“Trust, but verify” and Pakistan: I

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]
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Ronald Reagan said “Trust, but verify.” Gorbachev said, “You repeat that at every meeting.” Reagan said, “I like it.”

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Zen claimed a couple days ago that “Osama bin Laden was caught and killed in an ISI safe house in Abbottabad” — while here at ChicagoBoyz, Trent Telenko asserted:

We already knew Pakistan is what we feared a nuclear-armed Iran would be — a nuclear-armed, terrorist supporting, state. Just ask India about Mumbai and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Now we know that Pakistan is attacking us too. Al Qaeda is the operational arm of Pakistani intelligence (ISI) attacking us just as Lashkar-e-Taiba is its operational arm attacking India.

Those are “strong” versions of claims that have been made in “weaker” forms for some time now.

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Thus the NY Times refers to “the belief among administration officials that some elements of the ISI may have ties to Bin Laden and the Afghan Taliban” while according to the BBC, Adm. Mike Mullen recently claimed the ISI had a “long-standing relationship” with the Haqqani network. A Guardian report used the phrase “rogue elements” in discussing recently wikileaked documents from Guantanamo:

The documents show the varying interpretations by American officials of the apparent evidence of ISI involvement with insurgents in Afghanistan. There are repeated “analyst’s notes” in parentheses. Several in earlier documents stress that it is “rogue elements” of the ISI who actively support insurgents in Afghanistan.

So: is it “some elements of the ISI”—or “rogue elements of the ISI” — or simply “the ISI”?

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The Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate was included in the “list of terrorist and terrorist support entities identified as associate forces” in one of the leaked documents, the “JTF-GTMO Matrix of Threat Indicators for Enemy Combatants” with the notation:

This list is not all inclusive but provides the primary organizations encountered in the reporting from and about JTF-GTMO detainees. Through associations with these groups and organizations, a detainee may have provided support to al-Qaida or the Taliban, or engaged in hostilities against US or Coalition forces.

“Association with Pakistan ISID, especially in the late 1990s up to 2003” was listed in the same document as among the “the primary indicators for assessing a detainee’s membership or affiliation with the Taliban or ACM elements other than al-Qaida.”

BTW, what happened to the ISI in 2003?

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And what of Pakistan itself? is it just the ISI that’s problematic, or the entire state of Pakistan? Time magazine reports:

CIA ruled out participating with its nominal South Asian ally early on because “it was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the targets,” Panetta says.

Indeed, the problem may not be that there are rogue elements in ISI, nor that the ISI is a rogue element in Pakistan, but that Pakistan itself may be a rogue state, and a nuclear one at that.

How simple it is to write such a sentence and how subtle the task of understanding not leaping to conclusions but penetratingly understanding just what the real situation is.

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As Zen says in the same post:

It is long past time for a deep, strategic, rethink of what ends America wants to accomplish in Central Asia and some hardheaded realism about who our friends really are.

Intelligence needs to be intelligent, and to be seen to be intelligent. Whether we trust or mistrust — we need to verify.

[ first of three, at least ]

PAKISTAN EXPOSED – If Osama and Al-Qaeda are ISI, Then What?

The discovery of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan’s most secure stronghold at Abbottabad, just 800 yards from Pakistan’s West Point is clear and convincing evidence that Pakistan is a state sponsor of terrorism against America. There is no other reasonable explanation.

We already knew Pakistan is what we feared a nuclear-armed Iran would be — a nuclear-armed, terrorist supporting, state. Just ask India about Mumbai and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Now we know that Pakistan is attacking us too. Al Qaeda is the operational arm of Pakistani intelligence (ISI) attacking us just as Lashkar-e-Taiba is its operational arm attacking India.

There are no good options with Pakistan, just greater or lesser degrees of bad ones. Given its possession of nuclear weapons, there is little we can safely do to deter Pakistani terrorism against us. Nothing short of actually destroying the nuclear-armed Pakistani state, and the rapid, forcible, seizure of its nuclear weapons, will protect America from Pakistani terrorism – they’ll build more nukes if we allow the Pakistani state to survive.

Destruction of the Pakistani state and prompt seizure of its nuclear weapons are well within America’s power, particularly if we ruthlessly use some of our own tactical nuclear weapons in the process of seizing Pakistan’s. Securing Pakistan’s nukes quickly — to keep them from being used on American cities by Pakistani agents aka terrorists funded by Pakistani intelligence — is an important enough objective to merit the use of our tactical nuclear weapons.

Our second major problem here is that Pakistan’s people and culture are almost totally infected by Islamist Jihadist hatred of us, unlike Iraq and Iran. We liberated Iraq from tyranny, while the Iranian people loathe their Shiite Islamist tyranny. Pakistan is larger than Iraq and Iran combined, and far beyond our ability to subdue, let alone occupy. Our destruction of the Pakistani state would create a vast, hideously dangerous, and totally unrestrained failed state base for overt terrorism against us. The single thing they wouldn’t be able to use against us after we leave are nuclear weapons, which only an organized government can (so far) manufacture.

The only way to keep Pakistan from subsequently becoming a far more dangerous terrorist base than Afghanistan ever was would require the physical destruction of its people with strategic nuclear weapons. We won’t have the will do so…until we are again hit at home with more biological weapons, or with nukes.

Our world is now on the verge of Richard “Wretchard” Fernandez’s “Three Conjectures.”

What should our “Afpak” policy be and how should we think about Afghanistan….

….now that calls to leave will likely increase exponentially?

(Update: I don’t think I was very clear in this post when I wrote, “there is a state vision and a state plan to carry out that vision.” I did not mean complicity or duplicity or anything like that. The point I am trying to make is that the regular use of non-state actors as an instrument of internal power-politics or foreign policy is dangerous and should not be excused).

Security analyst Rory Medcalf from the Lowy Institute says parts of Pakistan’s security establishment were either aware of his location or were harbouring him.
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Mr Medcalf says in continuing to support Pakistan, the international community risks more of the same treatment.
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He says Australia should consider withdrawing support for Pakistan’s military and instead build up its police force and civil society institutions.

– from the news article, “Australia urged to rethink Pakistan military aid.”

I don’t know about Australia, but the United States has had every possible type of diplomatic and military relationship with Pakistan – we’ve developed and trained parts of its military (and this from the beginning. The UK, too.), stuffed it to the gills with military aid, provided money intended for education of its civilian population which was then squandered and looted, prevented India from retaliating against terror attacks emanating from the region, attempted to cut aid during the time of the Pressler Amendment, and “walked away” from Pakistan during the 90s:

Of course, Pakistan’s complaints are not entirely unfounded: the United States did abandon the region once the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Pakistanis, however, never acknowledge the enormous benefits that the country derived from its partnership with the Americans during the 1980s. Between 1979 and 1989 Pakistan received $5.6 billion (in constant 2009 dollars) in total aid, of which $3.5 billion was military assistance.) During this period, Pakistan developed its nuclear weapons program without penalty until 1990 while receiving enormous financial and military support from the U.S., which allowed Pakistan to improve its capabilities to fight India.
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Most frustrating is Pakistan’s refusal to acknowledge its own role in undermining its security by backing various Islamist militant groups in Afghanistan throughout the 1990s, including the Taliban. (Pakistanis often claim erroneously that the CIA created the Taliban.)

C. Christine Fair in Foreign Policy

So engagement hasn’t worked and disengagement hasn’t worked, either.

My initial read is that the American political and policy community is utterly confused – and a bit terrified. Over the years it has lied to itself and to the American people over the true nature of the regime running Pakistan. There are no rogue elements, unless you want to count the true democracy activists and human rights activists. It is a state expressly set up for the benefit of the feudals and the military and to allow non-state actors to develop so-called asymmetric capabilities. And the West provided intellectual cover for many years, initially because of its existential war with the Soviets. This initial engagement morphed and mission-creeped in various ways: poking back at the Soviet-friendly Indians, opening up relations with China, attempting to leverage Pakistan within the context of the Saudis and Iran (and now, again, a “different” China), “help” with Afghanistan, and so on and so forth. One of the reasons solving Kashmir became a US State department hobby-horse – and a standard of the DC think tank community – is because we were trying to placate a NATO member (the UK) that has its own problems with radicalization and a large immigrant population from Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

The United States won’t cut aid even though aid has been misused and propped up the most corrupt elements of the state. Aid is fungible and it has traditionally made things worse, not better. Money spent on the civil sector (or to train the police) means more money for the military and ISI. We are afraid, however, of the very nuclear weapons that the West’s money – and Chinese and Saudi aid – has helped to purchase ending up in terrorist hands or being gifted to the Saudis. And we still need to hunt down more people in that region and will pay almost any bribe to do it.

So here we are: “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.” – Sun Tzu.

A theory: Our foreign policy community is confused within the context of “Afpak” because our traditional DC foreign policy mandarins never came to terms with the repercussions of fighting tyranny in one part of the globe by explicitly ignoring versions of it in another. I mean, in terms of what this does to your own institutions long-term, what it does to your military and State department bureaucracies, and to think tanks and a generation of South Asia analysts. In this, our attempts to nation-build in Afghanistan are highly laudable but unworkable (witness the recent furor over the allegations regarding Greg Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea” charity). Yes, yes, I know that sometimes you have to hold your nose and work with people you don’t want to for a greater good and that greater good is continuing some version of our counterterrorism or counterinsurgency work within the region. But you shouldn’t lie to yourself or lie to the people you are meant to serve. It’s time for Washington to face facts. There are no rogue elements. There is a state vision and a state plan to carry out that vision.

To those who say, “well, we never really supported the civil sector in Pakistan in the past”: How do you do that effectively when the military colonizes the economy? When it owns large tracts of land and businesses? Once again, aid is fungible and the State department and its Western development theories (building civilian governmental capacities; in other words, social engineering abroad) has a rocky track record, at best. So now what?

What say you?

OBL DEAD!

Osama, how’s that martyrdom thing working for ya?

Feel free to post your own Osama Bin Laden gloats

The Glenn Beck, Mahdism and Antichrist series

[cross-posted from Zenpundit ]
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Glenn Beck has a new documentary coming out tonight on Mahdism and the Antichrist.

He calls it “the documentary that you will not see on mainstream television” and to get to see it, you have to be a subscriber to Beck’s Insider Extreme channel on the web. But then that fits with Beck’s emphasis right now — he doesn’t mind crying shame on the media for not carrying the documentary, but he doesn’t want unbelievers to see it either — he told his radio audience today:

Make sure you see it tonight at nine o’clock. And if I may recommend that you watch it with some friends. Invite some friends over, some like-minded people, don’t try to get any converts in. Pull up the nets, man, pull up the nets.

So okay — it won’t be on “mainstream television” but it will be seen in a million “like-minded” homes, and it will influence them, it will influence their perspective on Islam, and on the Middle East.

Here’s a description of what they can expect, drawn from Joel Rosenberg‘s blog today. Joel is the author of the apocalyptic thriller The Twelfth Imam, has seen the rough cut and will be appearing on the video, along with those he lists here:

Tonight on his website, Glenn Beck will premiere his new documentary film, “Rumors of War — Part Two.” As with Part One, I was interviewed for the film…

The documentary examines current events and trends in the Middle East and the Islamic world from various vantage points — Biblical End Times theology, Jewish End Times theology, and Islamic End Times theology. It discusses the latest threats from the Radical Islamic world to Israel, the West and our allies. It features a wide range of Jewish, Muslim and evangelical Christian authors and commentators in a balanced yet provocative and fascinating way. Among them:

  • Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the U.N.
  • Reza Kahlili, former CIA agent inside Iran and author of A Time To Betray
  • Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind novel series
  • Brigitte Gabriel, author of They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It
  • Joel Richardson, author of The Islamic Antichrist
  • Dr. Zudi Jasser, president of American Islamic Forum for Democracy

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The thing is, Beck doesn’t know a whole lot about these things, and his advisers get things wrong — sometimes flat out wrong, sometimes just out of proportion — too.

I aim to review Beck’s documentary along with its predecessor, and the books of Joel Richardson and Joel Rosenberg, and also take a look at some other books and articles that cover the same materials with greater scholarship and less religious special interest — notably the works of David Cook, J-P Filiu and Timothy Furnish — clear up some of this issues in which definitive corrections are in order, suggest areas where the preponderance of evidence and informed commentary leans away from Beck’s position, and raise again those urgent questions which remain.

Because from where I sit, Glenn Beck has hit on one of our blind spots — and is giving us a dangerously distorted mirror in which to view it.

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Here’s Beck talking about the upcoming documentary this morning on his radio show:

Tonight, you don’t want to miss, on Insider Extreme, something that we have been trying to tell the story for quite some time, and I have told it to you many times before, the story of the Twelfth Imam, well this is not the full story of the Twelfth Imam, this is what people Middle East believe about the Twelfth Imam, or the Mahdi as the… Sunnis? Sunnis are in Egypt, Shias are in, ah, is it Shias in Iran or is it the other way around? I think it’s S.. Shias are in Iran. One believes in the Twelfth Imam, the others believe in the Mahdi, same guy, it is the… the… you would know it as the Antichrist. It is the, it has every earmarking of the Antichrist, every single one, I mean, he makes a peace for seven years with Egypt, he viol… — I mean with Israel, he violates it, he marks people with a number, he beheads people if they don’t submit, I mean it’s all there. It’s all there. And Ahmadinejad says that he is alive and well and orchestrating the things in the Middle East.

Did you get that? He’s not sure: “is it Shias in Iran or is it the other way around?”

If Beck has been working on this documentary for a year now, let’s hope he does in fact know the difference between Sunni and Shi’a, and that he’s using the popular gag technique of pretending not to know, so his audience — who haven’t all been working on a documentary and may well not know — can feel all the more strongly “he’s one of us”. And besides, Sunni, Shia, it’s all the same, Mahdi, Twelfth Imam, no difference at all, right?

So that’s the level of required accuracy that’s tolerated here. Which side was it wanted to keep slavery? I forget now, I think it may have been the South. Belfast — now is that Catholic, or Protestant?

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And one last quick note from the same post on Joel Rosenberg’s blog:

As far as I can tell, Glenn Beck is leaving the Fox News Channel in part because Fox is opposed to him devoting so much time on his program to End Times issues, Bible prophecy, Iran’s eschatology, and the linkage of these things to left wing efforts to sow seeds of revolution and chaos. It’s too bad, really.

That’s an interesting data point.

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There will be plenty to talk about, anyway:

the new documentary, Joel Rosenberg’s thriller, which I enjoyed, Joel Richardson, with whom I correspond and whom I like, the new Mahdist video in Iran which is causing quite a stir, and may or may not be an “official” Iranian production, the vexed question — vexed in all three Abrahamic faiths — of whether you can hasten the coming of the Awaited One and if so, how, and the implications of all this both in the United States and in the Middle East, the Iranian nuclear program…

The Glenn Beck, Mahdism & Antichrist blog series, coming up.