Glad You Weren't Born In Pakistan?

Pick your poison

Forget for a moment that there's an on-going bloodbath in Pakistan's biggest city, Karachi, and that last week alone over 100 people were killed-- not in the tribal badlands but in the biggest city in the country. This weekend the news out of Pakistan began with two big stories: 1- a court ordered the seizure of former President Pervez Musharraf's assets for his involvement with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto; 2- the deaths of at least 2 dozen Pakistani troops in a cross-border raid by Afghan Taliban fighters. Each an immense story... and each nearly buried by a third... the killing of al-Qaida #2 operative, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan who has been running al-Qaeda's day to day operations, we're told. Supposedly essential for the functioning of the terrorist operation, Al-Rahman was killed August 22 in the tribal area of Waziristan. Just thought I'd mention-- obviously for no particular reason-- that after Musharraf had Bhutto murdered, he blamed Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the Pakistani Taliban. They usually revel in claiming credit for that kind of think but Mehsud and the Taliban denied any involvement. Almost immediately-- and exactly 2 years ago-- he was killed in a US drone attack, "one of the most high-profile casualties of the covert American campaign targeting al-Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan's lawless tribal belt on the Afghan border."



Back to 2011, an anonymous CIA agent told A.P. that "al-Rahman's death will make it harder for Zawahiri to oversee what is considered an increasingly weakened organization."

"Zawahiri needed Atiyah's experience and connections to help manage al-Qaida," the official said.



Al-Rahman was killed Aug. 22 in the lawless Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan, according to a senior administration who also insisted on anonymity to discuss intelligence issues.



The official would not say how al-Rahman was killed. But his death came on the same day that a CIA drone strike was reported in Waziristan. Such strikes by unmanned aircraft are Washington's weapon of choice for killing terrorists in the mountainous, hard-to-reach area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.



Rahman has been thought to be dead before. Last year, there were reports that Rahman was killed in a drone strike but neither senior U.S. administration officials nor al-Qaida ever confirmed them.



Al-Rahman, believed to be in his mid-30s, was a close confidant of bin Laden and once served as bin Laden's emissary to Iran.



Al-Rahman was allowed to move freely in and out of Iran as part of that arrangement and has been operating out of Waziristan for some time, officials have said.



Born in Libya, al-Rahman joined bin Laden as a teenager in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union.



After Navy SEALs killed bin Laden, they found evidence of al-Rahman's role as operational chief, U.S. officials have said.

I as many people believe that al-Rahman was killed as believe that Musharraf had Bhutto offed (It's been rep[orted widely in Pakistan that two senior police officers arrested for alleged dereliction of duty apparently told investigators that Musharraf himself had ordered the removal of a security detail on the day of her death.) And no one really knows whether al-Rahman was really killed by an American drone or not... but whether he was or he wasn't, a growing number of Pakistanis are sick and tired of American aid with CIA strings, aid that never seems to dribble down to society at large, but always winds up in the Swiss bank accounts of a small, corrupt elite-- and in the coffers of well-connected U.S. firms. The middle class here was very American-centric before 9/11. It isn't any more.

We don't believe in economic stimulus at home, but apparently it's OK to do it for the Taliban

With all that taxpayer moolah we're shoving directly and indirectly into Taliban piggybanks, can't we at least try to persuade them to "Buy American"? Or is this what's meant by "globalism"?



by Ken



And the, uh, good news, is that we managed to transfer this particular $360 million to the Taliban without having to give more than a modest amount of it directly. Most of it just sort of wound up in their hands.



Maybe it's because I had just read a review by Charles Rosen in the New York Review of Books of a new translation by John Ashbery of the prose poems of Rimbaud (the review, which also covers a new translation by Karl Kirchwey of Verlaine's Poems Under Saturn; only a digest is available free online, but if you're interested let me know and I'll see that you're taken care of), but I can't help feeling that what the folks at The American Prospect have achieved in today's "Balance Sheet" report, "A Stimulus for the Taliban," qualifies as some sort of prose poem. After telling us about AP's report ("$360M lost to insurgents, criminals in Afghanistan") "that the U.S. military, after going through hundreds of combat support and reconstruction contracts, estimates that $360 million in U.S. tax dollars has ended up in the hands of the Taliban," The Balance Sheet, um, explains:

In a confusing process described as "reverse money laundering," money moves from the United States to companies hired for transportation, construction, power projects and similar jobs who turn out to have ties to criminal networks. Only a small chunk of that $360 million was directly given to the Taliban; the bulk of the money was lost to profiteering, bribery and extortion by criminals and power brokers.

Say what?



I don't know about you, but I'm sure breathing easier knowing that "only a small chunk of that $360 million was directly given to the Taliban." After all, aren't those "criminals and power brokers" who extracted "the bulk of the money" via "profiteering, bribery and extortion" merely enacting an Afghan version of the Republican plan for turning the U.S. economy around? Isn't this pretty much what cesspools of corruption like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have in mind when they talk about "job creation"? Of course the only decent-paying jobs are for the profiteers, bribers, and extorters, but it's often true that a certain number of grunt-level jobs trickle down to the yawping masses.



As we've pointed out frequently, at least the huge sums that vanish down DoD ratholes normally provide a certain amount of economic stimulus, one of the few kinds apparently still permissible in the Teabagging Era -- it's what we call "military Keynesianism," and the Fiscal Prudes of the Right don't at all like to talk about it. However, at least that money tends to be shoveled into our own economy, whereas this particular $360M seems to have vanished into assorted Afghan ratholes. Criminal Afghan ratholes. And of course the Taliban.



The DoD is on the case, however. The Balance Sheet further reports:

The Department of Defense announced Monday that they would reduce subcontracting, and thus the number of connections to the criminal network. Additionally, U.S. authorities in Afghanistan are screening contractors more carefully, and are more aggressively barring companies that violate contract terms or are involved in illicit behavior. They hope this kind of scrutiny will prevent more money from getting to the pockets of the very people the U.S. is supposed to be fighting.

The Balance Sheet also includes -- in its "The Experts" side panel -- a quote from a piece by Karen DeYoung in yesterday's Washington Post (this is the correct link: "U.S. military awards contracts in Afghanistan to get money away from insurgents"):

U.S. commanders have argued that outsourcing the transport and security frees up the U.S. warfighters to handle more important missions. The only alternative, said a senior congressional staff member speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss information not yet released, is "to reduce the [U.S.] footprint in Afghanistan."



Policymakers and the public need to understand, he said, that "the cost of doing business is that we have to pay, effectively, our enemy for the right to be there."

Since that's clearly crazytalk, the business about reducing the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan, I guess we just have to go on paying our enemy for the right to be there. Which segues right into the other "expert" quote offered by The Balance Sheet, from the AP report linked above (here's another correct link):

Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., former chairman of the House oversight panel that investigated the wayward payments, said that the U.S. must stop the diversion of taxpayer dollars to the enemy. "When war becomes good business for the insurgents, it is all the more difficult to convince them to lay down their arms," Tierney said.

One might add, though, that a good part of the problem from a budgetary standpoint -- meaning in particular from a debt and deficit standpoint -- is that war is such excellent business for our own domestic profiteers, bribers, and extorters. And it actually produces a decent number of decent-paying jobs. But like I said, our friends the Fiscal Prudes never like to talk about military Keynesianism. So just forget I said anything.



Say, how 'bout that weather?





Of course weather talk is apt to lead to climate-change talk, and we're not supposed to talk about that either. So just never mind.

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