A few days ago, the Pakistani military
issued a bogus number for civilians killed by U.S. drones in
Pakistan- 67. This figure defies credulity, contradicts all the
counts by reputable international human rights organizations and
media tabulations, and most significantly, contradicts the toll given
by the official Pakistani government.
[1] This
as the Pakistani “prime minister,” Nawaz Sharif, met Obama in
Washington to gripe about drone strikes, which he claims to oppose.
[2]
And now the U.S. just bumped off the current boss of the Pakistani
Taliban (terrorist cousins of the Afghan Taliban who wrecked
Afghanistan when they ruled it and have been given sanctuary by their
Pakistani military backers to launch terrorist attacks on Afghanistan
since they were chased out of power by the U.S. and Northern Alliance
in 2001), Hakimullah Mehsud.
Before continuing, let me say that no
human being should shed a tear for this loathsome fanatic's demise.
He insisted on imposing crushing, dehumanizing, lifelong repression
on everyone in Pakistan, especially on females, using mass murder in
the form of bombings of civilians and other acts of terror to compel
compliance with his demented demands. He represented the
anti-humanism of a barbaric Islamic sect. [3]
What's interesting politically here is
that Mehsud was knocked off by a U.S. drone (and it's a good guess
that the Pakistani military supplied info on his whereabouts to the
U.S. in order to enable this assassination- Pakistani military intel
confirmed the successful hit, as did Mehsud's Taliban henchmen) at
the very moment the nominal civilian government of Pakistan was
embarking on negotiations with this terrorist hoodlum, with a
delegation on their way to meet with Mehsud. So within just a few
days the real power in Pakistan, the military, undercut and sabotaged
the putative (civilian) government twice, first with the bogus
lowball number of civilian drone deaths, and now with this. The Paki
Interior Minister even described the U.S. assassination as a
calculated blow on the now-stillborn attempt to initiate a peace
process.
The effect of the hit was akin to
throwing a rock at a hornet's nest. “Our revenge will be
unprecedented!” howled Taliban terrorist commander “Abu Omar.”
He blamed the “fully complicit” Paki government: “We know our
enemy very well.” Pakistanis braced themselves for the bloody
vengeance to come. A RAND corporation specialist saw such a result as
likely. (RAND stands for Research And Development. A so-called “think
tank,” it was set up originally by the U.S. Air Force as a nest for
military-industrial complex plotters and “analysts.” Among other
things, it generates “research” used to justify prying
ever-larger sums of money out of Congress to shovel into the
insatiable maw of the military and its associated parasitic
corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Grumman, and
numerous others.)
Paki “officials” said CIA drones
fired four or more missiles at the target in a small village in North
Waziristan, the effectively-autonomous region of Pakistan that has
been de facto ceded to the terrorists. Their detailed
knowledge points to close collaboration on the hit. [4]
The CIA relied on
one of their bedrock principles: “payback's a bitch.” Mehsud's
group is blamed for the suicide bomber who killed 7 CIA employees in
Afghanistan in 2009. The CIA was duped into believing that the bomber
was an informer they have recruited to infiltrate the terrorists.
Outfoxed at their own game of duplicity, the CIA thirsted for
revenge, getting the U.S. government to put a $5 million bounty on
Mehsud's head. The CIA has been gunning for Mehsud ever since.
Of course the CIA
won't be paying the price for the latest killing of a Mehsud.
Pakistani civilians will. The Paki Taliban will be delivering the
bill, denominated in blood, to hapless and helpless Pakistanis who
are bystanders in their own country.
So in just a
couple of weeks, the U.S. has sabotage two governments'
attempts to deal with the Pakistan Taliban in their own way. Before
the Mehsud hit, the U.S. military waylaid a convoy of Afghan
intelligence officers in Afghanistan and kidnapped a Pakistan
Taliban representative they were escorting. The Afghans had a plan to
provide aid to the Paki Taliban as a counterweight to Pakistani
support for the Afghan Taliban, to retaliate for Paki-sponsored
terrorist attacks in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan, and to have
a bargaining chip to get the Pakis to back off their support for
Afghan Talibs. Thus does the U.S. undercut other governments,
exposing them as impotent in their own countries. In the Afghan case,
the Afghan regime was totally humiliated: imagine a foreign military
squad intercepting an FBI convoy and seizing someone they're
escorting, inside the U.S. Thus the arrogance of the self-proclaimed
“indispensable nation.” Thanks, Uncle Indispensable. [5]
Of course, the Pak
military also undercut the nominal Paki government, killing the
attempt at negotiations. So the military doesn't want a
rapproachement with the “militants.” The timing of the
killing makes this seemingly obvious. Yet it won't go in and fight
them. Once again, they are playing a twisted, sick, immoral game.
Playing with fire seems to be their favorite pastime. Perhaps they
feel a high level of domestic terrorism is in their interest. Perhaps
they figure it discredits the civilian government. Perhaps they are
planning on playing the “saving the nation”card and overthrowing
the nominal government at some point, as they have done before (and
as all military coupists everyway and always do, pretending to be
rescuing the nation they are enslaving).
Whether any true peace could have come
about from negotiations by the Pak government with their indigenous
terrorists is highly debatable. In the past, deals have been cut with
these cutthroats, only to be immediately dishonored by the
terrorists. The attempts by the Pakistani establishment to appease
the monster created by the Pak military have all proved futile.
Instead the terrorists launched aggressive military offensives to
take over more territory, and in the last few years have used bombs
to slaughter thousands of Pakistani civilians. I have in the past
noted the parallels between the Islamofascists and the European
fascists of the World War Two era. Some similarities are utter
untrustworthiness, utter ruthlessness, extreme violence, an
uncompromising attitude towards achieving their desired ends, and a
record of breaking deals whenever it suits them. But that does not
give the Pak military and the U.S. the right to sabotage the attempt
by the legal government of Pakistan to deal with its internal problem
in its own way. [See: “
Are Islamic Jihadists Fascist?”]
Then again, the U.S. is delusional if
it thinks that just by killing each replacement leader of a
particular gang of terrorists, they are winning. If ten Chairmen of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a row were each killed, would the U.S.
military collapse? If ten FBI or CIA directors in a row were taken
out with bombs, would the FBI and CIA cease to exist? Get my point?
These are not small organizations that can be eliminated with
assassinations. These are broad-based movements with millions of
sympathizers around the world, which provide a deep well from which
to recruit. [6]
Let's look at the scorecard: the U.S.
has assassinated thousands of putative terrorists, including most of
the main leaders, even Osama bin Laden, the arch-villain in the U.S.
propaganda narrative. And what has the result been? The terrorists
are waxing powerful in Pakistan. They are growing ever-stronger in
Iraq, openly building training camps and bases in the western part of
the country and setting off terror bombs almost daily. They are
becoming increasingly active in the Syrian civil war. They recently
look over half of Mali, and were about to take over the other half,
requiring a French invasion to push them back into the desert, where
they survive. Northern Nigeria is an ungoverned land of terror thanks
to Boko Haram and the murderous and ineffective Nigerian army.
Al-Shabab is seemingly ineradicable in Somalia, from where they just
launched a headline-grabbing assault on the main shopping mall in
Kenya (and repulsed a U.S. Navy SEAL retaliation raid a few weeks
ago). In Yemen U.S. missile strikes on villagers have created more
recruits for the local franchise of Al-Qaeda. The Wahhabi ideology is
spreading in the Far East, in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the former
U.S. colony of the Philippines. It seems that the U.S. is barely
holding the jihadist movement at bay, and may even be strategically
losing. Drones may be necessary in the fight, but they are clearly
not sufficient, not for victory, and maybe not even for a stalemate.
1] The official Paki government
is really just a nominal government. It provides virtually no
services to the population, and has historically been a vehicle for
the corrupt Paki civilian elite to enrich itself. Past presidents and
prime ministers of Pakistan were infamous for massive self-enrichment
as they engorged themselves like giant leeches sucking at the body
politic while in office. The real government is the deep state that
consist of the military and its secret police/terrorism arm, the
so-called “Inter Services Intelligence,” universally abbreviated
in U.S. media as ISI. Pakistan has been a military dictatorship or
oligarchy since its founding, sometimes using corrupt civilian
governments as a beard to hide behind, sometimes dispensing with the
disguise entirely.
2] Sharif may really oppose the
drone attacks on his country. But it's irrelevant, because the
nominal civilian government of Pakistan does not even control the
Pakistani military and cannot issue orders to it. The Pakistani
military is a state within a (sham) state.
3] On the other hand, a foreign
government firing missiles into a sovereign country to kill a
criminal and political gangster is hardly desirable. The right way to
do it would be for the government of that country to assert control
over its own territory, apprehend the criminal, and put him on trial.
(A real trial, not a show trial.) Then, if he is convicted, in
this case to execute him. The way things are, we have the U.S.
killing hundreds of civilians in the course of killing a couple of
thousands of presumed jihadists. And the U.S. military and secret
police decide who is “guilty” and act as judge, jury, and
executioner. This is what Eric Holder Jr., the top legal officer of
the U.S., insists is “due process” under the U.S. Constitution.
No U.S. court objects to this. Thus is the U.S. Constitution and the
U.S.' alleged love of rights revealed yet again, as it has been over
and over in U.S. history, to be a sham.
However, as a practical matter this is
a “dirty war.” The Pakistanis will not or can not control their
own territory at this point- perhaps the Frankenstein's Monster
created by the ISI has grown too extensively, the cancer spread too
far, for that. Besides, the Paki military would rather dream about
war with India instead of dealing decisively with the genuine threat
to Pakistan, the menace within that the military itself created and
nurtured.
We could go into the fact that the U.S.
itself fundamentally created this problem of jihad, along with its
buddies the Saudis and the Pakistani military (erstwhile buddies in
the latter case) when it decided to back the most primitive religious
revanchists during the Soviet attempt to impose a semi-modern client
regime in Afghanistan. But that's a whole other essay, and is ground
that others have tilled already. (The CIA shorthand for the negative
boomerang effect of U.S. actions is “blowback.”) It should be
common knowledge by now how the U.S. watered the noxious weed of
jihadism with money, weapons, and training, yet Americans manage to
pretend not to know it. Anyone who tries to mention it is intimidated
by the insinuation of being “pro-terrorist.” Just as anyone who
tries to talk about how Israel has the U.S. establishment by the
testicles is called “anti-Semitic,” a very effective silencing
technique which causes people to censor themselves, making the task
of the self-appointed political-ideological commissars all the
easier. Indeed, their task of policing the public sphere would be
impossible without the complicity of all those who self-censor.
4] “
U.S. Drones Said to Kill Leader of Pakistani Taliban, Dealing Militants Major Blow,”
New
York Times, November 2, 2013, p. A13. “One Pakistani
official, citing intelligence reports,” also informed the
NYT
that Mehsud's uncle and a bodyguard were killed with Mehsud, as was
Mehsud's deputy, Abdullah “I Love Beheadings!” Behar, plus two
others were wounded. Pretty detailed information, I'd say. So it
seems the CIA isn't the
only American organization with close
ties to Paki “intel.”
The NYT says that Behar took the
place of Latif Mehsud, the commander who was just kidnapped from the
Afghans by the U.S. (The NYT, in the aforementioned articles,
opaquely refers to the kidnapping this way: “Latif Mehsud...who was
detained [SIC] by American forces in Afghanistan last month.”
No mention hint that he was seized from the Afghans.
And true to form, the Obama regime once
again acted with irritating coyness, as it so often does. White House
mouthpiece Caitlin M. Hayden put out a statement claiming the Obama
regime was in no position “to confirm reports of Mr. Mahsud's
death,” in the NYT's words. But the Times got “two
[ANONYMOUS] American defense officials with knowledge of the strike”
to confirm that their prey was enjoying his virgins in paradise.
5] It's worth mentioning that
the big recent pusher of the “indispensable nation” conceit is
one Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State under William Jefferson
Clinton, who said, when confronted by Leslie Stahl on CBS' 60
Minutes TV program about half a million Iraqi children dying
because of Clinton's murderous sanctions on Iraq and asked “was it
worth it” by Stahl, responded, after some orotund smoke-blowing,
“We think it was worth it.” What exactly was gained in return for
killing 500,000 Iraqi children wasn't explained. Remember, the U.S.
didn't manage to overthrow Saddam Hussein until the
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld invasion of 2003. Stahl, at least in what was
broadcast by CBS, didn't follow up on Albright's shockingly callous
and cold-blooded reply. Albright evinced not the slightest discomfort
at the question and uttered her reply with complete self-assurance
and authority. This woman, who ironically descends from Jewish
background, could have been an apparatchik in Hitler's Final Solution
with that attitude.
6] Now, the fact that millions
are potential jihadi recruits might sound like justification
for massive NSA spying on the world's population- including all
Americans who use a phone or access the Internet. Well it might be,
if the U.S. government were willing to admit that there are millions
of terrorist sympathizers out there. But for political and
ideological reasons they are petrified to say that. It makes it plain
that their “war on terror” is an endless tunnel with no light at
the end. It also shows them up as deceivers who have presented the
enemy as small bands of fanatics, not fish swimming in a sea of
millions of ideologically-attuned populations. And it makes the
current strategy of limited military and violent CIA actions appear
hopeless inadequate, indeed Sisyphean, to the task of eliminating the
jihadist crusade.
In fact, there is good evidence that
trying to stamp out terrorism aimed at the U.S. by drone
assassinations in distant lands causes such terrorism. Right
after the U.S. assassinated Hakimullah Mehsud's predecessor,
Baitullah Mehsud, the group tried to detonate a car bomb in Times
Square, in the heart of Manhattan. (And see how well the decapitation
strategy is working to eliminate these organizations? Haircut
strategy would be a better analogy. Just keep cutting the hair as it
keeps growing back.) Luckily the bomb was a dud. Bystanders spotted
it and alerted police- yet another example of the superfluousness of
the police state in protecting against terrorism. (The NSA had the
gall to take credit for foiling the Times Square bombing attempt.
What shameless liars. Yet U.S. media still dutifully transmits their
lies to the public as if they had any credibility whatsoever.) The
same thing happened with the “underwear bomber,” whose father
alerted U.S. officials to his radicalization, who bought a one-way
ticket and flew without luggage, yet had no trouble boarding a plane
to the U.S. (Unlike dissidents, Green party members, and other
political victims put on the No-Fly list by the vindictive FBI and
other repressive organs.) Passengers on the plane stopped this
Nigerian jackass from detonating his crotch on the plane. And none of
the 9,000 soldiers and cops hunting the surviving Boston Marathon
bomber found him- a homeowner did.
Of course, the “counterterrorism”
careerists love such events as the Times Square dud car bomb,
as it provides a booster shot of Terror Scare propaganda to keep the
public going along with the never-ending War On Terror, which keeps
the money and power flowing to the professional secret policemen and
hitmen of the massive U.S. “security” apparatus. There is a
symbiotic relationship between the jihadists and the U.S. “security”
establishment. The blows each strikes against the other side provides
grist for their respective propaganda mills and reinvigorates their
violent crusades.
Another reason the justification
would be invalid is the fact that the military and secret
policemen of the U.S. deep state, while claiming to only be
protecting all us poor helpless damsels in distress from the big bad
scary terrorists, in fact use their ever-increasing power to repress
dissent. These people and organizations have a century-long history
now of massive surveillance of American progressives, dissidents, and
“uppity” blacks who refused to accept their status as “niggers,”
that is, as subhumans subject to random violence, murder,
exploitation, and every kind of personal humiliation and denial of
jobs, services, fairness, even seats on buses. We have just seen them
murder the journalist Michael Hastings. They helped smother the
Occupy Movement, that challenged the corporate and financial
oligarchy. They systematically use their surveillance to gather and
them launder “evidence” used against people. These people cannot
be trusted with such power. They know that Islamic terrorism is no
fundamental threat to their system. In fact, periodic attacks serve
their interests, by justifying their relentless grabbing of more and
more repressive power inside America, with the acquiescence of a
population conditioned to be frightened and submissive to being
treated more and more like a prison population.
In addition, Congress has given them
carte blanche, with sham “oversight,” willingly kept in
the dark by the repressive deep state, and “judicial review”
consists of a secret “court” that rubber-stamps all the warrant
requests of the surveillance apparatus, a mere paperwork exercise.
In fundamental ways there isn't much
new here. The same deep state took out the president of the U.S.,
their nominal commander, in 1963 when they disapproved of his
policies.
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