Wikistrat Blog
Wikistrat, where I am a senior analyst for their North America desk, has started a blog featuring their analysts and experts. We’ll see how the Wikistrat Blog evolves, but for now here are a few sample posts:
Ask Wikistrat’s Chief Analyst Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett
Q: Timothy Kelly- Dr. Barnett, how do you think nuclear proliferation will play out in the Middle East?
A: I think the Obama Administration’s oil-focused sanctions will put immense pressure on the Iranian regime to cave in on the nuke question, possibly to the point of striking out in some manner that Israel – and perhaps the U.S. – can use as a pretext for launching substantial strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. But if I had to bet, I would lay money on Israel striking first for its own reasons versus Tehran providing the excuse. Iran has always struck me as incredibly aware of which line-crossing activities will elicit direct military responses, and, much in the vein of WS’s recent simulation on this subject, I think Tehran knows well that it needs to avoid any genuine threat to global oil markets – lest it trigger an “all-in” military response from the United States.
So I think Iran’s really stuck, as it were, and will likely have to suffer a beat-down from Israel sometime in the next 24 months. I think it can take that “licking” and keep on “ticking” in terms of its nuclear weaponization goals, which I think are real and – in structural terms – completely justified by the region’s current correlation of forces. So I’m still betting on Iran having the Bomb before Obama leaves office in 2017 (yes, I see him winning again in November), and when that happens, I do expect the Saudis to cash in their long-held promise from Pakistan to supply them with their own devices….
The 3 C’S Around The Pakistan Question (Abhijnan Rej)
In the Spring 2012 issue of The Washington Quarterly, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad proposed a strategy for dealing with Pakistan by imaging it to be in a class of countries that are both adversaries and allies at the same time – with some vectors of interests of the elites pointing towards the United States and some others that don’t. Ambassador Khalilzad’s analysis is macroscopic, to a large extent based on the evolution of the Pakistani nation-state at large. By way of a compliment to his analysis, I want to provide here a microscopic typology of Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism in terms of a complete union of three different groups with respect to interests in jihadi extremism. Each group is distinct and yet has a significant overlap with the other and all of them originate inside the Pakistani army.
The first group, which I will term complicit, is largely backed by former and serving Inter-Services Intelligence officers, conjecturally from its Directorate S, and with ties to jihadi groups going back to the 1980s. This group wants Pakistan as a model state for the entire ummah; it will not hesitate to harbor top al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, or for that matter directly engage American forces as it did in 2007 – not because it shares Salafist ideologies (it often doesn’t) but because of a deep sense of Muslim nationalism and therefore, per their logic, anti-Americanism. A simple fact of life in Pakistan is that even though the ISI was created as coordinating intelligence agency for the various armed services, it remains distinct from the army and to a very large extent autonomous from it. This could be one of the reasons why there was no contradiction when Admiral Michael Mullen had “given an A” to the Pakistani army during its fight with Taliban elements in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in 2009-2010 and the very next year, right before his retirement, described the Haqqani network as a “veritable arm of the ISI” to the Senate Armed Services Committee…..
Collection Item Of The Week: “Pentagon Report Finds Iran’s Ballistic Missiles Improving” (Lauren Mellinger, Caitlin Barthold, Steven Aiello, Zachary Keck and Zoya Sameen)
Summary
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