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Written by NotOverYet
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Saturday, 24 November 2007 |
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Manila Standard Today, Philippines
By Antonio C. Abaya
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
The ruling neo-con cabal in Washington DC is facing a geopolitical
dilemma: What to do if the government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf were
to collapse.
Pakistan has replaced Iran as the Crisis-of-the-Month. The Americans
(and the Israelis) have been itching to bomb Iran back to, at least,
the pre-industrial age. Iran has one of the largest known oil
reserves in the world, which the Americans covet, and is developing
the technology to build nuclear weapons, which the Israelis fear will
be used against them.
Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has after all said on many
occasions that the state of Israel should be wiped off the map.
On the other hand, Pakistan may have no oil, but it does have nuclear
weapons and the delivery systems with which to lob them to as far as
the Mediterranean Sea.
(Oil deposits that have been discovered in Central Asia are
programmed to be piped across Afghanistan to the Pakistani port city
of Karachi. That is why some 30,000 troops from the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization are fighting Islamic militants in Afghanistan,
thousands of miles away from the North Atlantic. Like Iraq,
Afghanistan is also about oil.)
In any order of battle, therefore, Pakistan is now top priority. If
the government of General Musharraf were to collapse, Pakistan 's
nuclear arsenal and ballistic missiles would be in danger of falling
into the wrong hands.
Not into the hands of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who is
trying to wrest power from General Musharraf through middle-class
People Power street action, with the help of hundreds of nattily
dressed lawyers protesting Musharraf's moves against the country's
Supreme Court chief justice (whom he had fired earlier over a
constitutional point).
The fear of the neo-cons is that Pakistan 's nuclear arsenal and
ballistic missiles might fall into the hands of Islamic militants,
who are also trying to overthrow Musharraf for their own sectarian
goals: The establishment of an Islamic state under Sharia law.
A nuclear-armed theocratic state in Pakistan would be the unforeseen
realization of the neo-cons' worst fears about Iran. Except that it
would exist in the here and now, not in two, five or 10 years' time.
In addition, a nuclear-armed Pakistan in the hands of Islamic
militants would ratchet up the simmering conflict with India over
Kashmir, and would embolden the Talibans in Afghanistan to finish off
the Nato contingents.
It would also give the Al Qaida's Osama bin Laden and Ayman al
Zawahiri, who are believed to be holed up in the mountainous tribal
areas in northeast Pakistan, more room for maneuver as they plan
their next moves against the Crusaders and the Zionists.
What to do? An article in the Nov. 18 issue of The New York Times,
written by Frederick W. Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon, may suggest what
the US response might be.
Neo-con Kagan was the chief architect of the Surge Plan which US
President George W. Bush put into play last January and which has
achieved a measure of success in Baghdad and neighboring Anbar
Province. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was
a signatory to the Project for the New American Century declaration
in 2000, which set the neo-con parameters for American defense
policies one year before 9/11.
In their joint article, Kagan and O'Hanlon suggest that the US could
send special forces to seize Pakistan's nuclear facilities and ship
the "nuclear material to someplace like New Mexico," but acknowledge
that "even pro-American Pakistanis would be unlikely to cooperate.
More likely, we would have to settle for establishing a remote
redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite
Pakistani forces, backed up (and watched over) by crack international
troops " Another Coalition of the Willing to which President Gloria
Macapagal Arroyo would conceivably send 51 Filipino policemen.
"A second broader option would involve supporting the core of the
Pakistani armed forces as they sought to hold the country together in
the face of an ineffective government, seceding border regions and Al
Qaida and Taliban assassination attempts against the leadership " In
December 2005, General Musharraf survived TWO assassination attempts
in TWO weeks, suspected to have been hatched by members of his own
military's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency, which had helped
organize the Taliban in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation
(1979-1989).
If Musharraf is assassinated the third time around, Benazir Bhutto
and the middle class lawyers are not likely to ascend to the seats of
federal power. More likely, Pakistan may fragment into smaller
pieces, with the Islamic militants grabbing what can be grabbed. For
us, this would be bad news because the Islamic militants in Mindanao,
Basilan and Sulu have organizational ties with Islamic militants in
Pakistan.
Wrote Kagan and O'Hanlon: "The great paradox of the post cold-war
world is that we are both safer, day to day, and in greater peril
than before. There was a time when volatility in places like Pakistan
was mostly a humanitarian worry; today it is as much a threat to our
basic security as Soviet tanks once were. We must be militarily and
diplomatically prepared to keep ourselves safe in such a world.
Pakistan may be the next big test." |
