DECISIVE REBUFF TO SELIG HARRISON (Open Letter)

OPEN LETTER TO SELIG HARRISON
Director, Asia Programme
Center for International Policy
1717 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Suite 801
Washington, DC 20036

Your opinionated essay, "Support to Pakistan Distorts Asia's Balance of Power," published in the Boston Globe on September 27, cannot be permitted to pass without rebuttal. The first in your series of misstatements is the allegation that the so-called Al Quaida organization operates without opposition. This is easily refuted by the actions of the frontier corps, the Pakistani military, the criticisms of modernizing and moderate mullahs in their mosques, and the seige of the Red Mosque. You do not deign to specify the US weapony you so readily denigrate as unsuitable for Islamabad, yet opening the plains of Punjab to a speculative Indian incursion (as previously practiced in the birthing of Bangladesh) would just as readily open the Punjab to separatist militias from Sindh (the Bhutto family principality) or the Baluchis, among others. To criticize Pakistani intelligence as being "riddled with Islamists" manifests total cultural blindness as well as condensation toward a putative allied state whose capital is, after all, Islamabad. Is one to expect followers of Shinto? Is one to criticize Italian intelligence in Rome for being "riddled with Catholics?" As for anti-American sentiment in the sub-continent, it is surely nourished by the grinding, if ill-coordinated, NATO mechanized forces in Afghanistan (eerily reminiscent of the more efficient operations of German and Italian troops in republican Spain) and USAF incursions into Pakistani air space.(recalling the Condor Legion).
The US financial consortium that lent Pakistan $6.2 billion in 2001 did so to support the military government of General Perez Musharraf, subsequently toppled for failure to massacre his own people with sufficient vigor, by a (sponsored) lawyers' riot and a US intrigue to replace him with civilian celebrities acting in the conjoined interests of Israel and India--Israel, inspired by a paranoid apprehension among Zionist zealots of a rebirth of revanchism in the Muslim world, and India, similarly apprehensive about Chinese ambitions and still smarting over Krishna Menon's defeat and its subsequent failure to pacify and absorb Kashmir. To expect the General Accounting Office to provide an accurate summary of disbursements of a foreign sovereign government would be properly adjudged "quaint," were it not purely ludicrous to expect acturarial accuracy from an agency that cannot satisfactorily account for billions of US fiat funds disbursed to American and British security contractors in US-occupied Baghdad.
To restrict the transfer of military weapons to those restricted to small-unit engagements amounts to the progressive disarmament of the Pakistani military which remains, as ever, the single strongest cohesive force in a multi-national Muslim state. Equally multi-national, Hindu India, surrounded by Muslim states to the north, west and east, nervously watches the new Maoist government in Nepal while suffering an internal guerilla war in the east and Tamil support for the Sri Lanka "Tigers" in the south. Harrison may posit a future in which the surrounding states, from Pakistan to Myramar and Thailand, may rejoice to live "in the shadow of Kali" (and the next BJP government), but India can in no way be conceived of as a solid rock to function as a fulcrum for globe-girdling American military might. Rather, a quick examinatin discloses it is as full of holes, ethnic, religious, and economic, as a piece of coral dredged from the Great Barrier Reef. It is the circle of Muslim states and non-states, from the Uighers in Sinkiang through Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and a newly-freed Afghanistan after NATO withdrawal (for reasons of expense) that would furnish an unassailable cultural-religous barrier against the "revisionist PLA generals" now enjoying their "place in the sun" in Beijing, and presumably mulling over an overland strike to facilitate their access to Iranian oil. (Land transport would be far more reliable than a "long march"
across the oceans from Venezuela.) Assailing Pakistan in a slimy piece of reptilian journalism for its military partnership with the Chinese generals only serves to make the "deep state" in Islamabad more militant, while attempting to chew the dragon's tail with rotten and falling (financial) teeth.
While Harrison may hurry to bank rupees from India and shekels from Jerusalem, he will do so only with his ears ringing with the guffaws of robust Russian laughter. The Indian air force is furnished with aging Soviet equipment, and Medvedev's forces have had recent experience in bombing Sukhoi air fields and repair facilities in Georgia. And since the Bush administration has made the Non-Proliferation Treaty a dead letter, it would be will to remember that Moscow also has weapons to sell.
--Anatol Chatsky
--Ministry of External Affairs
North American Resistence Command