Pakistan Rising
To understand Iran’s possible desire for a nuclear weapon, one needs to look no further than the treatment Pakistan has received on the global stage in the years following 9/11.
For instance, it has recently been reported by Saudi officials that Saudi Arabia has agreed to defer payment of $5.1 billion in crude oil to Pakistan. The last time the Saudi’s deferred payment to their close ally Pakistan, the debt was virtually written off in the end.
This move on the part of the Saudis buys them as well as Washington considerable sway in the internal politics of Pakistan. This will most likely lead to the continual propping up of Musharraf as President, as well as the purchasing of the goodwill of new Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani. The gesture may also help to ease any anger caused by such testing of Pakistan’s territorial integrity as seen in the killing of 11 Pakistani soldiers last week in a U.S. air strike carried out in Pakistan’s Mohmand tribal region (located 100 miles east of Jalalabad.) U.S. officials said the strike was in response to U.S. troops being fired upon.
While the new civilian Pakistani government has seen a sharp increase in pressure in the last five months, there is little doubt that without the strong military deterrent that Pakistan possesses as a nation U.S. troops would already have a strong presence in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood has recently said that the Pakistani government will not allow any foreign troops American or otherwise to carry out ground operations in the FATA.
U.S. officials in Washington are firing back. Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX) who recently stated, “[It is] imperative that US forces be allowed to pursue the Taliban and Al Qaeda in tribal areas inside Pakistan… If we don’t do something now, they’re going to strike us again (in the United States) and it is going to be out of this area.”
As much as some factions in Washington would like to be given full access to the FATA, there is a very low probability that an unilateral operation in the region would be successful, and more likely rather become another long drawn out disaster in some of the most difficult terrain in the world against some of the most sophisticated guerilla forces on the planet.
Some in Washington simply would like to bomb the FATA and murder most of the militants in the region, but bombing runs the risk of destabilizing the entire nation of Pakistan. Bombing would also likely drum up more anti-American sentiment. An increase in anti-American sentiment would further increase the number of foreign fighters flooding into the region, a number that is already sharply on the rise according to a recent report by the New York Times.
The situation in the region is much bleaker and much more complicated than most Americans have been willing to admit. The harsh reality of the highest death toll in the theater for years has once again demanded the attention of the Western world. The reality is that the West simply does not have the troops to route out all extremist elements in the region. There are going to have to be many diplomatic efforts made on the local level throughout the region.
After 7 years of Western troops in Afghanistan it is still largely a lawless country outside of Kabul and the other major northern cities controlled by the Northern Alliance.
By early next year the U.S. will have 40,000 troops in Afghanistan, the highest level in recent years, and with the recent announcement by Washington that the USS Abraham Lincoln is leaving the Gulf to position itself in striking distance of Afghanistan in the Arabian Sea, violence promises to increase before the world sees a stabilization of the region.
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