Opinion The Great (double) Game
The US pays Pakistans army and ISI to be two-faced because otherwise theyd be just one-faced,and 100 per cent hostile....
The trove of WikiLeaks about the faltering US war effort in Afghanistan has provoked many reactions,but for me it contains one clear message. Its actually an old piece of advice your parents may have given you before you went off to college: If you are in a poker game and you dont know who the sucker is,its probably you. In the case of the Great Game of Central Asia,thats us.
Best I can tell from the WikiLeaks documents and other sources,we are paying Pakistans army and intelligence service to be two-faced. Otherwise,they would be just one-faced and 100 per cent against us. The same could probably be said of Afghanistans president,Hamid Karzai. But then everyone out there is wearing a mask or two.
China supports Pakistan,seeks out mining contracts in Afghanistan and lets America make Afghanistan safe for Chinese companies,all while smiling at the bloody nose America is getting in Kabul because anything that ties down the US military makes Chinas military happy. America,meanwhile,sends its soldiers to fight in Afghanistan at the same time that it rejects an energy policy that would begin to reduce our oil consumption,which indirectly helps to fund the very Taliban schools and warriors our soldiers are fighting against.
So why put up with all this duplicity? Is President Obama just foolish?
It is more complicated. This double game goes back to 9/11. That terrorist attack was basically planned,executed and funded by radical Pakistanis and Saudis. And we responded by invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? The short answer is because Pakistan has nukes that we fear and Saudi Arabia has oil that we crave.
Pakistan,63 years after its founding,still exists not to be India. The Pakistani Army is obsessed with what it says is the threat from India and keeping that threat alive is what keeps the Pakistani Army in control of the country and its key resources. The absence of either stable democracy in Pakistan or a decent public education system only swells the ranks of the Taliban and other Islamic resistance forces there. Pakistan thinks it must control Afghanistan for strategic depth because,if India dominated Afghanistan,Pakistan would be wedged between the two.
Alas,if Pakistan built its identity around its own talented people and saw its strategic depth as the quality of its schools,farms and industry,instead of Afghanistan,it might be able to produce a stable democracy and we wouldnt care about Pakistans nukes any more than Indias.
Saudi Arabia is built around a ruling bargain between the moderate al-Saud family and the Wahhabi fundamentalist establishment: The al-Sauds get to rule and the Wahhabis get to impose on their society the most puritanical Islam and export it to mosques and schools across the Muslim world,including to Pakistan,with money earned by selling oil to the West.
So Pakistans nukes are a problem for us because of the nature of that regime,and Saudi Arabias oil wealth is a problem for us because of the nature of that regime. We have chosen to play a double game with both because we think the alternatives are worse.
Is there another a way? Yes. If we cant just walk away,we should at least reduce our bets. We should limit our presence and goals in Afghanistan to the bare minimum required to make sure that turmoil there doesnt spill over into Pakistan or allow al Qaeda to return. And we should diminish our dependence on oil so we are less impacted by what happens in Saudi Arabia,so we shrink the funds going to people who hate us and we make economic and political reform a necessity for them,not a hobby.
I am tired of being the sucker in this game.
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