Recommended Reading
Top Billing! Pundita – Alden Pyle in Pakistan, Part 2: Once upon a time in Saigon and Mumbai
A post of dramatic scope and fury as Pundita deftly sifts the shadowy underground of Af/Pak policy:
….Washington has yet to confront that the insurgency in Afghanistan, to the extent it exists, is miniscule and can be handled largely by non-military means. The major part of the fighting against NATO troops in Afghanistan is directed by Pakistan’s military and their intelligence service. As Rajeev Srinivasan explained earlier this month:
[…] Pakistan has clearly articulated its pursuit of strategic depth which, for instance, involves having a Plan B even if its major cities such as Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi, close to the Indian border, are obliterated in a possible Indian nuclear second strike (after Pakistan has wiped out Delhi and Mumbai in a first strike). They want to regroup from Afghanistan and continue their jihad against India from there.The Taliban, of course, are Pakistani Army and ISI soldiers dressed in baggy pants and beards for the occasion. The fact that alleged seminary students (whom the Taliban are supposed to be) suddenly started driving tanks and flying planes is indirect evidence that they were trained soldiers.Therefore, Taliban rule in Kabul means Pakistan has achieved its strategic depth. Clearly, they have no desire to fight or eliminate the Taliban, despite the fact that some factions (such as the one from the Mehsud tribe) have begun to inconvenience Pakistan through a campaign of suicide bombings. Dead Pakistani civilians are considered acceptable collateral damage by the ISI, but their attacks on the military apparatus is a big no-no. They are clearly ‘bad Taliban’, and will not get any share of the spoils.[…]
Got all that? As to what to do about it: For a few minutes set aside al Qaeda, the War on Terror, and Islamism. Get into the ballpark of what’s actually going on in Pakistan. From there it’s a hop and skip to working out a better war strategy in Afghanistan. Reaching the ballpark starts with realizing that we can’t ‘solve’ Afghanistan until we confront what Pakistan is and what we’ve been supporting in Pakistan since (drum roll please) 1947: a form of feudalism that’s supported by a caste system.
….There’s no need to ask, ‘How did it come to this?’ We just need to look back down the yellow brick road. What started with a photograph in LIFE ended up with many American troops murdered in Afghanistan by agents of a U.S. client state — and with Washington’s only protest to engage in butterknife rattling at the client state. And, perhaps in the hope that two clattering butterknives would equal the sound of one rattling saber, London joined Washington in telling Pakistan’s military and ISI that if they didn’t stop blowing up ISAF troops in Afghanistan, well, they needed to stop. This tough line was followed by Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown fobbing hush money on Pakistan’s government to the tune of £60m, “which will include funds for education and clean drinking water for children, to be delivered before the end of the financial year.”
A collection of related links to the acclaimed “Ecology of War” paper in Nature by Boorquez, Gourley, Dixon, Spagat, and Johnson. No, I have not finished digesting all of this yet:
Nature: -“Common Ecology Quantifies Human Insurgency”
John Robb: JOURNAL: A Quantitative Examination of Open Source Warfare, JOURNAL: A Critique of Open Source Warfare
Drew Conway: – On the Ecology of Human Insurgency, Response to John Robb Re: Ecology of Human Insurgency
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