Bush-era Policies Have Put Nuclear Weapons within Reach of Taliban
Related subjects: Afghanistan, Arms Proliferation, Asia / Pacific, Diplomacy & Politics, Iraq conflict, J.E. Robertson, Obama administration, Obama's 1st 100 days, Opinion, Pakistan, Security & Surveillance, ThoughtPossible.com, U.S. Politics Comments (4)
ThoughtPossible.com :: Today comes the news that the Taliban have taken more territory in Pakistan’s Buner district, just 100 km from the capital Islamabad. The shockingly weak government of Pres. Zardari has already ceded the Swat Valley to the Taliban, allowing harsh shari’a law to be imposed. The local government has been forced out of Buner, and the area is becoming a stronghold. If the Taliban reach Islamabad, they may be able to seize control of the one of the world’s 9 known arsenals of nuclear weapons.
The Bush administration’s obsessive adventure in Iraq led directly to the Taliban’s ability to destabilize huge swaths of northwestern Pakistan, moving ever closer toward the northern border regions closer to Islamabad. The Iraq war diverted hundreds of billions of dollars in military activity and supplies from potential deployment in Afghanistan to the campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein, based on false pretexts.
Meanwhile, billions of dollars in aid were given to Pres. Musharraf, a military dictator opposed by secular society for his actions against constitutional democracy and opposed by conservative muslims for his non-religious government and allegiance to Western powers. Musharraf waffled between fighting militants and combatting fractious tribalism in the northwestern frontier region and buying off those who threatened his reign.
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Ultimately, it is suspected Musharraf not only made deals with Taliban-linked figures, but also funneled hundreds of millions in payoffs to warlords and tribal leaders, potentially to the Taliban themselves, in an effort to buy their support. Essentially, instead of fighting the Taliban head-on, the Bush administration funded a campaign of bribery and appeasement that only empowered the militants and gave them increasing power in Pakistani territory.
That the Bush administration mysteriously gave $150 million to the Taliban themselves in the summer of 2001 has been glossed over by most press accounts of the struggle against Afghan extremism. The money was supposed to help facilitate a gas pipeline project that would transit natural gas from Central Asia through Afghanistan to port cities in Pakistan, where it could then be sent on to other parts of the world.
That appeasement money did not win enough favor with the Taliban for them to cooperate in the capture of Osama Bin Laden in September 2001. Even when faced with the potential annihilation of their regime and much of their nation’s infrastructure, the Taliban were unfazed by Bush administration threats of invasion. So why did the policy toward Pakistan continue the logic of mass funding of bribery and appeasement?
We may never be able to answer that, except to say that massive irresponsibility and disregard for catastrophic risk was instrumental in the Bush administration’s decision-making process, on any number of issues. Iraq invasion would be “a cakewalk”, never a quagmire. It would cost less than $50 billion. Katrina could never destroy a city, and if it did, just put the refugees in concentration camps on the side of the highways, no need to spend real money.
Pakistan could easily be controlled by a friendly military dictator. That was the logic. What could possibly go wrong? The Taliban, emboldened by American inaction against them, by the dictator’s preference for bribing them, would build an arsenal, train an army, take over the message of the most susceptible fundamentalist congregations, recruit a new generation of Pakistan-based clerics and radicals, stage an insurgency against the 5th most populous nation-state in the world.
Of course they would. They were given the means, the leeway. They were even offered treaties of appeasement over and over, and at every turn they violated their agreement not to continue fighting. Nevertheless, for 5 years, after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration’s policy was bribery and appeasement. The deliberate funding of a government whose intelligence services are known to be linked to the militants we consider our enemy.
That policy clearly put the Taliban in a position to mount the most credible insurgency against the Pakistani government, and to take aim at its nuclear arsenal. Now, with a government that handed over a massive piece of territory to a foreign guerrilla militia with far fewer resources, the Taliban are just 62 miles from the capital, and as far as we know, until Pres. Obama, with his message of firm opposition to Taliban expansion, took office, there was no plan in the works to prevent nuclear weapons falling into the hands of medieval terrorists.
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