The news from Pakistan in recent weeks is very disturbing. US drone strikes are moving deeper into Pakistan, not only in the tribal areas but also in the "settled" area of Bannu. There seems to be pretty strong evidence of collusion between the US administration and the government of Zardari and company and active collaboration between the Pakistan Army and US forces in Afghanistan. US strikes inside Pakistan are not actively opposed while verbal protests are made to the US ambassador in Islamabad. This is what is called "nura kushti" in Punjabi. It seems that the Pakistan government has given the green light to the US to bomb any area of the NWFP, which it deems necessary, leading to the deaths of tens of civilians in the last few months. If the Pakistan government was serious about protesting these raids it could close US/NATO supply lines, which run from Karachi to Torkham, but it does not do so. It is hypocritical to protest about the bombings when knowing fully well that the fuel and ammunition for the Predators is supplied through Pakistan. The Pakistan Air Force is clearly capable of detecting slow moving Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) entering Pakistan air space and of sending fighters to intercept them to either force them to go back or to shoot them down. Apparently there was one such incident in September 2008 when PAF jets were scrambled over North Waziristan forcing an UAV to disappear. But the Air Force does not do so now. Why?
The US claims that it is only killing Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives and leaders and names of those killed are bandied about in both the Pakistani and Western press. However there is no way to verify any of these statements and in the meanwhile one sees the corpses of women and children who have been killed. It seems to me that many of these killings are approved by some of the liberal/left intelligentsia of Pakistan who see the US fighting their war against Islamic fundamentalism. But, and I want to emphasize this, these are all extra-judicial murders and are clearly illegal under Pakistani law. (Perhaps not under US law, under which the US president can authorise the killing of foreigners without due process of law, witness the various attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and hosts of other murders carried out around the world by US secret service agencies. The British also specialise in extra-judicial killings. The UK’s special forces, the SAS, in an infamous extra-judicial incident killed three unarmed IRA suspects in March 1988 in Gibraltar). Take the case of the presumed killing a few days ago of the UK citizen, Rashid Rauf, by a US missile strike. The point to emphasize is that according to UK police sources he was a "suspected terrorist" and they wanted to arrest him. No charges were proved against him and in fact he was acquitted by a Pakistani court at one time. I am not presuming that he was innocent but simply that he had not been convicted of any crime. He was killed (if the news is true) by the US on intelligence presumably provided by Pakistan. This is clearly an extra-judicial killing, which is a crime. The principle of law for which we are fighting in Pakistan and which "presumably" the US also upholds is that one is innocent until proven guilty. Somebody may accuse me of being soft on the Taliban but this is not so. I deplore their tactics and am opposed to the kind of system that they would like to impose on Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the point is that "we" are supposed to be defending a just society in which justice and the rule of law prevail. Extra-judicial killings negate the very principles for which we stand and reduce us to the same barbaric level of the Taliban who carry out suicide bombings and murders in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In fact all the killings by the US in Waziristan are nothing other than extra-judicial murders. One could argue that one is at war and these are "enemy combatants". But where is the proof? The US says that these people are terrorists who are plotting to attack US forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere but again where’s the proof? The onus of proof is on the US and in this they have dismally failed. How can we believe their statements about people they kill in Waziristan (whom they have not interrogated or talked to) when they have not been able to prove even after 7 years of interrogation and torture that the people that they illegally hold in Guantanamo are terrorists?
The US claims that the armed resistance in Afghanistan is fuelled by training camps and infiltration from across the border in Pakistan. But we have heard this kind of story many times during the last 50 years whenever the US is unable to quell a popular resistance. When the US was losing the war against the Vietnamese people’s resistance it blamed infiltration from Cambodia. Remember the secret, ruthless and indiscriminate bombing of Cambodia by the US Strategic Air Command from March 1969 to May 1970. The supposed targets were the base areas and sanctuaries of the People’s Army of Vietnam and forces of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam. The campaign failed in stopping the victorious Vietnamese liberation army but it resulted in the deaths of an estimated 600,000 Cambodians. Not only did it fail but also popular indignation led to thousands of Cambodians joining the Khmer Rouge who then established a brutal regime in Cambodia. History may repeat itself here in Pakistan with the difference that instead of the mass murderers of the Khmer Rouge we may have their cousins, the Taliban, in power in Islamabad. Ironically protests against these Cambodian bombings were part of the May Day rally in Lahore in 1970 which I happened to take part in.
The same argument has been used recently in justifying the attack across the border into Syria from Iraq. Iran is also blamed for stirring up trouble in Iraq. It is all too easy for the US to blame infiltration from Pakistan for its troubles in Afghanistan. I am not saying that there are no training camps in Waziristan or that there is no infiltration but these are not really what are the crucial factors of the coming NATO defeat in Afghanistan. As any serious student of guerrilla warfare will tell you, there is no way an insurgency can be successful unless it has the support of the people. (The great Che himself discovered this to his cost in his failed campaign in Bolivia when he was cut off from the people). It should be obvious that the resistance in Afghanistan is winning (or at least is not losing) because the people of large parts of Afghanistan support it. And it should be clear that this kind of support does not come by terrorising the people. Clearly the Taliban in Afghanistan have identified themselves successfully with Pashtoon nationalism and the natural resistance of any people to foreign occupation. There is also evidence that the Taliban are now reaching out to their erstwhile enemies, the Tajiks and Uzbeks, to forge an alliance against foreign occupation. It would be well for the US to look within Afghanistan and to its own stupidity in invading Afghanistan in the first place to discover why it is losing the war.
The analogies with the Vietnam War do not end here. There are reports that US counterinsurgency trainers have been sent to Pakistan to train Pakistan Army instructors who will then train the Frontier Constabulary in counterinsurgency tactics. There are several interrogatives which arise here. The US claims that the Pakistan Army is a traditional army and has no experience or training in counterinsurgency. A corollary to this is that the US army does have such experience and knows how to fight a counterinsurgency. If such a claim weren’t tragic it would be laughable. For all its so-called experience it lost the war in Vietnam and is losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So what do they intend to teach the Pakistan Army? From the experiences in Vietnam and Iraq we know what constitutes counterinsurgency for the US army. Let me list some of the tactics here. These are the tactics taught at the notorious U.S. Army School of the Americas (in Panama from 1946 to 1984 when it was moved to the US) and which are part of CIA training manuals.
1. Massive and indiscriminate bombardment.
2. Collective punishment. The wholesale destruction of villages and towns which resist. Witness Fallujah, My Lai, and a host of others. These are the tactics which the Israelis use in Palestine as for example the destruction of Jenin. This is what is going on right now in Gaza. Is this the tactic which the Pakistan Army followed in destroying Lowi Sam in Bajaur?
3. Death squads. This is the advanced and organised form of extra-judicial assassinations. Recall the infamous Phoenix Program in South Vietnam designed to capture or assassinate the civilian infrastructure supporting the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam between 1967 and 1972. Nearly 30,000 Vietnamese were killed. The US promoted death squads in its client states in Latin America, like Chile, Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras to suppress the people resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of people. There is evidence of death squads in Iraq run by the Interior Ministry with the help of the US.
4. Torture. As we saw in Vietnam, Latin America, Guantanamo and Iraq (Abu Ghraib) torture is an integral and vital part of US counterinsurgency techniques.
5. Disappearances.
6. Disinformation, lies and propaganda.
7. Counter-terror.
8. Manipulating ethnic divisions within the country.
Are these the tactics which we want the Pakistan Army to follow in fighting the Islamic fundamentalists in the Frontier? Is this the kind of police state we want to live in? These are the tactics of a ruthless colonising force like the Israelis in Palestine and the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. If so then surely we are doomed to failure. Surely these are not the tactics one should use in dealing with our own Islamic fundamentalists however murderous and ruthless they might be.
In any case we already have the police indulging in extra-judicial killing and the secret agencies taking part in torture, illegal detention and disappearances. We already have thousands of people who have disappeared from Baluchistan. We have systematic torture being practised by our (in)-security agencies. Surely we want less of this rather than more of this. After all we were on the streets in 2007 to call for the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry who had begun to take up the cases of disappeared people and those who had been illegally transferred to US custody. It is precisely because the US wants to follow these tactics that it opposes the reinstatement of the Chief Justice. The demand of the people of Pakistan in 2007 was and now in 2008 is for an end to injustice, torture and illegal detention and not more of the same. If we follow this path we will surely swell the ranks of the Taliban.
The disturbing analogies with Vietnam continue. The presence of US trainers/advisors in Pakistan is very ominous. This can be the first step towards direct US involvement in military operations inside Pakistan. Recall that it was the dispatching of US military advisors to South Vietnam by Kennedy in the early 1960s which was the prelude to the later invasion of Vietnam by the United States. I am afraid that the stationing of US military advisors is just the thin edge of the wedge. I have stressed the analogy with Vietnam a lot in this essay to emphasize that those who do not learn from history are condemned to suffer its consequences.
Gen. Petraeus (an apt Imperial Roman name!), Imperial Pro-Consul and Commander of the imperial legions (the new US Central Command boss), is credited with a new counterinsurgency policy in Iraq while he was the commander there. But the evidence points to the "new" policy being more of the same: greater use of airpower, death squads, dividing the country along ethnic lines and paying local gangs to "keep the peace". Now we have my erstwhile friend, Ahmed Rashid, as advisor to Gen. Petraeus. I wonder how Rashid feels being advisor to the commander of an army which has been responsible for the deaths of nearly a million Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Afghanis and whose policies have led to over 2 million Iraqis becoming refugees and the total destruction of that country. Does this not disturb him? How can he be an advisor to the commander of an army which is bombing Pakistan? There has not been a greater crime against humanity in the recent past than the catastrophe inflicted on Iraq by Petraeus and his predecessors. I have been following Ahmed Rashid’s evolution from the 1970s. It is sad to see his evolution from a young idealist who wanted to bring a socialist Marxist revolution to Pakistan in the 1970s to an apologist of imperialism in 2008. He has become a steadfast supporter of US intervention in Central Asia as is evident from his books "Jihad", "The Resurgence of Central Asia" and "Descent into Chaos" and I guess it was a natural step for him to become an advisor to an imperial army. I wonder if there is a law in Pakistan which forbids a Pakistani national from being an advisor to a serving general of a foreign army which is bombing Pakistan.
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