"A Grassy Knoll in Pakistan
By: Peter Chamberlin
All things have come full circle in the mountains of Pakistan. The "great game" has been played-out. The cycle of death which we unleashed upon the world there, bringing the war on terrorism home to us, now draws us inexorably into the vacuum of its violent ending. The convulsions now wracking that country threaten to become a revolutionary explosion capable of bringing down the foundations of the world.
The rapidly building democratic-revolution is now entering the "critical mass" stage. Its expansion is accelerating beyond human control. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto was a calculated risk, intended to derail democracy in Pakistan because Islamic extremists were making the democratic transition from militias into political parties. For this reason, it is unlikely that she was assassinated by real Islamists, true Taliban. It is more likely that the hit on Bhutto was connected to the Administration's getting the "green light" (the day before the attack), to move large numbers of Special Forces "trainers" into the tribal regions.
Even though Bhutto was allegedly stirring the cauldron, "...demanding after returning to Pakistan that the ISI be restructured; and in a press conference during her house arrest in Lahore in November she went as far as asking Pakistan army officers to revolt against the army chief," http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7709 recent revelations by various neocon-men points to a covert US plan to eliminate her.
"A large number of ISI agents who are responsible for helping the Taliban and al-Qaeda should be thrown in jail or killed. What I think we should do in Pakistan is a parallel version of what Iran has run against us in Iraq: giving money [and] empowering actors. Some of this will involve working with some shady characters, but the alternative - sending US forces into Pakistan for a sustained bombing campaign - is worse," Steve Schippert was quoted as saying a November 2007 issue of Weekly Standard. (1. Steve Schippert | November 28, 2007 at 12:39 am "For what it's worth, the author attributed a comment to me that I did not make in the Weekly Standard article. While I ascribe fully to what the unnamed intelligence source who actually said it did in fact say, they are not my words.") http://hankypanky.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/the-plan-to-topple-pakistan-m...
Musharref seems to be laboring under the illusion that the United States government supports his efforts to contain the building political explosion, when, in fact, the explosion of Pakistan is what the neocon traitors have been waiting for. With big "events" come big opportunities. Bush does not intend to do anything to help him stave off the inevitable. Their aim, all along, has been to plan for the day after the catastrophic event, for the day when their real plans could be fully implemented. The Pakistani leader let their ceaseless warnings about the day after move him into cooperating with them, in allowing the new expansion of the war into Pakistan. The actual neocon objective, according to Professor Michel Chossudovsky, is:
"...fomenting social, ethnic and factional divisions and political fragmentation, including the territorial breakup of Pakistan. This course of action is also dictated by US war plans in relation to both Afghanistan and Iran.
This US agenda for Pakistan is similar to that applied throughout the broader Middle East Central Asian region. US strategy, supported by covert intelligence operations, consists in triggering ethnic and religious strife, abetting and financing secessionist movements while also weakening the institutions of the central government.
The broader objective is to fracture the Nation State and redraw the borders of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan." http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7705
By cooperating with Bush and Cheney, Musharref is supporting their efforts to revive the CIA training operation which had originally destabilized Pakistan. This had proven to be a winning strategy against powerful adversaries like the Soviet Union, but when the same strategy was tried elsewhere, where there were no large technological forces to attack, the trained militias targeted civilians. When it was transferred to the illegal "contra" war against Nicaragua it was quickly perverted, degenerating into organized death squads. "Targeted assassinations" and death squads, by trained, paid "militias" (mercenary armies) will overthrow regimes and terrorize the populations that dare to resist the American secret assault, will it will win no hearts and minds for the causes of democracy or freedom.
In the article, "Key Pentagon strategist plots global war on terror," (Dec. 30) http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2004099311_pentvick30.htm...
we learn that the man who planned the strategy and directed the actions of the former Afghan Mujajedeen has been given the same job in the new improved "Global War On Terror," patterned after it.
"In the Pentagon's newly expanded Special Operations office, Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Vickers is working to implement the U.S. military's highest-priority plan: a global campaign against terrorism that reaches far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan.
The plan details the targeting of al-Qaida-affiliated networks around the world and explores how the United States should retaliate in case of another major terrorist attack. The most critical aspect of the plan, Vickers said in a recent interview, involves U.S. Special Operations forces working through foreign partners to uproot and fight terrorist groups.
Vickers, a former Green Beret and CIA operative, was the principal strategist for the biggest covert program in CIA history: the paramilitary operation that drove the Soviet army out of Afghanistan in the 1980s... he directed an insurgent force of 150,000 Afghan fighters and controlled an annual budget of more than $2 billion in current dollars.
Today Vickers' plan to build a global counterterrorist network [to fight covert wars in 49 countries]."
According to the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,,2213925,00.html Vickers will expand the Special Forces units now in Pakistan, to "...train the Frontier Corps and recruiting local militias to take on the insurgents." We will train a large roving Frontier Corps paramilitary force, as well as local Islamic militias.
"A new and classified American military proposal outlines an intensified effort to enlist tribal leaders in the frontier areas of Pakistan in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as part of a broader effort to bolster Pakistani forces against an expanding militancy, American military officials said.
Militants have extended their reach beyond the tribal areas. If adopted, the proposal would join elements of a shift in strategy that would also be likely to expand the presence of American military trainers in Pakistan, directly finance a separate tribal paramilitary force that until now has proved largely ineffective and pay militias that agreed to fight Al Qaeda and foreign extremists, officials said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/washington/19policy.html?_r=3&oref=slo...
The "war on terrorism," focused primarily on a fictional global insurgency named "al Qaida," that, in fact, fought for American interests in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Croatia and Chechnya is an exercise in hypocrisy. The more "evidence" that is provided to us, to prove the al Qaida connection to every act of terrorism, the more evident it becomes that the war is a fraud, based on a cover-up of a treasonous attack, intended to whitewash history and to paint America as a heroic nation, dedicated to bringing freedom and democracy to all people. The United States' claim to be promoting democracy, while it exports state terrorism, has demolished the hopes of all those who still believe in American "good will," all over the world.
Informed people all over the world cannot fathom how the American administration can seriously claim to be pursuing "al Qaida-connected terrorists," when they know that "al Qaida," the terrorist organization never existed. Thanks to revelations by British MP Robin Cook in the Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,1523838,00.html and French intelligence agent Pierre-Henry Bunel at the Wayne Madsen Report, http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=BUN20051120&... people know that when the United States needed a new enemy, after the demise of the Soviet empire, they decided to call "the base" (an international computer data base in Saudi Arabia of Afghan fighters), designated as "al Qaida" [an email address], an international terrorist network.
"Bin Laden was, though, a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies. Throughout the 80s he was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians." - Robin Cook
"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money." - Pierre-Henry Bunel
"Elements associated with al Qaida" has become the new official catch-all phrase, used as often as possible, to incite terror among the American people and to justify new attacks by American forces and American-supported militia groups. We are going into Pakistan in force, to train new Pakistanis to fight other Pakistanis that we had trained too well in the past. How will we separate the "friendly" al Qaida from the unfriendly ones, when we bundle the whole bunch together under the rubric "al Qaida?"
Why are Islamists like Ayman al Zawahiri considered al Q., after they provided the US Islamic fighters in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia, as well other Islamic recruits who served US interests in Chechnya? http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=143 The Islamic mercenaries were fighting for us when the embassies were bombed in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, even after bin Laden and Zawahiri announced the establishment of "The International Islamic Front for Holy War Against Jews and Crusaders," (an umbrella organization linking Islamic extremists in scores of countries around the world, the bin Laden group that was renamed Al Qaida). The militant group, now called al Qaeda was the instant answer to the 9/11 attacks, even though it was never what it was alleged to be, the ultimate terrorist bogeyman. The conjunction of US and al Qaida interests all over the Muslim world should warn thinking individuals, whenever attacks happen to occur in just the places that the neocon war planners would most like to invade.
It is more than reasonable to question where al Qaida ends and the secret world of their CIA trainers begins. Was it other trained al Qaida agents who pre-planted the demolitions that brought the towers down, obtained US security codes, timed the attacks into ongoing war games and stood down fighter cover, or was that part of the act of war the CIA's domain? Questioning further along that line, was Pakistan's ISI (secret service) still acting as the CIA's surrogate, when ISI head General Mahmud Ahmad allegedly had Sheik Omar wire Mohammed Atta $100,000? According to Chossudovsky:
"The FBI had information on the money trail. They knew exactly who was financing the terrorists. Less than two weeks later, the findings of the FBI were confirmed by Agence France Presse (AFP) and the Times of India, quoting an official Indian intelligence report (which had been dispatched to Washington). According to these two reports, the money used to finance the 9-11 attacks had allegedly been "wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan, by Ahmad Umar Sheikh, at the instance of [ISI Chief] General Mahmoud [Ahmad]." 10 According to the AFP (quoting the intelligence source):
"The evidence we have supplied to the U.S. is of a much wider range and depth than just one piece of paper linking a rogue general to some misplaced act of terrorism." http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20020...
The name "Sheikh Omar" should set off alarms to those who are paying attention. He was the one who Bhutto fingered on the David Frost interview on 2nd November 2007 (2:15), "Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Osama bin Laden." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnychOXj9Tg Omar is mentioned in connection with a man that Bhutto feared might be involved in threats against her.
President Musharraf, in his book In the Line of Fire stated that the Sheikh was originally recruited by British intelligence agency, MI6 to go to the Balkans. Here is another shadowy figure linked to al Qaida, Western intelligence agencies and the US program, organized by Bill Clinton, to bring radical Islamist Jihadis to the war in Yugoslavia. They fought on the US side, in a war prosecuted by the United States, as an Islamic paramilitary force.
The new secret world war, based on the contra strategy, follows on the heels of what has been described as a "winning strategy" in Iraq, where the strategy was implemented and proven to be faulty. In Iraq, another former military/CIA contra trainer, James Steele has helped to implement the "El Salvador option," injecting the same training that he provided to Central American "death squads" during the illegal covert war against Nicaragua. But we know that the scenario, as it played-out in Iraq, produced the same results as in El Salvador, that of further polarizing the populace and turning the people against the US efforts. But, in Iraq, the policy was judged successful, by some, because of the unexpected bonus of inciting religious sectarian civil warfare. Between this new policy of promoting religious civil war and hiring armies of mercenaries, Bush & co. think that they are now winning in Iraq. For this reason, they plan to repeat the pattern in Pakistan.
We have seen elements of this new war strategy backfire in Gaza and Lebanon, where the political forces associated with Elliott Abrams sought to create viable insurgencies, like Mohammad Dahlan's U.S.-backed Preventive Security Services who were ran out of Gaza and the Lebanese Fatah al-Islam faction, allied with Said Hariri, who were driven from the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli. These small forces were far too weak to successfully engage the Lebanese government, or the Hamas government in Gaza, yet the US was willing to gamble on them.
Joint efforts between the CIA and the Israeli Mossad to train offshoots of the PKK terrorist organization in Iraq, for cross-border attacks upon Iran, have also gone astray, leading to Turkish military action in Iraq, to eliminate the intolerable terrorist attacks upon it, that were a bi-product of misguided American efforts. Similar efforts to train Jundallah terrorists in Pakistan to attack Iran succeeded in killing a few Iranians, but managed to bring international opprobrium on the US for its support of terrorism.
The new program to inflict mass terrorism upon Pakistan's Western Provinces will backfire as well, further compounding America's military dilemma, while increasing the suffering and tribal hatred of the Pakistani and Afghan people exponentially.
If America would only stop being the world's number one sponsor of terrorism, then its leaders might realize that promoting real democracy is the only answer to the global unrest. In Pakistan, democratic forces will sweep Musharref and the Americans completely out of power there. Both he and Bush must decide to do whatever is necessary to make that "clean sweep" a relatively peaceful one. There is no room for a dictator in any democracy – not in Pakistan, or America. If the attempt by the Pakistani government to cover-up the Bhutto assassination, by claiming that she was not shot is any indication of the path that Musharref has chosen for Pakistan, then there will be no chance for peace in that beleaguered country. http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=28445&only&rss
