In a development that underlines the tensions between the anti-Iran agenda of the US administration and the preoccupation of its military command in Afghanistan with militant Sunni activism, a State Department official last week publicly accused Iran for the first time of arming Taliban forces, but the US commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan rejected that charge for the second time in less than two weeks.
The use of the phrase "irrefutable evidence" suggested that the Burns statement was scripted by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. The same phrase had been used by Cheney himself on September 20, 2002, in referring to the administration's accusation that then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had a program to enrich uranium as the basis for a nuclear weapon.
But the NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Dan McNeill, pointed to other possible explanations, particularly the link between drug and weapons smuggling between Iran and Afghanistan.
Given the very small scale of the arms in question, Cheney's interest in the issue appears to have much less to do with Afghanistan than with his aim of ensuring that President George W Bush goes along with the neo-conservative desire to attack Iran before the end of his term (my em).
Evil is as evil does. So is stupid. Somebody please dab a loop on The Dick and tie him to a fence post before he does us any more harm.
The US military command in Afghanistan, on the other hand, sees the external threat in Afghanistan coming from Pakistan rather than from Iran. US commanders there are very concerned about the increase in Taliban attacks launched from Pakistan's North Waziristan and South Waziristan after Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf's truce with Islamic separatists in those border provinces last year.
See Fareed Zakaria on "The Real Problem With Pakistan".
The only institution that works in Pakistan is the military. The Army is mostly professional and competent. It is also vast, swallowing up approximately 39 percent of the government's budget. In a book published last month, author Ayesha Siddiqa details the vast holdings of Pakistan's "military economy"—including banks, foundations, universities and companies worth as much as $10 billion. And with or without Musharraf, as Daniel Markey ably explains in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the military will continue to run Pakistan's strategic policy.
Deeply ingrained in the Army's psyche is the notion that it was abandoned by the United States in the 1990s, after the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan. The generals are worried about Washington's warm overtures to India and fear that soon they will be abandoned again. One explanation for why the military has retained some ties to the Taliban is because they want to keep a "post-American" option to constrain what they see as a pro-Indian government in Kabul. If Washington were to dump Musharraf, the Pakistani military could easily sabotage American policy against Al Qaeda and throughout the region.
I wish I had the answers to all this, but I only have one: Get rid of Cheney. Quick.
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