Misleading Mid-East Punditry

The edit page of The Hindu is a far cry from the shouters of Times Now but there too punditry can be misleading noise.

The latest case in point is Suhasini Haidar’s analysis of “The West and its flawed anti-IS strategy” published appropriately enough on 1 April.

Here are some of its errors:

1. Throughout the piece there are references to “the West,” as if it is still a global political entity. The “West” of the Cold War has been gone for over a quarter century and in those years the United States and the countries of Western Europe have gone their separate ways.

2. It is true, the British and their military-industrial friends in Washington tried to extend the shelf-life of “the West” with the rigged election of Bush Jr. followed immediately by the Saudi-managed 9/11 attacks. But despite enormously profitable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the “special relationship” has become increasingly irritable and now is little more than a joint enterprise to wiretap everything that moves.

3. Meanwhile, the Americans have retreated to their historical default position of being leery of most things European except their wine, cheese and women. Britain, France and Germany awakened to that reality when a fit of post-Cold War hubris led them to implode Yugoslavia; they created an unmanageable mess and had to call for Yankee help.

4. The British have been especially hard hit in recent years by the end of transatlantic bonhomie. United States regulators have gone after the largest British banks with a hatchet for such things as money laundering, manipulating global gold prices and fixing interest rates. Under American pressure the Bank of England even had to accept a Canadian Governor. All this has made it difficult for the British elite to continue as usual with their profitable business managing the proceeds of global organized crime. In fact, they have been forced to pay off their multi-ethnic mafia/terrorist clientele with high-end British real estate. To prevent London becoming home to the world’s worst hoodlums the British parliament made it illegal for anyone with a criminal record to enter the country. And to ensure that the long-suffering people of Britain will not turn on their betters for selling off the country to criminals another law has completely delegitimized public protest: a 12-year old can now be arrested for standing on a street corner and cursing the government loudly.(The punishment will probably include non-stop viewing of Downton Abbey.)

5. Haidar’s assumption that the United States and Britain are on the same Mid-East page has never been true. Transatlantic differences have been a major factor in regional politics ever since FDR’s famous deal with Ibn Saud stuck a large American thumb in Churchill’s strategic eye. Things have got much worse of late. The Arab Spring” began when Washington withdrew support from long-established clients in the Middle East, and its failure is not the result of any “misreading” as much as it is of European support for favoured (read profitable) tyrants. That explains the seesaw process of democracy one day and mob/military rule the next. The Benghazi mob attack that killed the American Ambassador was clearly an MI 6 operation in revenge for the loss of Britain’s lucrative interests in Libya and the revelation of its long support for Gaddafi.

6. The Islamic State is essentially a British attempt to squelch the democratic potential of the Arab Spring and not, as Haidar seems to think, an ideological vehicle attractive to young Muslims. The streams of teenagers going to join IS from Western countries and the Russian Federation are drawn more by talk of parties, booze and sex than any desire for jihad. “Jihadi John,” the British face of televised IS murder, is reported to be an MI 6 operative ensconced in 5 star luxury. It is a mystery who the non-foreign IS fighters are; they could all be mercenaries.

7. To conclude, Haidar seems unaware that the whole fight against international terrorism is sham. There is incontrovertible evidence that Britain is the birth mother of modern international terrorism and that major NATO members are its godparents.

Rocky Road for UN Peacekeeping

It's the best of times and the worst of times for United Nations peacekeeping. With 20 missions and nearly 130,000 authorized military, police and civilian personnel, it is obvious that the UN's "blue helmets" are much in demand; but strangely, there seems to be waning support for peacekeeping in important ways. There seems to be growing reluctance among key States to support operations seen as too politically unsavory or dangerous; and some of the supposed beneficiaries of peacekeeping seem to be not grateful at all.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, warned the General Assembly's Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations yesterday that the faltering support could mean big trouble for UN authorized operations in the Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan and Eritrea.

Even as he spoke, some 700 UN troops from Eritrea were headed home to Jordan and India. Frustrated by the Eritrean government's blockage of fuel and food supplies to UN peacekeepers, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had tried to temporarily relocate them to the Ethiopian side of the disputed border, but finding that effort blocked too, resorted to a complete pull-out. He said in a report to the toothless Security Council that the Eritrean government's obstructions had put peacekeepers in an "untenable position."

Guéhenno, who is reported to be leaving his post because Ban, under pressure from Washington, "reformed" his department by taking away its logistics capabilities and putting it under a new Under-Secretary, warned that a "serious failure in one of our missions would be enough to put at risk the credibility of the whole of peacekeeping, which we have worked so hard to restore over the past few years."

What he meant by "credibility" is a mystery, for UN peacekeeping has a record of grand failures that includes Palestine (where the first UN mission was mandated in 1948), Rwanda (where a force was pulled out even as the 1994 genocide was in progress), and Bosnia (where peacekeepers stood by as the "safe area" the Security Council had declared in Srebrenica was overrun and subjected to mass murder and rape).

In the Sudan, where the savageries of Darfur were not even acknowledged by the Security Council till a solitary UN official quit his job to publicize the Organization's embarrassing inaction, the Kharatoum regime has stalled deployment of a 26,000 UN-African Union force. At present, the Darfur force consists of little more than the 9,000 or so African Union troops who have been there ineffectually for over a year.

In other crisis spots UN peacekeepers have gone into the field never to return: they have been stuck in Cyprus and the India-Pakistan border for decades. Where they have succeeded -- including Liberia. Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire and Timor-Leste, all in the last decade -- it is because the outside Powers which sustained conflict (and that includes not just States but mining companies), achieved their ends or decided to call it quits.

In Afghanistan, where the murky geopolitics of resource-rich Central Asia collide with the trade in heroin and "extremist Islam" (represented by the Taliban and rogue elements of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence), "peacekeeping" is hardly the word for what is going on. The UN has subcontracted its pacific role to NATO, which has tried in recent months to overshadow the Karzai government on the grounds that it is politically incompetent and logistically inefficient. The high point of that effort was the unsuccessful effort to place a British spy turned politician in combined charge of the UN, NATO and EU operations in Afghanistan (see February 10 post "Why Karzai Nixed Paddy Ashdown").

The net result of all this is that the moral authority of the United Nations (which it retains mainly by default, there being no other institution to represent the universal hope for peace), is being undermined. That would be undesirable at the best of times; when the world is entering a period of major instability caused by a tectonic shift of economic and political power to asia, it could be disastrous.

Is Push Coming to Shove on Pakistan's Nukes?

On 13 January Pakistan Television aired an interview with Air Commodore Khalid Banuri, the person in charge of the country's "nuclear assets." Its transcript was published with an introduction by the interviewer, journalist Ahmed Quraishi, who headlined it "Pakistan's Nukes Are Here To Stay -- Get Used To It."

On 22 January The Guardian in Britain published an article by Ian Traynor, its correspondent in Brussels, headlined "Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, NATO told." It reported that a 150-page report by a group of tip-level strategists said the: "West must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the 'imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction'."

According to The Guardian, the report argued that the "values and way of life" of the West were "under threat from political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism; the "dark side" of globalisation (i.e. international terrorism; organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction); climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential "environmental" migration on a mass scale; the weakening of the nation state as well as of organisations such as the UN, Nato and the EU. The circumstances required NATO to forgo the consensus rule, disallow a voice in decision-making for countries not operationally involved, and resort to the use of force without UN security council authorisation when "immediate action is needed to protect large numbers of human beings."

The two stories highlight the worsening security climate in Asia that I have noted in earlier posts, and almost certainly hide complex undercurrents in transatlantic relationships. Given the old British connection with the ISI, and the recently advertised loss of control by the latter of jihadist groups, Pakistan's nuclear weapons have become a wild card in the emerging intra-Western power struggle. In that context, the story on Pakistan Television asserting the government's firm control of its nuclear arsenal is calculated not to reassure the United States but to undermine its post 9/11 confidence that the "Islamic bomb" is under its control. This is very clear in Quraishi's introduction to the transcript of the interview.

Quraishi recounted that in November 2007 The New York Times had published "what many analysts in Islamabad described as a misleading story, claiming that the United States had spent up to $ 100 million over the past five years to help Pakistan secure its nuclear weapons." That story had "coincided with reports alleging that elite US troops already had access to Pakistan’s vast arsenal of nuclear and other strategic weapons." At the time, Pakistani officials had ignored the reports, "confident about their capabilities and a little curious about where these bogus stories were coming from."

Initially, Quraishi wrote, they accepted assurances the Bush administration had nothing to do with the reports but were increasingly concerned as a US "media campaign" began to portray Pakistan "as a nuclear power incapable of securing its weapons," and there was talk of war games meant to "grab Pakistani nuclear weapons" in case of instability in the country. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had even "proposed joint American and British ‘supervision’ of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons."

While those in charge of Pakistan's nuclear weapons tended to dismiss such talk, Quraishi reported, others viewed it "in the context of a deliberate US strategy to destabilize Pakistan." That assessment had led the chairman of Pakistan's Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Tariq Majid, to publicly blast the reports in an official statement on 11 December 2007 as the work of “vested and hostile elements in the international media.” In any such scenario, he said, "Pakistan would meet the challenge strongly." Quraishi asked Air Commodore Banuri "what Pakistan would do if its strategic installations came under attack." Banuri responded: Don’t mess with us.” The rest of the conversation went as follows:

Ahmed Quraishi: Who holds the authority to push the nuclear button in Pakistan?

Khaled Banuri: The short answer is very easy: Not an individual but the National Command Authority, comprised of all the senior decision makers of the country, [they] would look at all the issues including the deployment, if it ever comes to that.

AQ: Is it possible there could be a scientist on the inside, an extremist with links to terrorists, maybe Osama bin Laden, who could steal a Pakistani weapon …

KB: In a Tom Clancy fiction that could be a possibility. We are very sure of what our systems are.

AQ: What about the reports before 9/11 that mentioned the links between some of the scientists in our strategic programs, names, who met terrorists in Afghanistan?

KB: Those names, when you actually go into the details, had nothing to do with the classified side of our programs,[they might have been] some people from the system who perhaps were power plant engineers who had some sympathies and were doing some charity work. The key thing here is that Pakistan investigated those situations and now we have a system that takes care of all aspects, even for our very respected scientists who retire. There is a system where they will be occupied in various ways and we will know what they are doing.

AQ: Let’s say there is a violent change of government in Islamabad. Someone hiding in the foothills of Islamabad breaks into one of your facilities, kills 5 or 6 guards, goes inside, picks up one of those nuclear weapons held in a very elaborate security parameter, takes it out, comes out of the building, puts it in the back of a truck or van and speeds away. How possible is this scenario?

KB: Absolutely not possible. But it is a fair question. We have several layers—a multitude of systems of security and technical solutions for security, some of which are non-intrusive and invisible. There are no exceptions for anyone from the outside going into a facility. There are various levels of access. Then there is the issue of insider threat. Not possible. We look at each individual who works within the system very closely. We look at them from various angles, something that the West knows at ‘personal reliability’, the human factor. We look into everything, background checks, medical records, police records, any history of possible impulsive behavior. And if there is anyone who doesn’t have a smooth graph of behavior, they are not put into any sensitive jobs. Even if there is someone in personal distress, for example because of a death in the family, there is a way for relieving them for a few days from sensitive responsibility.

AQ: So the cinematic perception of a Pakistani equivalent of a suitcase carried at all times by the President or the Prime Minister, containing the button for a nuclear missile or something, is not correct?

KB: The decision making about nuclear assets is very carefully thought out. It’s not a hair trigger situation. We all have seen many Cold War movies and many of these idea come from them.

AQ: Well said. Where are we keeping our nuclear bombs?

KB: The response to this question is in two words: Strategic Ambiguity. If anyone even claims he knows where our weapons are, they are wrong. And if they think they do, they are in for a rude shock. Even within the system, if someone doesn’t need to know about sensitive sites, they don’t have that information. So very few in Pakistan would know where they are. And I’m not going to tell you [smiling].

AQ: Really, I was kind of hoping for a hint. Okay, are the safeguards in the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China, Israel and India any better than the Pakistani nuclear safeguards?

KB: Even if I sound arrogant, ours are better. We have the advantage of hindsight. We have worked hard, we have trained hard, and we are very sure of what we have. We have learned from the best international practices. We don’t have aircrafts flying around with unauthorized nuclear missiles and we have a short nuclear history compared to some of the countries you mentioned.

AQ: Media reports have suggested that the Americans have helped Pakistan secure its nuclear assets, which implies that the Americans have access to Pakistani nukes?

KB: Ensuring nuclear security is our own interest. We made the bomb, we have the means to protect it, and we’re confident of that security. But we do not mind exposure to education and awareness, but in a completely non-intrusive way.

AQ: So you’re saying you have exchanged ideas with the Americans but not given them any access?

KB: Absolutely. That’s out of the question. That’s the red line that was defined even before we got into this exchange of ideas. We do have some rudimentary equipment and some training [from the U.S.]. And the kinds of figures you have seen in the media [about U.S. financial aid to secure Pakistani nuclear assets] are highly exaggerated.

AQ: The figure quoted was in the tens of millions …

KB: A $100 million was quoted in one report [New York Times, Nov. 2007]. Nowhere in that range.

AQ: Really?

KB: Nowhere.

AQ: Some Pakistanis are concerned and are asking what if the rudimentary equipment handed over to you contained a transmitter that could send out signals to a satellite or something exposing where our installations are?

KB: You have responded to the question yourself. Anyone concerned in Pakistan would have thought about this. The Pakistani nuclear establishment is always concerned about even the remotest of possibilities. We have this responsibility on behalf of this whole nation. It’s a sacred responsibility.

AQ: So let me put this to rest once and for all: you have not given access to the Americans as part of accepting their ‘help’?

KB: No access whatsoever. There are no foreigners who have any access to any Pakistani assets and they will never have. There are very few Pakistanis, even within our policy circle, who have all the information.

AQ: Does everyone concerned inside and outside the region understand there will be consequences if Pakistan’s strategic assets are attacked?

KB: Let me say it in plain words: Those who have hostile intent would know that any endeavor to attack Pakistan in any way will not be successful and it will be disastrous. Our weapons are meant for deterrence and not for [aggression]. But we have the capability to deal with any threat.

AQ: So we will respond if we are attacked?

KB: My message is: Don’t mess with us.

AQ: Late Mrs. Benazir Bhutto had publicly warned a few weeks before her tragic death that extremists could descend on the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and take control of the nearby nuclear installations at Kahuta. Is this true?

KB: I don’t want to get into the politics of this statement. But I’d like to make two points. One, Pakistan’s nuclear assets are safe and secure. I say this with a lot of confidence. And, Two, I’d request all Pakistanis, wherever they are, that they should not mix politics with nuclear security.