Visions of Spring

The idea that U.S. wars and military operations overseas in the aftermath of 9-11 have made the world a safer place for Americans is contradicted by the evidence – two pieces of which made the news this morning.

The first piece is ex-MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller’s admission that the war in Iraq “substantially” increased the threat of terror to the UK. Her point is a common one made even by U.S. intelligence services in the run-up to the war in Iraq and after: the war worked to “radicalize” a new generation and led to the “diffusion of jihad ideology.” In her testimony to the British Iraq Inquiry, Manningham-Buller, who served as the head of the MI5 during the run-up to the war and several years after, starkly said, “We gave bin-Laden his jihad.”

In the other piece of news, the Express Tribune tallied up the record of suicide bombings in Pakistan since the war in Afghanistan. Prior to 9-11, Pakistan had one recorded suicide bombing in its entire history (1995, when an Egyptian man tried to blow-up the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad). Since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, however, Pakistan has witnessed 248 suicide attacks on its soil, resulting in the deaths of some 3,000 Pakistani civilians and more than 2,500 Pakistani military and police personnel.

For the Pakistanis, then, the U.S. war in Afghanistan has dramatically increased the level of actual terror and violence in the South Asia region, not just the threat. This is the predictable effect of cooperating with the U.S. in the Afghan war.

The fact that recent high-level attempted terror attacks and arrests in the U.S. have emanated from the Pakistani tribal areasbetokens serious trouble. Whether Pakistani militants can develop the operational capacity to wage international attacks is a different story (and, in my opinion, rather unlikely), but the will to do so is something new – a development that arose out of the U.S. war in Afghanistan (and now, to a considerable extent, Pakistan).

The virus is obvious: as long as the U.S. subordinates its own security to geopolitical and regional interests (such as control over Iraq’s petroleum reserves, creating a buffer in Afghanistan to East Asian interests in the Middle East, NATO’s credibility, etc.), then we can expect the disease of terror and violence to engulf and spread beyond the South Asian region.

What today’s news highlights is the fact that the U.S. wars and military operations overseas are having the predicted effect of making the world a lot less secure. That includes us here at home, too. We can force a change of U.S. military policy and reduce the threat of violence, or we can treat our terror and violence with equanimity, caring little about our victims in Afghanistan and Pakistan, thereby ensuring that our world becomes that much less secure for us and others.

Update: Just to highlight how commonplace these concerns are, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, spoke yesterday of the growing threat the U.S. faces from Pakistani militant groups. “[These groups] seems to be growing closer together…I see them as starting to emerge as a larger regional or global — at least, aspirational — global threat.” To be clear, Holbrooke doesn’t make the connection between the U.S. war in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas to this “global aspiration” on the part of Pakistani militants, but (as is made clear above) it’s hard to miss it.

The world’s becoming a scarier and scarier place. In the wake of militarizing the South Asia region (with well over 700,000 coalition forces — between the U.S., NATO, private-security contractors, the Pakistani Army, Frontier Corps, Afghan National Army and Police, etc.), the consequence is ratcheting up the violence and terror, radicalizing the local populations against the West, and inducing “global aspirations” on the part of the growing militant factions.