Havin’ a Blast!

When Al Qaeda tells you that if they got their hands on “the bomb,” they would use it on Americans, it does kind of give you that creepy feeling. And with Pakistan fighting pro-Al Qaeda Taliban on several fronts – in the Swat Valley in the north, in nearby Northern Waziristan as well as a planned offensive against the militants in Southern Waziristan – the thought of an extremist pincer movement closing in on a nation with somewhere between 60 and 70 nuclear weapons can give you an even creepier feeling.

It’s not exactly as if the Pakistanis are wreaking havoc against their enemies in their internal civil war. After signing a peace agreement in exchange for being allowed to apply Islamic law (sharia) in Swat, the Taliban militants sent armed troops toward the country’s capital, Islamabad . While Pakistani forces counter-attacked and claimed solid victories in the region, it was primarily because the Taliban forces had withdrawn to safer and defensible areas, presumably to save their strength for another offensive in the near future.

As armed U.S. unmanned drones crossed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border into Waziristan (purportedly fielding 50 such strikes with deadly consequences) – a safe haven for Taliban militants who attack U.S. and their Afghan compatriots within Afghanistan only to escape into what was thought to be a “no follow zone” in Pakistan – a peace agreement brokered in February of 2008 between Taliban faction, led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, in Northern Waziristan and the Pakistani government fell apart. Badadur revoked the peace accord on June 30^th, and immediately attacked the Pakistani forces in the area.

The June 30^th New York Times: “Soon after the Pakistani Taliban’s announcement that it was abandoning the truce, as many as 150 militants attacked a Pakistani military convoy about 22 miles west of Miramshah, the capital of North Waziristan. At least 30 soldiers —the Taliban claimed 60 — were believed to have been killed in the ambush, which highlighted the army’s vulnerability in the area.” The Pakistani army was already moving in on the largest Taliban force in Southern Waziristan , a major drain on its military, and the additional threat from Badadur could not have come at a more inopportune moment. The Pakistani forces were being stretched impossibly thin.

The Times: “The end of the peace deal came as the Pakistan military prepares for an offensive against another Taliban group, led by Baitullah Mehsud, in neighboring South Waziristan . … Mr. Mehsud is widely depicted as the main leader of the Taliban in Pakistan and has taken responsibility for a string of deadly bombings. The Pakistani authorities had been hoping to deny Mr. Mehsud support from North Waziristan , but Mr. Gul Bahadur’s decision has significantly expanded the theater of conflict.”

Afghanistan was host to the militants who launched civilian aircraft into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon – the infamous 9/11 attack – and was a friendly Taliban government that provided safe haven to the real extremists who threatened and continue to threaten the U.S. and her citizens all over the world. Our desire to pacify Afghanistan, extinguish the opium trade that has actually expanded since the initial American incursion into that region in retaliation for 9/11, and stabilize the region to deny Al Qaeda and its sympathizers safe haven cannot work without regional stability. Unless bordering Pakistan is the ruler of her own destiny, unless the nuclear weapons in her arsenal are within her firm grasp, the United States faces a desperate and unyielding enemy, hell-bent on our destruction and that of Israel . And the Taliban are fighting on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

For all of those displaced persons in Pakistan, fleeing from combat between Taliban and Pakistani armed forces, the charities that feed and shelter them, even those that receive American donations, are driving a deeper wedge between the locals and the U.S. The July 1^st Times: “Islamist charities and the United States are competing for the allegiance of the two million people displaced by the fight against the Taliban in Swat and other parts of Pakistan — and so far, the Islamists are in the lead…

“[At the end of June], a crowd of men, the heads of households uprooted from Swat, gathered here in this village in northwestern Pakistan for handouts for their desperate families. But before they could even get a can of cooking oil, the aid director for a staunchly anti-Western Islamic charity took full advantage of having a captive audience, exhorting the men to jihad. ‘The Western organizations have spent millions and billions on family planning to destroy the Muslim family system,’ said the aid director, Mehmood ul-Hassan, who represented Al Khidmat, a powerful charity of the strongly anti-American political party Jamaat-e-Islami.” It’s tough enough just keeping our head above water in this volatile region, and there are a few other global nemeses sniping at us.

We also face quite separate threats from North Korea ’s roguish actions as well as Iran ’s repressive government and pending nuclear weaponry (and note that Iran ’s Shiites and Al Qaeda’s Sunnis may have the same goals, but they are hardly allies in this quest). The stories of attacks and counter-attacks in distant lands, the strains on our sagging economy amplified by financial pressures generated wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan , lead many Americans to seek disengagement as quickly as possible. We are hopeful that our timed withdrawal from Iraq (our military has left all the major cities now) will leave some semblance of a viable government behind, but there are few signs in Afghanistan that anything close to stability is anywhere on the horizon.

What if we did withdraw completely and quickly? What if Pakistan and Afghanistan fell? What would it really matter? We need that money to rebuild our schools, our economy and a new healthcare system. We don’t need to fund such massive wars. Who cares if a bunch of crazy extremists, willing to die in the name of God, would get their hands on dozens of nuclear weapons, secreting them into distant corners of the globe thus denying the United States a specific country to counter-attack in the event of a terrorist nuclear blast planted somewhere in our nation? Who would really care? Not so easy, is it?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.