U.S. Close to War with Pakistan

Recently the government of Pakistan asked the government of the United States of America to stop making remote-guided drone bombing attacks within Pakistan's borders. Friday, April 22, the U.S. defied the Pakistan government and launched an attack that killed 23 people in North Waziristan, including five women and four children. Thus in one stroke President Barack Obama and his administration committed war crimes by becoming (again) an aggressor nation and by targeting civilians.

Ostensibly Pakistan is still a U.S. client nation, but the region is in rapid flux, and likely a covert war between the U.S. and Pakistan has commenced. Neither side will want to declare war at first. The U.S. almost never declares war because it is almost always an aggressor and only Congress can declare war, where one or two Senators are likely to oppose a declaration, and give good reasons. For Pakistan to declare war first is to invite both the destruction of its economy by bombs dropped by the U.S. Air Force, and possibly invasion by India. Neither nation will want to go to the United Nations (U.N.) either. The U.N. was set up to be an instrument of American (and originally, British) imperialism, but the U.S. would certainly get some sound criticism there.

Pakistan was carved out of the Indian subcontinent by the British when they could no longer maintain their empire. By setting up a primarily Islamic state in Pakistan and Hindu state in India, the British maintained a divide-and-conquer strategy. Since India set itself up as neutral but friendly to the old Soviet Union, the U.S. chose Pakistan for a client state. Also troubling was Pakistan's western border with Afghanistan. The border, also established by the British, did not run along tribal lines, instead splitting several large tribes in two (tribes large enough that they would allowed to be nations if they were white Christian tribes in Europe). Throw in Kashmir, with its Islamic majority and Hindu overlords, and the whole area has always been what is euphemistically called geographically unstable.

Both India and Pakistan now have nuclear weapons, but India is a wealthier, more populous, more technologically advanced nation. India has drifted into the U.S. camp during the past 20 years, what with Russia turned capitalist and the vast and rapidly growing Indian-American business community. That has left Pakistan the odd man out, with poor choices all around. China has grown to be more of an ally, but it also is anti-Islamic, and is a dangerous business rival. Afghanistan would make a good ally, but it brings its own problems, including its American puppet government.

Internally Pakistan is in turmoil. In addition to its tribal and class divides, it is in a cultural crisis. It is close to being a modern, technologically (and academically) sophisticated nation, but it also has a majority of people who subscribe to various Islamic fundamentalist sects. Over time it might have undergone more cultural modernization, but the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (and crimes against Palestine, and Iraq), and the association of the U.S. with Christianity (an even older and more absurd religion than Islam) have done much to revive religious fervor.

Pakistan has a democratic government, and that means you can have factions in power that are pro-Taliban, or pro-U.S., but almost everyone considers themselves a Pakistani nationalist. Given past patterns, the U.S. will now try a variety of tactics. The CIA will undermine, or even attack or assassinate, Pakistani politicians, soldiers, and cultural leaders who are seen as too pro-Taliban (or pro-Chinese). The U.S. will accidentally bomb some Pakistani Army regular soldiers, just to give the generals a taste of what a real war could be like. The U.S. may bribe India to initiate a few skirmishes at the border.

In turn, Pakistan will provide better support for the Taliban. They will let arms and money flow into Afghanistan, and perhaps provide even more advanced weapons. When those weapons hit U.S. troops, the Pakistan military will claim they were stolen. The U.S. will then upgrade bombing runs to include destroying Pakistani army military dumps anywhere near the Afghan border.

After that, everything depends on the political situations in each nation. My guess is that since Barack Obama has entirely alienated the peace voters in the U.S. since taking office, he'll choose to look tough going into the 2012 elections. He can't afford another quagmire in Pakistan, so he'll probably open up unrestricted bombing, just as the U.S. started bombing Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War.

As primitive as the Pakistan military is compared to the U.S., it has proximity to its advantage and is several of cuts above the Taliban. The Pakistani Army could be in Kabul in two weeks (after sufficent preparation). Since they would be invited by and welcomed by the Afghani people, they would not be engaging in an act of aggression. Maybe that would be best for everyone, if the U.S. had the wisdom to mind its own business for a change.

Barack Obama's Nonviolence

President of the United States Barack Obama was in India the other day, a pack of corporate CEO's in tow, trying to sell American goods, including military hardware, to the people and government of India. He took some face time with Indian students who asked questions about his attitude towards Islam and Pakistan. Barack Obama said good things about Mohandas Karamchand (aka Mahatma) Gandhi and his American "follower," Dr. Martin Luther King. Praising Gandhi in India is like praising corn in Kansas. Politicians do it.

Just in case you haven't heard about two of the greatest events of the 20th century, the expulsion of Great Britain from India, which Gandhi helped with, and the end of racial discrimination in the United States, which King helped with, let me just say that both Gandhi and King advocated nonviolent direct action as a strategy to achieve their goals. Nonviolence meant just that: no violence should be used to achieve political or social goals. Elsewhere I and many others have critiqued this idea, and have pointed out that success in these two cased hinged largely on a great deal of violence taking place in parallel with nonviolent protest.

Here I want to remind you of Barack Obama's interpretation of Gandhi and King.

Obama's interpretation of Gandhi's teachings involves escalating a war against the people of Afghanistan. Sure Obama inherited the war, but the vast majority of those who voted for him for President thought he would quickly withdraw American troops from Afghanistan.

The people of Afghanistan did not attack the United States. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a war crime, and every wounding or killing of any Afghan citizen is a war crime. Barack must be smarter than me because he can square trying to control the Afghan state with hyperviolence with Gandhi's nonviolence. I can't.

President Obama has also used missiles to attack people in Pakistan. The missiles are pretty indiscriminate: they kill women, civilian men, and children as well as their intended targets. But more important, the local militias that the U.S. attacks have never attacked the United States. So this is also a war crime. If you hang pictures of Gandhi and King on the wall, then kill people, do you get a war crime exemption?

I believe Obama does believe in nonviolence, for his enemies. He wants the oppressed people of Kashmir to practice nonviolence. He wants the Palestinians to practice nonviolence. He wants newly impoverished Americans to practice nonviolence. He wants Iran and North Korea to practice nonviolence. He wants the Taliban to practice non-violence. But his military allies like France, Great Britain, and Israel get a pass.

As to the American state he runs, he is bankrupting it with military hardware purchases, a bloated Homeland Security bureaucracy, and his wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I believe Barack Obama's version of nonviolence came around and bit the Democratic Party on the ass on election day. Just two years ago America was filled with hopeful Obama fanatics. They hoped for peace, a universal national healthcare plan, and a jobs program that would quickly bring America out of the great recession. Instead they got war, a health care bill that made no one happy except the insurance companies, and bailouts for billionaires and bureaucrats, but no jobs for ordinary people.

So Obama's base, which is the Democratic Party progressive base, mostly just sat out the 2010 elections. In my county, Mendocino County, the Democratic Party vote [the number of people who voted mostly for the Dem slate] dropped by over 50% from 2008 to 2010. The Republicans did not rally actually many more voters with their idiotic economic and social ideas. They rallied their base, which rallied ordinary Republican voters. Obama and the Democrats alienated their base.

But they don't care! Because basically the same class of rich people finance both parties. Are you a former congressman? You can get 10 times your old salary working as a lobbyist.

The only party in the U.S. that actually advocates nonviolence is the Green Party. When you register Democratic Party (or Republican), you are indicating you believe war crimes and crimes against humanity are okay, as long as an American flag is being waved while the crimes are being committed.

They're Rioting in Kashmir

Ask an American about Kashmir and they'll usually assume you are talking about Cashmere wool sweaters. The wool for which now mainly comes from Cashmere goats raised in China and Mongolia. But the rioting reported in recent days in the news is in an area governed by India, more formally known as Jammu and Kashmir.

Most recently, the rioting was triggered by the famed threat to burn Korans by America's most famous (for now) religious bigot, the Reverend Terry Jones. That is an easy idea for Americans to dismiss: Islamic religious zealots misbehaving because they heard the words of hate directed to them by a Christian zealot.

I doubt the rioting in Kashmir has much to do with Reverend Jones. It has much more to do with the basic problems of Kashmir that have changed very little since the British Empire was forced out of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. While I believe that the U.S. should mind its own business, which has not been going well of late, Kashmir is a matter that should be better understood by every American citizen because it is part of a pattern of injustice that ties in with Palestine, Afghanistan, Somalia and overall Moslem perception that they are not being treated with respect.

The nation of India is a modern creation from a portion of the British occupation of the Indian subcontinent. Pakistan (later dividing into Pakistan proper and Bangladesh) was the other portion, and the two new states were designed to have separate religious identities: Pakistan Islamic, India Hindu. In addition to a few modern-minded people who do not subscribe to religious myths, each of the two nations not only had a number of minority religious groups (India is still 13.4% Moslem), but encompassed a patchwork of ethnic groups as well. In particular Pakistan included many in the Pashtun ethnic group, which is also the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. There are even 11 million Pashtuns in India.

Relations between India and Pakistan got off to a bad start when ethnic (really religious) cleansing resulted in large scale atrocities as millions of Hindus moved from Pakistan to India and Moslems moved from India to Pakistan in 1947.

Kashmir occupies a special place in this mosaic. The British had not conquered India all at once. Along the way they made a variety of deals with the various local rulers. When they left the subcontinent [See also Partition of India] the recognized principalities that had never been fully incorporated into the British Empire were given the option of joining India, joining Pakistan, or becoming independent, but those that did not join India voluntarily or under pressure were later occupied and incorporated by military force. By Independence Day only Kashmir, Hyderabad, and Junagadh were still independent.

Contrast what happened in Junagadh with what happened in Kashmir. "Junagadh was a small seaport state on the coast of Kathiwar with a Hindu population and a Muslim nawab. The Nawab opted for Pakistan but after a few weeks Indian troops occupied the state and a plebiscite declared for Indian union. Pakistan took no action ..." [Percival Spear, A History of India, Vol. 2
page 241] Hyderabad also had a Muslim ruler over a Hindu majority population; India's tanks rolled in to take control in 1948. [Take note, Ghandi-freaks].

"There remained Kashmir which was in a class by itself. It was a fringe state, adjacent to both the new states, and could reasonably have joined either. It was also a mixed or conglomerate state, a state as it were by accident, formed through the chances of recent political history. It had a Hindu ruler; to the east it had a Hindu majority centre at Jammu, in the Vale of Kashmir itself the population was overwhelmingly Muslim ... The Hindu ruler played for time and still had not acceded to either side in October when a Pathan irregular force ... raced towards the capital Srinagar. In a panic the ruler acceded to India." And so a Moslem majority, Hindu ruled state was formed. "Pakistan called for a plebiscite to which initially Nehru agreed in principle. But he was never able to accept any proposals for carrying it out. A brief war flared up ... settled by a United Nations truce in 1948." [Spear p. 241-242]

Americans who often think its no big deal to be friends with people of many ethnic backgrounds, religions, and levels of wealth, have trouble comprehending that in other nations tribal, ethnic, religious and even caste identifications can remain very strong. They often overrule otherwise good people's ability to think fairly about human relations. But we do know that powerful people seldom want to give up power, and so governments almost never voluntarily cede territory no matter how right and just it is.

My hope would be that oppressed people in Kashmir can see that, in demanding their civil rights, they should uphold the civil rights of every person. Americans need some further work in that regard too. I am glad we stopped Terry Jones from burning the Koran. I believe that criticizing religions is part of our cherished freedom of the press and free speech. But if Mr. Jones is so sure Christianity is superior to Islam, he might try his luck and befriending Moslems and explaining what he sees as the difference. The real winner is the person exposed to two or more religions and modern rational thought who then makes a choice based on free will, not social coercion.