Let's see...who else should we attack...I know: Pakistan
Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem
By FREDERICK W. KAGAN and MICHAEL O’HANLON
AS the government of Pakistan totters, we must face a fact: the United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss. Nor would it be strategically prudent to withdraw our forces from an improving situation in Iraq to cope with a deteriorating one in Pakistan. We need to think — now — about our feasible military options in Pakistan, should it really come to that.
We do not intend to be fear mongers. Pakistan’s officer corps and ruling elites remain largely moderate and more interested in building a strong, modern state than in exporting terrorism or nuclear weapons to the highest bidder. But then again, Americans felt similarly about the shah’s regime in Iran until it was too late.
Moreover, Pakistan’s intelligence services contain enough sympathizers and supporters of the Afghan Taliban, and enough nationalists bent on seizing the disputed province of Kashmir from India, that there are grounds for real worries.
The most likely possible dangers are these: a complete collapse of Pakistani government rule that allows an extreme Islamist movement to fill the vacuum; a total loss of federal control over outlying provinces, which splinter along ethnic and tribal lines; or a struggle within the Pakistani military in which the minority sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda try to establish Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism.
(Continued here.)
By FREDERICK W. KAGAN and MICHAEL O’HANLON
AS the government of Pakistan totters, we must face a fact: the United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss. Nor would it be strategically prudent to withdraw our forces from an improving situation in Iraq to cope with a deteriorating one in Pakistan. We need to think — now — about our feasible military options in Pakistan, should it really come to that.
We do not intend to be fear mongers. Pakistan’s officer corps and ruling elites remain largely moderate and more interested in building a strong, modern state than in exporting terrorism or nuclear weapons to the highest bidder. But then again, Americans felt similarly about the shah’s regime in Iran until it was too late.
Moreover, Pakistan’s intelligence services contain enough sympathizers and supporters of the Afghan Taliban, and enough nationalists bent on seizing the disputed province of Kashmir from India, that there are grounds for real worries.
The most likely possible dangers are these: a complete collapse of Pakistani government rule that allows an extreme Islamist movement to fill the vacuum; a total loss of federal control over outlying provinces, which splinter along ethnic and tribal lines; or a struggle within the Pakistani military in which the minority sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda try to establish Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism.
(Continued here.)
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1 Comments:
Thanks for posting this OpEd piece.
Upon re-reading it, I picked up a couple of sentences that prompt the question of troop levels.
“With 160 million people, Pakistan is more than five times the size of Iraq.”
“Rule-of-thumb estimates suggest that a force of more than a million troops would be required for a country of this size.”
Ergo, does that mean that Kagen sees that there should have been at least 200,000 troops at the onset of the occupation ?
On February 27, 2003, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz rejected the claim of then-Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki, now retired, who predicted that "Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers ... would be required" to provide adequate security in a post-invasion Iraq. Wolfowitz said that Shinseki was "wildly off the mark," and that he was "reasonably certain that they [the Iraqis] will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep [troop] requirements down."
MSNBC reported that 162,000 US forces was the highest troop level --- that was in August 2007 during a time of overlapping troop rotation.
Say what you want about the effect of the troop surge, but IF Rumsfeld had authorized a larger deployment at the onset, everything would have been different.
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