We’re Number Two! We’re Number Two!

Pakistan pledges to help the United States in its quest for the nasty Taliban and al Qaeda fighters – the disruptors of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan – who have found solace and safe harbor within Pakistan’s borders. Their intelligence agency (the ISSI) even occasionally throws us a bone and delivers information that allows the very drone strikes they decry to hit an insurgent target in their Western Tribal District… or even arrests a nasty operative and hands them over to U.S. authorities. It looks nice on paper, but when you read about deep Taliban sympathies throughout the ISSI or the Pakistani military, or see recently “retired” senior Pakistani officers actively training Taliban forces in Pakistan, or recall how the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, Dr. A.Q. Khan, transferred vital technology designs to Iran to enable the development of their nuclear capacity, well you begin to understand that the U.S. and NATO are very much alone in their quest to destabilize if not eliminate the Taliban from Central and South Asia.

Even when Taliban militants attack Pakistani forces in internal Pakistani-insurgency (in Dir or Swat, for example), and where the Pakistani military even fights back, there remain general sympathies at every level of Pakistan’s social strata for their fellow Muslim passion-mongers, the Taliban. India (a primarily Hindu nation) is the number one enemy by a long shot, and even in the most militant of times, Taliban insurgency never rises above a very temporary second place foe, leagues behind demon India. Mostly, Taliban are admired for their never-ending commitment to their faith and their goal of pushing Western powers out of the region.

And local Pakistanis often pay the price for attacks by both U.S. and Pakistani forces against Taliban, both inside and outside of Pakistan. Bombings are often the retaliation of choice by these extremists, and while they may ostensibly target governmental and military targets, the innocent victims usually outnumber the announced targets by a vast number. On March 12^th, two blasts seconds apart, targeting Pakistani military vehicles driving through a crowded marketplace in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, killed 43 and injured 95, almost all innocent bystanders. To the locals, they don’t want to die in someone else’s battle; they just want to be left alone to live their lives.

Afghanistan itself is no better. The American military hit upon this notion of arming and training local tribal leaders (with rather significant cash bribes for their cooperation, by the way) to oust Taliban militants from their villages, towns, and rural countryside. After all, reasoned the Americans, giving local people the means of resisting an oppressive master would be the only way our thinly-spread forces could ever have a shot of taking and holding the countryside, far from the dominion of the Kabul government (however corrupt that central government might be). Of course, training and arming local leaders – would you change your opinion if I called them local “warlords,” which is what they really are – does tend to promote rivalry between regional warlords, jockeying for expanding their own oppressive regional control.

Well, once again, the Taliban are only the second real enemy to these Afghan warlords. Tribal enemies are always the first enemy, and everything else takes second place. The March 12^th New York Times: “Six weeks ago, elders of the Shinwari tribe, which dominates a large area in southeastern Afghanistan, pledged that they would set aside internal differences to focus on fighting the Taliban. This week, that commitment seemed less important as two Shinwari subtribes took up arms to fight each other over an ancient land dispute, leaving at least 13 people dead, according to local officials… Questions for Shinwari tribal elders this week about whether the pact against the Taliban still stood went unanswered as the elders turned the conversation to their intra-tribal struggle… ‘We promised to work with the government to fight the Taliban,’ said Hajji Gul Nazar, an elder from the Mohmand branch of the Shinwari tribe. He added, ‘Well, the government officials should have taken care of this argument among us before the shooting started.’”

Bottom line: Our priorities for the region are never going to be local priorities for the people who live there. We are foreigners, culturally and religiously ill-suited to direct regional policies, and often act as a nation hell-bent on violently shaking the local wasps’ nests in an effort to rid the region of wasps. There are mountains of mistrust against us, and there is a huge component in this region that passionately believes that we are waging war against Islam. To them, we are the real enemy, fighting a war they will never let us win… we’re number one!

I’m Peter Dekom, and as Iraqi elections unwind the “democratic” model, I wonder why Americans seem to be unable to learn the simplest lessons of history.