As Wall Street collapsed with a bang, almost no one noticed that we're on the brink of war with Pakistan.
People who don't read Rantburg didn't notice. We just talked about it a day or two ago.
And, unfortunately, that's not too much of an exaggeration. On Tuesday, the Pakistan's military ordered its forces along the Afghan border to repulse all future American military incursions into Pakistan.
That statement was likely for internal consumption and they're probably chagrined that it made the internationals. Yesterday there was another dronezap of a training camp and it was played up as "cooperation" with us. There's a lot of money coming into Pakistain from the U.S., and they don't call him Mr. Ten Percent for nothing.
The story has been subsequently downplayed, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mike Mullen, flew to Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, to try to ease tensions. But the fact remains that American forces have and are violating Pakistani sovereignty.
The Paks are violating Afghan sovreignty as well, and they're sending Pak trained and financed bad turbans to try and kill Americans.
You have to wonder whether the Bush administration understands what it is getting into.
Since Bush has been dealing with the Paks since the afternoon of 9/11/2001, I'd say he probably has a pretty good handle on them by now.
In case anyone has forgotten, Pakistan has a hundred plus nuclear weapons.
I'd heard it was a couple dozen deliverable. I'd guess the Indians know exactly how many are operational and probably where they're located.
It's a country on the edge of civil war.
It's been a country on the edge of civil war almost since its founding, and the process has been accelerating almost exponentially since Zia ul-Haq. The Paks are now, at this moment, in the midst of an undeclared civil war, no longer on the edge but rocketing down the slippery slope. Being Paks, they're hollering "wheee!" and enjoying the ride to oblivion.
Its political leadership is bitterly divided. In other words, it's the perfect recipe for a catastrophe.
That's why we call it a "failed state." Despite its elections and even in spite of its free press, Pak is actually worse off that Bangla this year, though that says nothing about where either country will be next year. It's like saying that someone with terminal cancer is better off than somebody with terminal mutating fungus.
All of which begs the question,
"Oh, please, Mr. Question!"
is it worth the ghost hunt we've been on since September 11?
In a word, yes.
There has not been a credible sighting of Osama bin Laden since he escaped from Tora Bora in October 2001.
Except on tape.
As for al-Qaeda, there are few signs it's even still alive, other than a dispersed leadership taking refuge with the Taliban. Al-Qaeda is alive and well, with branches all over the world, many of them operating under the al-Qaeda brand, like al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (formerly GSPC) and al-Qaeda in Yemen (formerly the Islamic Army of Aden) and al-Qaeda in Turkey (formerly the Great Eastern Raiders of Islam or some such gradiose name). There is an al-Qaeda in Britain that's distict from al-Qaeda in Europe, and both are loosely controlled by al-Qaeda headquarters in Pakistain. Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is mostly distinct from al-Qaeda in Pakistain and both have distinct chains of command leading back to Chitral, where Binny lives.
Al-Qaeda couldn't even manage to post a statement on the Internet marking September 11, let alone set off a bomb.
That's because Azzam al-Marini was either zapped by a Hellfire in Damadola or some such steenking border ville or drowned in his hot tub. That would seem to validate our habit of zapping the occasional turban regardless of which side of the border he's on.
U.S. forces have been entering Pakistan for the last six years. But it was always very quietly, usually no more than a hundred yards in, and usually to meet a friendly tribal chieftain.
Who would later end up with his head chopped off, in many cases...
Pakistan knew about these crossings, but it turned a blind eye because it was never splashed across the front page of the country's newspapers.
It kept the deniability plausible...
This has all changed in the last month, as the Administration stepped up Predator missile attacks. And then, after the New York Times ran an article that U.S. forces were officially given the go-ahead to enter Pakistan without prior Pakistani permission, Pakistan had no choice but to react.
Thankew, Noo Yawk Times... Actually, the Paks could have officially not noticed the article. What set them off was the fact that we were zapping protected jihadi camps, and probably frying precious ISI agents in the process.
On another level the Bush Administration's decision to step up attacks in Pakistan is fatally reckless, because the cross-border operations' chances of capturing or killing al Qaeda's leadership are slim.
Depends on the intel they're getting. Fashions change in the intel world almost as fast as they do in fashionable but Gay Paree, and the current fashion sez there's nothing like HUMINT, the guy on the ground who's seen it with his own eyes and reported it to his controller. I lean more toward the SIGINT side of the house, myself, since it's more difficult to tell your handler what he/she/it wants to hear when you don't know you're being handled. A telephone call saying "I'll meet you at Mahmoud's house in Damadola on the 26th at 5 in the morning" with an imagery confirm of truck stopping at a house in Damadola at 4.45 am is better intel than "Screech is gonna be in Damadola on the 26th."
American intelligence isn't good enough for precision raids like this.
Actually it is. That's why they take place.
Pakistan's tribal regions are a black hole that even Pakistani operatives can't enter and come back alive.
They do it all the time. They just don't want to admit it. ISI has worked with these goobers for years.
Overhead surveillance and intercepts do little good in tracking down people in a backward, rural part of the world like this.
I just gave an example of how they do. Throw in modern RDF systems and ground-based sensors and my guess is that we've got a pretty good handle on things. I've been out of the business for a long time, but I saw the birth pangs of lots of those systems and participated in a few. This is 20 years later. The ones that weren't stillborn or smothered in their cribs are grownup now, and I'll bet they're better than I'd have imagined when I met the early ones in 1968.
On top of it, is al-Qaeda worth the candle?
If you have to ask the question you shouldn't be in the business.
Yes, some deadender in New York or London could blow himself up in the subway and leave behind a video claiming the attack in the name of al-Qaeda. But our going into Pakistan, risking a full-fledged war with a nuclear power, isn't going to stop him.
Allow me to direct your attention to Chechnya. That's not a place I'd like to live, mind you, but things are much more calm and peaceful than they were in the heyday of Shamil Basayev. The Russers kept banging mastermind after mastermind: Khattab, Abu Walid, even Maskhadov himself. But once they hit Shamil the Chechen insurgency was toast. They have to rebuild from the ground up, and it's doubtful they'll find a guy combining the right proportions of military and poltical skills with outright lunacy to make a go of it. The same applies to Iraq, where we're now winning and have almost won. That wasn't the case in the heyday of Zarqawi. Most of these operations are very much personality-dependant, and they burst like bubbles once that personality is spread over a 600x600 meter patch of ground.
Finally, there is Pakistan itself, a country that truly is on the edge of civil war.
You're repeating yourself, bub. And they're in the middle of it, not on the edge.
Should we be adding to the force of chaos?
I vote "yes." I think it's to our advantage to stir the Pakistaini political pot and bring it to a boil. I'll tell you why in a paragraph or two...
By indiscriminately bombing the tribal areas along the Afghan border, we in effect are going to war with Pakistan's ethnic Pashtuns.
That statement might have some validity if we were in fact bombing "indiscriminately." But if it was indiscriminate, we'd be hitting patches of bare ground, or maybe downtown Peshawar. Instead, we're hitting madrassahs and occasionally somebody's house. Women, kiddies, puppies, kittens, baby ducks and fluffy bunnies are minced along with a few bodyguard bad turbans, but the real targets are the Qaeda bigs or the big cheeses in the various Taliban factions. These are fair game whether they're alone or in the bosoms of their families. If you need somebody to drop a 500 pound bomb on a convent full of nuns and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, sign me up. The nuns are toast, or maybe strawberry jam, as it were.
And then there's the question of why it's okay for the Pashtuns of Pashtunistan to make war on us, which they're doing -- just ask Baitullah Mehsud -- but not okay for us to make war on certain segments of Pashtunistan. Why is the obligation upon us to turn the other cheek, but not upon them?
They make up 15% of Pakistan's 167 million people. They are well armed and among the most fierce and xenophobic people in the world.
Yes, yes. They'll tell you all about it in a flash. Pashtuns make up a reputed 40% of the population of Afghanistan, and it's the Pashtun areas that are full of gunfire and explosions. The Uzbeks, Tadjiks, Hazaras, Turkmen, and what have you manage to get along okay except for a few fist fights and the occasional stolen cow. The Pashtuns consider ignorance a virtue, they're fond of rolling their eyes, waving guns, and bragging, and they're the neighbors nobody wants. Fact is, the Pak Punjabis thing they're "controlling" those nutjobs, even while meeting with the Arab Qaeda hard boyz and "controlling" them.
It is not beyond their military capabilities to cross the Indus and take Islamabad.
He says that like it's a bad thing...
Before it is too late, someone needs to sit the President down and give him the bad news that Pakistan is a bridge too far in the "war on terror."
I think Bush has sat down and studied the situation. I hope he's decided to stir that pot, tossing great handsful of seasoning into it to keep it good and spicy, the while pretending nothing's happening. Just like the Paks do with Afghanistan.
Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down.