Update: I really should have read this in the South Asia Tribune before I wrote this.
I've been thinking about Wes Clark's position paper on the pursuit of Osama Bin Ladin and the al Qaida network or movement. It might work, but ... the reading I've done for the Baluchistan and adjacentcies (trans-boarder Afgan/Pak/Iran) series (i,ii,iii,iv,v) and the Pakistani exiles and election series: (a,b), and the Arabian and Persian Gulfs, Indian Ocean and Andoman and Nicobar Command Sea Power series: (A,B,C), causes me to reach a different recommendation.
First, I don't thiink that the target is correctly identified. I think the best course forward is investigatory, followed by arrests, the legal response within the international law framework, a course rejected by Bush, possibly even before 9/11, not retaliatory pursuits, the military response within the force structure framework. The intelligence product of these two approaches can be distinguished, and the point of last August's article in Le Monde is that European law enforcement and intelligence services have reached conclusions different from the American military and intelligence services. The European legal and Intel consensus is that a second generation of planning and operational leadership now exists, and is in fact adapting to conditions. I covered this August 21st, 2004.
Second, the Bush program of retaliatory pursuits is unilateralist. It does not predicate action on the cooperation of local law enforcement, rather, it predicates acton on the destruction of local law enforcement. In a nutshell, the Bush program is to blow up a lot of the trans-boarder Afgan/Pak/Iran region, with the happy concurrence of the military dictatorship in Islamabad that wants to repeat the 1970s war against Kalat (Baluch) nationalists, using the Americans instead of the Shah of Iran's force, and the ambivalent concurrence of the narcotics dictatorships that, when the TV cameras aren't rolling, are the "state" in most of Afganistan, and over a vast number of hypotetically dead bodies of Iranians -- Iranians who inter-alia assisted in the American-lead but multinational invasion of Afganistan, and who have been bagging and holding al-Qaida operatives for most of the past three years -- see my pieces on the MEK cadres held at Camp Ashraf (i,ii,iii).
There is an alternative.
First, we can abandon the shoot-first, aim-second, ask-questions-later model, and put law enforcement back in charge. Second we can define the Iranian state, and the tribal societies that the Punjabi state exploits for oil and gas resources and nuclear weapons testing sites and "strategic depth" for the next Pak-India war as our partners in the elimination of banditry and worse in the trans-boarder region, and abandon the worst ambitions of both the Bush regime vis a vis Iran, and the Mushareff regime vis a vis the North West Territory and Baluchistan.
More broadly, we can stay the course with the existing states model colonial period left, which requires the US to entice then betray the Iraqi Kurds (Turkish and Iranian states beneficiaries), the Marsh Arabs (Iraqi state beneficiary), the Baluch (Iranian and Pakistani states beneficiaries), and the Sindh (Pakistani state beneficiary), and maintain cordial relations with the centers of each state, at least until their internal dissonances force them to war with each other, or we can do something different.
That's where I'd gotten before opening up Al Jazeera and the South Asia Times this morning. Overnight Nawab Akbar Bugti, the leader of the Bugti tribe, and one of the three Sheiks (Nawabs in Punjabi) who took 10,000 troops into safety, in exile in Soviet Afganistan, until forced to leave Taliban Afganistan, was in the media explaining the circumstaces of the heavy firefight that took place at Dara Bugti yesterday. So far, at least 20 Punjabi Army and Frontier Corps troops are reported KIA, with wounded counts several multiples of the KIA number, under circumstances that suggest that General Mucharaff has decided to assassinate Sheik Akbar Bugti.
What happend yesterday in Dara Bugti and Quetta was really important. Helicopter gunships firing on escaping groups of the mothers, wives and daughters of opposition leaders. Artillary fire on the occupied residences of opposition leaders. Telephone intercepts and targeted assassinations, all in one dawn-to-dusk period. Apparently the Army achived a 5-1 kill ratio firing on tribal militias, women and children, using air and artillary, as well as infantry assault weapons, and of course, the element of surprise.
I highly recommend the South Asia Tribune, in addition to Al Jazeera. Condi Rice might have noticed that her host just tried to eliminate a Baluch leader and provoke war with the Bugti tribe, who own the area where the US is sending troops (Khuzdar, Baluchistan).
I've written about the South Asian nuclear weapons inventories, but that's more a consequence of writing about the uranium enrichment issue [todo: collect links].
If you want, you can write comments to info@wespac2004.com. Rather than out-source the problem to the Saudi military, which has no more clue than anyone else 1,500 km distant from the area of operations, going to Oman and asking Persians, Baluch, Afgans and Punjabis to meet on neutral (or historic) territory and discuss law enforcement and economic development as regional issues, not issues monopolised by periphery-suppressing states seems the better course. We want the local LEOs to suppress banditry and worse, not simply because we can pay the ones we decide not to wipe out as incidental collateral damage, but because suppressing banditry and worse is what they want to do for their own interests.
Posted by EBW at March 18, 2005 07:48 AM | TrackBack