US Media Blackout on AFPAK Outrage

[Ibrahim]

[skyhook77sfg]

the bigger picture






Developments in the Middle East during Reagan's first term complicated the administration's response to low-intensity challenges. The loss of American lives, particularly the 246 Marines killed in Beirut, prompted a new direction in the White House's action and a new vehemence in its rhetoric. Onto its crusade against the ideological enemy in Central America and the Caribbean was superimposed a campaign against international terrorism. In doing this, the Reagan administration broke with the reticence of past advocates of counterterrorism and openly espoused the logic of adopting terrorist methods to fight terrorists. Implying the legitimacy of a state's turning to terror tactics as a utilitarian means to an end, the Reagan administration publicly extended the logic of covert counterinsurgency in internal conflicts to the sphere of international relations. Despite Reagan's overwrought rhetoric about terrorism, there was evidence that the United States had, indeed, experimented in perpetrating the very kind of terrorism it claimed to oppose.


A New York Times feature on Green Beret training for Salvadorans, "Salvador Gets Rights Lesson From the U.S.," described the training of cadets in "the rudiments of military operations, with a heavy emphasis on human rights and antiguerrilla techniques. Major Roger Slaughter, a Spanish- speaking officer from the Special Forces detachment in Panama, "tapped his pointer against the chart listing the do's and don'ts of gaining the support of the people in a fight against guerrillas," and told his visitors that "an army cannot violate the individual rights of the people they are sworn to protect." And so, with that admonition, drawn from the doctrine of the United States Army, Major Slaughter summed up the message that he and other American instructors have been trying to impress on the army of El Salvador. Major Slaughter said that winning the allegiance of peasants means respecting them. He said that it meant avoiding what he called "indiscriminate acts of violence."


The alienation of the political warriors of the postwar period from the mainstream military had been a consequence of both their elite status and the professional "impropriety" of their role in special, political, or "dirty" warfare. An officer at the Army War College, writing in 1983 recounts the case of a Fifth Special Forces Group commander relieved of his command "largely because of the collision of two competing impulses: that of the Army officer who doesn't lie, cheat, or steal, and that of the intelligence operative who always has a cover story to disguise his true function or intent.

The problem of reconciling real special warfare skills and attitudes, notably those involving illegal tactics, to the planners' multipurpose expectations is less easily managed than are public relations. Can Special Forces really be expected to switch from selective assassination one day to civic action the next while standing by to serve as light infantry in a conventional rapid deployment scenario? Should they be expected to? The special operations advocates appear to see no contradiction between the Special Forces' extralegal and unmilitary covert action role, in which military ethics and the rules of war are jettisoned, and their main role in the training of foreign military and paramilitary forces.



And then there is the screening procedure for men with "passive aggressive personalities" suitable for "commando tasks". They are people with a lot of drive, though they are well-disciplined and do not appear nervous, yet periodically experience bursts of explosive energy when they can literally kill without remorse.

[AzariLoveIran]

[skyhook77sfg]

editorial from todays frontier post

peshawar, pakistan


Time to think



Certainly, it is time for the Islamabad establishment to sit back and weigh carefully what colossal cost has caused to Pakistan its so-called strategic partnership with the United States, whose fragility and unreliability stand disconcertingly exposed by the Americans’ brinkmanship over their double murderer Raymond Davis’s episode.

They are in jitters, revealingly. He may or may not be with diplomatic status. But the Americans’ edginess makes it more than evident that he was engaged in a clandestine errand whose disclosure they fear would be devastating. This spurious partnership have they employed, anyway, as an umbrella for far more sinister pursuits in this country, whose disastrous consequences would haunt this nation for a long time to come, particularly in our tribal region bordering Afghanistan that was left to the satrapy of their CIA to administer and manage by the Bush administration after ousting Taliban.

In its nearly nine-year long satrapy, this American spy agency, known more for successes in subversion in foreign lands and monumental failures in intelligence, pursued an insidious project from its Afghanistan base to infest our tribal region and even some settled areas, in league with the compulsively hostile alien agencies like India’s RAW and Tajik-dominated Afghan intelligence service NDS. So intensive and extensive was their collusive infestation that not long after the Afghan Taliban’s ouster our entire tribal region was abuzz with reports of mule-loads of sophisticated deadly weapons, heaps of cash and even mountain jeeps and vehicles making their way surreptitiously from across the border and landing in questionable hands here....


....then a Pervez Musharraf slavishly playing a Bush’s valet realised that he had been taken for a ride by his American masters whose Afghanistan satrap, CIA, in cahoots with RAW and NDS, had infested the tribal areas so deeply as to neutralise even Pakistan’s own intelligence agencies which this CIA-led evil axis had neatly elbowed out from the region. Aghast and miffed, he found himself into a noisy row with visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai, both accusing each other of their agencies playing dirty games in their respective country. Outrageously, as the CIA was playing this double game on Pakistan, this wolf in the sheep’s clothing mustered up cacophonic media campaign, of which some of our own palmed-off media worthies and think tanks also became a willing part, to project deceitfully all the while that Pakistan was playing a double game in the so-called US-led war on terror. The viciousness of CIA’s shenanigans in our tribal is indeed unspeakable. When the Pakistani military went into operation in Bajaur agency sometimes back to subdue the surging militants whose insurgency had become a grave threat to the country’s integrity, it found itself fighting against gunmen infiltrating in truckloads from Afghanistan, where the CIA had recruited nearly 90,000 “contractors” when the US-led coalition armies hardly accounted for about 30,000 men in strength, and where over the time several hundreds of thousands of US-supplied weapons had mysterious disappeared from the military stores of the Afghan defence ministry as well as from the bases of the coalition forces. And, notably, these contractors, plainly mercenary killers, included such notorious characters as Blackwater and comprised Afghan and Central Asian fighters as well.

So whose men were these infiltrating gunmen who were fighting against our military in the agency? Like it or not, for the shenanigans of CIA our tribal region has veritably become a ticking tinderbox for our national solidarity and territorial integrity. And while the US-promised economic opportunity zones for the region remain in the air unrealised despite the passage of more than five years, the Pakistani state is getting increasingly precariously placed in the region for the lava of a boiling tribal rage. In contending with the CIA-sown infestation in the region, the Pakistani military is engaged in multiple operations that in spite of all its precautions do cause unavoidably civilian casualties, apart from property losses, inevitable population dislocations and the human miseries necessarily entailed. Then, more civilian than militant casualties occur in the CIA drone incursions which the tribal people now increasingly put in the lap of the Pakistani state, not as much in the aggressing alien attackers’. A volcano of tribal anger is verily in the making against the Pakistani state, for primarily no fault of its own but essentially for the vile shenanigans of the United States, mainly its infamous spy agency for subversion and evil games in foreign countries, the CIA. It is this upcoming volcano that the Islamabad establishment must fret about, not a shady character like Raymond Davis of America. The establishment must do it quick and fast. The time is running out very fast. It must think out how to defuse this ticking tinderbox of tribal anger. If it bursts out, which it will if left untended, it will be well neigh impossible to contain.



HELLO FOGGY BOTTOM, LANGLEY AND WEST WING

DO YOU COPY?


TICKING TINDERBOX OF TRIBAL ANGER

50 TO 80 NUCLEAR DEVICES

HELLO?

[Demon of Undoing]

I have long thought that the only American nuke scenario was if Pakistan failed and resentment there splattered the US. Looks like we are working overtime to make that happen.

[skyhook77sfg]

Agree your take Pakistan most likely source of nuclear "event" in US.

Tribal takover, po'd commanders looking the other way as a devise disappears, even a rogue ISI op.

we are dancing with the devil here and the music is getting louder and faster.

BTW


somewhere saw your post re worst sound in the world is the click when you expect a bang...

there's another ....

the sound of the bang coming out of the wrong end of the barell....

cartridge malfunction resulting in loss of face.... total loss.

slipping some engineered AK rounds in a case here and there where bad guys store ammo works real good in taking the edge off aggressive behaviours like firing weapons.

a little ricin in bags of stored grain is a leave behind that complements exploding ammo nicely.

[Demon of Undoing]

Bean Bol ammo . Got shown how it's made when I was ten .

That Ho Chi Minh Trail worked two ways , y'know .

Then again, it's like The Boss said, " They're still there, he's all gone ..." .

Damn , Hook. If you wrote this as a novel , people wouldn't believe it , you know ?

[AzariLoveIran]

[amos]

[skyhook77sfg]

dont recall much mercy originating in countries listed above since Cyrus the Great....

and that was a long long time ago.

US doesnt need mercy...

just some policy revisions.

rather than run this planet death star style with full spectrum dominance....

a better strategy than Team America might be true leadership by example.

like taking care of our own problems before solving the problems of others.

funding our own countrymen instead of ingrates in foreign lands.

[AzariLoveIran]

[Demon of Undoing]

The nation state has failed because it succeeded so well. We are in the process of revising into a mixed corporate-government alloy in ways we now are not . USA , Inc better re-figure its corporate strategy by downsizing and investing in the future .



There is no future in holding down the little brown folks any more, for the same reason cops stopped randomly beating black people on the streets of the worse types of place . It wasn't moral advances; the black folks got guns .

[Tinker]

Skyhook Could you drop us the links to your sources. Sometimes I want to show things you post here to other people, but I don't have the link to your source, so I have to google some of the text. It would just make it easier for sharing this info if you'd C&P the link.

[Tinker]

Seems like the significance of Raymond Davis is that he took the hood off of the covert operations in Pakistan, so that people can no longer pretend that we aren't fomenting instability in Pakistan.

[cincinnatus]

Skyhook,
Is the article above detailing CIA collusion with Indian WAR in the NWFP "true" in your experience, or just Pakistani paranoia about their historical enemy? NDS sure, but I can't see how the RAW could operate in Pashtunistan....


C

[AzariLoveIran]

[skyhook77sfg]

[skyhook77sfg]

[Tinker]

[Ibrahim]

The thing that makes Pakistan unique in the region is that if America breaks it they still haven't necessarily bought it. India is really, willing, and able (some generals even keen) to deal with a suddenly Islamist or otherwise bellicose Pakistan with every weapon in their arsenal. An arsenal that includes more nukes than Pakistan.

This might become very practical soon, as what I've seen and read gives me the impression that American defeat in Afghanistan might be so total as to suck Pakistan down with it, and create a second "Talibanized" state. At that point India will be the only actor to pick up the pieces. Possibly by nuking Islamabad.

Why the US has funded and cosied up to Pakistan over the past 50 years when India was the natural ally and horse to bet on is one of the great foreign policy question marks of the 20th century.

[monster_gardener]

[skyhook77sfg]

Ibrahim:

perhaps the movement started by these gentlemen will explain :


NEHRU NASSER TITO SUKARNO

was taken as a poke in the eye in foggy bottom...

[monster_gardener]

[skyhook77sfg]

http://www.dawn.com/2011/02/15/pakistan ... davis.html




TALIBAN WARNS PAK GOVT

PESHAWAR: The Pakistani Taliban warned the government on Tuesday they would punish any move to release Raymond Davis, a US consulate employee accused of murdering two Pakistanis in a case that has inflamed already strained ties with Washington.

US Senator John Kerry was due in Pakistan as part of the Obama administration’s efforts to resolve the crisis.

Davis, the US consular employee jailed in Lahore for shooting two Pakistanis last month, says he acted in self-defence during an armed robbery.

Washington insists Davis has diplomatic immunity and should be released but the Pakistani government, fearful of a backlash from Pakistanis already wary of the United States and enraged by the shooting, says the matter should be decided in court.

“If (Pakistani) rulers hand him over to America then we will target these rulers. If Pakistani courts cannot punish Davis then they should hand him over to us,” said Azam Tariq, spokesman for the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.

“We will give exemplary punishment to the killer Davis.”

On Thursday, the United States is expected to present a petition to a Lahore court to certify that Davis has diplomatic immunity and should be released.

The warning from the al Qaeda linked Taliban, which has kept up suicide bombings to destabilise Pakistan’s government despite several army offensives, underscores the charged atmosphere surrounding Davis’ case.

Cash-strapped Pakistan, one of the largest non-Nato recipients of American military aid, is loathe to risk losing US support by keeping Davis in jail but also fears antagonising groups who see the government as a US puppet.

http://www.dawn.com/2011/02/15/pakistan ... davis.html


NOW THAT NYTIMES IS ON THE STORY OBAMA SAYS DIPLOMAT DAVIS HAS GET OUT OF JAIL CARD

SENDS KETCHUP KERRY TO ISLAMABAD WITH A SORRY ABOUT THAT AND NEED ANY MONEY?

[Demon of Undoing]

The worst enemy for a money man is someone that can not be bought. Better hope the region is fresh out of that kind of character.