Afghanistan is not Sweden

Posted By Blake Hounshell Monday, July 26, 2010 - 12:43 PM Share

I've already said I was underwhelmed by the Wikileaks docu-dump on the Afghan war, and Peter Feaver and Dan Drezner have also weighed in with similar takes. As Drezner puts it, "So it turns out that the war in Afghanistan is not going well and Pakistan is playing a double game? Well, knock me down with a feather!!"

Nonetheless, a lot of people seem to be shocked by the revelations in the documents. One of them is New Yorker editor Amy Davidson, who discusses one incident where a convoy was shaken down by Afghan gunmen "in the pay of a local warlord, Matiullah Khan, who was himself in the pay, ultimately, of the American public." (Khan was the subject of a lengthy New York Times profile in June.)

Davidson seems outraged by this, but I find her reaction naive. She writes: "We may be the ones being shaken down on the highway, but from an Afghan perspective we are, by aligning ourselves with and propping up Hamid Karzai, also deploying the bandits. We are robbing ourselves, both of our purse and of our good name."

Fair enough. So who should the U.S. align with? And how does she think all those supplies get to U.S. bases?

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

EXPLORE:AFGHANISTAN
 

YKORI

1:42 PM ET

July 26, 2010

Being swedish, I must say

Being swedish, I must say that I do not understand the headline. Please educate me, someone! Please! I simply have to know.

 

BLAKE HOUNSHELL

7:52 PM ET

July 26, 2010

It means...

Afghanistan is a nasty, backwards place. We shouldn't be surprised when we see stories of brutality and corruption.

 

MARTY MARTEL

3:13 PM ET

July 26, 2010

US deserves to be screwed by Pakistan

After having poured billions of dollars in aid, US deserves to be treated with such contempt by Pakistani establishment (Pakistani Army, ISI and Government) since US has intentionally ignored Pakistani complicity in Afghan insurgency until now.

Files leaked by Wikileaks more or less corroborate ‘The sun in the sky’ report published by Harvard Professor Matt Waldman from London School of Economics on 6/13/2010.

That report states that “support for the Afghan Taliban is ‘official Pakistani ISI policy’ and is backed at the highest levels of Pakistan’s civilian administration. Pakistan appears to be playing a double game of astonishing magnitude. There is thus a strong case that the ISI orchestrates, sustains and shapes the overall insurgent campaign in Afghanistan.”

According to Afghan Taliban commanders’ interviews with Matt Waldman, the Pakistani ISI orchestrates, sustains and strongly influences the Taliban insurgency movement. The Afghan Taliban commanders also say that ISI gives sanctuary to both Taliban and Haqqani groups, and provides huge support in terms of training, funding, munitions, and supplies. In the words of these Afghan Taliban commanders, this is ‘as clear as the sun in the sky’.

The ISI is said to compensate families of suicide bombers to the tune of 200,000 Pakistani rupees, claims the report. Thus US AID TO BANKRUPT PAKISTAN FINANCES THE DEATH OF US/NATO SOLDIERS in Afghanistan. So in a way, US is financing the death of its OWN troops in Afghanistan.

Pakistani government issued its usual denials just as it had denied umpteen times the existence of Mullah Mohammed Omar’s ‘Quetta Shura Taliban (QST)’ in the provincial capital Quetta of Baluchistan. But General Stanley McChrystal called QST as the biggest threat to US Afghan mission in his report to President Obama in August, 2009.

Pakistan has denied presence of Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil umpteen times and just yesterday Adm Mike Mullen repeated in Islamabad that Osama is hiding in a very secure place in Pakistan.

The most breath-taking part of this sordid saga is that US is NOT holding Pakistan responsible for sheltering, protecting and supporting Haqqani’s HQN network and Mullah Omar’s QST network all these years while those networks have been causing daily deaths of US/NATO soldiers ever since 2002 even though Pakistan was SUPPOSED to have joined US fight against same Taliban back in 2001!

Can American CIA not know what Matt Waldman knows? How come Obama administration is continuing Bush’s mollycoddling of Pakistan with such incriminating evidence against Pakistan’s double game? How can US mission in Afghanistan succeed if Obama administration continues to ignore such Pakistani duplicity like Bush had done it before Obama? How long will US continue to evade what is as obvious as a ’bright sun’ in the sky on a summer day?

 

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