Bush asks Obama to revamp aid to Pakistan

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Hiphenated relations: Bush asks Obama to revamp aid to Pakistan​

The Indian media and Indian authors disguised as Americans are having a field day with all sorts of nonsense on Pakistan. They tried to get Pakistan declared a terrorist state among a lot of other hogwash. Many Indians are chagrined that even before the the Mumbai militants, the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration for all practical purposes that gotten rid of the dehiphenated relationship. Many Indians are up in arms now because the hiphenated relationship between the US and Pakistan is back.

Another aspect of the US-Indian relationship that is being impacted by the change in Washington is the US-China relationship.

Given the economic meltdown and the global shift of economic power eastward, the Obama team will prioritize the Asian economic powerhouses, especially China. That’s why Obama’s first official visit may be to Beijing, as some experts are forecasting. The other evidence of a reinvigorated Sino-US economic partnership is the two unambiguously pro-China voices in his financial team. Asia Times. Patrick Burns is a New York-based journalist and United Nations resident correspondent, and a staff reporter for the Tokyo Shimbun

There is a high level of frustration in Indian circles. They cannot attack Pakistan and if the China card is lost, they will be back again in the corner of the class-room where the rest of the rich boys and the naughty poor boys will be making fun of them as before. The BJP will take over power and take India towards oblivion. Superpower will be history and Yugolavia will be the fate if India is lucky.

The other day the Asia Society held another one of its “events”. There were many Indians invited. This Author’s name had also been submitted as one of the panelists. However the finalists were all Indians.n Salman Rushdie was among them. The vitriol was unimaginable and also very predictable.

NEW YORK, Dec 18: A panel discussion titled Understanding Mumbai Attacks at New York’s Asia Society on Wednesday evening became a one-sided Pakistan bashing event, with writer Salman Rushdie taking the lead in berating Pakistan and its ruling elite.

Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United Nations Munir Akram had been invited as one of the panelists but he was suddenly taken off the panel to make it a one-sided affair.

Mr Akram told Pakistani reporters that he had accepted to be on the panel to defend his country, but a day before the discussion he was informed that the format had been changed. He was told that he would not be on the panel but that he could speak from the floor when called upon to do so. That arrangement was not acceptable to Mr Akram and he withdrew his name.

Besides Rushdie, authors Mira Kamdar and Suketu Mehta were the other two panelists at the discussion organised jointly by the Asia Society, the South Asian Journalist Association and the Indo-American Arts Council. Vishakha Desai, an Indian-American, is the president of Asia Society. Dawn. Discussion turns into Pakistan-bashing fest: Munir Akram removed from panel By Masood Haider

This sort of activity shows a high level of frustration on the part of the Indians. Try as they may Pakistan seems to get away from their grasp. Delusions of superpower status and an inability to see themselves int he mirror have led to some sort of pathological dementia that needs to be addressed in Delhi at a national level.

So the man who presided over the Gujarat genocide was re-elected twice, and is deeply respected by India’s biggest corporate houses, Reliance and Tata. Suhel Seth, a TV impresario and corporate spokesperson, recently said, “Modi is God.” The policemen who supervised and sometimes even assisted the rampaging Hindu mobs in Gujarat have been rewarded and promoted.

The RSS has 45,000 branches and 7 million volunteers preaching its doctrine of hate across India. They include Narendra Modi, but also former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, current leader of the opposition L K Advani, and a host of other senior politicians, bureaucrats, police and intelligence officers. Asia Times. The monster in India’s mirror By Arundhati Roy

Many independent analysts call it, one step removed from Fascism. Indian Fascism has been described the most lethal and most dangerous the world has ever seen–all under the veneer of “democracy”.

India …declared herself an inclusive, secular democracy. It was a magnificent undertaking, but Babu Bajrangi’s predecessors had been hard at work since the 1920s, dripping poison into India’s bloodstream, undermining that idea of India even before it was born.

By 1990, they were ready to make a bid for power. In 1992 Hindu mobs exhorted by L K Advani stormed the Babri Masjid and demolished it.

By 1998, the BJP was in power at the center in Delhi. The US “war on terror” put the wind in their sails. It allowed them to do exactly as they pleased, even to commit genocide and then present their fascism as a legitimate form of chaotic democracy.Asia Times. The monster in India’s mirror By Arundhati Roy

President Obama is too smart to be beguiled by the nonsense that is being perpetuated by Delhi.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is preparing to present President-elect Barack Obama with a lengthy, classified strategy review aimed at reversing the gains that militants have made in destabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The review contains an array of options, including telling Pakistan’s military that billions of dollars in American aid will depend on the military’s being reconfigured to effectively fight militants. That proposal amounts to a tacit acknowledgment that roughly $10 billion in military aid provided to Pakistan as “reimbursements” for its efforts to root out militant groups has largely been wasted.

The payments have been the source of increasing criticism on Capitol Hill and from independent review groups, which have concluded that Pakistan diverted much of the money to build up its forces against India.

Revamping the aid to the military was part of a three-month study of what has gone wrong in the seven-year war along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The study calls for a new and broadly regional approach to insurgencies that move freely across the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the short term, it calls for continued covert strikes into Pakistani territory from Afghanistan, though the American military has been reluctant to repeat the kind of ground attack that led to an open exchange of fire with Pakistani border forces in September.

The report, which is expected to be presented to Mr. Obama’s top national security advisers in the next week or two, was the product of a highly unusual strategy review that was begun in mid-September, just four months before President Bush leaves office.

“We’ve gone seven long years proclaiming that Pakistan was an ally and that it was doing everything we asked in the war on terror,” said one senior official involved in drafting the report. “And the truth is that $10 billion later, they still don’t have the basic capacity for counterinsurgency operations. What we are telling Obama and his people is that has to be reversed.”

As a war that Mr. Bush once believed he had won came back to life in 2005 and 2006, the White House began a series of strategic reassessments, the most recent one reporting in the fall of 2006, just before the forced resignation of Donald H. Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. December 7, 2008 Revamping Aid to Pakistan Is Expected in Bush Report By DAVID E. SANGER

For about 50 years the US-Pakistani relationship was seen through the lenses of the Cold War. As such any American move towards India would be seen with suspicion in Islamabad. However President Clinton and then President Bush tried to “dehiphenate” the US Indian relationship. This meant that US relations with India would move ahead irregardless of the erlationship with Pakistan. Also this meant that the US Pakistani relationship would move ahead without any link to India.

This has not worked. Bruce Reidel and other major Obama advisors want to look at South and West Asia is a more holistic way. They clearly realise that when one tinkers with the Khyber Pass, Panipat and Delhi get affected. The think tanks on both sides of the American spectrum clearly realize that unless the Kashmir issue is resolved Pakistan cannot and will not be able to support the USA in Afghanistan. This realization has impacted the Indians more than the Pakistanis. The Indians are fuming at the mention of Kashmir.

Indian threats on the war on Pakistan is the usual huffing and puffing that comes out of Delhi after every attack (self inflicted or inspired by others).

But November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan, and India isn’t America. So perhaps we should reclaim our tragedy and pick through the debris with our own brains and our own broken hearts so that we can arrive at our own conclusions. Asia Times. Arundahti Roy

But those past studies looked primarily at the dynamics in Afghanistan. The current one, headed by the White House war czar, Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, took a far broader view. The drafts prepared for the incoming Obama administration suggest that the United States has never focused sufficiently on nation-building, jobs creation, construction of schools and roads, and, most important, pushing the Pakistani government to focus on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.

It also urges Mr. Obama to take a far more regional approach to the problem, something he has indicated in speeches he is inclined to do.

“The Pashtun tribes treat these countries as one territory, and we have to begin to do something similar,” one official familiar with the report said, declining to speak on the record because the contents of the report are confidential.

The report includes options, not “recommendations,” so that Mr. Obama would not be put in the position of endorsing or rejecting Mr. Bush’s suggested policies. It was completed just before the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, last month, and the reaction to those events is likely to complicate some of the central options even before they are handed off to Mr. Obama.

Though Pakistani officials regularly promised Mr. Bush, his intelligence chiefs and top American military officials that they would rout Al Qaeda and other militants from their sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal areas, mountains of intelligence suggest that the country was playing both sides, financing the Taliban even while fighting them. The group accused of the Mumbai attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was essentially the creation of the Pakistani intelligence services, as a proxy to fight in Kashmir against India.

Now, with the strong possibility that India will strike back for the Mumbai attacks, many in the Pakistani military are expected to argue that they were prudent to keep their forces primarily arrayed against India, rather than hunting down Al Qaeda and other militants.

“The real danger here is that what happened in Mumbai is gong to reinforce all the instincts to focus on India,” said one official familiar with the contents of the strategy review. “It worsens their paranoia.”

As recently as 2006, Mr. Bush would speak regularly of eventual “victory” in Afghanistan, as he did in Iraq. He is leaving office declaring that the so-called military surge in Iraq was successful, and with a status of forces agreement that calls for the withdrawal of the bulk of the American force over the next two years. But he has said little about Afghanistan, where the fighting has worsened, and the strategy review was premised on intelligence assessments that said that the United States was not losing the war, but was in danger of losing ground.

Several members of the strategy review, notably David J. Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency expert, have publicly offered a significantly grimmer view. Mr. Kilcullen told senior officials before he left a State Department post that the United States could begin to lose the war soon if strategy was not reversed. He has advocated working to secure major population centers rather than using NATO troops to chase the Taliban around the Afghan countryside.

A senior aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Eliot Cohen, also joined the panel, along with a top marine general and a number of officials from the intelligence agencies.

Asked about the study, a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, said only: “We are concluding our review. We intend to pass it to the new team, since most policy adaptations would take place on their watch. This is another part of our efforts to ensure a smooth transition.”

The tone of the new report, officials familiar with it say, is in line with arguments made over the past year by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, who has agreed to remain in his post under Mr. Obama. He has made clear in an article he wrote for a forthcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs that the kind of military victory Mr. Bush once spoke of, the military crippling of militants in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, is not the way to think about the future of the conflict.

“Over the long term, the United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory,” Mr. Gates wrote. “Where possible, what the military calls kinetic operations should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development, and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom the terrorists recruit. It will take the patient accumulation of quiet successes over a long time to discredit and defeat extremist movements and their ideologies.”

Yet the problem in Pakistan has been getting the military to accept help from the United States, which it suspects is tilting toward India and may harbor plans to seize Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal if the government in Islamabad collapses. In Afghanistan, the problem is incompetence, corruption, and the inability of President Hamid Karzai to extend his control of the country significantly beyond the capital, Kabul.

A senior military official said “the message of the report is that you can’t win in Afghanistan without first fixing Pakistan.”

“But even if you fix Pakistan,” the official said, “that won’t be enough.”

That was also the conclusion of a major study of what has gone wrong in Afghanistan, published in January by a group led by Gen. James L. Jones, a former NATO commander. General Jones, who retired from the Marine Corps, was appointed last week to become the next national security adviser.December 7, 2008 Revamping Aid to Pakistan Is Expected in Bush Report By DAVID E. SANGER

The Indian story on Mumbai now has holes in it.

The Lashkar has denied involvement, but remains the prime accused. According to the police and intelligence agencies, the Lashkar operates in India through an organization called the “Indian Mujahideen”. Two Indian nationals, Sheikh Mukhtar Ahmed, a special police officer working for the Jammu and Kashmir Police, and Tausif Rehman, a resident of Kolkata in West Bengal, have been arrested in connection with the Mumbai attacks. So already the neat accusation against Pakistan is getting a little messy.

If the men were indeed members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, why didn’t it matter to them that a large number of their victims were Muslim, or that their action was likely to result in a severe backlash against the Muslim community in India whose rights they claim to be fighting for? Asia Times. The monster in India’s mirror By Arundhati Roy. Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives, and has worked as a film designer, actor and screenplay writer in India. A 10th anniversary edition of her novel, The God of Small Things (Random House), for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, will be officially published within days. She is also the author of numerous non-fiction titles, including An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. This piece was published by Outlook India, which is sharing it with TomDispatch.com.