Email This Story
We’ve heard a lot about “situational awareness” this week, following the curious flight of a Northwest/Delta Airlines airbus well beyond its intended stop in Minneapolis.
Whatever the cause of their lapse in airmanship, the pilots of flight 188 eventually reached their destination.
The same can’t be said for the illustrious suits and uniforms commanding the U.S./NATO mission to Afghanistan, who are still lost and unresponsive in the fog.
Events on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border point to a complete blackout of situational awareness, with Bush-era generals and failed diplomats snoozing at the controls, while President Obama and his team anxiously wait for air traffic controllers, or a plucky flight attendant, to stir a few comprehending mumbles from beyond the cockpit door.
This is scarcely an exaggeration, and definitely not a joke if you’re an Afghan civilian or soldier, or a member of the international forces fighting the Taliban.
Situational awareness among the human beings in the crosshairs of the Afghan war is alarmingly clear. It’s a toss-up which threat is more disheartening: the bullets and suicide bombers of the Pakistan-based militant groups, or the floundering confusion of the commanders of the U.S.-led coalition.
In Kabul, the envoys of the richest, most progressive nations on earth this week struggled to engineer a more presentable façade of authority, led by a ballot-stuffing president whose claim to legitimacy is as suspect as that of Iran’s Ahmad Ahmadinejad.
Watching Kabul's chaos on their satellite TV screens in Pakistan are the leaders of the Afghan Taliban and associated militant fronts, identified by the U.S.-led coalition as their key enemies.
These Afghan terror chieftains have nothing to fear from the Pakistan Army, which has mounted yet another selective offensive against Islamabad’s domestic Taliban foes.
With surgical care, Pakistan Army units hunt Talib militants of the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan, while avoiding Afghan Taliban elements nearby, such as those led by Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin, with whom the colonels of the army’s intelligence branch are in league.
Despite the Haqqanis holding U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl as their hostage since July, and mounting a second murderous suicide bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul two weeks ago, Washington has rewarded the group’s Pakistan Army patrons with $200 million worth of weaponry – on a promise that the arms won’t find their way to targeting U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
It seems the Americans have learned nothing from the blowback caused by the Bush administration’s $2 billion-per-year bribe to the former Pakistani regime. This week President Obama signed into law a five-year program of non-military aid to Pakistan worth $7.5 billion.
In the face of such largesse to their civilian government counterparts, Pakistan’s schizophrenic armed forces establishment will hardly be distancing itself from Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who provides the Pakistanis with a proxy force in Afghanistan.
Omar’s Quetta shura continues to thrive in its safe havens in Baluchistan province, exercising command and control over attacks in Kandahar, Helmand and beyond, while supervising the movement’s central recruitment and rearmament operations in Pakistan.
Call it situational awareness or just common sense, the flashing lights and buzzing alarms triggered by the Taliban resurgence are telling Western leaders it’s time to wake up.
The flight plan to success goes through Pakistan. Ignore that, and they might just as well take the next plane to Minneapolis...
