A fascinating AsiaTimes piece discusses the completion of the latest US military base in Afghanistan. What makes this particular one so special? It’s designed to strike into Pakistan –
KARACHI – Another piece of the United States’ regional jigsaw is in place with the completion of a military base in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, just three kilometers from Bajaur Agency in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
Pakistani intelligence quarters have confirmed to Asia Times Online that the base, on a mountain top in Ghakhi Pass overlooking Pakistan, is now operational…The new US base is expected to serve as the center of clandestine special forces’ operations in the border region. The George W Bush administration is itching to take more positive action – including inside Pakistan…
…with the new Kunar base, American special forces will carry out extended operations, which means a limited war against Taliban and al-Qaeda assets in the tribal areas. These clandestine operations can be done with or without Pakistan’s consent.”
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p>For Mushie et. al., the situation boils down to a form of “I know, but can’t do anything, so I’ll stay put” –
A senior Pakistani security official explained to Asia Times Online, “American special forces have carried out clandestine operations in the past, and Pakistan was not informed. The Taliban and al-Qaeda also did not realize what was happening with the quick-as-a-wink hit-and-run operations in the tribal areas. Pakistani intelligence only knew of the operations after they happened. They included the killing of high-value Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders and high-value arrests,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
…US intelligence spotted bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, twice in Bajaur Agency and attacked the area with Predator drones. Zawahiri was unscathed, but several militants and civilians were killed.
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p>My oft-used credo on Pakistan (and many many many other situations) is that the choices we often face aren’t between Good and Bad but rather between Bad and Worse. And Pakistan is quite possibly the most indicative example we have today.
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p>National borders, sovereignty, and monopolies on force are / were bedrocks of the modern, post-Westphalia world. Those assumptions gave us our contemporary system of diplomats, borders, passports, visa’s, formal declarations of war, treatment of POW’s, jurisdiction, and the like. What we see in the US policy towards Pakistan – democracy and coalition building on the one hand, but the military perched & ready to strike on the other – harshly reflect the new realities as the post-Modern world engages a pre-Modern enemy.
(hat tip to Belmont Club for the pointer)
National borders, sovereignty, and monopolies on force are / were bedrocks of the modern, post-Westphalia world.
right. but in some ways pakistan is post-westphalia and pre-french revolutionary; a state without a nation (as opposed to a nation without a state; e.g., kurds). an analog might be the austro-hungarian empire. this sort of situation is common in many nominal nation-states.
harshly reflect the new realities as the post-Modern world engages a pre-Modern enemy.
a nice turn of the phrase. but i think one of the problems with our current discourse is that we conceptualize the enemy as pre-modern when it is just as post-modern. the problem of course is the salafist terrorist international also believes in the mythology that it is pre-modern, or at least that it is recreating the early 7th century ummah. but modern antecedents & often unorthodox techniques of the many salafist movements belies their claims, and our perceptions, of their pre-modernity.
It will also inflame Anti-US sentiment. This could become a good recruitment tool for the extremist wingnuts who like to hang out in that area.
Wow. This is a truly brilliant and air-tight plan. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
That train left the station a while ago, those wingnuts are already pretty inflamed. The ‘Central Staff hub’ as defined in Sageman’s Understanding Terrorist Networks while decimated by the original overthrow of the Taliban and loss of training centers, has morphed and re-energized in these tribal areas of Pakistan. High speed, low foot print, precision ops are necessary to hit enough nodes, while slowly trying to corral tribal leaders away from AQ/Taliban types.
US Special Forces have been sitting on the other side of the fence looking into Pakistan for sometime. The US has waited for mushie to clean house for a while, too, but Pakistan’s military hasn’t had much success either. If US Special Forces are in play (Green Berets) that means they’ll be doing unconventional warfare, training local militias along with the Pakistani military. These are force multiplier elements and is a slower approach, though may yield better long term results.
2 · sonal said
By the same logic will US support India’s desire to pursue militants into Pak from the Kashmir side like US plans to do now and ISrael has been doing all along. Though the only catch is that since India is not a superpower like US and doesn’t supply planes, arms and aid to Pak there will be all out war. And Kashmir is not Palestine and moreover India also has to worry about its large Muslim populatio. This is the quintessential contradiction of the politics in that region
why would India have to worry about its local Muslim population if it where to commit cross-border attacks to prevent future terrorist recruitment and acts in India? Terrorist attacks planned from Pakistan have a very important purpose besides fear, and thats exacerbating religious tension in India, going after the source should do more good for all Indians, irrespective of religion.
Now the response of dictator yearning for some way to unite his divided country, that is something all Indians/desis/south asians/brownfolk should fear. Mushy would grab onto a thorn-covered branch as long as he was still on the tree.
The publicity surrounding this event shows the extent to which the US is unhappy with Musharraf’s progress in the region. Before the US did missions clandestinely, now its involvement is there to see for all.
future, I agree..see http://www.nagalandpost.com/Leisuredesc.asp?sectionid=54798
1 · razib said
The problem is problem is that the rulers of the nation-less state expect post-modern courtesy, while the militant nations within that state aren’t bound to the same. I am not sure if the STI is post-modern, could you please elaborate?
Ah, all this talk of states-without-nations and nations-without-states…it’s kind of quaint, isn’t it? I mean, the whole Westphalian concept is going the way of the dodo, thanks to multinational corporations and their vested interests, mass population migrations, natural disasters, and the total lack of government accountability across the vast majority of the planet. How will states and nations ever line up neatly again? America is by definition “post-modern” in that sense…it hasn’t been a “state with a nation” in more than a century. Most of Europe is becoming like this, too.
The notion of national self-determination is right behind it. And let’s not even get into moldy old ideas about a state’s right to prevent outside interference in internal affairs, or equality between states. Puh-lease.
In the near-term, though, this is an interesting contrast to Mushie’s public statements whereby he stridently decries any American violation of Pakistani borders. Clearly, political pragmatism is winning over the political necessity of Westphalian ideology (as usual).
Yes, there are at least three mushy things about Mushie’s pronouncements in this matter: First is that the border areas (known variously as ‘tribal areas’ or ‘agencies’ in Pakistan) were places where the writ of the Pakistani state never did run. They are and have been little states unto themselves. Further, these areas may very well be the last places on earth where ‘state’ and ‘nation’ did coincide: within the little states, the tribes and families and ‘nations’ and their cultures, religions and ideologies – are pretty homogeneous. And something that gets hardly any mention in the media is that these tribal nation-states run themselves on one of the closest real-life approximations of ancient Athenian city-state democracy – with the jirga system. Thirdly, the ‘Durand’ Line, named for good old Mortimer Durand, is not recognized by Afghanistan, and certainly not by the tribal nation-states who live on both sides of it. It’s existence in international law is strongly disputed, and in essence, it is a fiction maintained on maps!
So from each of these perspectives, the Pakistani ‘sovereignty’ that might be getting violated if the coalition forces crossed the ‘border’, is quite highly imaginary. And an irony on an even grander scale: even as the post-Westphalian conception of the nation-state is being finished off, we’re encountering the tribalistic proto-nation state in the Afghan-Pakistan border – that actually preceded it by a few millenia, which lived alongside it throughout the Westphalian phase, remained essentially unaltered in spite of the Mughals, the British, the Pakistanis and the Russians; and, now, may very well outlive the Westphalian system!
chachaji! too much Westphalian irony! I’m going to go hang an American flag from my balcony and thus be able to decry Mexican immigrants and outsourcing.
I’ll call it my Westphalic symbol.