The idiocy of
Bush policies has decimated the US army and marine corps. Both have
failed to meet their recruitment quotas for two months. Their equipment
is in tatters and 200+ billion dollars will be needed just to replenish
it. Health care and disability payments for wounded troops will cost
nearly 500 billion dollars in the future. Nearly the same amount has
been spent in five years of war. The increase in oil price and the oil
import bill for the US have been another 500 billion dollars. That makes
the cost of the Bush-Cheney folly nearly two trillion dollars so far.
The US is
superbly capable of using air and naval power to decimate any opposing
force. It nearly destroyed the Taliban in 2001 merely with two thousand
special forces and massive air sorties. It has foolishly still not
learned to fight a counter-insurgency despite the lessons of Vietnam and
now Iraq and Afghanistan. The factors responsible for this are the
unwillingness to suffer casualties, a xenophobic and more often racist
prejudice towards enemy troops and population, which exacerbates the
paranoia by humiliating treatment of belligerents and populations that
become dragon’s teeth and further inflame insurgencies and increase
their recruitment to become a self-fulfilling outcome of a positive
feedback cycle.
The US and
its quadrennial defense review and military transformation are
lopsidedly biased towards technology and warfare by machines, with
little or no human casualties. There is a clear strategy of bombing
civil infrastructure and civilians to achieve regime change to install
pliable puppets to exploit a country’s natural resources at the cost of
impoverishing the target nation and alienating its population. Egypt,
Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and other energy rich
Middle Eastern and West African countries are classic examples. Where
the ruler is not compliant, the US engineers a regime change like in
Haiti, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and Venezuela by coups or
military means. The destruction of water, electricity and sewage plants
leads to such severe deterioration of civil society that sectarian
intra-population divisions are inflamed (Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan &
Afghanistan), criminal enterprises (Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia & Haiti)
flourish due to lack of law and order, educated middle class exodus is
accelerated leaving behind a failed state with only the destitute poor
and uneducated and the criminal amoral opportunists. An inexorably
vicious meltdown of the failed state begins.
Total air superiority is an unbeatable US strategy and this is why it
spends 250 million dollars for a single F-22 Raptor airplane. The lack
of adequate boots on the ground with terrorizing and humiliating the
population are equally matched perpetually losing strategies. The US saw
in Saddam, a rogue tyrant who could be overthrown without international
protest. It thought it would acquire control of huge Iraqi oil reserves
with reliable supply at a discounted price and be able to intimidate,
Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia and keep the EU, Japan, China and India
toeing its line. The Republicans also wanted their war profiteer
financiers to feed at the trough of taxpayer’s money. As sane foreign
policy mavens had predicted, the misadventure is now haunting the
Republican administration and may even lead to the demise of the party
in the next elections. It will also lead to unraveling of Afghanistan
and Pakistan in the future.
Currently the US army, marines and reserves cannot sustain the surge in
Iraq beyond March 2008 due to lack of manpower. Thus the US has to start
withdrawing troops from Iraq. It failed to realize that removal of
Saddam would strengthen the Shias and Iran and now in desperation is
trying to balance by arming Sunnis and sowing the seeds for a more
protracted civil war between them which could spread to other Gulf
States. It has only two equally unpalatable options, extend the war to
Iran at the behest of Israel and alienate its EU allies or trifurcate
Iraq and move its forces to a base in Iraqi Kurdistan and try to police
the area with minimal US casualties. The first option will push oil
above hundred dollars a barrel and wreck the world economy and the
second will involve high expenditures but make Iran even more
intransigent. The second option will embolden the insurgency in
Afghanistan and will eventually engulf Pakistan.
Mounting
Canadian casualties are souring that country’s commitment to
Afghanistan. Other NATO countries are unwilling to let their troops take
a combat role or police narcotics trade. The Lal Masjid attack by
Pakistani troops has sunk the truce in its Northwest Frontier Province
and increased the militancy of the Taliban supporters. If Musharraf is
unwilling to let the Pakistani army fight the militants, the only way
for the US to stabilize Afghanistan is to attack by air and occupy the
NWFP. This will increase US casualties and alienate Muslims around the
world even more. US reluctance to push for a fair peace process in
Palestine, its arming and funding of the Fatah to fuel a civil war
between Fatah and Hamas and also between the Lebanese Sunni government
and Shia Hizbollah will only help Al Qaeeda and other insurgencies. It
may start more fighting between Shias and Sunnis in Pakistan.
Many naive Indian pundits and politicians do not understand that despite
all the debacles, 25 to 33% of Americans still support Bush. This means
one in four to one in three still want to fight it out in Iraq. Most of
the others including Democrats were strong supporters of the war
initially and are just trying to extract their pound of flesh now for
political gain in the 2008 presidential elections. They still support a
South Korea, Japan or Germany like long term presence of US troops in
Iraq. They are like thieves who wish to keep the proceeds of their
illegal crime, they just don’t want to do the time (price of jail) for
it. In the same way the US sale of nuclear capable F-16s is not to
combat terrorism. The US has given Pakistan over ten billion dollars
since 9-11 and forgiven or rescheduled about five billion dollars of
debt. This has made Pakistan a more formidable enemy of India and if
anything increased terrorism threat for the West and India. They were a
sop to Musharraf and Pakistan to garner and mobilize the anti-India
sentiments to support Pakistani co-operation in US occupation of
Afghanistan and control the terrorists to the West but not those who
attack India in Kashmir or elsewhere. It would also force India to seek
comparable technology and may promote the sale of US planes to India and
increase the profits of US arms manufacturers who finance both US
political parties.
If the disintegration of Iraq is inevitable, then India needs to prepare
for the same in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Karzai government is
corrupt and ineffective and a more radical Pashtun leader is likely to
lean more towards the Taliban and Pakistan. It would then be in India’s
interest to have Afghanistan break up into an western Iranian section, a
northern Uzbek section, an eastern Tajik section and a southern Pashtun
section. Iran, Russia and India would all benefit. The Pashtun section
could lead to destabilizing the NWFP of Pakistan and deny Pakistan the
strategic depth of a Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It may even promote an
implosion of Pakistan into a Pashtun north joined with its counterpart
in Afghanistan, a western Baluchi section and a southern Sindhi section
with a less threatening landlocked weaker Punjabi section of Pakistan
and a reluctant occupied Kashmir section.
Finally, there is nothing wrong with signing the logistical agreement
with America or buying another landing craft like the USS Nashville.
India is not likely to need logistical support from the US and unlikely
to get it in a war with Pakistan or China and if we are a status quo
power with no expansionist designs, we don’t need multiple large landing
platforms. I am not averse to acquiring discounted ships but what we
need are long range cruise missiles, an impenetrable air defense,
submarine based nuclear missiles and the new modern fighter interceptors
which have been delayed for years due to the ineptitude and hope for
bribes by our politicians.
Even more importantly, as I have screamed to the point of becoming
hoarse, signing the humiliating nuclear deal and giving up our
independent nuclear deterrent and foreign policy would be a total
disaster. Recently a new proposal for India to have US and or
internationally supervised reprocessing of nuclear waste is meant to
make India the dumping ground for nuclear waste and exploit its cheap
labor, as is done in ship breaking in Saurashtra and toxic computer
waste all over India. The current Indian government is hell bent on
selling India's security and future. Since a number of our leaders from
all parties have their children living in the USA and the large and
economically successful Indian diaspora has an even larger coterie of
relatives in India, there is a natural pro-US sentiment. There is
nothing wrong with that but it should not lead to policies that neuter
the nation. Already there is capitulation to American neo-liberal
policies likely to benefit the Indian rich and powerful. India has
consented to intellectual property agreements raising the price of
common drugs for common Indians and peasant land grabs for the enriching
of industrialists have increased the Maoist insurgencies in the eastern
states.
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