Have you ever before heard of the Haqqanis? I
didn't think so. Like Al Qaeda, about which no one had ever heard prior to
9/11, the "Haqqani Network" has popped up in time of need to justify America's
next war -- Pakistan.
President Obama's claim that he had Al Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden exterminated deflated the threat from that long-serving
bogyman. A terror organization that left its leader, unarmed and undefended, a
sitting duck for assassination no longer seemed formidable. Time for a new,
more threatening, bogyman, the pursuit of which will keep the "war on terror"
going.
Now America's "worst enemy" is the Haqqanis. Moreover, unlike Al Qaeda, which was never tied to a country, the Haqqani
Network, according to Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of
Staff, is a "veritable arm" of the Pakistani government's intelligence service,
ISI. Washington claims that the ISI ordered its Haggani Network to attack the
US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, on September 13 along with the US military
base in Wadak province.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Armed
Services committee and one of the main Republican warmongers, declared that "all
options are on the table" and gave the Pentagon his assurance that in Congress
there was broad bipartisan support for a US military attack on
Pakistan.
As Washington has been killing large numbers of
Pakistani civilians with drones and has forced the Pakistani army to hunt for Al
Qaeda throughout most of Pakistan, producing tens of thousands or more of
dislocated Pakistanis in the process, Sen. Graham must have something larger in
mind.
The Pakistani government thinks so, too. The
Pakistani prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, called his foreign minister home
from talks in Washington and ordered an emergency meeting of the government to
assess the prospect of an American invasion.
Meanwhile, Washington is rounding up additional
reasons to add to the new threat from the Haqqanis to justify making war on
Pakistan: Pakistan has nuclear weapons and is unstable and the nukes could fall
into the wrong hands; the US can't win in Afghanistan until it has eliminated
sanctuaries in Pakistan; blah-blah...
Washington has been trying to bully Pakistan into
launching a military operation against its own people in North Waziristan.
Pakistan has good reasons for resisting this demand. Washington's use of the new
"Haqqani threat" as an invasion excuse could be Washington's way of overcoming
Pakistan's resistance to attacking its North Waziristan provence, or it could
be, as some Pakistani political leaders say, and the Pakistani government
fears, a "drama" created by Washington to justify a military assault on yet
another Muslim country.
Over the years of its servitude as an American
puppet, the Pakistan government has brought this on itself. Pakistanis let the
US purchase the Pakistan government, train and equip its military, and
establish CIA interface with Pakistani intelligence. A government so dependent
on Washington could say little when Washington began violating its sovereignty,
sending in drones and special forces teams to kill alleged Al Qaeda, but usually
women, children, and farmers. Unable to subdue after a decade a small number of
Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, Washington has placed the blame for its
military failure on Pakistan, just as Washington blamed the long drawn-out war
on the Iraqi people on Iran's alleged support for the Iraqi resistance to
American occupation.
Some knowledgeable analysts' about whom you will
never hear in the "mainstream media," say that the US military/security complex
and their neoconservative whores are orchestrating World War III before Russia
and China can get prepared. As a result of the communist oppression, a significant percentage of the Russian population is in the American orbit. These
Russians trust Washington more than they trust Putin. The Chinese are too
occupied dealing with the perils of rapid economic growth to prepare for war and
are far behind the threat.
War, however, is the lifeblood of the profits of the
military/security complex, and war is the chosen method of the neoconservatives
for achieving their goal of American hegemony.
Pakistan borders China and former constituent parts
of the Soviet Union in which the US now has military bases on Russia's borders.
US war upon, and occupation of, Pakistan is likely to awaken the somnolent
Russians and Chinese. As both possess nuclear ICBMs, the outcome of the
military/security complex's greed for profits and the neoconservatives' greed
for empire could be the extinction of life on earth.
The patriots and super-patriots who fall in with the
agendas of the military-security complex and the flag-waving neoconservatives
are furthering the "end-times" outcome so fervently desired by the rapture
evangelicals, who will waft up to heaven while the rest of us die on earth.
This is not President Reagan's hoped-for outcome
from ending the cold war.
Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan Administration. He was associate editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service. He is a contributing editor to Gerald Celente's Trends Journal. He has had numerous university appointments. His books, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is available (more...)