Sunday, August 3, 2008

Blaming Pakistan

There's a little ditty that's gaining popularity around the world. It goes something like this:

If your Afghan war is bloody
Blame Pakistan
If your Afghan war is bloody
Blame Pakistan
If your Afghan war is bloody
But you want it to seem cuddly
If your Afghan war is bloody
Blame Pakistan!

Ok, so I'm no Shakespeare.

Nevertheless, the recent bombing at the Indian embassy has the CIA and the CIA's Kabul frontman, Hamid Karzai, doing what they've been doing ever since Pakistan stopped being their base for harassing the Soviets - blaming Pakistan.

If the weapons involved in the blast were made in Pakistan, there's no surprise - but if the weapons were Russian in origin, would that mean that Russia had sponsored the attack? If it had been a US shell that was used in the bomb? Anyone who has even seen a photograph of a Karachi intersection knows that Pakistan is awash in guns, and has been that way since the last time a foreign power invaded Afghanistan. A lot of the world's ordnance over the last 30 years has found its way to Afghanistan.

Whenever something like this happens, one must ask "who benefits?" Did the ISI see some weakness to exploit in attacking the Indian embassy? Does India have a dearth of eligible embassy staff? Or maybe we are to believe that the ISI is acting out of blind hatred, merely trying to kill Hindus willy-nilly. If that is the case, there is a better place to find Hindus than in Afghanistan. Alternatively, maybe there was something going on at the Indian embassy that the ISI wanted to stop. If so, the Indians certainly aren't saying, and one would in that case have to wonder why?

What did the embassy bombing accomplish? Well, it made everyone blame Pakistan. By using Pakistani ordnance, whoever was supposedly in charge of the operation left a huge, gaping, amateurish liability - not something one would expect from a battle-hardened cloak-and-dagger spy agency. Predictably, a blast at the Indian in embassy in Kabul might kill some Indians, but it does nothing but hurt Pakistan's position.

But then, you might ask, if it wasn't Pakistan, then who? Perhaps it was the same people who attacked the Pakistani Consulate in Kabul this week. Maybe it was India.

Or maybe there is a war being fought in Afghanistan, and maybe it's a complicated country, divided along linguistic, religious, political, and tribal lines. Maybe Afghans are just generally averse to having foreigners tell them what to do, and especially sensitive to having a government imposed upon them by force. Maybe Pakistan is a convenient scapegoat for the difficulties of a war that was initially advanced only to satisfy the American public's desire for a bloody revenge, and little more.

If, however, "Blame Pakistan" turns into overt (because covert might already be going on) action against a country that has already bombed its own citizens in order to please America, then any Pakistani officer who advocated steps against NATO and its Afghan proxy will have been proven right.

As a recent column in the Globe and Mail put it

If Pakistani paranoia about India was the only thing that led its spies to work against the Karzai government, then it may be possible to provide reassurances and push back Indian activity in Afghanistan. However, beyond the fears about India are deep suspicions about U.S. intentions.

The fear, not only in the Pakistani intelligence community but across Pakistani society, is that, once the United States pacifies Afghanistan, Pakistan is next.

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