Pentagon
Chief Admits U.S. Is at War in Pakistan
“We
are fighting a war in the FATA, we are fighting a war against
terrorism,” said Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Wednesday,
referring to the tribal areas of Pakistan that the U.S. has spent
three years bombing heavily. Was that so hard to admit?
6
June, 2012
For
years, it has been. Neither the Bush nor Obama administration has
been forthright about the starkest fact of the recent war on
terrorism: most of it takes place in western Pakistan. As CIA
director and now Pentagon chief, Panetta has been one of the
key architects of
the accelerated drone-and-commando war the U.S. wages there in what
amounts to an open secret. In 2009, the critical year in that
acceleration, Danger Room boss Noah Shachtman started pressing the
Obama administration fordisclosure about
a war the U.S. waged
in all but name.
It
may be late, but at least now it’s happened. The day after the U.S.
claimed that its latest drone strike in tribal Pakistan killed
al-Qaida’s second in command, Abu Yahya al-Libi, Panetta used the
W-word to angrily dismiss the Pakistani government’s complaints
about the U.S. infringing on its sovereignty. “We
have made very clear that we are going to continue to defend
ourselves,”
Panetta said in New Delhi.
The
war has remained undeclared for two reasons. First, it’s awkward
and potentially destabilizing to say Pakistan is a U.S. ally but the
U.S. has to fight a war against terrorists on its soil. Second, it’s
politically perilous to ask a war-weary public to get used to
fighting what’s effectively a third war
in a decade, even if this one relies far more on remote controlled
robots than ground troops. That’s suited the Pakistani government:
it’s given the U.S. tacit support for the drone strikes and enough
cynical public denunciation of them to ward off popular upheaval.
It’s unknown how many civilians die in the drone strikes, but it’s
undeniable — except, sometimes, by the White House — that some
do.
But
that’s gone out the window as U.S.-Pakistani relations have
deteriorated over
the past year. Pakistan kicked
the U.S. out of an airbase used
for the drone strikes and shut
down a critical overland resupply route for
the Afghanistan war. Panetta appears to be at his wits’ end. His
stark admission that the U.S. is at war in Pakistan followed
a Tuesday
tongue bath for
Pakistan’s arch-rival, India.
In
case you’re wondering, there aren’t many legal implications
or obligations prompted by Panetta’s admission. The 2001
Authorization to Use Military Force, the legal wellspring of the war
on terrorism, clearly authorizes attacking the perpetrator
organization of 9/11 unbounded by geographic limits. Besides that,
the short document is vague
enough to
fly a Predator through. There is little upside and much risk for any
politician arguing it’s
time to end the 9/11 Era.
To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, the life of the war has not been
law; it has been politics.
It’s
hard to imagine the reverberations Panetta’s comment will have
amongst Pakistanis: polls indicatemost
don’t realize there’s a drone war going on at
all. Americans are understandably preoccupied with domestic economic
anxiety. The U.S. government, in other words, might have obscured its
shadow war for nothing.
From Press TV
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