M. K. Bhadrakumar is a retired Indian foreign service officer (and Ambassador) who writes often for Asia Times. His latest, “Foreign devils in the Iranian mountains ,” (linked below) relates well to one of the thinkpieces written last August, at IA’s Analysis-Synthesis section, called Balochistan and the New World Order. Serious intelligence development efforts will seldom yield the same subject lines as those discussions engineered by either the government or the capitalist media. There is nothing “sexy,” in the mind of Western readers, about Balochistan. But there are things going on there that could have very dramatic impacts on our futures.
In a rare public criticism of Pakistan, the Tehran Times commented last week that an exclusive Islamabad-Washington nexus is at work manipulating the Afghan situation. The daily, which reflects official Iranian thinking, spelled out something that others perhaps knew already but were afraid to talk about publicly.
All the same, the commentary gave a candid Iranian insight into the state of play in Afghanistan. It estimated that without a comprehensive rethink of strategy aimed at addressing the problems of weak political institutions, misgovernance, corruption, warlordism, tardy reconstruction, drug trafficking and attendant mafia, and excesses by the coalition forces, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) couldn’t possibly hope to get anywhere near on top of the crisis in Afghanistan.
The commentary pointed a finger at Pakistan’s training the Taliban and providing them with “logistical and political support”. It highlighted that US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who visited Islamabad recently, chose to sidestep the issue and instead bonded with President General Pervez Musharraf. This is because Washington’s priority - that the “new cold war” objective of NATO is to establish a long-term presence in the region - can be realized only with Musharraf’s cooperation.
Posted by stan in Analysis