Contrary to what US policymakers and opinion-makers would want us to believe, destabilising Pakistan – causing disruption and disarray in the Pakistani state – is part of ‘an evolving US foreign policy agenda’, writes Rahnuma Ahmed in conclusion of a four-part essay

I believed it [the war in Iraq] was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks... Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven.
   Barack Obama, ‘My Plan for Iraq’, Op-Ed, The New York Times, July 14, 2008
   
   SO, president Obama believes that the war in Iraq was ‘a grave mistake’. And what will the next US president say? That Obama’s escalation of the war in the ‘Af-Pak theatre’ was ‘an even more grave mistake’?
   Baghdad was reported to be slipping into a civil war in 2006. In recent weeks, sectarian violence has exploded as the predominantly Shia Iraqi government forces and the US-created al-Sahwa (Sons of Iraq), a Sunni militia, openly fight each other. Sectarianism was unknown in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, writes Dahr Jamail. Manufactured and fomented by the occupying forces, it is aimed at dividing Iraq along purportedly ‘natural’ ethnic-religious lines – Kurds, Shias and Sunnis. Proposed by Senator Joseph Biden (now the vice-president) in 2006, the US corporate media has since gone into gear, spinning tales of how Iraq’s borders were ‘artificially-constructed’. And how, in the interests of stopping further bloodshed, Iraq needs to be carved-up.
   A grave mistake it definitely was, but is the Obama administration doing anything to undo it? To make reparations? Like, say, rescinding the SOFA and the SFA agreements, said to have been approved by Iraq’s ‘sovereign’ parliament? Repealing the ‘hydrocarbon law’? Dismantling its 14 ‘enduring bases’ that resemble self-contained cities as much as military outposts? Closing down Fortress America, the recently-opened $700-million embassy in Iraq, the largest on the planet, ten times that of US embassy’s elsewhere, with space for 1,000 employees?
   And what about the 1,331,578 Iraqi deaths (justforeignpolicy.org)? No doubt an unbearably heavy burden for a nation that had ‘nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.’ Lost lives cannot be brought back, but at the very least, international war crimes trials can proceed against Bush and co. ‘Forgiving and forgetting’ maybe easy for Obama, but not so for the Iraqis.
   As Obama’s war shifts to Afghanistan and Pakistan (now that Iraq has been turned into, in Jamail’s words, a ‘permanent colony’), it seems, from what Obama says, the US’s ‘strategic goals’ can be broadened. And, what could they be? Are they aimed at making Pakistan more secure as a nation state, or at destabilising her?
   Contrary to what US policymakers and opinion-makers would want us to believe, destabilising Pakistan – causing disruption and disarray in the Pakistani state – is part of ‘an evolving US foreign policy agenda’. Michel Chossudovsky, professor of economics, University of Ottawa, thinks that regime change is no longer the main thrust of US foreign policy. That the policy is to actively promote Pakistan’s political fragmentation and balkanisation, as a nation.
   A new strategy has been set in motion to replace the older one of indirectly ruling Pakistan through its military and intelligence apparatus, one that was crafted and put into effect over decades by Washington. ‘Regime change’ aimed at ensuring continuity under military rule has been discarded. The new strategy is to institute a compliant political leadership, one that has no commitment to the national interest, that will simultaneously serve US imperial interests, while working towards the weakening of the central government, and fracturing Pakistan’s federal structure, already ‘fragile’. Direct forms of American interference – and this includes an enlarged US military presence within the nation’s territory – will soon follow.
   Other reports indicate that Washington has been heavily pressurising the Pakistani government since January to forget its long-standing enmity with India over disputed Kashmir. To fight ‘its’ war instead, against the Taliban and ‘al-Qaeda’. Military aid passed by the present US Congress is tied, to ensure that Pakistan’s military establishment no longer deviates as it had earlier, when it secretly went ahead and made its own nuclear bomb (1998). It is generally believed that President Reagan had pretended not to know, had kept it secret from Congress so that military aid to Pakistan could pour unabated, and Pakistan (and the ISI) could continue brokering the Washington-sponsored mujahideen resistance in Afghanistan. To defeat the Soviet Union, the ‘evil empire’.
   US military training to be given now will focus exclusively on fighting ‘counterinsurgency’ forces. In the name of providing military training to Pakistan’s security forces, analysts think that the US military presence will gradually be increased to numbers not previously known in Pakistan. Re-deploying the Pakistan army to fight the Obama administration’s war in neighbouring Afghanistan, and in its own country, is strategic to Washington’s global domination project: it will ‘free’ India from worrying either about its illegal occupation of Kashmir, or the threat of ISI-sponsored militant infiltration and attacks, planned across the border. A free Delhi will be able to work more closely with Washington, to be a counterforce to the inexorable rise of China. And, as Pepe Escobar points out, Washington’s dream of balkanising Pakistan would dismantle the ‘Terrorist Central’, capable of contaminating other parts of the Muslim world, from Indian Kashmir to the Central Asian ‘stans’ – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan. A Terrorist Central that was birthed and nurtured by the US, as revealed by Benazir Bhutto’s warning to President George Bush senior in the late 1980s, ‘You are creating a Frankenstein.’
   Baluchistan, long neglected by the Pakistani government, is in Escobar’s words, ‘the ultimate prize’. Comprising half of Pakistan’s land area, its deserts are immensely rich in uranium and copper; potentially very rich in oil, it produces more than one-third of Pakistan’s natural gas. Less than 4 per cent of her population live there; Baluchis are the majority, seconded by Pashtuns. Strategically, the US covets Baluchistan for several reasons: it lies east of Iran, south of Afghanistan, and has three Arabian seaports, including Gwadar, practically at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz. Built by China, Gwadar is the crux to what Escobar calls ‘the Pipelineistan war’, between the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline (IPI) and the US-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline (TAPI). IPI is planned to cross from Iranian to Pakistani Baluchistan – a nightmare for Washington. Whereas TAPI, perennially-troubled, is planned to cross western Afghanistan via Herat and branch out to Kandahar and Gwadar.
   Gwadar’s strategic value for China stems from its closeness to the Strait of Hormuz, since nearly 60 per cent of China’s energy supplies come from the Middle East. While China is anxious that the US, with its very high military presence in the region, could choke off these supplies, US military circles whip up paranoia about China’s scheme of building a naval base in Gwadar. In Washington’s dream of empire-building, Gwadar is to be the new Dubai. What stokes the fire is Pakistan’s status, a key pivot to both NATO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, of which Pakistan is an observer. Whoever ‘wins’ Balochistan, says Escobar, incorporates Pakistan as a key transit corridor to either Iranian gas from the monster South Pars field, or to a great deal of the Caspian wealth of ‘gas republic’ Turkmenistan.
   From Washington’s imperial perspective, Baluchistan has to be thrown into chaos. Nothing short of that will stop the construction of the IPI gas pipeline. Once Pakistan is balkanised, the US could take control of Baluchistan’s rich natural resources, and promote Gwadar for the benefit of TAPI, not IPI. That would fulfil the imperial dream – Caspian gas would flow under American and not Russian or Iranian control.
   The impending Talibanisation of Pakistan is accompanied by shrill cries of ‘nukes in the hands of kooks’, i.e. derogatory reference to Islamic militants who, it is assumed, will lay their hands on Pakistan’s nuclear bomb any minute, and that of course, will signal the end of the world. In the last week of April, secretary of state Hillary Clinton, in an appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was asked whether aid to Pakistan would be linked to getting information from AQ Khan, head of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, who later confessed to having been involved in a clandestine international network of selling nuclear know-how. Naming AQ Khan ‘probably the world’s greatest proliferator’, the US secretary of state said, we made it very clear that the network had been dismantled, and it was.
   But has the US network been dismantled? Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator-turned-whistleblower, has tried for five years to launch a congressional investigation of corruption at Washington’s highest levels – sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage – but has not succeeded. Not only has Congress refused to act, but the Justice Department, on a request from the State Department and Pentagon, has shrouded her case under the state-secrets privilege, ‘a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances’ (Philip Giraldi, 2008). Edmonds offered to tell her story to US media outlets. No response. What is now known is from her interview in the UK’s Sunday Times, and through a website linked through her. Through these, Edmonds speaks of ‘a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources [that] was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defence Departments.’ Her allegations are against Richard Perle, then chief of the Pentagon’s prestigious Defence Policy Board, and Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defence for policy. Senators Grassley and Leahy, a Republican and a Democrat, who interviewed her at length in 2002, attested to her ‘believability’.
   Nuclear secrets are definitely in rogue hands.
   And, where, in this unfolding story of great power games and imperial designs, wars over energy, covert operations and military-intelligence networks, corrupt and pliant political leadership serving Western imperial interests, balkanisation and cartography, sales of nuclear secrets, are the people and what they want.
   Iraqis want to stay united and to fight the occupation, writes Dahr Jamail. Pakistanis in general, according to The Times (May 5, 2009), are reported to ‘mistrust the west’ more than they fear the Taliban. And while Baluchis definitely want more autonomy, they are adamant about remaining within a Pakistani confederation. Escobar writes, people in FATA, or Swat, or anywhere else dread the Taliban-style rule. But they dread even more ‘being split into four countries and [going] under Indian suzerainty.’ And in Washington’s eyes, as Escobar points out, any form of resistance to foreign interference or Predator hell from above bombing is inevitably branded ‘Taliban’.
   The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Washington, the Pentagon and its European allies, may truly have made a mistake.