NATO's Dance with the Taliban (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Those familiar with the situation on the ground in Afghanistan are aware that only around 17 percent of the money spent in that unfortunate country is in the control of President Hamid Karzai’s "free government of independent Afghanistan."

The remaining 83 percent is, directly or via proxies, disbursed in accordance with instructions given by one or the other NATO country, or NATO’s loyal partner, the United Nations, whose hand-picked staff in Afghanistan keeps in close touch with "their" embassies and military establishments.

Local officials are aware of the way in which tenders and requests for supplies have been manipulated to ensure that they are directed toward countries favored by NATO decision-makers rather than the most cost-effective source.

Bloated salaries and allowances, as well as logistics costs similar to the levels of Halliburton – a U.S.-based provider of products and services to the energy industry – form part of the mosaic of reasons why NATO is so loathed by the people it claims to have liberated.

However, not a single international media outlet focuses on the misdirection of resources by NATO, preferring to focus their ire on the measly proportion of total expenditure under Karzai's control, as do notables like Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Barack Obama.

More Troops not the Answer in Afghanistan (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — During the 1960s, the United States had a president who did more for the underclass than most of his predecessors put together. Lyndon Johnson introduced healthcare, civil rights and other measures designed to provide a level playing field for people of different classes and colors among the citizenry.

Instead of acclaim, what he got was unpopularity, forcing him to surrender office after just one term. The reason was an unpopular war, fought the wrong way – through the insertion of greater and greater numbers of troops.

U.S. soldiers marauding through their land converted several hundred thousand South Vietnamese into Viet Cong. As a recent editorial on Afghanistan in the New York Times put it, Americans too would be tempted to violence were a strange-looking bunch of aliens to invade and occupy Oregon.

Those who seek conventional military solutions to problems within other countries forget that the world is very different from what it was during the peak years of European colonialism. Then, mass killings were acceptable. But now, were NATO to repeat in Afghanistan the tactics of European colonial powers in South America, Africa and Asia, their own populations would halt such slaughter.

In the age of worldwide cable television, significant "collateral damage" is unacceptable. This is not a situation that would have endeared itself to Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister who once favored the bombing of undefended villages in the Middle East, and looked the other way when more than 6 million Indians died in 1944 of starvation in the single British-ruled province of Bengal.

Kayani: Arsonist Disguised as Firefighter (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat 

Manipal, India — Pakistan's chief of army staff, General Parvez Ashfaq Kayani, is a master at the strategy of starting a fire and then volunteering to put it out in exchange for concessions. Yet he was taken aback when President Asif Ali Zardari declined to enter the noose of imprisonment being prepared for him by the expected return to office of dismissed Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.

Zardari has refused to reinstate Chaudhry, ousted by his predecessor Gen. Pervez Musharraf, despite urgings from Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani – who was functioning in tandem with Kayani in wanting a more pliant head of state than Zardari.

Since then, Kayani has been working at undermining his nominal superior, ensuring a steady diet of negative media reports about Zardari, and ensuring backroom backing for those champions of Punjabi supremacy in Pakistan, the Sharif brothers. The conspirators meet outside Pakistan, usually in locations in the Middle East, to fine-tune their plans to ensure the removal of Zardari and the return to center stage of Kayani ally Nawaz Sharif.

Of concern to democracies about this Pakistani soap opera is the backing that Kayani has given to the Taliban and its parasite, al-Qaida. It is no accident that NATO has failed to prevent this group of louts from retaking one-third of Afghanistan and moving into the rest.

U.S. backing for Kayani has ensured that the Pakistan military's double-faced policy of secretly helping the Taliban while publicly backing NATO continues. Now that the Clinton team is back in office, courtesy of President Barack Obama, the United States is returning to the 1994-96 policy of backing the Taliban.

Punjabis Re-Assert Supremacy in Pakistan (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — Since the 1980s, about six years after Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq took control from Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, the Pakistan army has been less a symbol of national unity than an instrument to ensure the supremacy of the Punjabi element in all reaches of Pakistan society.

Today, the army is replicating in the northwestern frontier what has always been the case in Baluchistan and Sindh -- frank control over local government through the use of bullets. Although the Pashtun and Baloch elements have been allowed some representation within the officer corps, ultimately it is the Punjabi element that decides policy.

Since2003, when they turned against Pervez Musharraf because of the Pakistan coup master's proclivity to cling to his post as Chief of Army Staff, the Punjabi element has moved closer to China, countering moves by Musharraf to align his country firmly with the United States in the ongoing War on Terror. From 2003 onwards, under cover of the need to confront Indian control in Kashmir, they have continued to give assistance to the jihadis. They have blocked U.S. moves to get the Pakistan army to mount an effective defense against the Taliban sheltering in almost every city in Pakistan, including Islamabad, where a cluster has set up base about five miles from the U.S. Embassy complex.