The US-UK-Israel agenda for the Middle East and South Asia region is proceeding unabated, writes Abdus Sattar Ghazali* The Global Trends 2025 report says the future of Pakistan is a wildcard in considering the trajectory of neighbouring Afghanistan. The release of the study last week coincided with a report in The New York Times that a redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites, showing their country truncated. The story was about a "New Middle East" map published in 2006 by the US Air Force Journal along with an article of retired Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters, entitled, "How a better Middle East would look?" Peters says that Pakistan is an unnatural state and a natural Pakistan should lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward spur near Karachi. Hence it would lose the Pathan territory of North West Frontier Province that will join their Afghan brethren. Pakistan would also lose its Baluch territory to the so-called Greater Baluchistan to be created by merging with the Iranian province of Baluchistan. The Global Trends 2025 report by Thomas Fingar, US deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, has a similar postulation. If Pakistan is unable to hold together until 2025, a broader coalescence of Pashtun tribes is likely to emerge and act together to erase the Durand Line, maximising Pashtun space at the expense of Punjabis in Pakistan and Tajiks and others in Afghanistan. (The Pak-Afghan border is called the Durand Line). Peters and Fingar are perhaps revealing and putting forward what Washington DC and its strategic planners have anticipated for South Asia and the Middle East. To borrow from Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, the redrawn and restructured Middle East has been causally allowed to surface in public, perhaps in an attempt to build consensus and to slowly prepare the general public for possible -- maybe even cataclysmic -- changes in the Middle East. It can be argued that redrawing the Middle East from the Eastern Mediterranean shores of Lebanon and Syria to Anatolia, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, the Iranian Plateau and South Asia is part of a longstanding Anglo-American and Israeli agenda in the region. "Constructive chaos" is the modus operandi to gradually achieve this objective. Constructive chaos is a newly coined political jargon used to justify present upheaval for future benefit. This chaos -- which generates conditions of violence and warfare throughout the region -- is being used so that the United States, Britain and Israel can redraw the map of the Middle East in accordance with their geo- strategic needs and objectives. Within this perspective, as Marwan Bishara says, Washington would already have achieved a strategic "success" while sowing chaos in the region, stirring up present regimes, groups and competing ethnicities in arms against each other. The cynical desire to carry the war to the enemy consists, in fact, of destroying, dividing and reigning. Central governments are weakened by tensions and wars, undermining the sovereignty of states and paving the way for new, more effective actors. The rapidly deteriorating situation in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the wake of frequent US missile attacks and Pakistan's military operations against militants is eroding the writ of the central government. Not surprisingly, the US missile attacks are fomenting anti-US sentiments while Pakistani army operations are seen as the army killing its own people at the behest of America. There is a general consensus among the masses as well as Pakistan's political leadership (with the exception of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party that came to power with US blessings) that militancy should be resolved peacefully through negotiations. Tellingly, the FATA region, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, was peaceful before the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. It is not remarkable that the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, was bluntly asked by a group of parliamentarians meeting with him at the residency of the US ambassador in Islamabad: Why did you Americans come to Afghanistan when it was so peaceful before you got there? The concluding paragraph of the New York Times story gives deep insight into the thinking of most of the people in Pakistan. Among ordinary Pakistanis many still regard Al-Qaeda more positively than the US, polls find. Talk shows often include arguments that suicide bombings in Pakistan are payback for the Pakistani army fighting an American war. Some commentators suggest that the US is actually financing the Taliban. The point is to bog down the Pakistani army, they say, leaving the way open for the Americans to grab Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Recently, in the officers' mess in Bajaur, the northern tribal region where the Pakistani army is stuck fighting militants, one officer offered his own theory: Osama bin Laden did not exist, he told a visiting journalist. Rather, he was a creation of the Americans, who needed an excuse to invade Afghanistan and encroach upon Pakistan. * The writer is executive editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective (www.amperspective.com).
