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Excerpt :
This double game goes back to Sept 11. That terrorist attack was basically planned, executed and funded by radical Pakistanis and Saudis. And the US responded by invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? The short answer is because Pakistan has nukes that America fears and Saudi Arabia has oil that it craves.
http://www.straitstimes.com/Review/Others/STIStory_560695.html?sunwMethod=GET
Aug 2, 2010
The Great (double) Game
By Thomas l. Friedman
THE trove of WikiLeaks about the faltering American war effort in Afghanistan has provoked many reactions, but for me it contains one clear message. It's actually an old piece of advice your parents may have given you before you went off to college: 'If you are in a poker game and you don't know who the sucker is, it's probably you.'
In the case of the Great Game of Central Asia, that's the United States.
Best I can tell from the WikiLeaks documents and other sources, the US is paying Pakistan's army and intelligence service to be two-faced. Otherwise, they would be just one-faced and 100 per cent against America. The same could probably be said of Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai. But then everyone out there is wearing a mask - or two.
China supports Pakistan, seeks out mining contracts in Afghanistan and lets America make Afghanistan safe for Chinese companies, all while smiling at the bloody nose America is getting in Kabul because anything that ties down the US military makes China's military happy. America, meanwhile, sends its soldiers to fight in Afghanistan at the same time that it rejects an energy policy that would begin to reduce its oil consumption, which indirectly helps to fund the very Taleban schools and warriors its soldiers are fighting against.
So why put up with all this duplicity? Is President Barack Obama just foolish?
It is more complicated. This double game goes back to Sept 11. That terrorist attack was basically planned, executed and funded by radical Pakistanis and Saudis. And the US responded by invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? The short answer is because Pakistan has nukes that America fears and Saudi Arabia has oil that it craves.
So the US tried to impact them by indirection. It hoped that building a decent democratising government in Iraq would influence reform in Saudi Arabia and beyond. And after expelling Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, it stayed on to stabilise the place, largely out of fears that instability in Afghanistan could spill into Pakistan and lead to Islamist radicals taking over Islamabad and its nukes.
That strategy has not really worked because Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are built on ruling bargains that are the source of their pathologies and America's fears.
Pakistan, 63 years after its founding, still exists not to be India. The Pakistani army is obsessed with what it says is the threat from India - and keeping that threat alive is what keeps the Pakistani army in control of the country and its key resources. The absence of either stable democracy in Pakistan or a decent public education system only swells the ranks of the Taleban and other Islamic resistance forces there. Pakistan thinks it must control Afghanistan for 'strategic depth' because, if India dominated Afghanistan, Pakistan would be wedged between the two.
Alas, if Pakistan built its identity around its own talented people and saw its strategic depth as the quality of its schools, farms and industry, instead of Afghanistan, it might be able to produce a stable democracy - and the US wouldn't care about Pakistan's nukes any more than India's.
Saudi Arabia is built around a ruling bargain between the moderate Al-Saud family and the Wahhabi fundamentalist establishment: The Al-Sauds get to rule and the Wahhabis get to impose on their society the most puritanical Islam - and export it to mosques and schools across the Muslim world, including to Pakistan, with money earned by selling oil to the West.
So Pakistan's nukes are a problem for the US because of the nature of that regime, and Saudi Arabia's oil wealth is a problem for the US because of the nature of that regime. Americans have chosen to play a double game with both because they think the alternatives are worse.
So they pay Pakistan to help them in Afghanistan, even though they know some of that money is killing US soldiers, because they fear that just leaving could lead to Pakistan's Islamists controlling its bombs. And they send Saudi Arabia money for oil, even though they know that some of it ends up financing the very people the US is fighting, because confronting the Saudis over their ideological exports seems too destabilising. (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.)
Is there another a way? Yes. If America can't just walk away, it should at least reduce its bets. It should limit its presence and goals in Afghanistan to the bare minimum required to make sure that turmoil there doesn't spill over into Pakistan or allow Al-Qaeda to return. And it should diminish its dependence on oil so it is less impacted by what happens in Saudi Arabia, so it shrinks the funds going to people who hate America and it makes economic and political reform a necessity for them, not a hobby.
Alas, the US doesn't have the money, manpower or time required to fully transform the most troubled states of this region. That will happen only when they want it to. The US does, though, have the technology, necessity and innovators to protect itself from them - and to increase the pressure on them to want to change - by developing alternatives to oil. It is time the US started that surge. I am tired of being the sucker in this game.
NEW YORK TIMES
This double game goes back to Sept 11. That terrorist attack was basically planned, executed and funded by radical Pakistanis and Saudis. And the US responded by invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? The short answer is because Pakistan has nukes that America fears and Saudi Arabia has oil that it craves.
http://www.straitstimes.com/Review/Others/STIStory_560695.html?sunwMethod=GET
Aug 2, 2010
The Great (double) Game
By Thomas l. Friedman
THE trove of WikiLeaks about the faltering American war effort in Afghanistan has provoked many reactions, but for me it contains one clear message. It's actually an old piece of advice your parents may have given you before you went off to college: 'If you are in a poker game and you don't know who the sucker is, it's probably you.'
In the case of the Great Game of Central Asia, that's the United States.
Best I can tell from the WikiLeaks documents and other sources, the US is paying Pakistan's army and intelligence service to be two-faced. Otherwise, they would be just one-faced and 100 per cent against America. The same could probably be said of Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai. But then everyone out there is wearing a mask - or two.
China supports Pakistan, seeks out mining contracts in Afghanistan and lets America make Afghanistan safe for Chinese companies, all while smiling at the bloody nose America is getting in Kabul because anything that ties down the US military makes China's military happy. America, meanwhile, sends its soldiers to fight in Afghanistan at the same time that it rejects an energy policy that would begin to reduce its oil consumption, which indirectly helps to fund the very Taleban schools and warriors its soldiers are fighting against.
So why put up with all this duplicity? Is President Barack Obama just foolish?
It is more complicated. This double game goes back to Sept 11. That terrorist attack was basically planned, executed and funded by radical Pakistanis and Saudis. And the US responded by invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? The short answer is because Pakistan has nukes that America fears and Saudi Arabia has oil that it craves.
So the US tried to impact them by indirection. It hoped that building a decent democratising government in Iraq would influence reform in Saudi Arabia and beyond. And after expelling Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, it stayed on to stabilise the place, largely out of fears that instability in Afghanistan could spill into Pakistan and lead to Islamist radicals taking over Islamabad and its nukes.
That strategy has not really worked because Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are built on ruling bargains that are the source of their pathologies and America's fears.
Pakistan, 63 years after its founding, still exists not to be India. The Pakistani army is obsessed with what it says is the threat from India - and keeping that threat alive is what keeps the Pakistani army in control of the country and its key resources. The absence of either stable democracy in Pakistan or a decent public education system only swells the ranks of the Taleban and other Islamic resistance forces there. Pakistan thinks it must control Afghanistan for 'strategic depth' because, if India dominated Afghanistan, Pakistan would be wedged between the two.
Alas, if Pakistan built its identity around its own talented people and saw its strategic depth as the quality of its schools, farms and industry, instead of Afghanistan, it might be able to produce a stable democracy - and the US wouldn't care about Pakistan's nukes any more than India's.
Saudi Arabia is built around a ruling bargain between the moderate Al-Saud family and the Wahhabi fundamentalist establishment: The Al-Sauds get to rule and the Wahhabis get to impose on their society the most puritanical Islam - and export it to mosques and schools across the Muslim world, including to Pakistan, with money earned by selling oil to the West.
So Pakistan's nukes are a problem for the US because of the nature of that regime, and Saudi Arabia's oil wealth is a problem for the US because of the nature of that regime. Americans have chosen to play a double game with both because they think the alternatives are worse.
So they pay Pakistan to help them in Afghanistan, even though they know some of that money is killing US soldiers, because they fear that just leaving could lead to Pakistan's Islamists controlling its bombs. And they send Saudi Arabia money for oil, even though they know that some of it ends up financing the very people the US is fighting, because confronting the Saudis over their ideological exports seems too destabilising. (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.)
Is there another a way? Yes. If America can't just walk away, it should at least reduce its bets. It should limit its presence and goals in Afghanistan to the bare minimum required to make sure that turmoil there doesn't spill over into Pakistan or allow Al-Qaeda to return. And it should diminish its dependence on oil so it is less impacted by what happens in Saudi Arabia, so it shrinks the funds going to people who hate America and it makes economic and political reform a necessity for them, not a hobby.
Alas, the US doesn't have the money, manpower or time required to fully transform the most troubled states of this region. That will happen only when they want it to. The US does, though, have the technology, necessity and innovators to protect itself from them - and to increase the pressure on them to want to change - by developing alternatives to oil. It is time the US started that surge. I am tired of being the sucker in this game.
NEW YORK TIMES
