WikiLeaks: Where's the Blood?

The Guardian caption to this Reuters photo says it all: “The WikiLeaks cables suggest Pakistan follows a covert military strategy at odds with US goals.” Kill the messenger?

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I’m hearing a lot about “blood on the hands” of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange — and searching for evidence past initial reports last summer that WikiLeaks’ war doc dump could inspire “revenge attacks” on compromised American sources in Afghanstan (did this happen? haven’t found confirmation). So far anyway, the blood I see from WikiLeaks is on the hands of a hopelessly misguided and disastrous US foreign policy determinedly ignoring Islam in its prosecution of wars in the Islamic world. Take this report (below) from the Guardian about leaked cables on Pakistan. Even as our now former ambassador Anne Patterson acknowledges that no amount of aid $$$ will persuade the Pakistan army (motto: “Faith in Allah, fear of Allah, and jihad in the path of Allah”) to stop sponsoring the Taliban, the Taliban-allied Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks, and the Mumbai attackers, we continue to dump more aid $$$ into Pakistan.

Gee, that sounds as if we are in effect supporting the forces fighting our own troops, doesn’t it? Gee, maybe we’re not really on the same side after all?

The Guardian goes to cite approvingly the “fresh thinking” (read: dhimmi thinking) on this problem from our now former ambassador Anne Patterson, whose Wikileaked cable conveys the following:

The only way to end [Pakistani] support for the Taliban – and ultimately root out the group – was to “change the Pakistan government’s own perception of its security requirements”[said Patterson].

Wow. Perception. Seeming vs. being. And how to open those doors of perception — sans drugs, Jim Morrison or Aldous Huxley?

Resolving the 63-year-old Kashmir conflict “would dramatically improve the situation”, she said, adding: “We need to reassess Indian involvement in Afghanistan and our own policies towards India, including the growing military relationship through sizeable conventional arms sales, as all of this feeds Pakistani establishment paranoia and pushes them closer to both Afghan and Kashmir-focused terrorist groups while reinforcing doubts about US intentions.”

In other words, adopt the jihadist cause in Kashmir and against India! There’s fresh thinking from a senior Bush-Obama diplomat.

More from the the whole sorry story (Guardian links from the original):

Pakistan‘s army is covertly sponsoring four major militant groups, including the Afghan Taliban and Mumbai attackers Lashkar-e-Taiba, and “no amount of money” will change the policy, the US ambassador warned in a frank critique revealed by the state department cables.

Although Pakistan had received more than $16bn ( 10bn) in American aid since 2001, “there is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance … as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these groups”, Anne Patterson wrote in a secret review of Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy in September 2009.

The assessment highlights a stark contradiction – that one of Washington’s key allies is quietly propping up its enemies – and is an admission of the limits of US power in a country that still views India, not the Taliban, as its principal threat.

With Washington fearful of deploying troops to fight al-Qaida in Pakistan, money has been its main weapon since 2001. It has given the army $9bn to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida in the tribal belt; on 22 October the White House announced an extra $2bn over the next five years.

Pakistan has paid a heavy price, losing more than 2,500 soldiers and many more civilians. Its generals insist they have cut erstwhile ties with the Taliban and other militant groups. But secret cables show US diplomats and spies believe the army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency continue quietly to back selected militant groups.

Four are singled out: the Afghan Taliban, its allied Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks on the western Afghan frontier, and Lashkar-e-Taiba on the eastern border with India. Some ISI officials “continue to maintain ties with a wide array of extremist organisations, in particular the Taliban, LeT and other extremist organisations,” Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, wrote in December 2009. …

Alarmed by the links with Haqqani, whose fighters kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, and fearful that policy towards Lashkar-e-Taiba could trigger nuclear war with India, US officials have urged [Pakistan army chief] Kayani to change course. “The biggest single message Kayani should hear in Washington is that this support must end,” said one dispatch.

Yeah, that’ll show ’em. Beat. Have another chocolate?

As ISI chief from 2004-07 [army chief] Kayani presided over the spy agency as the Taliban surged in Afghanistan and Lashkar-e-Taiba prepared the Mumbai attacks. US officials consider it a sensitive point. “Kayani … does not want a reckoning with the past,” they said before last year’s US visit. “We should preface that conversation with an agreement to open a new page in relations. What is in the past is behind us.”

Pakistan’s army chief is former ISI chief? Are we nuts? (Don’t answer that.)

US allegations of collusion cast fresh doubt on the credibility of former president Pervez Musharraf, who chafed angrily against suggestions of a “double game”. “We are not a banana republic and the ISI is not a rogue agency,” he told a congressional delegation led by a senior Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, in January 2007. Asked about the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, he said: “I do not believe Omar has ever been to Pakistan.”

Yet there are also hints that ISI policy towards militant groups is complex and changing. In a March 2009 briefing to the FBI director, Robert Mueller, the embassy noted that the ISI chief, General Shuja Pasha, “continues to profess a determination to end ISI’s overt and tacit support for proxy forces“. Speaking to the Guardian this year a senior ISI official acknowledged “historical links” with the Haqqanis but insisted the spy agency was not in a position to dictate action terms. Last spring Kayani and Pasha flew to Kabul offering to broker peace with the Haqqanis….

And make a great deal on a large bridge to a New York borough.

While American efforts are fixated on using money to wean Pakistan away from militants, there is little fresh thinking. One exception is last year’s policy review by Patterson, a well-regarded diplomat who left Islamabad earlier this year.

Pakistani paranoia was fed by insecurity towards India and America, she said. The only way to end support for the Taliban – and ultimately root out the group – was to “change the Pakistan government’s own perception of its security requirements”.

I think we better change our own government’s perception of its security requirements. India, as a victim of jihad, is on our side. Pakistan as a sponsor of jihad is not. Simple.

Resolving the 63-year-old Kashmir conflict “would dramatically improve the situation”, she said, adding: “We need to reassess Indian involvement in Afghanistan and our own policies towards India, including the growing military relationship through sizeable conventional arms sales, as all of this feeds Pakistani establishment paranoia and pushes them closer to both Afghan and Kashmir-focused terrorist groups while reinforcing doubts about US intentions.”…

As Groucho Marx told Margaret Dumont in A Night at the Opera: “If I were any closer, I’d be in back of you.”

Patterson’s logic is shared by other western diplomats. Last year the Spanish ambassador to Kabul, Jose Turpin Molina, told his Pakistani counterpart that “It’s over. You’ve won.” The Pakistani replied that his country was an ally of Spain, to which Turpin said: “you are an ally to both sides”.

The Pakistani “laughed heartily”.

And the joke’s on … three guesses.