Richard Whalen

Have you noticed that the presidential candidates now refer to “the war” almost in the past tense? The economy and Bill you-know-who now has all the media’s attention but, in the meantime, on January 9th, Bush & Co. authorized the CIA to secretly operate U.S. Special Forces troops in the wild, lawless territories of Northwestern Pakistan, where the Taliban, al Qaeda and other militant Islamic groups hold sway.

All that was needed was Pakistan’s quick approval, which was assumed. Making the request were Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence and General Michael V. Hayden, the CIA Director who personally traveled 14,000 miles for the one-day meeting in Islamabad.

They were turned down flat. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, former Commander-in-Chief of the Army and now the civilian leader, rejected his visitor’s argument that the Pakistanis are now seriously pursuing Taliban subversion and violence directed at the regime. Pakistani authorities say they have more than 100,000 troops in the remote region, conducting a major offensive in South Waziristan. The U.S. pays Pakistan some $10 billion annually to patrol the remote region and seek out al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

The high-level American official requests followed the December 27, 2007 murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, shot down by al Qaeda gunmen in the suburbs of the capital in the Army’s headquarters town of Rawalpindi. The audacious murder of Bhutto, whom Musharraf sought to engage in a civilian political alliance, showed that al Qaeda and its shadowy masters in the Army’s all-powerful Inter-Services-Intelligence (ISI), a state within the state, acted with impunity in the subverted, deeply compromised and penetrated political realm. (The ISI invented the Taliban after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and still control it.)

Pakistan’s Army Chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Musharraf’s hand-picked successor, is personally loyal to him but the ISI-dominated Army is corrupt, allied with the Muslim world’s most fanatical extreme Islamists, and eager to gain control of the double-keys to Pakistan’s estimated 80 nuclear weapons. Musharraf is playing for time to purge the ISI and strike a bargain with another civilian ex-Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, to restore a semblance of democracy and gain Washington’s favor.

The U.S. has used and abused poor, pliable Pakistan since the days when, in the 1950s, Gary Francis Powers and others took off from their secret U2 bases to spy at high altitudes above closed Russia. Now, the U.S. sees 160 million Pakistanis as the Muslim backdoor to Hindu India and a semi-reliable guardian against Afghanistan, Russia, China and Central Asia’s “Stans” states. But the Pakistanis see the U.S. as a receding great power losing interest in the geopolitical great game. For the U.S., Pakistan could become expandable as the ill-protected Bhutto murder shows. Musharraf sees the ISI shifting sides towards his enemies, the fanatical Islamists, and regards Americans as dangerous friends.

We have no Kipling to sing the hymns of our retreats. He wrote: “If any questions why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.”