Spy Wars in Crackistan

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A show trial is underway in Pakistan following the arrest of an American CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who is apparently a pawn caught between warring intelligence services, our CIA and Pakistan’s I.S.I.  And aside from the spy versus spy intrigue associated with this shadow play, it reflects the broader dysfunction of the tortured relationship the U.S. and Pakistan are trapped in.

Yesterday I spoke with Chris Fair who spends a lot of time there, speaks the local languages and knows the country well, including members of the I.S.I. (Inter-Services Intelligence).  And Pakistan’s intelligence service is considered the power behind the throne in a country often described as not a country with an army, but an army with a country. 

As depressing as it is to keep up with the Israeli and Palestinian agony, the India and Pakistan confrontation is even more bitter and intractable.  I am reminded of an academic seminar with Indian and Pakistani academics and outside experts at the UCLA Faculty Club a few years ago that was supposed to be an examination of the enduring Kashmir problem and other bilateral issues.

Instead the LAPD were called after it descended into recrimination and insults and almost turned into a brawl.  For all of the endless bickering between Israelis and Palestinians over a struggle characterized by too much history and too little geography, similar conferences that I’ve attended involving them are love fests by comparison.

The late Richard Holbrooke did try to include the Kashmir conflict in his portfolio when he became president Obama’s special envoy to the region.  But that possibility of removing the Kashmir flashpoint from the equation was scuttled by the India lobby, a new force in Washington that has modeled itself on the Israel lobby.

If these nuclear armed countries, who have fought three wars, all of which Pakistan lost, could get over it and start trade and cooperation instead of perpetuating a military stalemate, maybe they would stop wasting billions that should be spent on their impoverished peoples.

That was what the Prime Ministers of both countries had in mind when they were about to meet a few years ago before a terrorist attack in Mumbai blew that opportunity.  And it is no accident that it was the I.S.I. who unleashed their attack dogs Lashkar-e-Taiba on Mumbai.

It was also what our strategists had in mind, thinking that a peace settlement would take the subcontinent’s nukes off hair trigger and then free up Pakistan’s army facing India so it could be redeployed to the western border with Afghanistan and help the U.S. out of the quagmire there.

That was the hope, however unrealistic, but the Pakistani army had long ago recruited terrorist groups to conduct guerrilla war on the cheap in Kashmir as a way to even the odds with India by tying down their enemy’s numerically superior army.  But the I.S.I. is not about to give up its asset, Lashkar-e-Taiba.  The same group Raymond Davis was apparently spying on.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan every day our boys and girls are killed by the Taliban; armed, directed and sheltered by Pakistan’s military.  Yet we keep funding Pakistan’s military with billions they waste on building more nukes to the point that now they could have a bigger arsenal than England and France.

And all the while the I.S.I. shelters the Haqqani network who are our most formidable adversaries in Afghanistan, and they are also rumored to be sheltering al Qaeda and Bin laden.  Is the specter of Pakistani nukes falling into the wrong hands worth the cost of maintaining the delusion that Pakistan is an ally in the war on terror?

Meanwhile Pakistanis believe it is America’s fault for stirring up the unrest that is tearing their country apart, and every day they grow more and more anti-American, in spite of the billions we are giving them from the Kerry/Lugar/Berman fund.  Denial is easier than fixing a broken country but unless the Pakistanis want to help themselves, how can we help them? 

Perhaps left alone this feudal kleptocracy will, like the similar regimes in the Middle East, be toppled by its young people yearning for justice and opportunity.  But we should get the hell out of Muslim lands.  That’s the lesson here, reinforced by the recent parting words of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who quoted General MacArthur, that anyone who sends a land army into Asia needs his head examined. 

So we should not waste another minute or another life on this lost cause.  Whatever instability might follow our exit from Af/Pak, even if jihadis take over, it could not be worse than Iran.  And Iran has to contend with Israel’s nukes aimed at it, just as India’s are aimed at Pakistan.  In any case theocracies eventually implode from within.  Just like Vietnam, the best way to end a war is to end a war.