So it is now Pakistan, not Afghanistan

[Faheem Uddin]

So it is now Pakistan, not Afghanistan, where the United States is to
fight its Afghan war. That clearly is the upshot of President Barack
Obama’s Wednesday announcement of the plan for the US troops’ drawdown
in Afghanistan. After asserting, albeit untenably, that the drawdown
was beginning “from a position of strength”, he warned he would
tolerate no terrorist safe havens in Pakistan. The implications are
quite obvious. Henceforth, it is Pakistan which is to get most of the
punishment for a war that the American commanders and their political
bosses, along with their allies, have botched up so terribly in
Afghanistan that not even the troop surge has palpably helped
retrieve. In all likelihood, Pakistan is in for intensified US drone
attacks and more ground raids in days ahead, particularly in its
tribal areas, the North Waziristan Agency especially. President Obama
may go lyrical about the surge having dented the Taliban insurgency.
But that at best he could only self-interestedly. The objective ground
realities definitely do not support his effusion at all. The surge may
have led up to increased killings of insurgents; but insurgency has
not diminished in any manner. The insurgents are fighting on
unrelentingly, even daring the occupation forces in their fortified
citadels, and also springing out of their strongholds in the south and
the east to expand into the north and the west. The surge aimed at
securing the major population centres. Two years down the road, the
occupiers cannot claim credibly having secured even one in the
insurgency-blighted region. Marjah they had touted up to be their
showpiece of the surge’s success. Yet this cluster of villages they
are holding fragilely by doling out dollars in big wads to local
warlords to buy peace. Kandahar they claim to have brought under their
thumb.