Bomb, Bomb... Pakistan?

"In today's world, trying to pin down the provenance of a terrorist strike and isolate it within the borders of a single nation state, is very much like trying to pin down the provenance of corporate money. It's almost impossible."
--Arundhati Roy

So it's official. Thanks to the Mumbai massacre (did you know that Westerners were also targets!) India is now firmly aligned with the neocon camp. President Obama is being left little choice but to continue the disastrous Afghanistan war now that Pakistan has been cynically implicated in the devastating terrorist attack.

Whether India with over 150 million Muslims in their population has the stomach for a lengthy Afghanistan occupation will no doubt depend on the concessions they can demand from Washington. With the fastest growing population in the world in a country with already 1 billion people India sees itself as the future ITT giant. One wonders whether a wish to counter India's ambitions lies behind Governor Napolitano, Obama's pick for the Dept. of Homeland Security plan to increase the Asian brain drain by raising the H-1B cap on high tech visas.

As I have conjectured-- the difference between the neocons and the rest of the U.S. foreign policy establishment centers around tactics rather than strategic policy. Thus it came as no great surprise that a governor from Arizona was pegged to head Homeland Security given that state's long and curious ties to international terrorism.

"British Terror Suspect Allegedly Tried to Set Up Training Camp In Arizona"

"Arizona Was Home to bin Laden ''Sleeper Cell'' The Arizona Republic, September 28, 2001"

Nor was I shocked that "bomb, bomb John McCain" jumped on a plane to India and then left to warn the Pakistanis that they had better play along with the latest phase in the "War on Terror" otherwise known as the battle for control of the planet's gas and oil. As far as the neocons are concerned-- transparent threats are an imperial power's finest form of diplomacy.

[Recalling Phase 1: Don't forget Georgia!
"The Russians have every reason to be worried" about US intentions," says Thomas Stauffer, an energy strategist and former Harvard professor in Washington. "The only geopolitical logic I can see [to long-term US moves]," Stauffer adds, "is that we want to get a certain amount of space on the checkerboard, with which we can negotiate with the Russians."

Such considerations haven't escaped notice in Washington, where US Secretary of State Colin Powell last December said that Kazakhstan's oil was becoming of "critical importance."

And "Caspian reserves could be critical to future global energy supply," notes an analysis earlier this month by the respected, London-based Jane's Foreign Report. "This is in line with the doctrine of 'full-spectrum dominance' that now seems to govern American foreign policy and is manifesting itself in the Caucasus and Central Asia," the report said.

That some in Washington want to keep US troops in Central Asia beyond the Afghanistan campaign "accentuates the fact that the war on terrorism is horribly complicated, and risks being lost by being overloaded with other agendas," Lieven adds. "One problem is that some in the Pentagon are gung-ho for world domination."]

Today a report in the Daily Times quoted [Senator] McCain as saying that he believed it could be a "matter of days" before India carried out surgical air strikes if Pakistan did not act on evidence provided to it on elements linked to the attacks.

According to the report, McCain had said that if "Pakistan does not act, and act fast, to arrest the involved people, India will be left with no option but to conduct aerial operations against select targets in Pakistan".

We Americans fool ourselves if we think that the rest of world views our actions benignly or that either Pakistan or India will happily go along and subvert their interests to ours indefinitely. Former ISI chief Hamid Gul puts the neocons' blatant 'gunboat diplomacy' in perspective, dismissing as "nonsense" reports that Pakistan has agreed to arrest and hand him over to India in connection with the probe into the Mumbai terror attacks.



"It is nonsense, it is disinformation because (Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice and America want my name to be included," he told a private Indian channel over phone from Rawalpindi. "They (the US) don't like this loud voice in which I condemn them, their aggression, their oppression, their invasion over Afghanistan and lies in Iraq. I expose them, their 9/11 was a fraud, it was an inside job,"

It will be a test of Obama's spine and savvy if he can manage the ongoing decline of U.S. hegemony without miring us in a painful economic depression and destroying what's left of our military... not to mention our credibility.