This morning I heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telling the BBC World Service that the reason she’s pushing Pakistan so hard on cleaning out Taliban areas is that the Taliban continue to be in league with al-Qaeda—that they form “a syndicate of terror.”
Factually, this is wrong, of course, and is even uncomfortably reminiscent of George W. Bush’s groundless linking of Saddamism to al-Qaeda. But religiously it is even wrong-er. Because what the Secretary does not see at all, apparently, is what all Pakistanis see as we up the ante and use ever-more-lethal drone attacks to “take out” alleged bad guys. What they see is that we constitute our very own syndicate of terror within their national borders. In her brilliant reporting for the New Yorker, Jane Mayer continues to document why everyday Pakistanis and Afghanis would see it this way. They don’t see us rescuing them; they see us ruining them, both through our slaughter of so many innocents and also through our utter obliviousness to their folkways and traditions.
This is why Matthew Hoh resigned his State Department position: he saw the disastrous confluence of moral blindness and military hubris in our current approach to the region.
But let us even suppose that Clinton is correct in her assertion of a hand-and-glove relationship between Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. Even then, would what we are doing there under the rubric of counterterrorism make any sense at all? No, it would make even less sense, because nothing is more certain to cement just such an unholy relationship than bellicose U.S. insistence that there can be no middle ground: that a given tribal leader, say, needs to be totally for us or else we will treat him as totally against us.
And note that it is always about “us.”
That is the other thing that rightly inflames the locals. We are still seeking to avenge a trauma that took place eight years ago in Lower Manhattan, and we appear willing to inflict any amount of trauma on any number of others in order to work out our own issues.
Yes, Af-Pak continues to be a stew of strategic confusion for policymakers. But at the root of it is a still-worse moral confusion about means and ends and a tragic absence of accurate self-perception.
Tags: af-pak, afghanistan, hillary clinton, state department
"We are still seeking to avenge a trauma that took place eight years ago in Lower Manhattan, and we appear willing to inflict any amount of trauma on any number of others in order to work out our own issues."
Laarman makes this sound like a psychoanalytic couch session. As if the trauma is in our minds and the military response is akin to a neurosis. This is a fundamentally flawed view of international relations. Al-Qaeda physically attacked the United States on numerous occasions. Al-Qaeda was receiving succor and support from the Taliban in Afghanistan. Thus the United States responded. The U.S. has a responsiiblity to finish what it started.
Laarman claims that it is 'factually wrong' that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are working together. With all due respect to Rev. Laarman what national security updates does he receive?
Right after 9/11 some in the White House wanted to retaliate against Iraq. Then we got Bin Laden pinned down in the hills of Afganistan, but we held up. We could have captured or killed him, but we wanted time to get our army in the region. Then it turned out we weren't that interested in Bin Laden, we wanted war in Iraq, probably because they have a potential of 40 trillion dollars of oil in the ground. I suspect we knew that killing OBL might prematurely end our terror war just when such tremendous political power was flowing from the situation. We acted in the best interests of the rich who could profit from a war that we could fund with hundreds of billions of dollars. We acted in the best interests of the rich who were hoping in the end to have an oil deal that would give themselves rights to the oil, and a residual force to protect their interests. We acted in the best interests of conservative politicians who were gaining ground by calling liberals un-American.
No one disputes the need to take al-Qaeda seriously. That is precisely what the Bush-Cheney response to 9-11 did NOT do, and there is much evidence that the Obama policy will be no more strategic. You say "The U.S. has a responsibility to finish what it started." Sounds to me exactly like General Westmoreland in Vietnam. And no, I don't receive strategic briefings, but much of the intelligence that the press has been able to ferret out suggests that the Taliban, though scary and repressive, have different objectives from those of al-Qaeda. The point I was making is that if we WANT the Taliban and al-Qaeda to form a syndicate of "terror against us" we couldn't be spurring that development any better than we are right now with our massive presence and our remote-control assassinations in a country (Afghanistan) that we are clueless about.
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