US foreign policy 7-18-2016

18, July 2016                        US foreign policy  

Our foreign policy initiatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been a series of monumental blunders. Beginning in the 1970s, billions of dollars of military hardware were funneled to arm and support Bin Laden (our former ally), the Mujahidin, to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Later this morphed into Al Qaeda. We then supported President Karzai, a self-serving politician, who amassed a huge fortune milking the US Treasury. He left behind a thoroughly weakened demoralized army. Fearful of ‘losing’ Afghanistan on his watch to the Taliban, which would undoubtedly invoke the fury of the Republicans, President Obama has sent in more troops in a never ending escalation of the conflict – the longest war in US history.

Likewise, Pakistan is another disaster. In 1970, Nixon/Kissinger sent billions of dollars of military aid to support the messianic General Yahya Khan in his war with East Pakistan which eventually resulted in the birth of a new nation, Bangladesh. We were complicit in the genocide that resulted. See ‘Archer Blood – the Blood Telegram’. We squandered another $11 billion since 9/11 in military aid to Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a never-ending dance, in which it has to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so decisively as to actually win it, for its extension means the continuous flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.  It continues to consume a quarter of the country's annual budget, undermining one civilian government after another, enriching  itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.