U.S. Foreign Policy Challenges; Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Lashkar-i-Taiba

U.S. Foreign policy is presently engaged in the midst of a political quagmire with Pakistan. Since that nation formed in 1947 in a divorce form India as the British gave independence, each nation has fought over turf and water. Kashmir and Jumma-a former princely kingdom has the headwaters of several important rivers that flow south and west useful for irrigation and drinking. Perhaps the fight over a divided Kashmir and Jumma is fundamentally about water rights as much as real estate.

The allocation of Kashmir and Jumma was made by a British administrator drawing a line on a map and neither India or Pakistan has been able to reconcile to the difficult boundary apportionment. Pakistan trained as many as a half a million terrorists or guerillas to fight Indian forces in Kashmir the last 30 years. One of the essential terrorist training entities is Lashkar-I-Taiba.

Pakistan’s main intelligence service named the I.S.I. worked closely with establishing several lashkars (tribal militias) in the Northern Territories of Pakistan to trained jihadists to fight the hated Hindu military in Kashmir. The American C.I.A. also got involved in supplying and encouraging terrorist-guerilla fighters to battle the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The constellation of jihadist training camps has also supported the Taliban of Pakistan and the Taliban of Afghanistan in addition to Al-Qa’eda. The I.S.I. haven’t much interest in ‘turning off’ these Sunni terrorist training facilities much because of Pakistan political concerns.

Pakistan has a perennial concern about renewed war with India. Neither does Pakistan want Afghanistan to become influenced much by Hindus of India. Pakistan is a poor nation with an officially Sharia based constitution and like the U.S. Congress avoids intelligent policy decisions because extremists in each major party compel extremism.

Pakistan has a weak civilian government and education system. It is under funded and not very powerful. Often the military is called in to rule for a time, and the military is paradoxically the most secular of the major political forces in Pakistan. The Intelligence service is rifled with fundamentalist sympathizers, as increasingly is the military. When the United States alerted Pakistan that it was sending cruise missiles to hit Osama Bin Ladin in 1996 (I believe it was), he was alerted within minutes and departed the scene in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has a protracted and difficult to manage internal political economic and an ambiguous relationship with India regarding stability. The Kashmir status is unsettled and has hundreds of thousands if not millions of economically and socially challenged people with allegiance as much to fundamentalist concepts including jihad as much as to any particular government ruling entity. Many rural people would prefer to simply live well, yet the nature of western capitalism precludes the good neighborliness approach any way from being a practical economic development paradigm. Even in the U.S.A. corruption in economic networking can lead to vicious repression.

The United States spends hundreds of billions to finance a military in Afghanistan and only moderately effective economic assistance to construct a stable, de-volatilized society. Yet Pakistan has a long-range interest of controlling the Afghan government through a sponsored Taliban or other proxy organization. Pakistan is happy enough with a friendly jihadist Sunni government in Afghanistan as a way to secure its northern border.

Kashmir and Jammu might be a direct route to connect with India in some hypothetical future and that would not be to Pakistan’s liking. Afghanistan could also connect to India via far western China if mountain routes can be transcended with engineering, and that could change relationships too.

The United States sends billions of dollars in military aid packages to Pakistan for who knows what reason-ostensibly to buy assistance in sending predator missiles to hit Taleban human targets as well as al Qa’eda targets in Northern Pakistan, and also to allow the U.S.A. to offload military supplies from ships and drive overland from Karachi to Afghanistan. Payments are made by the United States to Taleban and Al Qa’eda connected neo-terrorist gangs on the route for ‘protection’ so the convoys won’t be attacked.

Even if the United States can attain a kind of low level of violence in Afghanistan in a couple of years, the longer range prospects for eliminating the constellation of jihadist training facilities and support in Pakistan seems a kind of ‘out there in the distance’ prospect. AN interesting point regarding Afghanistan security is that the Sunni terrorists can always relocate too another nation in the area for training purposes. It is also somewhat unusual that Al Qa’eda prefers the para-military form of terrorism requisite for war in Kashmir in attacking western targets rather than conventional tradecraft of espionage and clandestine saboteurs engaging in economic war.

The U.S.A. does not face a real convential military threat from Muslim fundamentalists at all. Good intelligence and border security work could halt terrorists from reaching the United States at far lower cost. Newer and more effective economic engagement relationships founded in low entropy environmentalism could be innovated simultaneously with newer and more cost effective defense strategies. A better long-range policy for Pakistan should be developed that would allow Internal Pakistani economic development and political actualization for a populist regime that does not require bilateral antagonism with India.

The United States for decades has been one of Pakistan’s major foreign aid contributors and our policies have in part helped shape the present situation. Our policies definitely seem to require correction and more of an intelligent design considering all of the elements involved. Afghanistan also shares a border with Iran and Uzbekistan and each have real concerns. Iran is of course also a neighbor of Iraq, and Turkey and the Kurds have issues as well. Our policy cannot be simply isolated in its applications for the displacement of various political parties and shifting of relationships occurs whenever change is brought to any portion of the region. It is not simple yet not terribly difficult either. It is an obvious multi-year project to attain regional economic stability along low-entropy principles of ecological economics and respect for religious beliefs and humanitarianism together. The U.S. administrations of the present and future should be aware that the defense budget is a little larger than the interest on the national debt annually and contributes to its increase.

The U.S. national economy is ill founded on to axes. One is its high-entropy anti-nationalistic globalist approach concentrating wealth and increasing poverty and harm to the environment—even Pollock in Alaska are over-fished and may lead to a crash of the fishery health similar to the problems with Atlantic cod- Fishing should largely be restricted to sports fishing and subsistence use the next decade to give the fisheries time to recover robust health. Soybeans are an excellent source of vitamin D.

The second ill-foundation of the U.S. economy is the Clinton-Obamonics of Wall Street and Financial sector skimming of wealth instead of low-entropy economic manufacturing being the foundation of the economy. Protracted foreign wars and foreign economic and military engagements are harmful to U.S. national interests and should be rolled up and stowed in the bad policies of the past bin.