By Larry Jones
Larry Jones’ review of the first part of Robert Greenwald’s film can be found here.
The second part of Greenwald’s online film states that “Pakistan is in such a perilous state that Bruce Riedel, a foreign policy expert leading President Obama’s Afghanistan review, has called it "the most dangerous country in the world today." Pakistan has nuclear weapons and a government disconnected from the poverty, malnutrition, and lack of healthcare afflicting its people. And though
Pakistan remains a U.S. ally, tensions continue to rise as the U.S. considers broadening military strikes, often carried out with pilotless drone missiles, within Pakistan’s borders. Part two of Rethink Afghanistan focuses on how the Afghanistan crisis affects Pakistan and all of us.”
Pakistan remains a U.S. ally, tensions continue to rise as the U.S. considers broadening military strikes, often carried out with pilotless drone missiles, within Pakistan’s borders. Part two of Rethink Afghanistan focuses on how the Afghanistan crisis affects Pakistan and all of us.”As I write this on March 27, more than 48 Pakistanis were killed today and over 80 injured by a suicide bomb blast during prayers at a Sunni mosque in the Khyber Pass area. A government official claimed that Islamist militants carried out the attack to disrupt the supply route for U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan which passes in front of the mosque. See the AP news report.
A report from Pakistan’s The News reported in the Christian Science Monitor says that the attack marks the first bombing of a Sunni mosque in the region and that locals in the area had reported more U.S. unmanned drones “which will no doubt add to growing resentment of US airstrikes in the region.”
The blast occurred just prior to President Obama’s saying he had a new plan to “disrupt, defeat and dismantle” Taliban and al-Qaida forces in the Afghanistan and Pakistan northwest regions. Obama, who has already sent 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan, is now sending 4,000 additional U.S. troops and, to be sure, there will be more to come.
He also called for congressional support of a bi-partisan bill before Congress which authorizes "$1.5 billion in direct support to the Pakistani people every year over the next five years — resources that will build schools, roads and hospitals and strengthen Pakistan’s democracy," he said.
THE FILM’S MAJOR THEME
The major theme of this film is that that the escalating presence of the U.S. military within Pakistan is the cause for the enlargement of resurgent forces. “Pakistan is an indispensable ally in the war against terror,” says an opening commentator, expressing a viewpoint virtuallyl universal in the circles of the U.S. ruling class, “yet the Pakistanis view the U.S. as a greater threat than al-Qaida.”
“The United States has a very important interest in a stable Pakistan, a country that’s endowed with several dozen nuclear weapons at a minimum,” comments Steve Coll, the President & CEO of the New America Foundation. Without denying producer Greenwald’s genuine wishes and actions for peace, unfortunately, the United States’ “very important interests” appear to be at least a major lens through which he sees the Pakistan/Afghanistan instability.
LONG HISTORY OF BORDER CONFLICT
In the film, Pakistani author Tariq Ali says that “the border [between Pakistan and Afghanistan] that was created in the 19th century by the British was done essentially to define the borders of the British empire, and many of the Pashtuns are extremely unhappy that the border has divided their tribes; they have links at the border.” And later he stated that “one reason the Taliban have been successful is that they have recognized that Pakistan and Afghanistan are essentially one theatre. They consider both governments illegitimate.”
To the people living in the northwest region there is no visible division between the two countries. So when we speak of war in either country, we are at the same time speaking about the war in the other.
To the extent many Pakistanis support the Taliban, it is because the Taliban has “reinvented themselves as the Pakistani nationalist cause,” says Faiysai Alikhan at one point in the film. Thus, as a spokesperson for the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace put it, “The mere presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important factor in the rising of the Taliban.”
There are really two governing forces in Pakistan, the weak Karzai regime put in power by the U.S. and the Pakistani army. Steve Coll of the liberal New America Foundation points out that “the U.S. questions whether the Pakistani army is playing a double game. The Pakistani army sees its mission as protecting the country from its one existing enemy, India.” He fails to mention that in reality, although Pakistan is theoretically an ally of the U.S., the world’s only superpower is also an enemy.
Nevertheless the India question is a major part of the equation in southern Asia and the Pakistani army welcomes U.S. arms in order to fend off their nuclear enemy. Meanwhile, the U.S. has given the green light to India to develop more nukes. Last fall, the Bush regime and Congress made a deal with India which exempts India from its nuclear proliferation restrictions and permits it to keep its scores of nuclear bombs and allows them to build more. The U.S. will provide India with more nuclear technology. Then-Senator Obama voted in favor of this disaster.
So while the U.S. is having fits over the possibility of Iran’s ever getting nuclear weapons, it gives the green light to India to do more such saber rattling right now. Probably in response to the U.S./India nuclear deal, China has offered to help Pakistan build nuclear power plants. So the U.S./Pakistan/Afghanistan/India tangle has already moved into China just up the way.
WHY NOT JUST GET OUT OF ALL OF THEM?
Andrew Bacevich, a professor of International Relations & History at Boston University, expresses a major concern for U.S. strategists when he says that “the worst scenario is one in which our efforts to project military power into Pakistan in order to stabilize Afghanistan will have the unintended consequence of destabilizing Pakistan.”
While all the experts in this informative film point out errors in American foreign policy in the region, none of them says THE U.S. SHOULD GET OUT NOW!!! But from where I sit, that sounds like a pretty good idea. As I said in my review of part one, what is needed, and very urgently, is massive independent political opposition to the utterly unjust war for empire that the United States, under the leadership of Barack Obama, is waging in Afghanistan, and, it appears, in Pakistan.
You can view the entirety of part 2 here: rethinkafghanistan.com/
Larry Jones describes himself as a former Protestant minister and American, but says he gave them both up for the sake of humanity.