Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Another US Plan To Bring More War To Pakistan

A new and classified American military proposal outlines an intensified effort to enlist tribal leaders in the frontier areas of Pakistan in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as part of a broader effort to bolster Pakistani forces against an expanding militancy, American military officials said.
Is this a trial balloon? Or the shape of things already in motion?

Whatever it is, it's more bad news from The New York Times:

U.S. Hopes to Use Pakistani Tribes Against Al Qaeda
If adopted, the proposal would join elements of a shift in strategy that would also be likely to expand the presence of American military trainers in Pakistan, directly finance a separate tribal paramilitary force that until now has proved largely ineffective and pay militias that agreed to fight Al Qaeda and foreign extremists, officials said. The United States now has only about 50 troops in Pakistan, a Pentagon spokesman said, a force that could grow by dozens under the new approach.
Now we're talking about spending millions (or billions) (or trillions) of dollars and dozens or hundreds or thousands of lives (who knows? who cares?) to foment more war ...

... by hiring more people to fight against the people who are fighting against us (and against the people we're paying to fight with us).

Presumably because it's working so well!
The proposal is modeled in part on a similar effort by American forces in Anbar Province in Iraq that has been hailed as a great success in fighting foreign insurgents there. But it raises the question of whether such partnerships, to be forged in this case by Pakistani troops backed by the United States, can be made without a significant American military presence in Pakistan. And it is unclear whether enough support can be found among the tribes, some of which are working with Pakistan's intelligence agency.
And now we're talking about ethnic cleansing.
The tribal proposal, a strategy paper prepared by staff members of the United States Special Operations Command, has been circulated to counterterrorism experts but has not yet been formally approved by the command’s headquarters in Tampa, Fla. Some other elements of the campaign have been approved in principle by the Americans and Pakistanis and await financing, like $350 million over several years to help train and equip the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force that has about 85,000 members and is recruited from border tribes.
And what is this doing in the New York Times?
Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has used billions of dollars of aid and heavy political pressure to encourage Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, to carry out more aggressive military operations against militants in the tribal areas. But the sporadic military campaigns Pakistan has conducted there have had little success, resulting instead in heavy losses among Pakistani Army units and anger among local residents who have for decades been mostly independent from Islamabad’s control.

American officials acknowledge those failures, but say that the renewed emphasis on recruiting allies among the tribal militias and investing more heavily in the Frontier Corps reflect the depth of American concern about the need to address Islamic extremism in Pakistan. The new counterinsurgency campaign is also a vivid example of the American military’s asserting a bigger role in a part of Pakistan that the Central Intelligence Agency has overseen almost exclusively since Sept. 11.
Larisa Alexandrovna says, "How is this for stupid?"
After having all but ignored al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden for the last six years, the Bush administration is now refocusing their efforts by using a new, but old, strategy of arming people they do not know, cannot control, and who will likely turn against us.
I agree it's stupid, but it also fits into a larger plan.

Chycho says, "Is this the next phase of the plans to partition Pakistan?"
Further information at “Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a ‘New Middle East’
Click the map to enlarge it.

Chycho says:
The only way to defuse the situation and dampen the hatred that locals must have towards the United States and its allies is, as Taliq Ali and Malalai Joya suggest, an immediate and complete withdrawal of all foreign forces from Afghanistan.
We can't even get out of Iraq, where our intervention was based on a pack of lies that almost everybody now agrees was a pack of lies!

How are we ever going to get out of Afghanistan, which was based on a different pack of lies altogether?

It's not going to be easy -- not without 9/11 Truth -- especially with the 9/11-Lie "anti-war" crowd saying "We're diverting the troops from Afghanistan!"