Black Swans Soar
by
on December 8, 2011 2:45 PM in Politics
December 5, 2011
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
For Pakistanis, arguably the world’s most anti-U.S. population, the NATO airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at an Afghan-Pakistani border post at Salala in the Mohmand Tribal Agency was deliberate.
The U.S. and NATO command immediately regretted the loss of life but held back any formal apology pending a thorough investigation, as it thinks the Pakistanis – who may have been mistaken for Taliban partisans – were the first to open fire.
The suspicion is that the Pakistanis were harboring the insurgents, who first opened fire and then retreated into the army base appropriately named Camp Volcano.
The latest crisis in the rocky Pakistani-U.S. relationship escalated quickly on the Pakistani side. Islamabad demanded that the only CIA drone base in the country pack up and leave, which the United States had been preparing to do anyway since the May 2 SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
The twin NATO supply routes from Karachi into Afghanistan that supply 30 percent of Afghan war requirements, were closed down, immobilizing hundreds of tanker trucks over two 1,000-mile routes to Kandahar and Kabul.
Compounding the crisis is the absence of Pakistan’s exceptionally brilliant ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, brought down by a shameless self-promoter, Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American. Mr. Ijaz gave an alleged memo from Mr. Haqqani to former National Security Adviser James L. Jones to relay to Adm. Mike Mullen, the outgoing U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The memo, according to Mr. Ijaz, asked for U.S. help in heading off a possible Pakistani military coup and promised concessions in return.
When the secret memo was leaked to the media in Pakistan, Mr. Haqqani denied authorship but was recalled immediately to Islamabad, where he was forced to resign.
Mr. Haqqani now faces the threat of being tried on a variety of trumped-up charges, perhaps even treason. He once wrote a book titled “Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military.” In his book, Mr. Haqqani clearly held the notoriousInter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in contempt. When he was a professor at Boston University, his many op-ed columns infuriated Pakistan’s spooks. Before Boston, he had a fellowship at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he slammed President Pervez Musharraf’s military regime.
Pakistan‘s all-powerful ISI, where Mr. Haqqani once served, clearly has scores to settle with him.
Still, no one can understand why and how Mr. Haqqani trusted Mr. Ijaz and implicated himself with email and text messages when distaste for Mr. Ijaz was so widespread in government circles.
Teresita C. Schaffer, who served as a U.S. diplomat in South Asia for 30 years, says, “The amazing thing is that the coverage of this sorry episode has entirely focused on Haqqani and not on Ijaz, who acknowledged being the person who got the memo to Adm. Mullen. Ijaz has a long history of exaggerating his role in similar conspiratorial ventures and representing himself, I believe incorrectly, as some kind of secret negotiator.”
Mr. Ijaz once used his friendship with former CIA Director James Woolsey in building up his profile as a troubleshooter in the world’s hot spots. Those who know him said he had a special talent for ingratiating himself with the intelligence communities of the United States and Pakistan. He seemed equally at ease on Capitol Hill and in Washington’s think-tank community.
Ambassador Sherry Rehman, Mr. Haqqani’s successor in Washington, is a staunch defender of democracy, the democratic process, human rights and civilian control of the military. But her ultrapoor giant of a country of 187 million people still cannot afford a decent high school system, as the military absorbs almost 40 percent of the budget. Pakistan has lost about 35,000 people killed in the past three years to terrorist bombings. Ms. Rehman has her hands full trying to putPakistan’s relations with the United States back on the track of mutual distrust from the slough of outright hostility, where it wallows now.
Gone, too, is the notion that there is no solution to the Afghan war without Pakistan and forPakistan without the Taliban. Lasting progress will come only if Afghanistan’s neighbors Iran,China, Russia and India are included as well.
That’s what Henry Kissinger advocates today. But we have no new Kissinger to make it happen. And we can’t wait till the end of 2014, President Obama’s final exit deadline.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor-at-large of The Washington Times and United Press International.
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