Author: Thomas L Friedman
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: August 2, 2010
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-great-double-game/654756/
Introduction: The US pays Pakistan's army
& ISI to be two -faced because otherwise they'd be just one-faced, &
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. It's 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 don't know who the sucker is, it's probably you." In the case
of the Great Game of Central Asia, that's us.
Best I can tell from the WikiLeaks documents
and other sources, we are paying Pakistan's 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 Afghanistan's 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 China's 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 wouldn't care about Pakistan's nukes any more
than India's.
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 Pakistan's nukes are a problem for us because
of the nature of that regime, and Saudi Arabia's 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 can't 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 doesn't 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.
