A Pakistani soldier stands on top of an armored personnel carrier during an army exercise near port city of Karachi, 2007 (Zahid Hussein)
After three US soldiers lost their lives in a roadside bomb explosion in northwestern Pakistan Wednesday, media attention for America’s little-publicized armed involvement in Afghanistan’s volatile neighbor state has been aroused.
The Huffington Post called the conflict the “once-secret war” and quoted Wired‘s Noah Shachtman who asked: “Now can we start treating this like a real war?”
Shachtman wasn’t referring to the media’s previous lack of interest in the situation though. “When are we going to start treating this conflict in Pakistan as a real war,” he complained, “with real oversight and real disclosure about what the hell our people are really doing there?
Maybe at one point, this conflict could’ve been swept under the rug as some classified CIA op. But that was billions of dollars and hundreds of Pakistani and American lives ago.
Aside from the obvious fact that no “hundreds” of American lives have been lost in Pakistan, the suggestion that the US Government has somehow tried to cover up its military involvement in the country during the past years is absolutely false.
The war in Afghanistan is no war between nations. Coalition and NATO forces aren’t battling an Afghan state and the Taliban is no conventional enemy. Its tactics include guerilla, insurgency and terrorism while its warriors cross borders with little restraint—and little effort, it seems. The lack of control along the mountainous Afghan-Pakistani border as well as the independent strongholds which Taliban affiliates in Pakistan maintain make it impossible to ignore the one country while trying to stabilize the other. Some commentators apparently fail to recognize that, but the Obama Administration certainly doesn’t.
The president has stressed time and again that Afghanistan and Pakistan ought to be considered as both parts of the same theater of war. In fact, he began saying so while campaigning in 2008. In October of last year, Secretaries Hillary Clinton of State and Robert Gates of Defense reiterated his position in their interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
Gates, at the time, agreed with what Henry Kissinger had written several times at that point: that the unstable border between the two South Asian states was the most dangerous of breeding grounds for extremism and terrorism targeted at the United States. The foremost challenge had moved to that region, noted Kissinger, “where sanctuaries on the Pakistan side of the border supply and train the assault on Afghanistan and the allied forces assisting it.” And no guerilla war, warned the former diplomat, “has ever been won in the face of sanctuaries immune to attack.”
So, to answer Shachtman’s question, “When are we going to start treating this conflict in Pakistan as a real war,” one can answer defiantly that the United States have been doing so at least since the day Barack Obama took office. Nothing has been “swept under the rug.” Instead, the administration has been very clear about its intent to draw Pakistan into the conflict and about its determination to prevent a Taliban power base from emerging there.
