The World

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, because there are plenty of better ones on the blogosphere. But I would like to name some events and facts over the last couple of years that suggest deeper problems in Pakistan than we are ready to deal with.

First – remember Raymond Davis? The American CIA agent who killed two Pakistanis in Lahore? Almost certainly those men were agents of or employed by the Pakistani ISI, roughly equivalent the the US CIA.

Davis was reportedly being intimidated because he was ‘crossing a line’. That intimidation ended bloodily, and the US went to great lengths to get him out of Pakistan.

Now we have wikileaks helpfully informing us that the ISI had been sabotaging efforts to find bin Laden for some time now, hence why they were being circumvented by people like Raymond Davis and why Pakistan was given no warning of the final raid on bin Laden’s compound.

What are the implications of this?

1. It makes me believe there was in fact a high-value target inside Pakistan who was killed on May 2. The tension between intelligence agencies makes it seem as though the CIA had finally had enough of the obfuscating;
2. It makes ISI involvement in the Mumbai terror attacks seem far more likely;
3. It means that Afghanistan and its people will not be safe from the Taliban until the ISI undergoes extreme change. That means the Pakistani government has to be serious about addressing it, and has to feel like it no longer is so threatened that it needs the ISI in its current form. That means that if we really want peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we need to address the situation between Pakistan and India.

Apparently that’s where we are keeping all our options currently. There is talk of a no-fly zone, because it is known that Gaddafi has bombed the opposition and will probably do so increasingly as things become more dire for him. The US has moved assets into the area, but it’s unknown whether we’ll have to use them.

I can see both sides – on the one hand, we certainly don’t want foreign intervention to undermine the populism of the revolt and taint any future regime with the scent of imperialism.

However, the West has clearly thrown their collective hats in with the opposition. If they are crushed, there is no reconciliation possible with Libya for years, probably decades. Moreover, Libya is neither Egypt nor Tunisia – the forces arrayed against the opposition are not an army of the people but a network of secret forces and mercenaries. More people have already died in Libya than in Tunisia and Egypt combined. What would it say about our commitment to Democracy if we watch from our aircraft carriers, loaded up with jet planes, as pro-Democracy forces are bombed and massacred?

I’m curious what everyone thinks. I certainly don’t have the answer.

Before I even touch this subject that I’ve been discussing with the folks at 4&20 blackbirds, I feel the need to give a disclaimer: This is my opinion. I’m almost certain Pogie’s opinion is more liberal than mine, and I’m curious to hear exactly what it is.

The question I propose is this – ought the United States be an empire? I propose that although we have made truly enormous mistakes as an imperial power, the alternative of further isolationism is worse.

As evidence, I offer the last period of American isolationism – the period between the world wars. The United States did not enter the war against Germany until Dec 11, which is two days from today. By that point -

A quarter million Chinese were massacred in Nanjing; a substantial portion of the 20 million Chinese who perished at Japanese hands between 1937 and 1945 were already dead.

A half million Ethiopian civilians were killed in the Italian invasion of the country, which the impotent and US-less League of Nations ineffectively opposed.

200,000 Polish Catholic civilians had died in the German invasion of Poland. Polish Jews were already in ghettos and camps, and the first gas chambers were being tested.

Much of the Soviet Union was already occupied; tens of thousands of Jews and other Soviet civilians had already been executed.

There were dozens more democides throughout those few decades. Many of them could have been avoided simply by the US participating actively in the League of Nations. The rest could have been solved with aggressive US intervention from the beginning, rather than waiting to get hurt under the mistaken impression that we would be safe as long as we didn’t deal with the rest of the world. I know what you’re thinking: “But PW, that was an unusually violent decade.” First of all – You’ll find the decades before were also atrocious, and the US was also fairly isolated post-Roosevelt and pre-1918. But more importantly, that’s the point. After WWI, the British were timid and unable to assert their authority, and the US, which should have been the natural inheritors of the British imperial torch, instead chose to close its eyes to the chaos around it, chose for many years not to ‘hold up half the earth’. The result was that many of the worst atrocities of the century either occurred before we were willing to do anything or were already unpreventable by the time we joined the war.

Conclusion? Yes, the ‘American Empire’ has done terrible things, and our jingoistic adventurism will inevitably weaken us if we continue making bad choices. However, broader arguments that the basic position of the US as a globally involved power should be more limited will improve neither American security nor global living conditions.