Pakistan wields a double-edged sword

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

KARACHI - The first few thousand of more than 3 million people displaced by fighting in Pakistan's Swat and Malakand regions in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) have returned to their homes. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, on a tour to a refugee camp, said this week he was "optimistic" about the job more than 30,000 troops are doing in tackling militants in the area.

The months-long offensive in and around Swat has, however, stirred bitter resentment against the Pakistan Army and its Operation Rah-e-Raast (Operation for the Right Path), despite the positive spin the authorities try to put on the operation and their claims of killing top Taliban commanders.

The army's media relations department has claimed on at least four occasions that Mullah Fazlullah, nicknamed "Radio Mullah", the leader of the pro-Taliban Tehrik-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi (TNSM) that controls the insurgency in Swat, had been seriously wounded.

In all likelihood, the latest offensive will be much like Operation Rah-e-Haq (2007-08) in the Swat Valley, where the militants weathered the storm and emerged stronger than ever. Once the refugees return home, the militants will take up arms again for more pitched battles.

Contrary to the military's claims of hundreds of militants killed, the militants say they have lost only 50 of their men, with the remainder being civilians killed in crossfire or in aerial bombings. Of the 50, two commanders - one named only as Daud and the other as Shah Doran - have died.

The military operation has seen the emergence of a new supreme commander of the Swat Valley - Bin Yameen. He is fiercely anti-army and insiders say that even if ceasefires agreements are made, he will ignore them and fight to his last man and last bullet.
Renowned as a pir (spiritual guide), Bin Yameen is a former Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM - led by Maulana Masood Azhar) leader in Swat. He spent seven years as a prisoner of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance after being captured in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban in the 1990s. On his release, he returned to Swat and joined the JeM. In mid-2000, he was picked up by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence for alleged involvement in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate president General Pervez Musharraf.

A top jihadi leader who was detained - also without trial - over the same incident told Asia Times Online, "He [Bin Yameen] was the victim of the worst sort of torture by army personnel, right up to the time it became crystal clear that he was not involved in any activity against the army or Musharraf. He became full of venom against the army."

After his release, Bin Yameen joined Mullah Fazlullah's TNSM, but retained command over a group of men loyal to him. Now there is a slogan that says "Bajaur [Agency] belongs to Faqir and Swat belongs to pir". (Faqir refers to another anti-army militant, Maulana Faqir Mohammad, whose brother was killed by the army in a torture cell.) At present, the entire Taliban leadership in the Malakand area is lying low, leaving Bin Yameen and his men face-to-face with the army.

Bin Yameen is just one example of a Talib who was once used by the military to further its strategic depth in Afghanistan, but who is now bitterly opposed to the army. In a similar manner, in the past month, the "war on terror" has taken a turn.

The Pakistan army had favored opening several fronts against militants in the troubled tribal areas, but the new US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, and other US officials wanted to concentrate on closing the Taliban's supply lines to Afghanistan's Helmand province, as a NATO operation was planned for there.

The only Pakistani Taliban commander who sends his men to Helmand is Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan. Over the past few years, he has dispatched several thousand fighters. (A command structure comprising former Kashmiri fighters, under Abdul Jabbar, also sends men to Helmand.)

A few months ago, when the Malakand operation was in full swing, the Americans became so desperate that action should be taken against Pakistani militants who were due to go into Helmand that the Pakistani establishment believed they would take matters into their own hands and move into Pakistan.

To pre-empt this, all possible tribal rivals of Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan were organized (all were Taliban) under the banner of the Pakistan army. Qari Zainuddin Mehsud, whom the army claimed had 3,000 men, could hardly gather a few dozen, as with Haji Turkestan. The biggest Taliban commander on the Pakistani side, Mullah Nazir, an arch-rival of Baitullah due to tribal feuds, initially assured the army he would stay neutral if action were taken against Mehsud. Another Taliban commander, Gul Bahadur, also a rival of Baitullah, was silent.

Baitullah responded by conveying a message through influential commander Sirajuddin Haqqani to all Taliban leaders that if the Pakistan army entered South Waziristan, it would be completely under American pressure. As such, they should not make any agreements with the army.

Mullah Nazir promptly refused to allow the army passage in his area; Qari Zainuddin Mehsud was assassinated by Baitullah's men and Haji Turkestan went into hiding and refused to cooperate with the army.

With the army nevertheless poised to attack Baitullah last month, Gul Bahadur, considered "good Taliban" by the army, broke a ceasefire in North Waziristan by carrying out a devastating attack on a military convoy in which three officers and 26 soldiers were killed. Thirty military personnel were also abducted.

The incident stunned the army and it was faced with the reality that far from eliminating Baitullah, he had emerged as the leader of all of the Pakistani Taliban; tribal feuds had been put aside. This was despite the fact that the army clarified on a number of occasions that the military operation was only against Baitullah, not even against his tribe. Clearly, no one believed the army.

Credibility problem
Three weeks ago, police arrested five bandits in the southern port city of Karachi - Adil, Shah Hussain, Ahmed Baloch, Rahmat and Sher Muhammed, all from the Mehsud tribe and none of them from the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.

They were simply bandits who happened to be Mehsuds. However, the army was so keen to settle scores with Baitullah that a military security unit ordered a police officer, Raja Umar Khattab, to shoot them. Khattab refused, as he was aware, after their 15 days in custody, that they were just bandits and that an extra-judicial killing would land him in serious trouble.

The five were then transferred to another police officer, who did the deed. The bodies were immediately sent to South Waziristan with a message to Baitullah that the "more you defy us, the more you will collect the bodies of your tribal men".

This sordid episode further cemented the support of the entire Mehsud tribe around Baitullah, including all Taliban commanders. Baitullah is once again the undisputed number one commander of the Pakistani Taliban.

The military's missteps were not limited to Waziristan and the Swat Valley, as shown in the operation in Orakzai Agency - an outpost of Baitullah's where his cousin, Hakimullah Mehsud, calls the shots.

The Taliban control the regions of Khyber Agency and Kurram Agency through Orakzai, and it is also the main hub for carrying out attacks on Peshawar, the capital of NWFP.

During the operation, aircraft destroyed the biggest seminary in the agency, in the process killing the highly respected 72-year-old religious scholar Mufti Amin, a pro-army cleric who opposed suicide attacks on the Pakistani security forces.

The next day, the director general of Inter-Services Public Relations, Major General Athar Abbas, scornfully declared Mufti Amin a "miscreant". This inflamed the ordinary people of Orakzai and they turned hostile to the army. A military helicopter was soon after shot down in the agency, killing several personnel, including a colonel. When a team was sent to collect the remains, the Taliban ambushed it and and killed 40 people.

With events spiraling out of control on several fronts, military headquarters in Rawalpindi approached all Taliban commanders about a ceasefire. They were assured that if the militants provided guarantees, a ceasefire deal was also possible in Swat Valley. This initiative came too late as anti-army militants are entrenched in their views.

Another misstep
In April, some high profile arrests (Exposed jihadis put Pakistan on the spot Asia Times Online, May 5, 2009) uncovered a jihadi network operating through Pakistan. As a result, a top jihadi commander, Abdul Jabbar, was forced to take refuge in North Waziristan.

Jabbar had always opposed attacks on the Pakistani security forces as well as jihadi operations in Pakistan. Under US pressure (more than 500 Americans have arrived in Islamabad to observe developments) an operation was organized against militants in the southern Punjab and several high-profile commanders, including one named Farooq and other members of the Jaish-e-Mohammad, were arrested.

A top jihadi leader commented to Asia Times Online, "We never imagined such a reaction. We have not fought against the Pakistan army and we do not consider it right. But if the present arrests continue, what option will we have ... without going to Waziristan and doing what other people are doing there?

Military headquarters believes that people like Maulana Sufi Mohammad - spearhead of the sharia movement in Malakand division - are an ace in their hand. He is being detained in a military safe house. But in recent weeks, the militants' command structure has changed and people like Sufi Mohammad have become irrelevant. Now it is people like Bin Yameen, once an asset, who call the shots against the militants.

Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KG18Df03.html

General Responsible for All US Intelligence Operations Says 911 is a Fraud!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMgGehS8KdE

Afghanistan: Marines' Mission Doomed to Failure

Note: Just two weeks into July, the month is already the deadliest for NATO troops in Afghanistan. The high casualty count is at least partially the result of Operation Khanjar, the largest U.S. Marine Corps ground offensive in years. But NAM contributor Sonali Kolhatkar writes that NATO's modus operandi are doomed to failure.

The United States’ new offensive into Afghanistan’s troubled Helmand province provides a test case for achieving President Obama’s stated goal: “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
Sonali Kolhatkar co-directs
the Afghan Women's Mission.
It is the first major push of its kind, relying on a massive ground presence of thousands of Marines rather than air strikes, which American strategists acknowlege have killed far too many civilians over the past two years. But while Operation Khanjar realizes Washington’s increased desire to divert more “resources” into Afghanistan, it is unclear what, if anything, can be accomplished by this kind of brute force.

At the launch of the offensive, U.S. General Stanley McChrystal gave only the following explanation: that his intention is to “clear, hold and build” in Taliban strongholds like Helmand.

But what exactly does “clear” mean? If it means to kill, the U.S. Marines will have to distinguish between Taliban and non-Taliban Afghans to avoid more civilian casualties. This is a near-impossible task. The Taliban do not wear a uniform or carry membership cards. They carry weapons, but so do Afghan civilians, who do so to protect their families. In an effort to lower the embarrassing count of civilians killed (often greater than the numbers killed by the Taliban), McChrystal has ordered troops to cut short any pursuit of Taliban fighters if civilians are at risk.

The U.S. troops have to play cautious -- they have everything to lose: their own lives and the diminishing goodwill of the Afghan people. Unfortunately for the troops, Afghan civilian resentment, built up over the past several years, has not vaporized just because the U.S. military’s rules of engagement have officially changed. The Marines are facing a Taliban force bolstered by the survivors of U.S. bombs and the loved ones of those killed. The Taliban’s greatest advantage is their ability to move through a population increasingly sick of “death-by-occupation,” leaving the U.S. troops with only two options: risk letting the Taliban escape, or kill the Taliban even if it means killing civilians in the process and violating the new rules. Both scenarios lead to a Taliban victory.

Perhaps by “clear,” McChrystal means capture. But that raises more difficult questions: Where will they put the prisoners, and what sort of justice will be offered? Will the United States turn Bagram into a greater gulag than Guantanamo? Will they turn over those who survive their torture and interrogation to secret military tribunals? In releasing 90 percent of those imprisoned at Guantanamo without charge, the United States has already proved inept at distinguishing al Qaeda and Taliban members from ordinary civilians over the past eight years. Imprisoning and torturing innocent civilians has the same obvious effect as killing them: increased hostility and resentment toward the occupation.

Perhaps by “clear,” McChrystal simply means pushing the Taliban out of the areas where they are operating into surrounding areas. Already there are reports that the Taliban have escaped the current offensive, simply retreating to the western and northern parts of the country and launching their own counter-operation: Iron Net, intended to trap the U.S. forces. They have killed dozens of troops and civilians through roadside and suicide bombs in the past week alone. In response, the United States has reportedly fallen back on the discredited strategy of air raids to kill dozens of people they claim are “militants,” but likely include civilians.

If the current strategy does result, intentionally or not, in displacing the problem into new areas, presumably more Marines will have to be deployed to those areas to repeat the cat-and-mouse game, and push the Taliban up against borders that they cannot infiltrate.

But Afghanistan is not a small country (it is comparable in size to Iraq) and by this logic, the United States is looking at a long-term blanket occupation of the country, something that ordinary Afghans have increasingly declared they do not want.

A BBC-ABC News poll conducted prior to the current ground offensive revealed that less than 50 percent of Afghans have a favorable opinion of the United States, down from 68 percent in 2005. (The poll also revealed an even greater dislike of the Taliban, meaning that Afghans tolerate the U.S. military only because they have no other options.)

The likelihood of American success in Afghanistan is at best dim and, at worst, heading inevitably toward a lose-lose situation. Given the impossibility of surgically identifying and killing a moving and elusive target, there are only two possible outcomes: killing a lot of civilians, or pushing the insurgency to the rest of the country, or both. After the Iraq debacle, are Americans ready for yet another unpopular occupation, protracted war and thousands of U.S. casualties?

Perhaps the name is apt: the United States' Operation Khanjar is named for an Arabic (not Afghan) dagger widely used in past centuries by fighters in the Gulf Arab region, in countries like Oman. But today, the Khanjar is largely a ceremonial weapon, a decorative objet d’art used to adorn walls but useless in a real fight. Like the Khanjar, the current U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, out-of-touch with reality, is more symbolic than practical.

NAM contributor Sonali Kolhatkar is co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission and co-author of the book Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propoganda of Silence.

Strategic Calculus and the Afghan War

By George Friedman

U.S. and allied forces began their first major offensive in Afghanistan under the command of U.S. Gen David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal this July. Inevitably, coalition casualties have begun to mount. Fifteen British soldiers have died within the past 10 days — eight of whom were killed within a 24-hour period — in Helmand province, where the operation is taking place. On July 6, seven U.S. soldiers were killed in separate attacks across Afghanistan within a single day, and on July 12 another four U.S. soldiers were reported killed in Helmand.

While the numbers are still relatively low, the reaction, particularly in the United Kingdom, has been strong. Afghanistan had long been a war of intermittent casualties, the “other war.” Now it is the prime theater of operations. The United States has changed the rules of the war, and so a great many things now change.

The increase in casualties by itself does not tell us much about the success of the operation. If U.S. and NATO forces are successful in finding and attacking Taliban militants, Western casualties inevitably will spike. If the Taliban were prepared for the offensive, and small units were waiting in ambush, coalition casualties also will rise. Overall, however, the casualties remain low for the number of troops involved — and no matter how well the operation is going, it will result in casualties.

Laying the Groundwork for Counterinsurgency

According to the U.S. command, the primary purpose of the operation in Helmand is not to engage Taliban forces. Instead, the purpose is to create a secure zone in hostile territory, staying true to the counterinsurgency principle of winning hearts and minds. In other words, Helmand is supposed to be a platform for winning over the population by securing it against the Taliban, and for demonstrating that the methods used in Iraq — and in successful counterinsurgency in general — can be applied to Afghanistan.

The U.S. strategy makes a virtue out of the fundamental military problem in counterinsurgency whereby the successful insurgent declines combat when the occupying power has overwhelming force available, withdrawing, dispersing and possibly harassing the main body with hit-and-run operations designed to impose casualties and slow down the operation. The counterinsurgent’s main advantage is firepower, on the ground and in the air. The insurgents’ main advantage is intelligence. Native to the area, insurgents have networks of informants letting them know not only where enemy troops are, but also providing information about counterinsurgent operations during the operations’ planning phases.

Insurgents will have greater say over the time and place of battle. As major operations crank up in one area, the insurgents attack in other areas. And the insurgents have two goals. The first is to wear out the counterinsurgency in endless operations that yield little. The second is to impose a level of casualties disproportionate to the level of success, making the operation either futile or apparently futile.

The insurgent cannot defeat the main enemy force in open battle; by definition, that is beyond his reach. What he can do is impose casualties on the counterinsurgent. Theasymmetry of this war is the asymmetry of interest. In Vietnam, the interests of the North Vietnamese in the outcome far outweighed the interests of the Americans in the outcome. That meant the North Vietnamese would take the time needed, expend the lives required and run the risks necessary to win the war. U.S. interest in the war was much smaller. A 20-to-1 ratio of Vietnamese to U.S. casualties therefore favored the North Vietnamese. They were fighting for a core issue. The Americans were fighting a peripheral issue. So long as the North Vietnamese could continue to impose casualties on the Americans, they could push Washington to a political point where the war became not worth fighting for the United States.

The insurgent has time on his side. The insurgent is native to the war zone and has the will and patience to exhaust the enemy. The counterinsurgent always will be short of time — especially in a country like Afghanistan, where security and governing institutions will have to be built from scratch. A considerable amount of time must pass before the counterinsurgent’s strategy can yield results, something McChrystal and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have both acknowledged. The more time passes and the more casualties mount for the counterinsurgent, the more likely public support for the counterinsurgent’s war will erode. Therefore, the counterinsurgency timeline is unlikely to match up with the political timeline at home.

The Intelligence Problem

The problem of intelligence is the perpetual weakness of the counterinsurgent. The counterinsurgent is operating in a foreign country and thereby lacks the means to distinguish allies from enemy agents, or valid from invalid information. This makes winning allies among the civilian population key for the counterinsurgent.

Unless a solid base is achieved among the residents of Helmand, the coalition’s intelligence problem will remain insurmountable. This explains why the current operation is focusing on holding and securing the area and winning hearts and minds. With a degree of security comes loyalty. With loyalty comes intelligence. If intelligence is the insurgent’s strategic advantage, this is the way to counter it. It strikes at the center of gravity of the insurgent. Intelligence is his strong suit, and if the insurgent loses it, he loses the war.

Then there is the issue of counterintelligence. Every Afghan translator, soldier or government official is a possible breach of security for the counterinsurgent. Most of them — and certainly not all of them — are not in bed with the enemy. But some inevitably will be, and not only does that render counterinsurgent operations insecure, it also creates uncertainty among the counterinsurgents. The insurgent’s ability to gather intelligence on the counterinsurgents is the insurgents’ main strategic advantage. With it, insurgents can evade entrapment and choose the time and place for engagement. Without it, insurgents are blind. With it, the insurgent can fill the counterinsurgent’s intelligence pipeline with misleading information. Without it, the counterinsurgent might see clearly enough to find and destroy the insurgent force.

Counterinsurgency and the al Qaeda Factor

The Afghan counterinsurgency campaign also suffers from a weakness in its strategic rationale. What makes Afghanistan critical to the United States is al Qaeda, the core group of jihadists that demonstrated the ability to launch transcontinental attacks against the West from Afghanistan. The argument has been that without U.S. troops in the country and a pro-American government in Kabul, al Qaeda might return, rebuild and strike again. That makes Afghanistan a strategic interest for the United States

But there is a strategic divergence between the war against al Qaeda and the war against the Taliban. Some will argue that al Qaeda remains operational and, therefore, the United States must make a long-term military investment in Afghanistan to deprive the enemy of sanctuary.

But while some al Qaeda members remain to issue threatening messages from the region, the group’s ability to meet covertly, recruit talent, funnel money and execute operations from the region has been hampered considerably. The overall threat value of al Qaeda, in our view, has declined. If this is a war that pivots on intelligence, the mission to block al Qaeda eventually may once again be left to the covert capabilities of U.S. intelligence and Special Operations Command, whether in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere.

Widening the war’s objectives to defeating the Taliban insurgency through a resource-intensive hearts-and-minds campaign requires time and patience, both of which lie with the insurgent. If the United States were to draw the conclusion that al Qaeda was no longer functional, and that follow-on organizations may be as likely to organize attacks from Somalia or Pakistan as they would be from Afghanistan, then the significance of Afghanistan declines.

That creates the asymmetry that made the Vietnam War unsustainable. The Taliban have nowhere else to go. They have fought as an organization since the 1990s, and longer than that as individuals. Their interest in the future of Afghanistan towers over the American interest if it is determined that the al Qaeda-Afghanistan nexus is no longer decisive. If that were to happen, then the willingness of the United States to absorb casualties would decline dramatically.

This is not a question of the American will to fight; it is a question of the American interest in fighting. In Vietnam, the United States fought for many years. At a certain point, the likelihood of a cessation of conflict declined, along with the likelihood of U.S. victory, such that the rational U.S. interest in remaining in Vietnam and taking casualties disappeared. In Vietnam, there was an added strategic consideration: The U.S. military was absorbed in Vietnam while the main threat was from the Soviet Union in Europe. Continuing the war increased the risk in Europe. So the United States withdrew from Vietnam.

The Taliban obviously want to create a similar dynamic in Afghanistan — the same dynamic the mujahideen used against the Soviets there. The imposition of casualties in a war of asymmetric interests inevitably generates political resistance among those not directly committed to the war. The command has a professional interest in the war, the troops have a personal and emotional commitment. They are in the war, and look at the war as a self-contained entity, worth fighting in its own right.

Outside of those directly involved in the war, including the public, the landscape becomes more complex. The question of whether the war is worth fighting becomes the question, a question that is not asked — and properly so — in the theater of operations. The higher the casualty count, the more the interests involved in the war are questioned, until at some point, the equation shifts away from the war and toward withdrawal.

Avoiding Asymmetry of Interests

The key for the United States in fighting the war is to avoid asymmetry of interests. If the war is seen as a battle against the resumption of terrorist attacks on the United States, casualties are seen as justified. If the war is seen as having moved beyond al Qaeda, the strategic purpose of the war becomes murky and the equation shifts. There have been no attacks from al Qaeda on the United States since 2001. If al Qaeda retains some operational capability, it is no longer solely dependent on Afghanistan to wage attacks. Therefore, the strategic rationale becomes tenuous.

The probe into Helmand is essentially an intelligence battle between the United States and the Taliban. But what is striking is that even at this low level of casualties, there are already reactions. A number of prominent news media outlets have highlighted the rise in casualties, and the British are reacting strongly to the fact that total British casualties in Afghanistan have now surpassed the number of British troops killed in Iraq. The response has not risen to the level that would be associated with serious calls for a withdrawal, but even so, it does give a measure of the sensitivity of the issue.

Petraeus is professionally committed to the war and the troops have shed sweat and blood. For them, this war is of central importance. If they can gain the confidence of the population and if they can switch the dynamics of the intelligence war, the Taliban could wind up on the defensive. But if the Taliban can attack U.S. forces around the country, increasing casualties, the United States will be on the defensive. The war is a contest now between the intelligence war and casualties. The better the intelligence, the fewer the casualties. But it seems to us that the intelligence war will be tougher to win than it will be for the Taliban to impose casualties.

U.S. President Barack Obama is in the position Richard Nixon found himself in back in 1969. Having inherited a war he didn’t begin, Nixon had the option of terminating it. He chose instead to continue to fight it. Obama has the same choice. He did not start the Afghan war, and in spite of his campaign rhetoric, he does not have to continue it. After one year in office, Nixon found that Lyndon Johnson’s war had become his war. Obama will experience the same dilemma.

The least knowable variable is Obama’s appetite for this war. He will see casualties without any guarantee of success. If he does attempt to negotiate a deal with the Taliban, as Nixon did with the North Vietnamese, any deal is likely to be as temporary as Nixon’s deal proved. The key is the intelligence he is seeing, and whether he has confidence in it. If the intelligence says the war in Afghanistan blocks al Qaeda attacks on the United States, he will have to continue it. If there is no direct link, then he has a serious problem.

Obama clearly has given Petraeus a period of time to fight the war. We suspect Obama does not want the Afghan war to become his war. Therefore, there have to be limits on how long Petraeus has. These limits are unlikely to align with the counterinsurgency timeline. The Taliban, meanwhile, constitute a sophisticated insurgent group and understand the dynamics of American politics. If they can impose casualties on the United States now, before the intelligence war shifts in Washington’s favor, then they might shift Obama’s calculus.

This is what the Afghan war is now about.

The Headscarf Martyr!!!

Guardian on the issue

Kate Connolly of Guardian (AUDIO)

BBC report here (AUDIO)

Obama’s Undeclared War Against Pakistan Continues

Three days after his inauguration, on January 23, 2009, President Barack Obamaordered US predator drones to attack sites inside of Pakistan, reportedly killing 15 people. It was the first documented attack ordered by the new US Commander in Chief inside of Pakistan. Since that first Obama-authorized attack, the US has regularly bombed Pakistan, killing scores of civilians. The New York Times reportedthat the attacks were clear evidence Obama "is continuing, and in some cases extending, Bush administration policy." In the first 99 days of 2009, more than 150 people were reportedly killed in these drone attacks. The most recent documented attack was Tuesday in Waziristan. Since 2006, the US drone strikes have killed 687 people (as of April). That amounts to about 38 deaths a month just from drone attacks.

The use of these attack drones by Obama should not come as a surprise to anyone who followed his presidential campaign closely. As a candidate, Obama made clear that Pakistan’s sovereignty was subservient to US interests, saying he would attackwith or without the approval of the Pakistani government. Obama said if the US had "actionable intelligence" that "high value" targets were in Pakistan, the US would attack. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed those sentiments on the campaign trail and "did not rule out U.S. attacks inside Pakistan, citing the missile attacks her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, ordered against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998. ‘If we had actionable intelligence that Osama bin Laden or other high-value targets were in Pakistan I would ensure that they were targeted and killed or captured,’ she said."

Last weekend, Obama granted his first extended interview with a Pakistani media outlet, the newspaper Dawn:

Responding to a question about drone attacks inside Pakistan’s tribal zone, Mr. Obama said he did not comment on specific operations.

‘But I will tell you that we have no intention of sending US troops into Pakistan. Pakistan and its military are dealing with their security issues.’

There are a number of issues raised by this brief response offered by Obama. First, the only difference between using these attack drones and using actual US soldiers on the ground is that the soldiers are living beings. These drones sanitize war and reduce the US death toll while still unleashing military hell disproportionately on civilians. The bottom line is that the use of drones inside the borders of Pakistan amounts to the same violation of sovereignty that would result from sending US soldiers inside the country. Obama defended the attacks in the Dawn interview, saying:

Our primary goal is to be a partner and a friend to Pakistan and to allow Pakistan to thrive on its own terms, respecting its own traditions, respecting its own culture. We simply want to make sure that our common enemies, which are extremists who would kill innocent civilians, that that kind of activity is stopped, and we believe that it has to be stopped whether it’s in the United States or in Pakistan or anywhere in the world.

Despite Obama’s comments about respecting Pakistan "on its own terms," this is how Reuters recently described the arrangement between Pakistan and the US regarding drone attacks:

U.S. ally Pakistan objects to the U.S. missile strikes, saying they violate its sovereignty and undermine efforts to deal with militancy because they inflame public anger and bolster support for the militants.

Washington says the missile strikes are carried out under an agreement with Islamabad that allows Pakistani leaders to publicly criticize the attacks. Pakistan denies any such agreement.

Pakistan is now one of the biggest recipients of US aid with the House of Representatives recently approving a tripling of money to Pakistan to about $1.5 billion a year for five years. Moreover, US special forces are already operating inside of Pakistan, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in Baluchistan. According to theWall Street Journal, US Special Forces are:

training Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force responsible for battling the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, who cross freely between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said. The U.S. trainers aren’t meant to fight alongside the Pakistanis or accompany them into battle, in part because there will be so few Special Forces personnel in the two training camps.

A senior American military officer said he hoped Islamabad would gradually allow the U.S. to expand its training footprint inside Pakistan’s borders.

In February, The New York Times reported that US forces are also engaged in other activities inside of Pakistan:

American Special Operations troops based in Afghanistan have also carried out a number of operations into Pakistan’s tribal areas since early September, when a commando raid that killed a number of militants was publicly condemned by Pakistani officials. According to a senior American military official, the commando missions since September have been primarily to gather intelligence.

It is clear — and has been for a long time — that the Obama administration is radically expanding the US war in Afghanistan deeply into Pakistan. Whether it is through US military trainers (that’s what they were called in Vietnam too), drone attacks or commando raids inside the country, the US is militarily entrenched in Pakistan. It makes Obama’s comment that "[W]e have no intention of sending US troops into Pakistan" simply unbelievable.

For a sense of how significant US operations are and will continue to be for years and years to come, just look at the US plan to build an almost $1 billion massive US "embassy" in Islamabad, which is reportedly modeled after the imperial city they call a US embassy in Baghdad. As we know very clearly from Iraq, such a complex will result in an immediate surge in the deployment of US soldiers, mercenaries and other contractors.

The Great American Bubble Machine

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

MATT TAIBBI

In Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83, Matt Taibbi takes on "the Wall Street Bubble Mafia" — investment bank Goldman Sachs. The piece has generated controversy, with Goldman Sachs firing back that Taibbi's piece is "an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories" and a spokesman adding, "We reject the assertion that we are inflators of bubbles and profiteers in busts, and we are painfully conscious of the importance in being a force for good." Taibbi shot back: "Goldman has its alumni pushing its views from the pulpit of the U.S. Treasury, the NYSE, the World Bank, and numerous other important posts; it also has former players fronting major TV shows. They have the ear of the president if they want it." Here, now, are excerpts from Matt Taibbi's piece and video of Taibbi exploring the key issues.

Matt Taibbi On Goldman Sachs' Big Scam

From Matt Taibbi's "The Great American Bubble Machine" in Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

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NEXT: Goldman Sachs' Role in the Housing and Internet Busts

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Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs' Role
in the Housing and Internet Busts

From Matt Taibbi's "The Great American Bubble Machine" in Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83.

The basic scam in the Internet Age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. Companies that weren't much more than pot-fueled ideas scrawled on napkins by up-too-late bong-smokers were taken public via IPOs, hyped in the media and sold to the public for megamillions. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out 50-story windows and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

It sounds obvious now, but what the average investor didn't know at the time was that the banks had changed the rules of the game, making the deals look better than they actually were. They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational. While Goldman's later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry's standards of quality control.

Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.

And what caused the huge spike in oil prices? Take a wild guess. Obviously Goldman had help — there were other players in the physical-commodities market — but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once-solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

See Matt Taibbi discuss Goldman Sachs' role
in the housing and internet busts.

NEXT: Goldman Sachs Graduates in the Government

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Matt Taibbi Runs Down Goldman' Sachs Graduates with Government Positions

From Matt Taibbi's "The Great American Bubble Machine" in Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83.

The history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman.

But then, something happened. It's hard to say what it was exactly; it might have been the fact that Goldman's co-chairman in the early Nineties, Robert Rubin, followed Bill Clinton to the White House, where he directed the National Economic Council and eventually became Treasury secretary. While the American media fell in love with the story line of a pair of baby-boomer, Sixties-child, Fleetwood Mac yuppies nesting in the White House, it also nursed an undisguised crush on Rubin, who was hyped as without a doubt the smartest person ever to walk the face of the Earth, with Newton, Einstein, Mozart and Kant running far behind.

Rubin was the prototypical Goldman banker. He was probably born in a $4,000 suit, he had a face that seemed permanently frozen just short of an apology for being so much smarter than you, and he exuded a Spock-like, emotion-neutral exterior; the only human feeling you could imagine him experiencing was a nightmare about being forced to fly coach. It became almost a national cliché that whatever Rubin thought was best for the economy — a phenomenon that reached its apex in 1999, when Rubin appeared on the cover of Time with his Treasury deputy, Larry Summers, and Fed chief Alan Greenspan under the headline the committee to save the world. And "what Rubin thought," mostly, was that the American economy, and in particular the financial markets, were over-regulated and needed to be set free. During his tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy — beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits.

See Matt Taibbi run down Goldman Sachs graduates with government positions.

NEXT: Goldman Sachs' Powerful Influence

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Goldman Sachs' Powerful Influence

From Matt Taibbi's "The Great American Bubble Machine" in Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83.

After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.

It began in September of last year, when then-Treasury secretary Paulson made a momentous series of decisions. Although he had already engineered a rescue of Bear Stearns a few months before and helped bail out quasi-private lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers — one of Goldman's last real competitors — collapse without intervention. ("Goldman's superhero status was left intact," says market analyst Eric Salzman, "and an investment-banking competitor, Lehman, goes away.") The very next day, Paulson greenlighted a massive, $85 billion bailout of AIG, which promptly turned around and repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. Thanks to the rescue effort, the bank ended up getting paid in full for its bad bets: By contrast, retired auto workers awaiting the Chrysler bailout will be lucky to receive 50 cents for every dollar they are owed.

Immediately after the AIG bailout, Paulson announced his federal bailout for the financial industry, a $700 billion plan called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and put a heretofore unknown 35-year-old Goldman banker named Neel Kashkari in charge of administering the funds. In order to qualify for bailout monies, Goldman announced that it would convert from an investment bank to a bank-holding company, a move that allows it access not only to $10 billion in TARP funds, but to a whole galaxy of less conspicuous, publicly backed funding — most notably, lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. By the end of March, the Fed will have lent or guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion under a series of new bailout programs — and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret.

Converting to a bank-holding company has other benefits as well: Goldman's primary supervisor is now the New York Fed, whose chairman at the time of its announcement was Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Friedman was technically in violation of Federal Reserve policy by remaining on the board of Goldman even as he was supposedly regulating the bank; in order to rectify the problem, he applied for, and got, a conflict-of-interest waiver from the government. Friedman was also supposed to divest himself of his Goldman stock after Goldman became a bank-holding company, but thanks to the waiver, he was allowed to go out and buy 52,000 additional shares in his old bank, leaving him $3 million richer. Friedman stepped down in May, but the man now in charge of supervising Goldman — New York Fed president William Dudley — is yet another former Goldmanite.

The collective message of all of this — the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds — is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage."

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NEXT: Goldman Sachs' Excuse

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Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs' Excuse

From Matt Taibbi's "The Great American Bubble Machine" in Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83.

Fast-forward to today. It's early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs — its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign — sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.

Gone are Hank Paulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm's co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

See Matt Taibbi react to Goldman Sachs' excus