The real State of the Union By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE
The real State of the Union
By Pepe Escobar 

US President Barack Obama's State of the Union (SOTU) address was a somewhat surrealist spectacle. Way beyond avalanches of PR spin, the US government for a long time has not exactly done wonders for the public good. So as it advertises itself in front of a dysfunctional US Congress dismissed as repellent by an overwhelming majority of Americans - including, and expanding, on those 76% who are living paycheck to paycheck - what's left is a grand, old Hollywood production. 

And Obama, of course, is a decent actor who can deliver a decent speech - certainly better than Ronnie Reagan, whom Gore Vidal used to describe as "the acting president". 

The key theme of SOTU 2014 was the appalling income inequality in the US. Call it an appendix of this past week at the World Economic Forum in Davos - that snowy Vegas for the 0.00001% - in which the Masters of the Universe finally "discovered" inequality. So much inequality, in fact, that 2014 was instantly tagged by the Masters - and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe - as the new 1914, all that furiously tweeted to all corporate boardrooms of the liquid modernity elite. 

As Obama got into his groove, he proclaimed that Obamacare had won; that he would resort to ruling by executive order to get things done; and that a mixed salad of platitudes and vague proposals/generalities attested to the imminent success of his agenda of improving "opportunity" as the only answer to fighting inequality. Oh yes; and that the American Dream was not in a coma. 

No word, of course, about the "gentle", progressive dismantling of what's left of US democracy, via the Orwellian/Panopticon complex, through which 0.00001% elite rule is painfully achieved in a sanitized Total Information Awareness (TIA) environment. With the US government in total control of the Internet, that once-upon-a-time dream - the revolution will be televised - won't happen even on the web. 

Neoliberalism or death
In the absence of the late, great Howard Zinn, Americans now have to put up with historic Clintonista Robert Reich. Reich may be correct on two of his reasons for the American malaise. 

With the US working class paralyzed and fearful of losing their jobs (labor unions have been virtually destroyed), and with students mired in horrendous debt (even as the average starting salary for graduates has been dropping steadily), two key vectors of protest are neutralized. 

But Reich is wrong on his third reason - that over 80% of US public opinion distrusts government so much that they have given up on any possibility of reform. 

The key point would be to examine how American turbo-financial capitalism has been drifting since the mid-1970s. The point is not that a cabal of medievalist Republicans, evil corporate CEOs (and their handpicked pols), plus Wall Street is in charge. The point is to examine how demented financial asset speculation plus a demented inflation of dodgy financial securities have been the defining features of the US and global system. 

This would imply a hardcore critique of advanced capitalism - which in fact is neither "advanced" nor really capitalism - that is absolute taboo in US corporate media. And the whole thing started even before the prophet Ronnie Reagan, then through Bubba Clinton and all the way to the Dubya/Obama continuum. 

The latest graphic illustration is a system in which 85 people - packable in a London double-decker - own as much wealth as the bottom 50% of humanity. How's that possible? A cursory examination of David Harvey's groundbreaking A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005) would answer most questions - all related to such tricks as trickle-down economics, slashing taxes for the wealthy and corporations, the destruction of labor unions, lower real wages, job outsourcing, the disenfranchising of just about anyone who's not part of the 0.00001%, and a free for all in the 0.00001% banking and finance casino. End result; a vortex of wealth concentration - which has absolutely nothing to do with democracy in a republic. 

Good ol' Uncle Marx would tell it for what it is: a class war. And the 0.00001% has won, hands down, fast and loose. 

It's easy to forget that Dubya inherited a sizable budget surplus. He then slashed taxes for the wealthy; presided over two horrendously expensive wars, one because he "had to bomb somebody" and the other a war of choice; and then he was the MC of the biggest Wall Street crash since the Great Depression. 

And yes, it's all about the Bush-Obama continuum. In Obama's "recovery" era, asset values for the wealthiest 7% of Americans has shot up 28% while declining 4% for the rest. 

At least 80% of US voters don't want social programs to be cut so the budget can be balanced; they want more taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Obama instead cut from social security. 

Then there's the destruction of American cities; this study details how Detroit was screwed while the state of Michigan was spending a fortune on "business incentives". 

And to top it off, there's the Jamie Dimon syndrome, as in the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, aka Obama's "one of the smartest bankers we've got". Even if the US's number one bank has lost billions in dodgy toxic mortgage-backed securities, manipulated energy prices and even defrauded credit card customers, your CEO still gets a hefty bonus as the bank's stock were up 21% in 2013. 

Whether Obama played ball - small or otherwise - at the SOTU is irrelevant. Apart from flagrant absurdities on Iran, Syria and Israel-Palestine, and not a word on Russia and China, no wonder the climatic Hollywood tear-jerker sequence involved an Army Ranger almost killed by an improvized explosive device in Afghanistan. He was Obama's living metaphor of "Yes We Can", the 2014 remix. 

Curiously, just before SOTU, the US government and the Pentagon leaked to the New York Times that if "a small number" (Obama) of US troops actually remain in Afghanistan, the CIA will continue to drone the tribal areas of Pakistan to oblivion, and will continue to use Afghan bases to spy on Pakistan. 

So it's all about the CIA's dirty wars. Obviously none of the AfPak components want this state of affairs - so it looks like Obama's heroes will have to beat the hell out of Dodge for good. Good for them, as they will be exchanging lethal IEDs for a new shot at the ultimate land of "opportunity." Is that a fact? Yes, because POTUS said so. 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. 

Bin Laden Death Script & the Needed Trigger for Next Step-Pakistan

Time to Talk about ‘Why & Why Now’ It has been over two weeks since the orchestrated ever-changing Bin Laden Death. The question of what happened remains the same except it doesn’t seem to matter any longer. The US media is done after making their initial splash, and the majority is left with one conclusion: the SOB is dead, and who gives a da… how it happened. Whether Osama held an AK-47 while using some damsel in distress as a shield, whether there was a real fight or not, whether it was really Osama’s body in an organic edible shell we fed to the endangered sharks, whether the full credit goes to the CIA or the White House or the Pentagon …no longer seems to matter. Dizzy-fying confusion induced by dozens and dozens of lies and discrepancies and denials has given way to post-adrenaline-rush exhaustion. The question of what happened has been classified as moot and irrelevant. Right or wrong I’ll leave that question behind, at least for now, and instead, go back to focus on the more important question- the question of ‘why and why now.’
As I stated during the first few days of covering the Bin Laden Death Script, when it comes to DC dirty politics, when it comes to the new world order machine, and when it comes to US presidents, timing is everything and there are no such things as coincidences:

Considering the mainstream media’s sensationalism and propaganda tactics and their cemented role as an extension of the establishment, one must step back and take in the entire landscape, the context, connections, and of course the timing. Only after that, after putting the pieces together instead of dumbly staring at the images spread before us by the media, we have a chance to get a grasp of the reality-facts; or at least a chance to come up with real questions.

In the past two weeks, after talking with many experts and sources, both nationally and internationally, Pakistan has been surfacing as the common thread holding the most rational explanation of ‘why and why now.’ Interestingly, I came across the following statement by Rep. Ron Paul during his interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:

“The helicopters that landed in Abbottabad won’t be the last to put American troops on the ground in Pakistan, I see the whole thing as a mess, and I think that we are going to be in Pakistan. I think that’s the next occupation and I fear it. I think it’s ridiculous, and I think our foreign policy is such that we don’t need to be doing this.”

I was planning to write a comprehensive piece based on information and analyses I have gathered from my solid intelligence and Pentagon sources. However, after watching the interview with Ron Paul (And he has his credible sources), I decided to go ahead and write a fairly quick commentary on why the question of ‘why and why now’ keeps pointing to Pakistan as the next probable occupation target for our never-dying neocon objective-makers. Actually the following is more of significant developments and a timeline than a subjective interpretation or commentary. I am going to put them together and have us look at the pattern and where these points point to, and that’s exactly what I meant by “one must step back and take in the entire landscape, the context, connections, and of course the timing.”
Let’s start with Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which was launched in 1997 and became known for leading the public campaign to oust Saddam Hussein both before and after the September 11 attacks. As many of my highly aware readers know, those neocons, their objectives and activities, never go away. They may change names or change a few front faces, but like a leech they always hold on to the system; the system they help put in place in the first place:

The blandly-named Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) – the brainchild of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, neo-conservative foreign policy guru Robert Kagan, and former Bush administration official Dan Senor – has thus far kept a low profile; its only activity to this point has been to sponsor a conference pushing for a U.S. “surge” in Afghanistan.But some see FPI as a likely successor to Kristol’s and Kagan’s previous organisation, the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which they launched in 1997 and which became best known for leading the public campaign to oust former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein both before and after the Sep. 11 attacks.
…

So what’s their mission statement, and what have these neocons been cooking up with the new face, their new president, Obama? The following is from an article by Jim Lobe in 2009:

The mission statement opens by listing a familiar litany of threats to the U.S., including “rogue states,” “failed states,” “autocracies” and “terrorism”, but gives pride of place to the “challenges” posed by “rising and resurgent powers,” of which only China and Russia are named.
…FPI intends to make confrontation with China and Russia the centrepiece of its foreign policy stance. If this is the case, it would mark a return to the early days of the Bush administration, before 9/11, when Kristol’s Weekly Standard took the lead in attacking Washington for its alleged “appeasement” of Beijing… FPI has chosen to push for escalating the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan. The organisation’s first event, to be held here Mar. 31, will be a conference entitled “Afghanistan: Planning for Success”.
…

For now, this is what I want you to take from the above on Obama’s Neoconistic objectives: fiercely counter China-Russia when it comes to establishing US hegemony, especially in Central and South Asia, with emphasis on Afghanistan. Next, let’s look at the strategic importance of the same region for China [All emphasis mine]:
In order for China to sustain its status as the emerging economic superpower, it must take all the necessary steps required in order to have sufficient energy resources for the near future. According to Pakistani think tank, BrassTacks, Chinese interests in the Indian Ocean became visible in 2002, when they invested heavily and began work on the Gwadar Port, located in Baluchestan, a province of Pakistan.
The Gwadar Port has its benefits for both Pakistan and China. According to Abdus Sattar Ghazali, executive editor for American Muslim Perspective, “The cost benefits to China of using Gwadar as the port for western China’s imports and exports are as evident as the long-term economic benefits to Pakistan of Gwadar becoming a port for Chinese goods.” Not only does Gwadar enable China to fulfill its energy needs, but it will also provide a strategic military footprint in the Arabian Sea, which has the United States worried.
…
Okay, now you have Obama’s Neoconistic objectives with China as its main target and competitor, and you have China competing for the same strategic area, Pakistan, to fulfill its energy needs and establish a strategic footprint in the Arabian Sea, and in the middle of it, the point where US-China strategic objectives intersect: Pakistan.

In order to halt this, the globalists need to block China’s access to the Arabian Sea by way of Gwadar. According to BrassTacks, to do this, “there needs to be a ‘new Pakistan’ as indicated in Operation Enduring Turmoil.” Operation Enduring Turmoil is PNAC’s plan to disassemble Pakistan into three parts. According to a “game plan” drawn out by Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, in a 2006 article of the Armed Forces Journal, “Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribes would be reunited with their Afghan brethren [and] would also lose its Baluch territory to Free Baluchistan. The remaining ‘natural’ Pakistan would lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward spur near Karachi.” With this done, what was once the NWFP, a province of Pakistan, is now part of Afghanistan, and what was once Baluchistan, a province of Pakistan, is now its own state, Free Baluchistan. This would force China to impossibly go through Afghanistan and Free Baluchistan in order to reach the Arabian Sea. Such an arrangement would cut China’s route to the Arabian Sea.
…

Now, please focus on our three main actors- China, US and in the middle, the strategically important Pakistan. Let’s use our common sense minus logic-clouding details, and consider what happens when the strategically crucial actor in the middle starts straying away from one main actor and moving toward the other.
This is from November, 2009:

China has sent out an interesting signal ahead of US president Barack Obama’s scheduled visit to Beijing by offering a set of advanced fighter jets to Pakistan. It has agreed to sell $1.4 billion worth of jets to Islamabad days ahead of the planned visit of the US president Barack Obama to Shanghai and Beijing on November 15-18.
The move is expected to jolt the US administration as it works on notes and talking points for Obama’s meetings with Chinese leaders. He is expected to discuss Beijing’s relationship with India and its role in internal conflicts in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Beijing is keen to reduce US influence on Pakistan, which will make it easier for it to deal with India, sources said. Washington’s recent decision to extend massive financial assistance to Islamabad is seen in some quarters as a policy setback for China.
…

A year later, in October 2010, the following interesting perspective on how things were heating up between the US and Pakistan is published by Margolis:

The neoconservative far right in Washington and its media allies again claim Pakistan is a grave threat to US interests and to Israel. Pakistan must be declawed and dismembered, insist the neocons. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is reportedly being targeted for seizure or elimination by US Special Forces. There is also talk in Washington of dividing Afghanistan into Pashtun, Tajik and Uzbek mini-states, as the US has done in Iraq, and perhaps Pakistan, as well. Little states are easier to rule or intimidate than big ones. Many Pakistanis believe the United States is bent on dismembering their nation. Some polls show Pakistanis now regard the United States as a greater enemy than India.
…

It is important to remember how Obama passed AIPAC neocons’ test on Pakistan during his presidential campaign in 2007. Obama said if elected in November 2008 he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government,”If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” Obama said.
Now, let’s fast-forward to early April 2011:

Pakistan’s ambassador to China used a recent celebration of his country’s Republic Day to give a rhetoric-filled talk about Beijing-Islamabad relations. If March 23, 1940, was the day the Muslim League decided to establish Pakistan, then the anniversary would be a time to declare that relations with China will define the way forward. ‘We shall take our bilateral relations to new heights,’ Masood Khan proclaimed. [...] Pakistan has been moving into China’s sphere of influence for decades and the countries routinely refer to each other as ‘all-weather’ partners.
This year will mark the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations. ‘Even when I was there in 1981, ’82, I could see Chinese military factories going up,’ says Stephen Cohen, a Pakistan expert at the Brookings Institution. Now, Pakistan represents a major market for China’s nuclear and military technology. According to SIPRI, a Swedish think tank, over 40 per cent of Chinese arms exports go to Pakistan—the largest share of any country China sells to.”

Obviously Obama’s day in day out bombing of Pakistan, his ‘let’s drone the hell out of them’ policy, had backfired, producing the opposite effect for his Neoconistic global hegemony objectives. Now, things begin to really heat up; this is from April 17, 2011:

President Obama’s rhetoric in Delhi had no substance except to rile the Pakistanis. The Delhi card didn’t quite work. The Chinese Premier visited Islamabad and pledged $20 billion in investment in Pakistan during the next five years. How about them apples? The Pakistani retort is what it has always been we need “Friends Not Masters”.
Britain as a colonial power practiced “Divide and rule” pitting religious and ethnic differences in the Middle East to rule continents. Bhutto famously theorized that the post-colonial powers were working on a “unite and rule” strategy forcing Pakistan to work with India against China.
“The idea of becoming subservient to India is abhorrent and that of cooperation with India, with the object of promoting tension with China, equally repugnant.” Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.
…
Most Pakistanis don’t want closer relations with Washington–they want to build closer relations with Beijing, and work on creating the Muslim Union (similar to the European Union) in Central Asia. Links with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey are key to the future of Pakistan.
Islamabad is moving ever closer to China, both militarily and economically– and that’s a fact Jack.
…

By mid April things start going downhill; very fast.

The transactional relationship between Washington and Islamabad is coming to an end. While US-Pakistani transactional relations are fraying at both ends, the opposite is true of Sino-Pakistani relations.
Pakistan supported China when she was recognized only by Albania, and built the bridge to the USA. This fact cannot be forgotten by the Chinese who mention it in every summit and mentioned it in this summit also
…
There is renewed energy to pace up the development of Gwadar Port to provide China a shorter route and easy excess to world markets to dispatch its goods to Europe and America.
“The Gwadar port project will transform Pakistan’s Navy into a force that can rival regional navies. The government of Pakistan has designated the port area as a “sensitive defense zone.” The Gwadar port will rank among the world’s largest deep-sea ports. The port provides China a strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.
Located at the entrance of the Persian Gulf and about 460 kms from Karachi, Gwadar has had immense Geostrategic significance on many accounts. The continued unstable regional environment in the Persian Gulf in particular as a result of the Iran/Iraq war, the Gulf war and the emergence of the new Central Asian States has added to this importance. Considering the Geo-economic imperative of the regional changes, the ADB’s Ports Master Plan studies considered an alternate to the Persian Gulf Ports to capture the transit trade of the Central Asian Republic (CAR) as well as the trans-shipment trade of the region.
…

And finally, on April 27, according to my sources, the following catalyst prompts the Obama team to execute the Kill Osama Bin Laden Script. This is the pivotal point in the Bin Laden Death Operation Script as a catalyst for the soon to come Pakistan Occupation:

Pakistan is lobbying Afghan President Hamid Karzai against building a long-term strategic partnership with the United States, and urging him instead to look to Pakistan and its ally, China, for help in striking a peace deal with the Taliban and rebuilding the economy, according to Afghan officials.
…
Washington’’s relations with Pakistan have reached their lowest point in years following a series of missteps on both sides, and Pakistani officials say that they no longer have an incentive to follow the American lead in their own backyard, the report added.
“Pakistan is sole guarantor of its own interest,” said a senior Pakistani official, adding: “We”re not looking for anyone else to protect us, especially the US. If they”re leaving, they”re leaving and they should go.”
…

The next day, on April 28, , a senior Pakistani government official said that the Export-Import Bank of China will loan Pakistan $1.7 billion to develop a city-wide train system in the eastern city of Lahore.
Since the holes-filled and never-explained ‘kill or capture’ operation, the presidential PR machine, the US media and their extension guised under ‘alternative’ have been beating the war drums. After all, as with any wars of ours, public opinion must be shaped, and public backing must be garnered. This is one of the latest reflecting just that: 

After the killing of Usama bin Laden in Pakistan, few American voters believe that country is an ally of the United States in the war against terrorism. Moreover, most doubt Pakistan is worthy of continued U.S. foreign aid.
That’s according to a Fox News poll released Wednesday.
Nearly three out of four voters — 73 percent — say the United States should stop sending foreign aid until Pakistan demonstrates a deeper commitment to the war against terrorism. Some 19 percent would continue to provide funding.
…
With the discovery that bin Laden apparently had been living in Pakistan for years, the consensus is Pakistan is not a friend (74 percent). A small 16 percent minority of voters views Pakistan as a strong U.S. ally in the war against terrorism.
…

You must be thinking: Pakistan must have tons in their own dossier to expose US government duplicities, lies, and nefarious activities. So why have they been relatively silent in all this? Why don’t they open the flood gate on ‘facts’ surrounding Bin Laden, his supposed role in 9/11, his supposed journey since 9/11, and his supposed death recently? And I have an answer for that: neither party has played all their cards yet. Just take a look at how Gates has been playing both sides carefully while measuring the outcome of various factors in play:

Gates reiterated the accusation that elements within the Pakistani government knew about the location of Osama bin Laden and were keeping that information from the United States. Bin Laden was killed in a US raid earlier this month.
At the same time, Gates echoed comments by other officials, conceding that the US has absolutely no evidence to that effect and that it is “pure supposition on our part.” The repeated accusations, despite being based on “pure supposition” have done major damage to US-Pakistan ties, and have spawned calls from Congress to suspend all aid to Pakistan to punish them.
Gates, who attended the conference with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, also said that the US raid that killed bin Laden had “humiliated” the Pakistani government, and that they had “paid a price” for bin Laden’s presence. Mullen added that the US ability to attack Pakistan with impunity was “a humbling experience” for the Pakistani military.
…

The White House neocons are in the midst of age-old diplomatic games, bluffing, and hedging their bets. They have the ‘foreign & military aid’ card. They have the ‘ISI dirt files’ card. They have the ‘ultimate China leaning’ card. And of course, they have the ‘mighty power of preemptive occupation war’ card which is always blessed and supported by NATO and overlooked by their butlers in the UN.
China has its own set of cards; whether it is their biggest market for dumping goods, or carrying the US debt, or who knows what else. For now they are using the ‘talk’ card with no real strings attached:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao assured his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani of China’s “all-weather friendship” on Wednesday, during a visit that sharply contrasted with anger between Washington and Islamabad.
“I wish to stress here that no matter what changes might take place in the international landscape, China and Pakistan will remain forever good neighbours, good friends, good partners and good brothers,” Wen told Gilani at the start of a meeting in central Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.

Suffice it to say that not all cards have been placed on the table. As the famous Kenny Rogers’ Gambler lyrics go:
You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.
As for us the people, we’ll be sitting and waiting for the three parties to conclude this stage of their global hegemony game. We’ll be reading and watching and listening to their PR machine in the media give us one concocted fantasy after another. As in all other wars of ours we will have zero to say, zilch to gain, and plenty to lose. They have the cards, and we are the piled up tokens on the table.
# # # #
This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Tags: Afghanistan, Bin Laden Death, Bin Laden Death Timing, Boiling Frogs Post, Central Asia, China, Gwadar Port, neocons, New World Order, Obama, Osama Death Script, Pakistan, PNAC, Ron Paul, sibel edmonds, South Asia.

Posted in Uncategorized by Sibel Edmonds

1. May 20th, 2011 at 10:07 am
   
   Jon Gold Says:
   The United States pointing fingers at Pakistan is like Al Capone pointing fingers at Frank Nitti.
   http://911truthnews.com/death-of-bin-laden-may-distract-from-a-more-disturbing-story/
   http://911truthnews.com/scapegoating-the-pakistani-isi/
   Sibel, please read both… they are both extremely relevant to all of this.
   
2. May 20th, 2011 at 11:08 am
   
   Bill Bergman Says:
   Things appear to be heating up on this score, e.g.
   http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110520/wl_nm/us_pakistan_blast
   It seems like we have to read mainstream news with two eyeballs, one eyeball taking it for granted that they are trying to tell the truth, and the other eyeball considering how and why they might be lying to us, and then putting the messages from both eyeballs together in our brains, and try to make sense out of it.
   
3. May 20th, 2011 at 12:09 pm
   
   yoshi Says:
   For those of you here who think that Ron Paul will be the answer to Obama, consider some points.
   We live in a hypervigilant world (thanks largely to MSM and govt. conditioning). We must defeat the terrorists! We must protect the Homeland at all costs! Also, politicians being what they are (with some rare exceptions), can you can name one national name that would dare to oppose that mentality?
   Set aside the dump-the-Fed-and-fire-Bernanke stuff for a moment. What other examples has Paul done to really differeniate himself from the neocons? No, cable news soundbites don’t count. I’m talking about actual hearings or bills that he’s introduced that have been passed and signed into law.
   Answer? He doesn’t have any.
   If he really opposes the wars that we’re in, why doesn’t he hold a press conference and announce that until we withdraw from said wars, he won’t pay his taxes? Why doesn’t he take a taypayer-funded “Congressional delegation” trip to Gaza to show the world what our “Israeli aid” is really doing there? Why doesn’t he publically back Ken O’Keefe and his efforts to finally bring peace to the Midddle East? Why doesn’t he stand up to Obama and say that he’s using terrorist tactics to “stop terrorism” which is only making it worse?
   Because here politicians don’t stand up to AIPAC. When most members of the House signed a letter pleding their “loyal support” to Israel, did Paul sign it as well? Just making appearances on “Hardball” or some neocon think tank that C-SPAN decides to show really means nothing.
   This tell me that his “campaign strategists” want him to be everything to everybody. He’s not a Democrat, but he’s also not your typical neocon. What does THAT mean?
   Before going into the House, Paul was a Naval flight surgeon. This means that he was under Tri-Care (the military’s national health care). Now, he’s under govt. national health care. I’ve never heard him say that health care is a human right. Coming from a doctor, that’s frankly really disappointing. Why is he entitled to the best care possible but I’m not?
   IMO, Paul has no chance. Millions will vote for Obama because they’re conditioned to think that he’s the lesser of two evils. So that makes it ok. The other thing is that not all but many just don’t care any more. If that’s not true, then we’d have daily millions-in-the-streets protests that the MSM couldn’t avoid talking about. What else could it be?
   
4. May 20th, 2011 at 1:38 pm
   
   Blackflag Says:
   Sibel,
   I will re-review your post in more detail later, but off the top of my head….
   I would suggest rather that Iran is the center piece of the geo-political play here.
   The invasion of Iraq does not support the isolation tactics over China. I cannot connect this dot directly to a China play.
   However, Iraq invasion specifically connects the dot to an Iranian play.
   With Pakistan, Iran is totally surrounded by America -
   -bases (and troops?) in Turkmenistan
   -NATO ally Turkey on one border
   -US-occupied Iraq on one border
   -US-occupied Afghanistan on one border
   -(maybe) US-occupied Pakistan on one border
   -Arabian sea full of US carriers.
   Iran has no outs.
   Now, it could be argued that Iran is a sub-play in a large China play….
   
5. May 20th, 2011 at 1:41 pm
   
   Blackflag Says:
   Further,
   Iran has been a oozing sore since Truman. It was also the first country that Eisenhower doctrine (you are either with us or against us) was applied.
   The overthrow of the Shah significantly disrupted American geo-political position as Iran was one of the two cornerstones of the US projection of power in the region (the other being Israel).
   I think this game over Iran has been in the works since Reagan took office in 1980’s.
   
6. May 20th, 2011 at 2:40 pm
   
   Sibel Edmonds Says:
   @Bill: Many thanks for the link; fits well.
   @Jon: I’ll check them out later today; thanks.
   @Blackflag: Have you seen the headlines today on 9/11 suit against Iran? Interesting, ey?!
   @Yoshi: Thanks for sharing, but I disagree with you. He is the only chance I see; currently.
   

Welcome to the post-Osama world By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE
Welcome to the post-Osama world
By Pepe Escobar

To follow Pepe's articles on the Great Arab Revolt, please click here.

United States President Barack Obama, riding high in the polls, his re-election virtually assured, is now free to bask in the glow of his all-American victory in the global "war on terror", which his administration had rechristened "overseas contingency operations" (OCO). The Osama Bin Laden hit on Monday was indeed an OCO - a swift, overseas "kinetic military action" surmounting innumerable contingencies such as the violation of the aerial space of a theoretically sovereign nation.

Yet US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's first reaction was to stress the "war on terror" in fact goes on forever, true to the spirit of the Pentagon's own slogan, "The Long War". That applies especially to the ultra-strategic AfPak theater. It's as if commander-in-chief Obama could not but be a regal prisoner in a labyrinth not of his own making.

The White House's move to break out of the labyrinth was to paradoxically go ballistic and seal the death of the 9/11 trauma, capitalized by the George W Bush administration as a license to kill evil - be it in itself or in the form of an axis - and thus affirm Jeffersonian freedom. From 2001 to 2008, those were the years when the hyperpower - on a mission from God and focused as a laser on a Hegel/Fukuyama "end of history" - simply trampled over international law.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were supposed to be only the first two stops on the way to redemption (then there would be the road to Damascus, Tehran and even Tripoli ...) What was christened as The Greater Middle East project was supposed to smash "terror" and the regimes that sheltered it; the Taliban Afghanistan and - in the neo-con vision - Saddamist Iraq. Others would inevitably fall like dominoes.

Almost a decade after 9/11 - and with the Bush "dead or alive" promise finally fulfilled Terminator-style - where does the former hyperpower goes next?

The strategic chessboard has completely changed. It's hard to exercise hyperpower hegemony when you know China will overtake you as the world's number one economy, possibly as soon as 2016 - and when you're drowning in debt to, who else, strategic competitor China. Yet you're still overextended military, and your never-ending "war on terror", not to mention two-and-a-half wars, are costing trillions of dollars, paid up by, who else, your top banker China.

Your soft power is not as seductive as it used to be - although your hi-tech creativity is still matchless; and most of all nobody in the developing world, starting with the BRICS group, gives any credence to your Washington Consensus anymore.

And the winner is ... China
So for now the winner of the "war on terror" is China, which for a number of reasons, paramount among them the Deng Xiaoping motto "to get rich is glorious", is now close to the point where it was for 18 of the past 20 centuries, that is, on top.

Obama may be accused of many things - including of being a Nobel Peace Prize warmonger. But he's also a smart intellectual. The president has surveyed the landscape and has seen how America's Paul Kennedy-diagnosed imperial overextension has accelerated its decline. And he also has seen how in the process the US was totally corroded by the specter of "Islamic terror".

And that may lead us to the answer of the magic bullet question about the timing of the Bin Laden hit.

When 9/11 happened, music genius Karlheinz Stockhausen said - to the outrage of millions of Americans - that "this was the greatest work of art the world has ever seen." He had a point as 9/11 - in terms of its impact upon the collective unconscious of mankind, almost to the point of paralysis - reduced Albert Speer's and Leni Riefenstahl's specials to child's play.

So to symbolically kill the "war on terror" - which was invented because of 9/11 - Obama had to (literally) kill the (alleged) perpetrator, be it real or not, guilty or not, a clone or not. Thus the hit, the swift disposal of the body, no photos, end of the movie, no credits rolling; a tight cinematic narrative. The obvious holes in the plot, as in any Hollywood blockbuster, are deemed irrelevant; what matters is success at the box-office - and we move on.

Like a basketball-playing Freudian, Obama went for the kill, the reason of the whole trauma. He identified it as the only way to start anew - as in trying to end the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq and start concentrating on what really matters for the US; investments in education and infrastructure, the dire state of the economy.

There's no guarantee Obama's "cure" will work. Millions of Americans may - and are - feeling the boost, as if the whole country ingested a tsunami of Red Bull. The key question is whether jihadism will disappear for good from the current geopolitical landscape.

In fact even before the Bin Laden hit it had already been defeated by history - as in the great 2011 Arab revolt affirming, unequivocally, the Arab world's will to welcome democracy, not suicide bombers.

Obama's "cure" will face monstrous contradictions. Drones kill civilians in the Pakistani tribal areas while the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's "humanitarian" war kills civilians in Libya. Humanitarian warmongers silent in the face of the appalling repression in Bahrain and the House of Saud getting away with conducting an anti-democracy counter-revolution all across the Persian Gulf.

If Bin Laden - and Muammar Gaddafi - may be selected for diplomacy by targeted assassination, why not the ghastly dictatorship in Myanmar, or Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan? Moreover, the Pentagon will keep fighting with all its might to keep its Long War going on forever.

Obama the psychoanalyst has just baptized a new, post-Osama world. Let's see how America reacts, or if it's soon back to the couch.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

For CIA drone warriors, the future is death By Pepe Escobar

Forget the iPad; the ultimate icon of fetishized commodity is the drone. Israelis do it - and sell them like hot cakes. Mexicans do it - to patrol their side of the border. Brazilians wanna do it - to patrol the Rio favelas. Saudis wanna do it. Uzbeks wanna do it. Everybody's singing: Let's do it. Let's fall in love (with the drone).

Furthermore, abandon all hope those who enter (the doors of misperception): Afghanistan is now officially just a lowly, troop-infested sideshow to the AfPak war. The real thing is an illegal drone war against Pakistan. Viva Richard Nixon. As much as Tricky Dick annexed Cambodia to the Vietnam War, the Barack Obama administration pulled a Nixon regarding Pakistan. And the great thing is that no one needs another WikiLeaks "dump" to know this. It's out there in the open.

Tricky Dick's tricks paved the way to Year Zero for the Khmer Rouge. Obama's throw of the dice may be paving the way to a Year Zero for the Pashtun brotherhood. The 16-agency US intelligence establishment says the Afghan adventure is doomed. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is somewhat gloomy. But the surge-addicted White House - in a stark reminder of those George W Bush-era reports about Iraq - says it's all swell (Taliban "momentum has been arrested in much of the country"). Pentagon supremo Robert Gates says Washington now controls more Afghan territory than a year ago; maybe in terms of Kabul shopping malls - and that's already a stretch.

Taliban momentum, anyway, is just an afterthought. What matters for the White House is to smash ("significant progress") al-Qaeda, allegedly holed up not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan's tribal areas. Take them Pakistani Talibs out from the air, with the CIA playing Ride of the Valkyries, just like in an orgiastic Facebook-friendly remix of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, with all those US Marine tanks rolling along in Helmand province offering a cute counterpart. I love the smell of a burning Talib in the morning. Makes me think of ... re-election.

But what about collateral damage? Tough guys of the "real men go to Tehran" type say this is for sissies (the New America Foundation says around a third of drone deaths are civilians, but that's hugely underestimated, according to Pakistani sources.) Blowback, anyway, is guaranteed to last until the 22nd century.

Faster CIA, kill, kill

So it's not the Pentagon but the CIA that is showering Death from Above over dirt-poor mud-hut villages in a country against which the US is not at war. Things may change - witness the frenzy to legally nail "terrorist" Julian Assange - but US law does not exactly condone mass assassination campaigns.

The CIA drone war is obviously secret and illegal. That can be fixed with the incoming chairman of the US House Armed Services Committee updating the congressional authorization for this extended war on al-Qaeda. As for Pashtuns collaborating with the CIA, they are technically Afghans, not Pakistanis, from different tribes; that will foster centuries of subsequent tribal trouble once the families of the dead ascertain who the snitches are.

Whatever the rhetoric emanating from Washington in 2011, the game will keep being duly played according to only one plot-advancing script; American Pentagonists visit Islamabad/Rawalpindi to warn the Pakistanis of Washington's perennial "strategic impatience" with what they're doing, while their military/intelligence establishment go live to spin they're doing all they can, but also need to be watchful of Pakistan's own interests.

In a nutshell: expect for 2011 an endless parade of Predators and Reapers firing barrages of missiles at the usual "suspected militants" in North Waziristan, Khyber or anywhere else in the tribal areas; and forget about Islamabad/Rawalpindi sending their army into North Waziristan to fight "al-Qaeda" or even the local tribes.

What this essentially means is that the nebula/myth conveniently branded "al-Qaeda" remains in the clear. There's no way its few dozen invisible jihadis can be crushed by the CIA's illegal air war, not to mention troops from Islamabad/Rawalpindi. And even supposing they were, the "franchises" would still be in business - as in AQAP, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula/Yemen.

Drone Eye for the Straight Guy

Who cares about Don't Ask, Don't Tell? The new hit in all things AfPak is Drone Eye for the Straight Guy. The next chief of the CIA's National Clandestine Service - that is, the CIA's new top spy - is John D Bennett, none other than the former head of a drone-infested CIA paramilitary wing. An Associated Press story even claimed that he directed the drones in Pakistan during the Bush era.

Even the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General "Hoss" Cartwright, has totally gone Drone Eye for the Straight Guy. As he sees it, COIN is now history; the hip thing to do is "counter-terrorism", as in drone-saturated air war. Consider the drone war as Washington's premier stimulus package to Central Asia.

Progress in over-stimulated Afghanistan, according to the Obama administration's year-end report, is "frail and reversible". This means in practice that for all the spin, missile-saturated Kandahar is not becoming Orange county anytime soon.

The Afghanistan plot won't thicken; it will dilute in the usual diarrhea. Afghans will keep saying over and over again they are not exactly Taliban fans - but they hate the corrupt Hamid Karzai gang and Washington even more, for allowing their occupied country to be controlled by gangsters and warlords.

Washington will keep tweaking its losing "strategy" of smashing the Taliban with extreme firepower. The Taliban for their part have already fine-tuned their own strategy of "flee the south-go north". All the roads in Afghanistan lead to Kabul; not by accident, all are intercepted or under Taliban attack. Karzai rule stops abruptly at the last rickety police station south of Kabul, on the road to Kandahar. It's as if Kabul was enveloped by an eerie Titanic feeling - that pampered, gated-condo isolated neo-colonial coterie of generals, diplomats, non-governmental organizations and security contractors partying hard as in before the fall of Saigon.

But soon anyway a "new" narrative will be taking over - the snail-pace North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) "drawdown" from 2011 to 2014. But does that mean the beginning of the endgame - no more war? Rather it's back to the beginning, as in "abandon all hope those who enter (the doors of misperception)". To (literally) thunderous applause by a coterie of neophyte neo-jihadi bombers, the Obama White House has explicitly emphasized "NATO's enduring commitment beyond 2014".

A key feature of this "enduring commitment" is that the Afghan army soldiers and cops NATO is training (supplemented by US private contractors of the Dyncorp/Blackwater mould) will need no less than US$6 billion a year, every year, till probably eternity, from the usually euphemistic "international donors", key among them US taxpayers.

It's a gas, gas, gas

And here's where The Year of the Drone merges with what the late, great deconstructionist Jacques Lacan would qualify as "the unsayable": the invisible, dangerous liaisons between the "war on terror" and the energy war, as in the topography of the war on terror matching all the key 21st-century sources of energy from the Middle East to Central Asia.

This implies a key Pipelineistan chapter - the never-ending saga of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, which has been at the very core of the troubled Washington-Kabul marriage since the mid-1990s.

The TAPI inter-government agreement was finally signed in mid-December. Make no mistake; this is Washington in overdrive. The Washington-backed Asian Development Bank is to come up with the bulk of the $7.6 billion (and counting) financial package. The 2,000 kilometer-long TAPI - to be built by an international consortium - should snake through a very dodgy 735 kilometers of Afghanistan and 800 kilometers of Pakistan.

Hype apart, there's no hard evidence that TAPI will "stabilize" Afghanistan or contribute to India and Pakistan trading kisses instead of insults. AfPak in this case are both transit countries. Most of the Afghan stretch will be underground - much as the US-supported BTC from Baku in Azerbaijan to Ceyhan, Turkey. In theory, local villages will be paid to guard the pipeline. But that still does not guarantee security to a steel serpent crossing western Afghanistan and then going east through Kandahar.

Once again in theory, TAPI is indeed a steel Silk Road between Central and South Asia. If TAPI is ever built - and that's still a big "if" - certainly it will mark a monster crossover of Pipelineistan with the US Empire of Bases. Because none other than the Pentagon and NATO will provide the overall security. And that means the Atlanticist West forever embedded in AfPak. One can imagine what the Taliban on both sides - not to mention disgruntled Pashtuns in general - will make of that.

And even if TAPI is built, this still does not mean that its key competitor, the $7.3 billion Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, also known as the "peace pipeline", has lost the battle - much to Washington's horror. The Indians have said that much - they are now chasing insurance giants of the Lloyds variety. And Pakistan definitely wants both TAPI and IPI.

TAPI theoretically should be finished by 2014. Surprise! That's exactly the deadline year (for now ...) for American troops to exit Afghanistan. No one will be exiting anything. Finally, the whole AfPak imbroglio will be revealed for what it is; a Pipelineistan gambit.

Meanwhile, enjoy the Year of the Drone. And while we're at it, here's some breaking news. The 2011 Pentagon/NATO strategy for AfPak is already established: wait for the Taliban spring/summer offensive to see where they're at. And then drone them to death. Call it Drone Eye for the Bad Guy.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. 

Have (infinite) war, will travel By Pepe Escobar

Anyone aware enough to think that Washington's goal is not to "win" the unwinnable AfPak quagmire but to keep playing its bloody infinite war game forever is now eligible for a personal stimulus package (in gold). 

Let's review the recent evidence. All of a sudden, the White House, the Pentagon and the United States House of Representatives have all embarked on a new narrative: forget major US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011; let's move the goalpost to 2014. 

Then wily Afghan President Hamid Karzai tells the Washington Post he does not want all these US troops roaming around "his" country no more, adding please, stop killing my people with special-forces night ops - a euphemism for Pentagon terrorism. 

General David “I'm always positioning myself for 2012” Petraeus is "astonished". How could he not be? After all, Karzai wanted to give the boot to private contractors - undisputed AfPak champions of false-flag black ops - then he gave up, as he might give up again on the night raids. As for Petraeus, he only wants the best of both worlds; kick up the hell-raising, as in drone hits and night ops (who cares about collateral damage?) and sit back and talk with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence-created Taliban. 

Incidentally, Petraeus' counter-insurgency myth has been buried in the plains south of the Hindu Kush (not that many in the US noted). The counter-insurgency (COIN) myth implies that Washington, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and what passes for "Afghan security forces" could "take, clear, hold and build" areas previously controlled by the Taliban. They could not accomplish any of this even in Marjah, insistently sold by the Pentagon and compliant corporate media as a success, not to mention much bigger Kandahar. 

Former US secretary of state Colin Powell has just weighed in on CNN, admitting the US won't be "pulling out 100,000 troops. I don't know how many troops we'll pull out." Powell also said that "inside the national security team", the whole thing is "conditions-based". Thus "conditions" may be bent to suit any narrative. Sharp noses may immediately detect a whiff of Vietnam, and Powell had to insist that Afghanistan is not that country. Well, whether Karzai is increasingly becoming the new Ngo Dinh Diem is beside the point; his assassination would not solve anything anyway. 

And all this while a 71-page Council on Foreign Relations report written by 25 "experts" gets a lot of traction in Washington. The report finds that the war costs a fortune, may not serve US interests and it's not "clear that the effort will succeed". Do people get paid to conclude this? The report also meekly suggests that depending on President Barack Obama's December strategic AfPak review, the US "should move quickly to recalculate its military presence in Afghanistan". It won't. 

Let's try following the money. The AfPak war costs roughly US $7 billion a month - money that Washington needs to borrow from Beijing. Afghanistan in itself costs $65 billion a year - not counting NATO and humanitarian aid. Afghanistan's gross domestic product is only $22 billion. So Washington is spending three times the wealth of a whole country just to occupy it. Money for nothing. Properly invested, by this time Afghanistan would be the new Singapore. 

AfPak costs nearly $100 billion a year. Surrealist as it may seem, polls indicate that for most Americans the US federal budget deficit is not a priority. No wonder no election candidates on November 2 emitted a peep about the ridiculously expensive quagmire. 

Let's face it. Whoever is writing this screenplay deserves an Oscar. 

All you need is NATO 

According to the official narrative, technically NATO only left its (cavernous) building in Europe for Afghanistan under the organization's Article 5 (emphasizing collective defense) to help Washington fight George W Bush's "war on terror" against al-Qaeda. Yet even somnolent diplomats in Brussels know that Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri crossed from eastern Afghanistan to Pakistan in early December 2001, and disappeared into a black void. 

This would never prevent NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen - ahead of the NATO summit this weekend in Lisbon - stressing that the war, well, goes on forever, as in "there is no alternative to continuing military operations". NATO's council secretary Edmund Whiteside didn't mince his words, "Afghanistan will be a very long military venture." And German Brigadier General Josef Blotz insists: "No timetable has been set for withdrawal of coalition troops." 

The "strategy" of the 152,000-soldier, 50-nation, NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan ranks as a thesis on Monty Python geopolitics; to pledge a tsunami of euros for Karzai's shenanigans while forcing member countries to unleash ever more troops into the Taliban meat grinder - even though public opinion all across Europe says out loud "we can't take this anymore". 

At least the commander of British forces in southern Afghanistan, Major General Nick Carter, was sensible enough to stress that NATO would only know if it was "winning" by June 2011, "when the fighting season begins again" and everyone can "compare Taliban attacks with this year". Wait for another eight months and pray for 2014; that's the "strategy". Talk about on-the-ground intelligence. 

NATO is absolutely useless at infiltrating the historic Taliban - also known as the Quetta shura, based in Balochistan (they cannot even point a drone to where Mullah Omar is). NATO cannot infiltrate the Haqqani network in North Waziristan. And NATO cannot infiltrate the Hezb-i-Islami network, controlled by former prime minister and bomber of Kabul (in the mid-1990s) Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, based in and around the strategic Khyber Pass. 

The Pakistani ISI will always align with the Taliban under any circumstances - because this is Islamabad's way of protecting its "strategic depth" against India. The ISI will always insist on having the Taliban at the same table with Washington, otherwise any semblance of "talks" will be dead on arrival. 

Islamabad's dream scenario is the Taliban, the Haqqanis and Hezb-i-Islami controlling southern and eastern Afghanistan. That would also be instrumental in preventing another one of Islamabad's primal fears - that disgruntled Pashtuns will unite and go all out to form an across-the-artificial-border Pashtunistan. 

The key to all this mess is not Obama, Karzai, the Pentagon or NATO. It's which way General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, number 29 on Forbes' list of the most powerful people in the world, will see the wind blowing. As much as during the Bush "war on terror" years, when Islamabad was ruled from Washington, during the Obama AfPak years the White House is a hostage of Islamabad. 

But for the Pentagon/NATO axis, Pakistan is just a drop in the ocean. Next Friday and Saturday, at the Lisbon summit, the world will be presented with a NATO-goes-global narrative. Team Pentagon/NATO will be convinced to abandon its privileged outpost of infinite war - Afghanistan - over its dead nuclear bombs. After all, Washington/Brussels has implanted a precious foothold in the heart of Eurasia - arguably for life. 

The Lisbon summit, moreover, will see NATO formally adopting a new strategic concept - which essentially means keeping its nuclear arsenal in perpetuity, including US nuclear bombs stationed in Europe. You know, those nuclear bombs that Iran does not have (but Pakistan and India, not to mention Israel, do). Paraphrasing the great Burt Bacharach, what the world needs now, is NATO sweet NATO. 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and RedZone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obamadoes Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). 

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com. 

Osama has (not) left the building By Pepe Escobar

Osama has (not) left the building

By Pepe Escobar

For the dubious privilege of financing the 16-agency, alphabet soup, United States intelligence establishment not to find Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawahiri, US taxpayers have been plundered to the staggering tune of US$500 billion - and counting. Still, the obvious questions resonate from Seattle to Selma and from Sweden to Swaziland. Where's Osama? Where's al-Zawahiri? Where's escaped-on-the-back-of-a-motorcycle Taliban supremo Mullah Omar?

For starters, why don't US intelligence agencies ask the French Foreign Ministry? They swear on their Dior ties Osama is indeed alive - and it is his jihadi master's voice showcased in an audiotape broadcast by al-Jazeera this past Wednesday. In the tape, Osama in so many words warns France that the Eiffel Tower may experience a different kind of wobble one of these days (it has been evacuated twice lately).

Osama - or the ghost passing for Osama - said: "If you want to tyrannize and think that it is your right to ban the free women from wearing the burqa, isn't it our right to expel your occupying forces, your men from our lands by striking them by the neck?" A jittery Paris has taken the analogy extremely seriously.

A room with a view
So now that it's established that Osama seems to be alive and well, having made a successful transition from TDK cassettes to MP3 (unless very circumspect French diplomats are lying; and unless we suppress roars of laughter at the assertion by row after row of US "intelligence analysts" that fake Osama tapes have never been broadcast), comes the question of his humble abode.

So why not turn to the formidable North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and its arrays of the most sophisticated military hardware in the world - after all they are spectacularly losing a war in Afghanistan itself as we speak? (The legendary Mikhail Gorbachev - who knows a thing or two about losing a war in the Hindu Kush - has just made it plain and simple: "Victory is impossible in Afghanistan. Obama is right to pull the troops out. No matter how difficult it will be.")

Anyway, NATO officials recently leaked to global corporate media that Osama is hiding "somewhere in northeastern Pakistan". Oh really? Would that be Miram Shah, across from Paktika? Would that be Parachinar, across from Nangarhar (where Osama and al-Zawahiri escaped to from Tora Bora in December 2001)? Would that be Chitral, across from Kunar? Would that be on the Karakoram Highway near the Chinese border?

Radio silence. The NATO boys simply don't know - as they don't seem to be very familiar with the intricate mountain geography and tribal rivalries south of the Hindu Kush. Seems like the NATO boys are taking a cue from those rows of so-called US "intelligence analysts" swearing over their air-con think-tank offices that Osama still oversees the "strategic direction" of al-Qaeda from a base “somewhere in Pakistan". Pakistan happens to be twice as big as California. Try finding a stray wacko in the Mojave Desert.

NATO boys also swear that Mullah Omar is commuting between Quetta, Balochistan's capital, and Karachi. Well, he could be taking a night desert bus or a donkey caravan - and still he can't be found. Has anyone searched the VIP rooms at the Serena Hotel in Quetta, perhaps?

Maybe the Pakistani intelligence apparatus knows something. "Not us!" - screams the Pakistani ambassador to the US, Hussain Haqqani, "The reason why this statement is not made officially and publicly by NATO is because they do not have any basis to make that statement."

Well, then certainly Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence knows - or some key operatives inside the ISI. And in this case, the Central Intelligence Agency would know. Ambassador Haqqani: "If anybody thinks that Pakistan has any interest in protecting bin Laden they are smoking something they shouldn't be smoking.” Well, apparently no one is smoking Hindu Kush's finest - because Haqqani still swears Washington and NATO have shared "no intelligence" with Pakistan about Osama for a few years now. Would it be because - as in the famous Hollywood dictum - no one knows anything?

The invisible man
In real life, the fact is that a selected few inside the ISI know - as they have followed Osama's every move since the early 1980s in Peshawar. And they are not talking - never will. But for the CIA and the 16-agency alphabet-soup intel community

not to know, this speaks volumes about an "intelligence" establishment where 1 million Americans hold top-secret clearances. Those 1 million are absolutely worthless when it comes to gathering on-the-ground intelligence south of the Hindu Kush.

So maybe they should ask the Pakistani Army. General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani - a Pentagon darling - has been to Washington for the third round of what is called a "strategic dialogue" with the Pentagon. It's easy to picture Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asking Kiani, "If North Waziristan is the epicenter of terrorism, where al-Qaeda is holed up, why don't you go there with all guns blazing and snatch them for us?"

In principle, Kiani will do it - that's what he has promised the Pentagon. But will he? Not really. Kiani will scare away - just for show - the Haqqanis, led by Sirajuddin Haqqani, eldest son of legendary mujahid Jalaluddin Haqqani, while ISI operatives duly tell them to run the other way.

Chapman Base in Khost, Afghanistan, on the other side of North Waziristan, is operated by the CIA. But don't expect Chapman to come out swinging exhibiting "dead or alive" al-Qaeda scalpels. There are indeed some Arab al-Qaeda jihadis sheltered by the Haqqanis - a few dozen at max, but they will have plenty of time to get out of Dodge, thanks again to the services of those ISI agents.

Moreover, Kiani is not suicidal. He knows the Haqqanis and the myriad groups they protect are intimately linked to the Punjabi Taliban. If Kiani launches a major offensive, blowback - in the form of an epidemic of urban suicide bombings rocking Pakistan - is an absolute certainty.

Blowback is on the way anyway - because in this "no one knows anything, and no one's talking" scenario, the only real weapon available for Washington is to drone North Waziristan to death.

Granted, the Barack Obama administration is also desperately trying to find a way out in AfPak. Saudi Arabia is key. Not only Mullah Omar, but also other viscerally anti-occupation Afghan leaders such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf maintain very close ties with Saudi Arabia. Washington now depends on Saudi Arabia to convince them to sit down and talk.

That's not a given (they all say they're not talking). And even if they did it might - or might not - lead to an endgame (the Pentagon certainly doesn't want one). As for the Pakistani army and intelligence establishment, what they do want is an Afghan satellite government, still part of the "strategic depth" doctrine, and to keep receiving military aid from Washington till perpetuity. Thus playing a double game is key - and that applies most of all to Osama and al-Zawahiri, the golden rationale behind the everlasting "war on terror" - another name for the Pentagon's "long war".

Now you see them - now you don't. So expect a lot of Osama digital audio from now on. He should consider his own podcast on iTunes. There's no real prospect in sight that Osama will honor former US vice president Dick Cheney's correctional facilities anytime soon. He has not left the building, and is now merrily singing Suspicious Minds in a double bill with Elvis.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.