BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. and Iraqi officials are in contact with representatives of some Sunni Arab insurgent groups to build an alliance against al Qaeda in Iraq, the outgoing U.S. ambassador said on Monday.Now, I'm all for jaw, jaw, jaw as opposed to war, war, war, as Churchill would have it, but the aim of those talks is ludicrous: Al Qaeda, although it would exploit the opportunity if presented, has no interest in doing anything in Iraq except foment trouble. This isn't about nation-building for them, ironically.
Zalmay Khalilzad also said he was cautiously optimistic that "success is possible" in Iraq, but urged leaders to act fast if they were to maintain the support of the impatient U.S. people amid growing pressure for a timetable to withdraw troops.
At his final news conference in Baghdad, he confirmed reports that U.S. embassy and military staff as well as Iraqi government officials had met representatives of insurgent-linked groups on several occasions.
You see, they already have one: Talibanistan
The residents of Dara Adam Khel, a gunsmiths' village 30 miles south of Peshawar, Pakistan, awoke one morning last month to find their streets littered with pamphlets demanding that they observe Islamic law. Women were instructed to wear all-enveloping burqas and men to grow their beards. Music and television were banned. Then the jihadists really got serious. These days, dawn is often accompanied by the wailing of women as another beheaded corpse is found by the side of the road, a note pinned to the chest claiming that the victim was a spy for either the Americans or the Pakistani government. Beheadings are recorded and sold on DVD in the area's bazaars. "It's the knife that terrifies me," says Hafizullah, 40, a local arms smith. "Before they kill you, they sharpen the knife in front of you. They are worse than butchers."This is why I've long felt that the US has played footsie with the wrong dictatorship in South Asia...I'd rather they didn't play footsie with ANY dictatorship, but situational ethics comes into play here.
Stories like these are being repeated across the tribal region of Pakistan, a rugged no-man's-land that forms the country's border with Afghanistan--and that is rapidly becoming home base for a new generation of potential terrorists. Fueled by zealotry and hardened by war, young religious extremists have overrun scores of towns and villages in the border areas, with the intention of imposing their strict interpretation of Islam on a population unable to fight back. Like the Taliban in the late 1990s in Afghanistan, the jihadists are believed to be providing leaders of al-Qaeda with the protection they need to regroup and train new operatives. U.S. intelligence officials think that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, may have found refuge in these environs. And though 49,000 U.S. and NATO troops are stationed just across the border in Afghanistan, they aren't authorized to operate on the Pakistani side. Remote, tribal and deeply conservative, the border region is less a part of either country than a world unto itself, a lawless frontier so beyond the control of the West and its allies that it has earned a name of its own: Talibanistan.
The Time article goes on to talk about how Dick Cheney gave President Musharraf a stern talking to (although no wrist slap, you'll notice) about this territory and it's strategic significance to the "war on terror". It also points out that Musahrraf's hands are tied by the political minefield that is domestic Pakistani governance: he already has large factions very angry at him for siding with the US and his reliance on more moderate groups is slipping as he tightens his fist around Pakistan (all but disbanding the judiciary of the country). All he can really rely on is the Pakistani army, who support the Taliban (and by extension, Al Qaeda).
What's a dictator to do? I'll have more to say on this topic when I make my HUGEST ANNOUNCEMENT EVER in a few days.
Told you it would be huge. But I digress.
To create a coalition against Al Qaeda In Iraq at this point smacks of make-work, the kind of thing you do when you really need a vacation from yourself, but can't be seen away from your desk. You know, like filing.
It might provide an opening for a unifying conference for Sunni, Shi'a and Kurd factions to begin to form a nation, but in my recollection throughout history, those kind of collaborative governments rarely work without an overarching external threat (like, say, England during our revolution). Some loose confederations remain intact, like Indonesia, but there's a different kettle of fish involved: boundaries are fairly well-defined and more important, separate.
Still, I suppose we should be thankful they can find any common ground with the insurgency. Al Qaeda In Iraq was never particularly popular with the citizen-soldiers of the Iraqi insurgency, Sunni division, although there's much to be said of the "enemy of my enemy." Perhaps this will dissuade the Sunni insurgency in toto.
Then again, monkeys may fly out of my butt...
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