Sycophantism and Waziristan

Yes it is time I start blabbering on about my awesome professor again.

Dr. Ahmed, the professor I am privileged to work for along with some other fantastic research assistants, has just been featured in an article for The Globalist talking about US covert action in Waziristan, relating a bit to yesterday's post about Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Waziristan is a province in NW Pakistan and is the favorite location for presumed bin Laden hide outs it appears. According to the BBC, the Pakistani government has been aggressively pursuing Al Qaeda and Taliban activists and looking for tribal allies to push Al Qaeda and the Taliban out.

In the past, Waziristan cooperated with the Americans in pushing the Soviets out of the region, and had a favorable view of Americans. But after the war was won, and the Americans had left, something began to change. Dr. Ahmed describes:

"Initially, Americans had a good reputation. After all, it was because of the Americans, especially the CIA, that the Afghans won the war in Afghanistan. The CIA, working with the Pakistani intelligence, was able to provide weapons to the Afghans and especially the “Stingers” to shoot down the Soviet helicopters. Afghans remember that Ronald Reagan had called them ‘freedom fighters.’

But not long afterwards, Afghans looked at their land and said, ‘My god, look at the devastation, we are destroyed, our homes are destroyed. One-fourth of our people have lost a limb or a leg because of the Soviet’s brutalities. Our homes have been uprooted; there is starvation in parts of Afghanistan.’ And they thought, ‘our American friends will help us.’

But the Americans just walked away. That was the fatal error. When the United States walked away they left a vacuum. The warlords came back, along with local rivalries — and this time the king of Afghanistan was no longer there to act as a unifying force. It was just an implosion of society. In that vacuum, we saw the emergence of the Taliban. In that anarchy and chaos, emerged Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and the stage was set for 9/11."

Taliban or Al-Qaeda, Who Would You Choose?

So I was reading about how Musharraf is more concerned with security on the Afghan border and rooting out the Taliban rather than hunting down Osama bin Laden on the Newsweeks, and I was reminded of a class reading.

What if you were in Musharraf's position, would you make the same decision?

If I had limited resources and had to choose between put more effort into fighting the Taliban on my borders or hunting bin Laden within my country, I'd go for the former. The Taliban is a greater threat than Al-Qaeda, in my view. The Taliban has something Al-Qaeda does not, a political objective which gains a lot more supporters on the ground than an anarchist organization could ever hope to have, or at least the potential to have more.

Oh, look, I've used a new word from my reading. Anarchism. No, not the smelly drain pipe jeaned punk rock commies that run around middle class areas. The other kind.

"Unlike Hamas or Hizbullah, al-Qaeda has not organized a mass-based political machine, nor has it built a network of social welfare organizations. As a matter of fact, besides its single-minded focus on jihad, al-Qaeda has no program. While Hamas and Hizbullah wage campaigns of national liberation, al-Qaeda identifies with no particular struggle."

and

"Like other anarchist movements, al-Qaeda is reactive. It focuses solely on resisting what it considers to be an intrusive alien order and preserving a culture and lifestyle and the homeland of that culture and lifestyle its members believe to be under attack. Unlike other movements whose discourse it shares, al-Qaeda does not operate as a cog within the international state and economic systems. Rather it wars on those systems."

The Modern Middle East: A History
James L. Gelvin

My radical new idea is to abandon the term "jihadis" when referring to the AQ. I'm going to say anarchists, and maybe add a nice little modifier like "international" or "third world". We'll see.

B T dubbs, RIP Heath Ledger. I loved Brokeback Mountain.

I also feel compelled to say bin Laden is very very bad. It should be obvious, but I think we've all been made to feel a little paranoid about what we say, and I'm not taking any chances. I made the graphic too.