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to the NY Times (12/21/2010), the policy being pursued by the Obama administration, tends to insulate it from such warnings of potentially disastrous consequences of an aggressive U.S. military role in Pakistan. The administration increased the number of CIA drone strikes in northwest Pakistan over that of the Bush administration – a policy requiring that it discount the political fallout of the drone campaign in Pakistan. The CIA has also set up “fusion centres” with the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, aimed at making the Pakistani military more dependent on U.S. intelligence and less likely to be responsive to public opposition to U.S. military activities in Pakistan. The Petraeus proposal as quoted by a “senior American officer” stating, “We’ve never been as close as we are now to getting the go-ahead to go across.”

Andrew Gavin Marshall states that “in December of 2000, the CIA released a report of global trends to the year 2015, which stated that by 2015, “Pakistan will be more fractious, isolated, and dependent on international financial assistance.”¹ Further, it was predicted, Pakistan:

… will not recover easily from decades of political and economic mismanagement, divisive politics, lawlessness, corruption and ethnic friction. Nascent democratic reforms will produce little change in the face of opposition from an entrenched political elite and radical Islamic parties.

Andrew Gavin Marshall puts the emerging realities in context. “The war in Afghanistan is inherently related to the situation in Pakistan… In September of 2008, the editor of Indian Defence Review wrote an article explaining that a stable Pakistan is not in India’s interests: ‘With Pakistan on the brink of collapse due to massive internal as well as international contradictions, it is matter of time before it ceases to exist.’” He explained that Pakistan’s collapse would bring “multiple benefits” to India, including preventing China from gaining a major port in the Indian Ocean, which is in the mutual interest of the United States. The author explained that this would be a “severe jolt” to China’s expansionist aims, and further, “India’s access to Central Asian energy routes will open up.”

Zardari operates in close cooperation with the leader of MQM – Altaf Husain – most Pakistanis would define him as an agent of the Indian Secret police working against Pakistan. No wonder, how Zardari’s PPP and MQM are realigned to stand together in a future political election. The PPP Government comprises of several indicted criminals who continue to hold high offices in the country. General Musharaf even dismissed the Chief Justice of Pakistan to ensure his own power and survival. The common folks of Pakistan were dealt a cruel blow to their hopes for change and a promising future. None of these perverted rulers feel any sense of guilt in their public behavior. In 2009, the international media reported that 12,900 people were killed in Pakistan for the insane satisfaction of the US led warmongering. In 2010, 3,000 innocent civilians are known to have been killed because of the US drone attacks in North-South Waziristan. The real figures could be multiplied as no credible data is maintained by the aggressive parties. The war on terrorism has crippled the nation across the board in social, economic, political and public life. The net beneficiaries are the Generals, Bhuttos, and Zardari while the Pakistani nation is entrapped and being strangulated by the few.

The Pakistani nation wants to hold these criminals to accountability in a court of law. The recent Wikileaks documents reveal how some of the Generals and the PPP politicians conspired against the interest of the people of Pakistan. Their mindset and behavior belong to draconian age full of poisonous backdoor conspiracies for continued power sharing governance. The PPP operated democracy does not have roots in Pakistani society; it is a mere foreign illusion to destroy the nation by it sown agents. The political gangsterism has ruined the life of ordinary Pakistanis. These agents of foreign rule have no sense of fear and shame that emboldens them to commit any wicked and cruel crime against the freedom and security of Pakistan.

Andrew Gavin Marshall quotes David Kilcullen, advisor to President Obama, who warned in April of 2009, of a possible collapse of Pakistan within months: “We have to face the fact that if Pakistan collapses it will dwarf anything we have seen so far in whatever we’re calling the war on terror now.” The adviser explained that this would be unlike the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, which each had a population of over 30 million, whereas “Pakistan has [187] million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al-Qaeda sitting in two-thirds of the country which the Government does not control.”

Conscientious and thinking people of Pakistan must strive to workout freedom from exploitation and death squads operated by these so called democrats. A dire sense of reality would ask for change and reformation of the cancerous political governance. Pakistan desperately needs a new government of non-partisan people to disengage its status-quo of collaborative warmongering and to determine a new policy to end the collaboration with the US War and demand immediate withdrawals of the US-British troops from neighboring Afghanistan and to stop drone attacks and incursions into the Pakistani tribal belts of Waziristan and Baluchistan province. The war engagement is killing the people of Pakistan and eliminating its future as a stable nation. This is a clear conspiracy to dismantle the Muslim nation from within. The rulers have lost the sense of reality and accountability to the people. It is a problem of institutionalized corrupt political governance and betrayal to the principles of Islamic system of life –the foundation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. There are superficial tensions guised under the “war of terrorism” to engage the citizens of Pakistan toward bloodshed and continuous animosity to kill each other. The US drone attacks in Waziristan are linked to this goal of domestic strife and collapse of the nation. If there is a new non-partisan government under new and intelligent leadership dedicated to the service of the people of Pakistan, these problems can be addressed based on the strategic interest of Pakistan and with favorable outcomes.

Plato noted that “thinking is man’s natural instrument for problem solving… any problem could be solved by thought.” The thinking people of new and educated generation must have opportunities to perceive, plan and play a defining role in the rebuilding the future of Pakistan. So far, the young generations have been deprived by the influential feudal lords dominating the political landscape. The bogus set-up of the National Assembly and Senate and federal governance is disconnected joint of Pakistani politics. They reflect a burden on people’s conscience. There is no honorable role for Bhuttos, Zardaris, military Generals and Sharifs to be part of Pakistan’s future. They are all dead entries with no relevance to the prevalent realities of living Islamic Pakistan. Pakistan NEEDS a new government under new and intelligent proactive leadership having confidence of the people and a foreign policy to detach itself from the US warmongering and show publicly a shifting metaphor of freedom from the foreign dictates. Pakistani nation looks for change and new and politically responsible leadership and the answer rests with the vision and honest commitment of the new educated generation to serve the people of Pakistan and safeguard its future.

To make a new future, it is important that General Musharaf, Zardari, Geelani, Sharifs and so many other monsters must face legal justice. They must be held accountable for their crimes against the people of Pakistan. Looking at the current events, the dead politicians are again raising slogans to serve the interests of the people of Pakistan. There are multiple psychodramas on screens these days. Could the dead Bhuttos, Zardaris, Sharifs, and the Generals be a reference point or a changing force for the future of Pakistan? Pakistani politics is synonymous to corruption. None of the political establishments or independent politicians have the credibility to move the masses from a crippled present into a politically sustainable future. The answer rests with the new generation of educated and intelligent people to assume this vital role. A change would facilitate new opportunities, new ideas and engage competent people to THINK and workout rational and realistic remedies for a new future. Pakistan needs to get of the neo-colonial clutches and hegemony of the few corrupt families. The outcome of any near future ballot box under the present circumstances will not change the strategic status-quo but will continue to waste time and resources and defy the logic of time and necessity for a navigational change — that is, a new government under new leadership to arrange a new constitution and a new political system of institutions and governance to be evolved to serve the best interests of the people of Pakistan.

1. Andrew Gavin Marshall “Imperial Eye on Pakistan- Pakistan in Pieces, Part 1″ Global Research, 5/30/2011
2. Foreign Policy, 01.2011.

The Afghan war is expanding even further, not only with increasing drone attacks in neighboring Pakistani territory but because of U.S. threats to take far greater unilateral military action within Pakistan unless the Islamabad government roots out “extremists” and cracks down harder on cross-border fighters.

Washington’s tone was so threatening that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to assure the Pakistani press October 21 that the U.S. did not plan a ground offensive against Pakistan. The next day, Afghan President Hamid Karzai shocked Washington by declaring “God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan…. If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan’s help, Afghanistan will be there with you.”

At the same time, Washington has just suffered a spectacular setback in Iraq, where the Obama Administration has been applying extraordinary pressure on the Baghdad government for over a year to permit many thousands of U.S. troops to remain indefinitely after all American forces are supposed to withdraw at the end of this year.

President Obama received the Iraqi government’s rejection from Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki October 21, and promptly issued a public statement intended to completely conceal the fact that a long-sought U.S. goal has just been obliterated, causing considerable disruption to U.S. plans. Obama made a virtue of necessity by stressing that “Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.”

This article will first discuss the situation in Afghanistan after 10 years, then take up the Iraq question and what the U.S. may do to compensate for a humiliating and disruptive rebuff.

The United States is well aware it will never win a decisive victory in Afghanistan. At this point, the Obama Administration is anxious to convert the military stalemate into a form of permanent truce, if only the Taliban were willing to accept what amounts to a power sharing deal that would allow Washington to claim the semblance of success after a decade of war.

In addition, President Obama seeks to retain a large post-”withdrawal” military presence throughout the country mainly for these reasons:

• To protect its client regime in Kabul led by Karzai, as well as Washington’s other political and commercial interests in the country, and to maintain a menacing military presence on Iran’s eastern border, especially if U.S. troops cannot now remain in Iraq.

• To retain territory in Central Asia for U.S. and NATO military forces positioned close to what Washington perceives to be its two main (though never publicly identified) enemies — China and Russia — at a time when the American government is increasing its political pressure on both countries. Obama is intent upon transforming NATO from a regional into a global adjunct to Washington’s quest for retaining and extending world hegemony. NATO’s recent victory in Libya is a big advance for U.S. ambitions in Africa, even if the bulk of commercial spoils go to France and England. A permanent NATO presence in Central Asia is a logical next step. In essence, Washington’s geopolitical focus is expanding from the Middle East to Central Asia and Africa in the quest for resources, military expansion and unassailable hegemony, especially from the political and economic challenge of rising nations of the global south, led China.

There has been an element of public deception about withdrawing U.S. “combat troops” from Iraq and Afghanistan dating from the first Obama election campaign in 2007-8. Combat troops belong to combat brigades. In a variant of bait-and-switch trickery, the White House reported that all combat brigades departed Iraq in August 2010. Technically this is true, because those that did not depart were simply renamed “advise and assist brigades.” According to a 2009 Army field manual such brigades are entirely capable, “if necessary,” of shifting from “security force assistance” back to combat duties.

In Afghanistan, after the theoretical pull-out date, it is probable that many ”advise and assist brigades” will remain along with a large complement of elite Joint Special Operations Forces strike teams (SEALs, Green Berets, etc.) and other officially “non-combat” units — from the CIA, drone operators, fighter pilots, government security employees plus “contractor security” personnel, including mercenaries. Thousands of other “non-combat” American soldiers will remain to train the Afghan army.

According to an October 8 Associated Press dispatch, “Senior U.S. officials have spoken of keeping a mix of 10,000 such [special operations-type] forces in Afghanistan, and drawing down to between 20,000 and 30,000 conventional forces to provide logistics and support. But at this point, the figures are as fuzzy as the future strategy.”

Estimates of how long the Pentagon will remain in Afghanistan range from 2017 to 2024 to “indefinitely.”

Obama marked the 10th anniversary with a public statement alleging that  “Thanks to the extraordinary service of these [military] Americans, our citizens are safer and our nation is more secure”— the most recent of the continuous praise of war-fighters and the conduct of these wars of choice from the White House since the 2001 bombing, invasion and occupation.

Just two days earlier a surprising Pew Social Trend poll of post-9/11 veterans was made public casting doubt about such a characterization. Half the vets said the Afghanistan war wasn’t worth fighting in terms of benefits and costs to the U.S. Only 44% thought the Iraq war was worth fighting. One-third opined that both wars were not worth waging. Opposition to the wars has been higher among the U.S. civilian population. But it’s unusual in a non-conscript army for its veterans to emerge with such views about the wars they volunteered to fight.

The U.S. and its NATO allies issued an unusually optimistic assessment of the Afghan war on October 15, but it immediately drew widespread skepticism. According to the New York Times the next day, “Despite a sharp increase in assassinations and a continuing flood of civilian casualties, NATO officials said that they had reversed the momentum of the Taliban insurgency as enemy attacks were falling for the first time in years…. [This verdict] runs counter to dimmer appraisals from some Afghan officials and other international agencies, including the United Nations. With the United States preparing to withdraw 10,000 troops by the end of this year and 23,000 more by next October, it raises questions about whether NATO’s claims of success can be sustained.”

Less than two weeks earlier German Gen. Harald Kujat, who planned his country’s military support mission in Afghanistan, declared that “the mission fulfilled the political aim of showing solidarity with the United States. But if you measure progress against the goal of stabilizing a country and a region, then the mission has failed.”

According to Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is a critically important “long term commitment” and “we’re going to be there longer than 2014.” He made the disclosure to the Senate Armed Services Committee September 22, a week before he retired. In a statement October 3, the Pentagon’s new NATO commander in Afghanistan, Marine Gen. John Allen, declared: “The plan is to win. The plan is to be successful. And so, while some folks might hear that we’re departing in 2014… we’re actually going to be here for a long time.”

Lt. Gen. John Mulholland, departing head of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, told the AP October 8:  “We’re moving toward an increased special operations role…,whether it’s counterterrorism-centric, or counterterrorism blended with counterinsurgency.” White House National Security Advisor Tom Donilon said in mid-September that by 2014  “the U.S. remaining force will be basically an enduring presence force focused on counterterrorism.” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta strongly supports President Obama’s call for an “enduring presence” in Afghanistan beyond 2014.

Former U.S. Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was fired last year for his unflattering remarks about Obama Administration officials, said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations October 6 that after a decade of fighting in Afghanistan the U.S. was only “50% of the way” toward attaining its goals. “We didn’t know enough and we still don’t know enough,” he said. “Most of us — me included — had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years.”

Washington evidently had no idea that one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world — a society of 30 million people where the literacy rate is 28% and life expectancy is just 44 years — would fiercely fight to retain national sovereignty. The Bush Administration, which launched the Afghan war a few weeks after 9/11, evidently ignored the fact that the people of Afghanistan ousted every occupying army from that of Alexander the Great and Genghis Kahn to the British Empire and the USSR.

The U.S. spends on average in excess of $2 billion a week in Afghanistan, not to mention the combined spending of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, but the critical needs of the Afghan people in terms of health, education, welfare and social services after a full decade of military involvement by the world’s richest countries remain essentially untended.

For example, 220,000 Afghan children under five — one in five — die every year due to pneumonia, poor nutrition, diarrhea and other preventable diseases, according to the State of the World’s Children report released by the UN Children’s Fund. UNICEF also reports the maternal mortality rate with about 1,600 deaths per every 100,000 live births. Save the Children says this amounts to over 18,000 women a year. It is also reported by the UN that 70% of school-age girls do not attend school for various reasons — conservative parents, lack of security, or fear for their lives. All told, about 92% of the Afghan population does not have access to proper sanitation.

Even after a decade of U.S. combat, the overwhelming majority of the Afghan people still have no clear idea why Washington launched the war. According to the UK’s Daily Mail September 9, a new survey by the International Council on Security and Development showed that 92% of 1,000 Afghan men polled had never even heard of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — the U.S. pretext for the invasion — and did not know why foreign troops were in the country. (Only men were queried in the poll because many more of them are literate, 43.1% compared to 12.6% of women.)

In another survey, conducted by Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation and released October 18, 56% of Afghans view U.S./NATO troops as an occupying force, not allies as Washington prefers. The survey results show that “there appears to be an increasing amount of anxiety and fear rather than hope.”

Perhaps the most positive news about Afghanistan — and it is a thunderously mixed “blessing” — is that the agricultural economy boomed last year. But, reports the October 11 Business Insider, it’s because “rising opium prices have upped the ante in Afghanistan, and farmers have responded by posting a 61% increase in opium production.” Afghani farmers produce 90% of the world’s opium, the main ingredient in heroin. Half-hearted U.S.-NATO eradication efforts failed because insufficient attention was devoted to providing economic and agricultural substitutes for the cultivation of opium.

Another outcome of foreign intervention and U.S. training is the boundless brutality and corruption of the Afghan police toward civilians and especially Taliban “suspects.” Writing in Antiwar.com John Glaser reported:

“Detainees in Afghan prisons are hung from the ceilings by their wrists, severely beaten with cables and wooden sticks, have their toenails torn off, are treated with electric shock, and even have their genitals twisted until they lose consciousness, according to a study released October 10 by the United Nations. The study, which covered 47 facilities sites in 22 provinces, found ‘a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment’ during interrogation by U.S.-supported Afghan authorities. Both U.S. and NATO military trainers and counterparts have been working closely with these authorities, consistently supervising the detention facilities and funding their operations.”

In mid-September Human Rights Watch documented that U.S.-supported anti-Taliban militias are responsible for many human rights abuses that are overlooked by their American overseers. At around the same time the American Open Society Foundations revealed that the Obama Administration has tripled the number of night time military raids on civilian homes, which terrorize many families. The report noted that “An estimated 12 to 20 raids now occur per night, resulting in thousands of detentions per year, many of whom are non-combatants.” The U.S. military admits that half the arrests are “mistakes.”

Meanwhile, it was reported in October that in the first nine months this year U.S.-NATO drones conducted nearly 23,000 surveillance missions in the Afghanistan sky. With nearly 85 flights a day, the Obama Administration has almost doubled the daily amount in the last two years. Hundreds of civilians, including nearly 170 children, have been killed in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas from drone attacks. Miniature killer/surveillance drones — small enough to be carried in backpacks— are soon expected to be distributed to U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

So far the Afghanistan war has taken the lives of some 1,730 American troops and about a thousand from NATO. There are no reliable figures on the number of Afghan civilians killed since the beginning of the war. The UN’s Assistance Mission to Afghanistan did not start to count such casualties until 2007. According to the Voice of America October 7, “Each year, the civilian death toll has risen, from more than 1,500 dead in 2007 to more than 2,700 in 2010. And in the first half of this year, the UN office reported there were 2,400 civilians killed in war-related incidents.”

At minimum the war has cost American taxpayers about a half-trillion dollars since 2001. The U.S. will continue to spend billions in the country for many years to come and the final cost — including interest on war debts that will be carried for scores more years — will mount to multi-trillions that future generations will have to pay. At present there are 94,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan plus about 37,000 NATO troops. Another 45,000 well paid “contractors” perform military duties, and many are outright mercenaries.

Washington is presently organizing, arming, training and financing hundreds of thousands of Afghan troops and police forces, and is expected to continue paying some $5 billion a year for this purpose at least until 2025.

The U.S. government has articulated various different objectives for its engagement in Afghanistan over the years. Crushing al-Qaeda and defeating the Taliban have been most often mentioned, but as an October 7 article from the Council on Foreign Relations points out: “The main U.S. goals in Afghanistan remain uncertain. They have meandered from marginalizing the Taliban to state-building, to counterinsurgency, to counterterrorism, to — most recently — reconciliation and negotiation with the Taliban. But the peace talks remain nascent and riddled with setbacks. Karzai suspended the talks after the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the government’s chief negotiator, which the Afghan officials blamed on the Pakistan-based Haqqani network. The group denies it.”

There is another incentive for the U.S. to continue fighting in Afghanistan — to eventually convey the impression of victory, an absolute domestic political necessity.

The most compelling reason for the Afghan war is geopolitical, as noted above — finally obtaining a secure military foothold for the U.S. and its NATO accessory in the Central Asian backyards of China and Russia . In addition, a presence in Afghanistan places the U.S. in close military proximity to two volatile nuclear powers backed by the U.S. but not completely under its control by any means (Pakistan, India). Also, this fortuitous geography is flanking the extraordinary oil and natural gas wealth of the Caspian Basin and energy-endowed former Soviet Muslim republics such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

In Iraq, the Obama Administration’s justification for retaining troops after the end of this year was ostensibly to train the Iraqi military and police forces, but there were other reasons:

• Washington seeks to remain in Iraq to keep an eye on Baghdad because it fears a mutually beneficial alliance may develop between Iraq and neighboring Iran, two Shi’ite societies in an occasionally hostile Sunni Muslim world, weakening American hegemony in the strategically important oil-rich Persian Gulf region and ultimately throughout the Middle East/North Africa.

• The U.S. also seeks to safeguard lucrative economic investments in Iraq, and the huge future profits expected by American corporations, especially in the denationalized petroleum sector. Further, Pentagon and CIA forces were stationed — until now, it seems — in close proximity to Iran’s western border, a strategic position to invade or bring about regime change.

Under other conditions, the U.S. may simply have insisted on retaining its troops regardless of Iraqi misgivings, but the Status of Forces compact governing this matter can only be changed legally by mutual agreement between Washington and Baghdad. The concord was arranged in December 2008 between Prime Minister Maliki and President George W. Bush — not Obama, who now takes credit for ending the Iraq war despite attempting to extend the mission of a large number of U.S. troops.

At first Washington wanted to retain more than 30,000 troops plus a huge diplomatic and contractor presence in Iraq after “complete” withdrawal. Maliki — pushed by many of the country’s political factions, including some influenced by Iran’s opposition to long-term U.S. occupation — held out for a much smaller number.

Early in October Baghdad decided that 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. troops in a training-only capacity was the most that could be accommodated. In addition, the Iraqis in effect declared a degree of independence from Washington by insisting that remaining American soldiers must be kept on military bases and not be granted legal immunity when in the larger society. Washington, which has troops stationed in countries throughout the world, routinely insists upon legal exemption for its foreign legions as a matter of imperial hubris, and would not compromise.

The White House has indicated that an arrangement may yet be worked out to permit some American trainers and experts to remain, perhaps as civilians or contractors. Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a staunch opponent of the U.S. occupation, has suggested Iraq should employ trainers for its armed forces from other countries, but this is impractical for a country using American arms and planes.

Regardless, the White House is increasing the number of State Department employees in Iraq from 8,000 to an almost unbelievable 16,000, mostly stationed at the elephantine new embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone quasi-military enclave, in new American consulates in other cities, and in top “advisory” positions in many of the of the regime’s ministries, particularly the oil ministry. Half the State Department personnel, 8,000 people, will handle “security” duties, joined by some 5,000 new private “security contractors.”

Thus, at minimum the U.S. will possess 13,000 of its own armed “security” forces, and there’s still a possibility Baghdad and Washington will work out an arrangement for adding a limited number of “non-combat” military trainers, openly or by other means.

In his October 21 remarks, Obama sought to transform the total withdrawal he sought to avoid into a simulacrum of triumph for the troops and himself: “The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops…. That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”

Heads held high, proud of success — for an unjust, illegal war based on lies that is said to have cost over a million Iraqi lives and created four million refugees! It has been estimated that the final U.S. costs of the Iraq war will be over $5 trillion when the debt and interest are finally paid off decades from now.

If President Obama is reelected— even should the Iraq war actually end — he will be coordinating U.S. involvement in wars and occupations in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now Uganda (where American 100 combat troops have just been inserted). Add to this various expanding drone campaigns, and such adventures as Washington’s support for Israel against the Palestinians and for the Egyptian military regime against popular aspirations for full democracy, followed by the backing of dictatorial regimes in a half-dozen countries, and continual threats against Iran.

Washington’s $1.4 trillion annual military and national security expenditures are a major factor behind America’s monumental national debt and the cutbacks in social services for the people, but aside from White House rhetoric about reducing redundant Pentagon expenditures, overall war/security budgets are expected to increase over the next several years.

The Bush and Obama Administrations have manipulated reality to convince American public opinion that the Iraq and Afghan wars are ending in U.S. successes. Washington fears the resurrection of the “Vietnam Syndrome” that resulted after the April 1975 U.S. defeat in Indochina. The “syndrome” led to a 15-year disinclination by the American people to support aggressive, large-scale U.S. wars against small, poor countries in the developing third world until the January 1991 Gulf War, part one of the two-part Iraq war that continued in March 2003.

According to an article in the October 9 New York Times titled “The Other War Haunting Obama,” author, journalist and Harvard emeritus professor Marvin Kalb wrote: “Ten years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, an odd specter haunts the Obama White House — the specter of Vietnam, a war lost decades before. Like Banquo’s ghost, it hovers over the White House still, an unwelcome memory of where America went wrong, a warning of what may yet go wrong.”

This fear of losing another war to a much smaller adversary — and perhaps suffering the one-term fate of President Lyndon Johnson who presided over the Vietnam debacle — evidently was a factor behind President Obama’s decision to vastly expand the size of the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan and why the White House is now planning a long-term troop presence beyond the original pullout date.

Today’s combat directly touches the lives of only a small minority of Americans — military members and families — and much of the majority remains uninformed or misinformed about many of the causes and effects of the Iraq/Afghan adventures. Obama may thus eventually be able to convey the illusion of military success, which will help pave the way for future imperial violence unless the people of the United States wise up and act en masse to prevent future aggressive wars.

Imagine Britain had been invaded and occupied by armed forces from another region of the world with China, for example, as a significant “partner” in the “coalition”. Imagine tens of thousands of Britons had been killed, and millions had fled as refugees. This is how the Chinese state broadcaster might report the invasion ten years hence:

It’s ten years this week since Chinese forces first became involved in Britain, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for south-east England. So what’s been achieved in that time?

These were the actual words that presenter Fiona Bruce used on the flagship BBC News at Ten:

It’s ten years this week since British forces first became involved in Afghanistan, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for Helmand province. So what’s been achieved in that time? (BBC One, October 4, 2011, italics added)

This is BBC ‘impartiality’ in action. These words were a prelude to a piece by Paul Wood, the BBC’s Afghanistan correspondent, that was a model of Pravda-style propaganda which we will examine further in Part 2.

Meanwhile, in a shameful editorial, the Guardian burnished its credentials as a hand-wringing liberal supporter of the war. Readers were told that the war that had been “unavoidable” and that “we’ had then stayed in the country ‘through all the twists and turns imposed by events”, struggling with “the incoherence of our own changing policies, for reasons which have become less and less understandable.” The paper sighed that “an anniversary of this kind has a sobering effect” in that “we hugely overestimated the capacity of our military, diplomatic and intelligence establishments to change other societies.” This “hubris was most evident in the United States, but it was not absent in Britain.”

“The trouble”, claimed the editorial, “was that, once in that obscure corner, whether Iraq or Afghanistan”, coalition forces “were confronted by shrewd and ruthless opponents.” Historically, invaders do tend to be resisted by those “shrewd and ruthless” people in “obscure corners” whose land is being occupied, and whose lives, livelihoods and resources are at risk.

“Some Afghans”, however, “were indeed ‘like us’, recognisably middle class or western in their beliefs and aspirations, and the effect of our intervention may well have been to increase that number.”

The white man’s burden is surely lightened by that happy realisation. Especially because some of these people ‘like us’ – yes, the Guardian really did say that – “may have a more important role to play” in the future. Thus reassured, “we can hope we have planted seed that will bear fruit later.”

The tragedy of the Afghanistan war, asserted the Guardian, is that “we” stumbled into an age-old conflict not of our making:

The problem is not that Afghanistan is unconquerable, as some claim. It is that we, like the Russians before us, joined an ongoing conflict between different ethnicities, between modernisers and traditionalists, between social classes, and between newer and older forms of religiosity.

Now, “after 10 years of muddle and mayhem”, our “minimal common interest” – indeed, “our remaining duty”  – must be to aim at “a power-sharing settlement” involving the Taliban.

There was no hint from this supposed vanguard of critical and liberal journalism that “our remaining duty” should involve an immediate withdrawal of our forces. No hint that this country should make some attempt at restitution for the decade of “muddle and mayhem” that “we” have inflicted on yet more victims of the West’s grasping and destructive foreign policy.

The Independent’s editorial derived from a similarly tortured perspective of perplexed liberalism: “questions about what has been achieved yield far from encouraging answers” and “what little progress there has been is looking increasingly vulnerable.”

However, the editors added, “it would be a mistake to overlook the real advances that have been made”, such as “democratic elections, a written constitution and a degree of social freedom”. The paper also appealed yet again to “the issue of women’s rights – or the lack of them” as “one of the most convincing” supposed “justifications for international involvement in Afghanistan.”

There was token acknowledgement in the editorial of “Afghanistan’s vast natural resources” which, we are to believe,”could still be a source of funding and stability.” But there was only silence about the realpolitik underlying Western foreign policy; namely, that control of these huge resources was, in fact, ‘one of the most convincing’ reasons for the invasion-occupation of Afghanistan.

Instead, the editorial makes a benign-sounding but pathetic plea for the “international community” to “help realise the potential.” But for whose benefit? The corporate media would have us believe that the interests of the Afghan people would be paramount, and that they would be allowed to prosper. For the truth, we have to look elsewhere.

Turning Afghanistan Into A ‘Hub’ And ‘Conduit’ For US Interests

For example, energy analysts Shukria Dellawar and Antonia Juhasz note in a recent article in Foreign Policy in Focus, that:

Unknown to most Afghans, in January 2009 the government implemented a new Hydrocarbon Law that transforms its oil and natural gas sectors from fully state-owned to all but fully privatized.

In April 2011, the Afghanistan Ministry of Mines launched the first of what is expected to be a number of tenders for the country’s oil and gas resources. As in Iraq, the contracts include production-sharing agreements that have been strongly rejected by other major oil-producing countries in the Middle East. Why have such agreements been rejected? Because they heavily favour Western oil corporations, granting extremely long-term contracts (45 years or more in the case of Afghanistan) and greater control, ownership, and profits to the companies compared to the far more common contracts that are used for the bulk – around 88 per cent – of the world’s oil.

Dellawar and Juhasz warn that:

The Afghanistan contracts, moreover, would not require foreign companies to invest earnings in the Afghan economy, partner with Afghan companies, or share new technologies.

Crucially, Afghanistan is not only important as an energy producer, but also as a potential “energy conveyer”. Negotiations are proceeding rapidly for the vital Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline which would carry natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India. The pipeline has long been an important objective of Western governments and fossil fuel corporations that have had their sights on the energy-rich countries of the Caspian region. Indeed, the Bush administration made completion of the TAPI a core part of its Afghanistan war strategy.

As then-U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher said in 2007:

One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south.

Dellawar and Juhasz conclude:

If the pipeline is constructed and U.S. companies begin producing in Afghanistan, its importance to the West will only intensify, as will the desire to keep Afghanistan ‘open for business’. If Afghanistan does not have the internal capacity to provide this ‘openness’ itself, the United States and other foreign governments may feel forced to do so on its behalf – utilizing their own troops.

As ever, then, Western states and corporations are striving relentlessly to maintain control of resources and global markets, and to maximise profits for themselves, with as much force and skullduggery as they can muster. And Western media will provide intellectual cover by selling the resultant theft, slaughter and misery as “stabilisation”, “‘investment” and “the protection of human rights”.

As former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges writes:

The liberal class is permitted to decry the worst excesses of power and champion basic human rights while at the same time endowing systems of power with a morality and virtue it does not possess. Liberals posit themselves as the conscience of the nation. They permit us, through their appeal to public virtues and the public good, to see ourselves and our state as fundamentally good.

Supine Reporting In Service To The State

Regular readers may recall an alert in 2007 which compared Soviet and recent US/UK reporting on Afghanistan. The alert was a collaboration with Nikolai Lanine, who had fought with the Soviet Army during its 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan. He had subsequently spent several years trawling through Soviet-era newspaper archives comparing the propaganda of that time with modern Western media performance.

As we pointed out then, if the claims of  impartiality and balance in modern professional journalism are to be believed, the similarities should have been few and far between. After all, Soviet-era media such as Pravda – meaning, ironically, “The Truth” – are a byword for state-controlled mendacity in the West. Instead, as the alert showed, the similarities were painfully precise.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was an unalloyed act of aggression, an attempt to crush a perceived threat to Soviet security and power. But it was portrayed by the Soviet government, and compliant Soviet media such as Pravda and Izvestia, as an act of humanitarian intervention “to prevent the establishment of… a terrorist regime and to protect the Afghan people from genocide”, and also to provide “aid in stabilising the situation and the repulsion of possible external aggression.”  Once the “terrorists” had been defeated by the Soviet army, Afghanistan would be left to become “a stable, friendly country”. Soviet “involvement” was presented as being in the best interests of the Afghan people: the focus of the Soviet government’s benevolent concern. ¹

The parallels to the media’s coverage of Western “involvement” in Afghanistan today are obvious.

Western media support for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, in the wake of the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September, was steadfast from the beginning. Ten years ago, as the bombs and missiles rained down, an Independent editorial described the “war”  — in reality, a massive attack on aThird World Country by the planet’s most powerful military force –  as “ultimately inevitable”. Moreover, “Washington had the right – indeed, the duty – to respond” and ”there was no question that the United States was justified in using armed force.” Piling up the insults to readers’ intelligence, the paper said that it was ”to the immense – and unexpected – credit of America that it approached the business of retaliation with such method, caution and responsibility.”

In fact, the US launched its brutal assault despite dire warnings by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) that more than seven million people were facing a crisis that could lead to widespread starvation if military action were initiated. In September 2001, the US government had demanded that Pakistan stop convoys of food on which much of the already starving Afghan population depended. The FAO warned of a likely ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ unless aid convoys were immediately resumed and the threat of military action terminated. Compare the grim reality with the Independent’s claim of  “caution and responsibility” underpinning the US “business of retaliation”.

Three months into the war, a rare report in the Guardian highlighted the desperation of Afghan people:

The village of Bonavash is slowly starving. Besieged by the Taliban and crushed by years of drought, people in this remote mountain settlement have resorted to eating bread made from grass and traces of barley flour. Babies whose mothers’ milk has dried up are fed grass porridge. The toothless elderly crush grass into a near powder. Many have died. More are sick. Nearly everyone has diarrhoea or a hacking cough. When the children’s pain becomes unbearable, their mothers tie rags around their stomachs to try to alleviate the pressure. “We are waiting to die. If food does not come, if the situation does not change, we will eat it [grass] … until we die,” said Ghalam Raza, 42, a man with a hacking cough, pain in his stomach and bleeding bowels.

But on the eve of war, the Guardian had told its readers:

It needs to be said as clearly and as unemotively as possible at the outset that the United States was entitled to launch a military response.

The invasion was “an act of legitimate self defence to protect our nations from further attack”.

The paper offered token words of hope that Bush and Blair’s promises of food, medicine and other supplies to Afghan civilians would be honoured. Blair tried to sweet-talk the Afghans by saying that, in the past, the West had simply “walked away” from its people. But not now:

This time round we must not repeat that mistake. This conflict will not be the end… once the conflict is over we’ve then got to sit down with people in Afghanistan and try and work out a stable and coherent way for the future… We are not going to walk away again.

This is the standard, patronising rhetoric beloved of all triumphant invaders.

As defenceless Afghan civilians were being slaughtered, the Guardian editors asserted that “nothing in the world is more important right now than that [Bush and Blair] succeed”.

The Guardian even claimed that Afghanistan had brought the storm of destruction upon their own heads:

Offered the opportunity to hand over Bin Laden and to act against his networks, and pressured to do so even by those closest to them, including Pakistan, the Afghan regime has refused. There is no question, therefore, but that a monstrous injustice against America remains unassauged [sic].

In fact, even before 11 September 2001, the Taliban had offered to present bin Laden for trial following attacks on US targets in the 1990s, “but the US government showed no interest”.

Following the 11 September atrocities, the US refused to present evidence of bin Laden’s culpability to the Taliban “presumably because”, as Noam Chomsky said in an interview at the time, “that would have suggested some limit on the imperial prerogative to act without any authority”.

How genuine the Taliban offer was may never be known. But, as Chomsky points out, the brutal US stance could be put succinctly as follows:

Hand him [bin Laden] over, or else; and if you do, we may leave you alone (overthrowing the Taliban regime was a late afterthought). No government, surely not the U.S., would ever accept such a demand, unless compelled to by the threat of extreme violence. There was, then, no alternative to such [a] threat, if that was the demand, as it was. But that offers no justification for the threat of violence, or its implementation.

As for the editorial cheerleaders, press stenographers and armchair-warrior commentators who abased themselves before Western state power, they would do well to heed the cogent summary offered by WikiLeaks:

If a journalist hides the truth they are not journalists; they are partners in the crime they are hiding.

•  Part 2 will follow shortly…

1. Lyahovsky, A.A., & Zabrodin, V.M., 1991, Taini Afganskoi Voini [Secrets of the Afghan War]. Moscow: Planeta

One issue under debate is whether military force alone can settle the problem of the Haqqani network or if a political settlement is necessary.

The other issue is whether the United States should continue to carry out a drone war against the Haqqani network in defiance of Pakistan’s demand for a veto over the strikes, or reach an accommodation with Pakistan that would narrow the focus of the strikes.

That policy debate pits top military leaders, Pentagon officials and the CIA, who want to put priority on pressuring Pakistan to attack the Haqqani forces, against those in the Obama administration who doubt that the military effort can be decisive and support a political approach to that key insurgent force.

The military, the Pentagon and the CIA have been pushing aggressively since late 2010 to get the administration to force the Pakistani military leadership to carry out a major offensive against the Haqqani leadership and forces in North Waziristan, despite an intelligence assessment that Islamabad will not change its policy toward the Haqqani group.

Just days before his tenure of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ended, Mullen took advantage of the consternation of the entire Obama administration over the 20-hour siege of the U.S. Embassy and U.S.- NATO headquarters in Kabul September 13 to raise the issue of Pakistani ties with the Haqqani group at a higher level of intensity.

He sought to exploit what he called “credible evidence” that Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was involved in the planning or execution of the Kabul attacks.

It soon became evident, however, that Mullen was not speaking for a united Obama administration. White House spokesman Jay Carney responded to a question about Mullen’s remarks on September 28 by saying it was “not language that I would use”.

A September 27 article in the Washington Post quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying that Mullen’s charge was “overstated” and that there was “scant evidence” of ISI “direction or control” over the Haqqani group.

Then Washington Times Pentagon correspondent Bill Gertz suggested September 28 that the criticism of Mullen was coming from officials in the intelligence community and the State Department who wanted to relax the pressure on Pakistan over the Haqqani network rather than intensifying it.

The critics were calling for cutting back sharply on drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, according to the Pentagon official who leaked the disagreement to Gertz. Their argument, according to Gertz’s source, was that continuing the strikes at the present level is unlikely to damage Al-Qaeda any more than it already has been.

That argument parallels those made by former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair in an August 14 New York Times op-ed piece.

The vast majority of the drone strikes over the past two years, however, have targeted the Haqqani network, not Al-Qaeda or the Pakistani Taliban. The drone war has therefore become the basis for an alliance between the leadership of the CIA and the military in support of pressure on Pakistan’s military over its failure to attack the Haqqani network.

The military and the CIA have argued strongly against negotiating with the Haqqani network. In June 2010, CIA Director Leon Panetta declared publicly, “We have seen no evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation where they would surrender their arms, where they would denounce Al-Qaeda, where they would really try to become part of that society.”

That position also reflected the interests of the U.S. military. Panetta’s move to Defence and his replacement by Gen. David Petraeus at CIA ensures that the same alignment of interests will continue.

But the Obama administration’s December 2010 strategy review produced a potential alternative to that military-CIA approach.

An intelligence assessment circulated just as the 50-page classified review of progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan was being completed concluded that Pakistan was not likely to agree to carry out a major military operation against the Haqqani group, regardless of U.S. pressures. It also suggested that, without such a change in Pakistan’s policy, the U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan couldn’t succeed.

That strengthened the hand of those who had been sceptical about the military’s approach to the problem. The result, according to sources familiar with the document, was that the strategy review suggested the need for a “political approach” to the insurgency in general and the Haqqani network in particular.

The review, which is described as “diagnostic” rather than “prescriptive”, did not mandate such a political approach, nor did it define what it would entail, according to the sources. The political approach “wasn’t off the ground yet”, one source told IPS.

The implication, however, was that the Haqqani network would have to be integrated into the broader U.S. strategy of “dialogue” with the Taliban insurgent leadership, even as military pressure on the insurgents continued. It could not go further than that, because Obama had not made a decision to enter into peace negotiations with the Taliban.

After the December review, Pakistan stepped up its effort to persuade the United States to deal directly with the Haqqani network, telling the Obama administration that it could bring the Haqqanis to the negotiating table.

Despite opposition from the military-Pentagon-CIA phalanx to a Haqqani role in negotiations, those in the State Department and the White House who were backing a broader strategy of negotiations for Afghanistan and hoping to ease tensions with Pakistan supported separate talks with the Haqqani group.

In a hint of the direction U.S. policy was tilting, Mullen, who was no fan of direct contacts with the Haqqani network, declared in June that some members of the network might be open to “reconciliation”.

ABC News revealed on “The Blotter” October 3 that a U.S. official had met with Ibrahim Haqqani, the son of the patriarch of the organisation, Jalaludin Haqqani, a few months before the September 13 Kabul attacks.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is now in day-to-day command of the network, told BBC the same day that the U.S. had raised the possibility of representation of the network in the Afghan government.

Although no U.S. official has confirmed that claim, it is consistent with past efforts to divide the Haqqanis from Mullah Mohammed Omar, to whom the Haqqanis have pledged their loyalty. In May 2004, Seyed Saleem Shahzad reported in the Asia Times Online that Siraj Haqqani had confirmed a report Shahzad had gotten from another source – presumably ISI – that the United States had offered through ISI to make Jalaludin Haqqani prime minister.

The elder Haqqani’s response, according to his son, was, “After so much killing of Afghans through ‘daisy cutter bombs’ and like, shall I sit in the government under U.S. command?”

While rejecting offers to end their resistance war in return for a position in the government, the Haqqanis are ready to join broader negotiations whenever Mullah Omar agrees to begin talks, as was confirmed by a Haqqani network source to Reuters September 17.

Last week, unnamed U.S. officials were spreading the word to news media that there was reason to believe the Haqqanis were to blame for the assassination of Afghan High Peace Council Burhanuddin Rabbani, despite the apparent absence of any real evidence the group was involved.

That was another indication that the debates over the two Haqqani-related issues are far from being resolved.