Zardari drops a rhetorical bombshell

charles hercock

Let us call it a day

Forget the yanks

Our history told us not to get emboiled in this proud independent country

Let us go now

TrevorsDen

Its hardly rocket science to see that the war is not going swimmingly. How much of this is due to covert support from Pakistani agencies is I guess open to debate.

But then again its not a war we are aiming to 'win' as such. Our aim is to create a viable Afghan govt and armed forces. But we should be well aware we will have an interest in Afghanistan long after that.

But then again, again, actual events on the ground are being kept very hazy. there was a much trumpeted offensive some months ago - what happened to it. We have seen another, just last week. But thats about it - I grow tired of seeing the same map on the news broadcasts - what does it mean? Constantly we hear of deaths in 'Sangin'. What for? What is going on there? Do we really know anything about the nature of this war? Just how are we to judge remarks like this?

Yow Min Lye

It's difficult to win the hearts and minds of people you are dropping bombs on.

Hugh Janus

Surely this is just another riposte in the war of words between Zardari and No 10? They have been like a dog with a bone over this and obviously want to go on fanning the flames for their own political reasons. They can say what they like (and probably will do so) but it is fact that terrorist training camps have been operating on their soil for quite some time now, so DC was correct to highlight this. I suspect, however, that certain factions within their country are making it very difficult to eradicate these camps, despite their protestations to the contrary. The comment that the allies are losing the war is simply a ya-boo response and I doubt that it will be taken as seriously as you suggest.

Methinks they doth protest too much. By doing so thy continue to draw attention to a problem that they cannot or will not resolve.

Chuck Unsworth

Who is this 'we' he speaks of? Does he really have any control over, say, his Intelligence forces? Who do they work for? Maybe he needs to take a close look at his own back yard.

MaxSceptic

We should withdraw all troops from that hell-hole and delivery any necessary 'aid' as may be required from 30,000 feet.

MaxSceptic

We should withdraw all troops from that hell-hole and deliver any necessary 'aid' as may be required from 30,000 feet.

Long the UK

Nine years on and we are getting some political realism....

Pathetic!!!!

AndyLeeds

Yes, yes and Pakistan isn't helping is it ? Which brings us back to what David Cameron said. That was right on the money as everyone knows.

Richard of Moscow

From the article: Pakistan's President Zardari has said that the "international community … is in the process of losing the war against the Taliban." And he added, "And that is, above all, because we have lost the battle for hearts and minds."

That's a bit rich, coming from him.

Those same hearts and minds who call President Zardari "Mr Ten Percent" because of his reputation as the most corrupt figure in Pakistani politics? Or maybe it's the hearts and minds in Pakistan who believe he was involved in the murder of Benazir Bhutto, his own wife. Or just the others, who merely accuse him of being a US puppet.

Augustus

As far as Afghanistan is concerned, things may have started to deteriorate under President Bush, but they have certainly gone downhill a lot faster under President Obama. And you have to wonder, what's up with this guy? What's he thinking when he goes to Muslim countries and apologizes for being American? Apologizing for things most people can't even begin to imagine. Making comments that America is not a Christian nation. Even if not every American is, it still has Christian ethics in its writings and laws. And even going further and saying to some people that America is a Muslim nation, and that it sees things through the eyes of their peaceful Islamic belief system. It's ludicrous. The point is, if you follow what he truly believes in his heart, which is to do well by the Muslim community in the world, it is a form of not only sacrificing American troops, but also America itself.

The notion that you can transform the hearts and minds of a people such as the Afghans, who live the way they do because of their doctrine, is really a fool's errand. But whatever the ultimate mission ends up by being, even if it's only
killing the bad guys and going home, what is as sure as night following day, is that
at the end of it all there will be a very strong Islamic regime, one way or another, in control in Afghanistan.

Gawain

Zardari is speaking as much a truth as Cameron was and he is also playing British politics aided and abetted by the Labour Party. The only conclusion to draw from this is that we cannot get our troops out of the region quick enough. Our strategic and economic interests lie in forging good relations with India. Pakistan is just a mess of trouble and as long as we stay in Afghanistan the longer we will be subject to blackmail from Pakistan and their fellow travellers in the Labour Party will hobble efforts to forge links with India. You just can't be friendly with everyone but you don't have to fight everyone. We need to be able to ignore Pakistan but at the moment we can't.

Baron

well, well, ain’t that plain speaking from President Zadari then? It was our head boy who started it, the President came second.

the President’s is of course right that we’re losing the fight, but wrong on the reason why. As Yow Min Lye observes it’s pretty hard to win the hearts and minds when the bombs are flying. In the WW2, the Allies made no serious attempt to win the German unwashed over until the source of the evil they were fighting got eradicated. Only then could the Marshall Plan kick in. It ain’t that straight in Afghanistan where we are fighting not an Army but an ideology. The Taleban bunch are a motley of locals who hold certain views on how the country should be run. Their take on the governance of the country, pretty awful by our standards, differs from that we are pushing through Karzai with as much probability of success as that the 240,000 Russians had way back last century.

Holly ......

Hearts & minds my bottom!
The day after 9/11 Afghanistan would have been nuked off the face of the earth,if I'd have been Bush...but he couldn't do that due to the fact that the Bin Laden family bank roll the Bush's.
Because these foolish men fuddled the 9/11 attacks with Iraq we now speak of hearts & minds in Afghanistan...how they are even compared is an insult to all the Iraqi's that died in operation Shock & Awe and all our troops that died for the ego's of four men.
Afghanistan is a mess because Bush & Co went
in half heartedly believing in god knows what.
The hearts & minds where never there for the taking.
If anything good came out of 9/11 it is the fact that Saddam's sons are dead.

Craig Strachan

One inconvenient truth deserves another.

Alexandrovich

Win their hearts and minds! Oh yeah. Like we've won the hearts and minds of the ones that live in the UK. The ones who resist integration and have a mind to blow us sky high.
Fat chance in Afghanistan. And for this we are sacrificing soldiers on an almost daily basis. For the supposed benefit of two cesspit countries.

Dimoto

I think we are seeing the first skirmishes of the "who lost Afghanistan?" scapegoat search. Like Vietnam, this is shaping up to be of the "we fought with one hand behind our back due to Pakistan giving sanctuary to the insurgents" variety. (did you know that Pakistan has twice as many Pushtuns as Afghanistan ?)

As for Zardari .... since independence, Pakistan has alternated between general-presidents (some pukka, some not so pukka), and short-lived, deeply corrupt, "civilian governments". Zardari is just the latest manifestation and will be gone soon, He is a no-account opportunist endorsed by Washington as the least worse option.
We might get to see a rerun of the (equally corrupt) PML government of Nawaz Sharif , or perhaps the US may identify a general whom they quite fancy.
Unlike Turkey, there is not much sign that a maturing political system, will gradually reduce the role of the army as guarantor of the country's integrity.

It is tragic to think that at independence, Pakistan (including East Pakistan) was richer and more developed than India on most measures.

Minnie Ovens

Here is Tom Friedman's take on Afghanistan in the NYT
The trove of WikiLeaks about the faltering U.S. war effort in Afghanistan has provoked many reactions, but for me it contains one clear message. It’s actually an old piece of advice your parents may have given you before you went off to college: “If you are in a poker game and you don’t know who the sucker is, it’s probably you.”
In the case of the Great Game of Central Asia, that’s us.
Best I can tell from the WikiLeaks documents and other sources, we are paying Pakistan’s Army and intelligence service to be two-faced. Otherwise, they would be just one-faced and 100 percent against us. The same could probably be said of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai. But then everyone out there is wearing a mask — or two.

China supports Pakistan, seeks out mining contracts in Afghanistan and lets America make Afghanistan safe for Chinese companies, all while smiling at the bloody nose America is getting in Kabul because anything that ties down the U.S. military makes China’s military happy. America, meanwhile, sends its soldiers to fight in Afghanistan at the same time that it rejects an energy policy that would begin to reduce our oil consumption, which indirectly helps to fund the very Taliban schools and warriors our soldiers are fighting against.

So why put up with all this duplicity? Is President Obama just foolish?

It is more complicated. This double game goes back to 9/11. That terrorist attack was basically planned, executed and funded by radical Pakistanis and Saudis. And we responded by invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Why? The short answer is because Pakistan has nukes that we fear and Saudi Arabia has oil that we crave.

So we tried to impact them by indirection. We hoped that building a decent democratizing government in Iraq would influence reform in Saudi Arabia and beyond. And after expelling Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, we stayed on to stabilize the place, largely out of fears that instability in Afghanistan could spill into Pakistan and lead to Islamist radicals taking over Islamabad and its nukes.

That strategy has not really worked because Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are built on ruling bargains that are the source of their pathologies and our fears.

Pakistan, 63 years after its founding, still exists not to be India. The Pakistani Army is obsessed with what it says is the threat from India — and keeping that threat alive is what keeps the Pakistani Army in control of the country and its key resources. The absence of either stable democracy in Pakistan or a decent public education system only swells the ranks of the Taliban and other Islamic resistance forces there. Pakistan thinks it must control Afghanistan for “strategic depth” because, if India dominated Afghanistan, Pakistan would be wedged between the two.

Alas, if Pakistan built its identity around its own talented people and saw its strategic depth as the quality of its schools, farms and industry, instead of Afghanistan, it might be able to produce a stable democracy — and we wouldn’t care about Pakistan’s nukes any more than India’s.

Saudi Arabia is built around a ruling bargain between the moderate al-Saud family and the Wahhabi fundamentalist establishment: The al-Sauds get to rule and the Wahhabis get to impose on their society the most puritanical Islam — and export it to mosques and schools across the Muslim world, including to Pakistan, with money earned by selling oil to the West.

So Pakistan’s nukes are a problem for us because of the nature of that regime, and Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth is a problem for us because of the nature of that regime. We have chosen to play a double game with both because we think the alternatives are worse.

So we pay Pakistan to help us in Afghanistan, even though we know some of that money is killing our own soldiers, because we fear that just leaving could lead to Pakistan’s Islamists controlling its bomb. And we send Saudi Arabia money for oil, even though we know that some of it ends up financing the very people we are fighting, because confronting the Saudis over their ideological exports seems too destabilizing. (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.)

Is there another a way? Yes. If we can’t just walk away, we should at least reduce our bets. We should limit our presence and goals in Afghanistan to the bare minimum required to make sure that turmoil there doesn’t spill over into Pakistan or allow Al Qaeda to return. And we should diminish our dependence on oil so we are less impacted by what happens in Saudi Arabia, so we shrink the funds going to people who hate us and we make economic and political reform a necessity for them, not a hobby.

Alas, we don’t have the money, manpower or time required to fully transform the most troubled states of this region. It will only happen when they want it to. We do, though, have the technology, necessity and innovators to protect ourselves from them — and to increase the pressure on them to want to change — by developing alternatives to oil. It is time we started that surge. I am tired of being the sucker in this game.

Ruby Duck

I know bugger all about Pakistan or the Middle East, but I do wonder who, exactly, wanted Saddam Hussein out of the picture.