Crime 'one of the world's top 20 economies', says UN official

Crime generates an estimated $2.1 trillion in global annual proceeds - or 3.6pc of the world's gross domestic product - and the problem may be growing, a senior United Nations official has said.

Criminal groups have shown 'impressive adaptability' to law enforcement actions and to new profit opportunities Photo: PA

Reuters

10:37PM BST 23 Apr 2012

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"It makes the criminal business one of the largest economies in the world, one of the top 20 economies," said Yury Fedotov, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), describing it as a threat to security and economic development.

The figure was calculated recently for the first time by the UNODC and World Bank, based on data for 2009, and no comparisons are yet available, Mr Fedotov told a news conference.

Speaking on the opening day of a week-long meeting of the international Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ), he suggested the situation may be worsening "but to corroborate this feeling I need more data".

He said up to $40bn is lost through corruption in developing countries annually and illicit income from human trafficking amounts to $32bn every year.

"According to some estimates, at any one time, 2.4m people suffer the misery of human trafficking, a shameful crime of modern day slavery," Mr Fedotov said separately in a speech.

He also cited a range of other crimes yielding big money.

Organized crime, illicit trafficking, violence and corruption are "major impediments" to the Millennium Development Goals, a group of targets set by the international community in 2000 to seek to improve health and reduce poverty among the world's poorest people by 2015, Mr Fedotov said.

Criminal groups have shown "impressive adaptability" to law enforcement actions and to new profit opportunities, a senior US official told the meeting in Vienna.

"Today, most criminal organizations bear no resemblance to the hierarchical organized crime family groups of the past," Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Brian Nichols said, according to a copy of his speech.

"Instead, they consist of loose and informal networks that often converge when it is convenient and engage in a diverse array of criminal activities," Mr Nichols, of the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, added.

He said terrorist groups in some cases were turning to crime to help fund their operations: "There are even instances where terrorists are evolving into criminal entrepreneurs in their own right."

Deny the British empire's crimes? No, we ignore them

New evidence of British colonial atrocities has not changed our national ability to disregard it

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 April 2012 20.30 BST

Members of the Devon Regiment round up local people in a search for Mau Mau fighters in Kenya in 1954. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

 

There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain's colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.

The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the rightwing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.

Last week's revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations, is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press. I was unable to find any mention of the secret archive on the Telegraph's website. The Mail's only coverage, as far as I can determine, was an opinion piece by a historian called Lawrence James, who used the occasion to insist that any deficiencies in the management of the colonies were the work of "a sprinkling of misfits, incompetents and bullies", while everyone else was "dedicated, loyal and disciplined".

The British government's suppression of evidence was scarcely necessary. Even when the documentation of great crimes is abundant, it is not denied but simply ignored. In an article for the Daily Mail in 2010, for example, the historian Dominic Sandbrook announced that "Britain's empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law … Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria." Could he really have been unaware of the history he is disavowing?

Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly 10 years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain's Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu's Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, and conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors – rebels and loyalists – and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.

Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died.

The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as "Labour and freedom" and "He who helps himself will also be helped". Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph.

Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound.

Elkins provides a wealth of evidence to show that the horrors of the camps were endorsed at the highest levels. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, regularly intervened to prevent the perpetrators from being brought to justice. The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to the House of Commons. This is a vast, systematic crime for which there has been no reckoning.
No matter. Even those who acknowledge that something happened write as if Elkins and her work did not exist. In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan maintains that just eleven people were beaten to death. Apart from that, "1,090 terrorists were hanged and as many as 71,000 detained without due process".
The British did not do body counts, and most victims were buried in unmarked graves. But it is clear that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Kikuyu died in the camps and during the round-ups. Hannan's is one of the most blatant examples of revisionism I have ever encountered.

Without explaining what this means, Lawrence James concedes that "harsh measures" were sometimes used, but he maintains that "while the Mau Mau were terrorising the Kikuyu, veterinary surgeons in the Colonial Service were teaching tribesmen how to deal with cattle plagues." The theft of the Kikuyu's land and livestock, the starvation and killings, the widespread support among the Kikuyu for the Mau Mau's attempt to reclaim their land and freedom: all vanish into thin air. Both men maintain that the British government acted to stop any abuses as soon as they were revealed.
What I find remarkable is not that they write such things, but that these distortions go almost unchallenged. The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told. As evidence from the manufactured Indian famines of the 1870s and from the treatment of other colonies accumulates, British imperialism emerges as no better and in some cases even worse than the imperialism practised by other nations. Yet the myth of the civilising mission remains untroubled by the evidence.

Aggressive Captaincy

	Michael Clarke doesn't give his bowlers protective fields by default like many other captains © Getty Images Enlarge
Related Links Review 2011 : 'We need a deep point. What if he gets four?' Players/Officials: Michael Clarke Series/Tournaments: Australia tour of West Indies Teams: Australia

Captains: follow Clarke's lead

In the long run, captains who aim to win and set fields that will get them wickets are the ones who will succeed and last

Ian Chappell

April 22, 2012

Michael Clarke is quickly establishing a well-deserved reputation for brave and aggressive captaincy. His entertaining approach is based on one premise: trying to win the match from the opening delivery. This should be the aim of all international captains, but sadly it isn't.

In every era there are Test captains who prefer to attain a position of safety before they go all out for victory. These captains are frightened stiff of the Michael Clarkes, who make it obvious they are not interested in a draw. At least 50% of international captains consider a draw to be a good result and when that option is removed they easily panic.

The first thing a captain like Clarke understands is that he will lose some matches in constantly striving for victory. Once that premise is accepted the captain has reached the stage where he hates to lose but doesn't fear it. There's a huge difference: the latter is a positive state where the captain will do everything in his power to win; the former a mindset where the captain sets out not to lose.

An important indicator of a captain's thinking is his field placings. A positive captain will always make the opposing batsmen feel their very existence is threatened. Through his field placings he allows his bowlers to turn at the top of their mark and see where a wicket (other than bowled, lbw or through the batsman's stupidity) can be claimed. 

A bowler operating to a purely containing field is like Zorro without his sword; he's not very threatening. There has been plenty of discussion on whether the shorter forms of the game will adversely affect batting techniques and turn bowlers into cannon fodder. What the 50- and 20-over matches have actually had a marked influence on is field placings.

Whereas the No. 1 priority, by a wide margin, used to be taking wickets, followed by saving singles, and then, way off in the distance, stopping boundaries, in the mind of the modern captain the last one has assumed far too much importance.

The almost robotic use in Test matches of a deep cover point and a backward square leg on the boundary, regardless of whether the ball is being played in that direction, borders on mindless captaincy. When a fieldsman is unemployed for half an hour but the captain still retains him in that position, you have to wonder: who appointed this captain?

The change in attitude to field placings is perfectly summed up with some typical Caribbean humour and common sense.

Former West Indies fast bowler Herman Griffith was captaining a Barbados club side in the 1930s once, and called on his debutant offspinner to have a trundle. "Where do you want the field?" asked Griffith politely.

"I'd like a deep-backward square leg, a midwicket on the boundary and a long-on and long-off," replied the youngster.

"Give me the ball," growled Griffith.

Not unreasonably, the young man asked, "Why?"

"You intending to bowl shite," came the forthright answer.

Nowadays, most bowlers would be horrified if the captain didn't automatically give him a number of protective fielders in the deep. Clarke is not such a captain.

Sadly, his latest gambit - a challenging declaration at the Queen's Park Oval, which was answered with equal bravado by Darren Sammy, failed because of inclement weather. Nevertheless, it's to be hoped their positive endeavours have acted as a sharp reminder to the administrators.

In Test cricket the captain is allowed free rein. We've seen in the case of Clarke and Sammy what's possible when two captains use a bit of imagination and have a desire to produce a result. It's impossible to legislate for captaincy imagination. In the 50-over game, which is highly regulated through a variety of Powerplays, and bowling and field restrictions, there is less real captaincy involved.

Wherever possible, the captaincy should be left to the skippers, and those with imagination will prosper. Hopefully those who lack inspiration and the nerve to face a challenge will be quickly replaced by the selectors.

Former Australia captain Ian Chappell is now a cricket commentator and columnist

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India's Dharmic Tradition in contrast to Abrahamic Faiths Explained

The Left’s Untouchable

Why was Ambedkar’s critique of caste anathema for Indian Marxists?

Manash Bhattacharjee

It’s an abiding mystery of Indian politics: why the Left has consistently shown an uneasy reluctance to seriously engage with B.R. Ambedkar’s thoughts. When Ambedkar pushed for the Poona Pact in 1932, demanding separate electorates for Dalits, the Indian Left kept its distance from the issue. Symptomatically, E.M.S. Namboodiripad wrote: “This was a great blow to the freedom movement. For this led to the diversion of people’s attention from the objective of full independence to the mundane cause of the upliftment of the Harijans.”

EMS’s reaction to the Poona Pact was in consonance with his reading of Indian history in Marxist terms. Borrowing crudely from Marx’s understanding of the history of slavery, EMS found the caste system, despite its exploitative structure, to be “a superior economic organisation”, which facilitated organised production through a systematic allocation of labour. He didn’t note Ambedkar’s sophisticated distinction between “division of labour” and “division of the labourer” (including the hierarchy within that division) in the casteist relations of production. The eternal fixedness of the labourer with regard to his birth (as the “subject” who “will bear its Father’s name”), and the religious sanction behind such an identity, were deemed unimportant. Being mostly from the upper castes, Left scholars avoided examining the assumptions of caste.

Since before Independence, the mainstream Left framed the class question safely within the nationalist question; for EMS and his comrades, this issue was not a diversion.
Ambedkar had the courage to push for a radical division within the framework of nationalist politics, by asking for separate electorates. By calling Ambedkar’s cause “mundane”, EMS drew a specious distinction between the working class and Dalits, holding the former to be “superior”. Through this, EMS betrayed his predominantly upper-caste mindset. He is an exemplar of progressive casteism in the history of Left politics and thinking in India. This led to lower castes and Dalits not finding a place in the party hierarchy.

The most insidious form of caste solidarity ignores and hides the stark fact that caste is part of what Althusser calls the “apparatus” of ideology and is based in material existence. Every form of social practice (and exploitation) in India is contextually casteist. It creates conditions of multiple prejudice between the bourgeois and the working class (where the scavenging class/caste goes unnamed). And this prejudice becomes part of the relations of production as caste introduces elements of segregation and humiliation within those relations. In the case of untouchables, one might in fact call it relations of waste, where the disposing of sewage, etc, is not accorded even the minimum standard of dignified working conditions.

Ambedkar pointed out how the class system had an “open-door character”, whereas castes were “self-enclosed units”. He gave a brilliant explanation of caste’s forced endogamy: “Some closed the door: others found it closed against them.” The image throws up a phenomenon opposite to the Kafkan idea of law: the (Hindu) gatekeeper of law, in Ambedkar’s explanation, is also the lawgiver, and he allows entry by birth, but no exit. Once entry has been secured in Hindu society, as Ambedkar argued, everyone who is not a Brahmin is an other. Hinduism is a uniquely self-othering social system, whose (touchable) norms are secured by declaring a brutal exception: untouchability.

In his comparison of Buddha and Marx, Ambedkar bypasses Marx’s idea of private property and keeps out the question of capital ownership. He also does not complicate the relation between ‘law’ and ‘government’. These appear to be limitations of the historical conjuncture of Dalit politics. But Ambedkar finds the materialist and non-violent character of Buddhism to be evoking another thinkable historical version of a Marxist society.

Some critics in the Indian Left see the Dalit movement as being merely a ‘politics of recognition’ and having no revolutionary potential. It is a shallow view of the movement against segregated exploitation that seeks to penetrate entrenched hegemony. The politics against untouchability demands more than good wages and working conditions: it asks for a reconfiguration of the socio-cultural space and the elimination of a violated and untouchable ‘bare life’.

Ambedkar had warned that the Indian socialist would have to “take account of caste after the revolution, if he does not take account of it before the revolution”.

In a discussion after the screening of his film, Jai Bhim Comrade, Anand Patwardhan said that even though Gandhi erred on the caste system, he did more against untouchability than the Left. Under the stark light of this observation, the Left must rethink its ideological history. Or else, the crisis of its political legitimacy may not outlive the warnings.

Ways of bidding Farewell - Goodbye, God be with you, Khuda Hafiz, Allah Hafiz...

In Pakistan, saying goodbye can be a religious statement

To some, the growth of 'Allah hafiz' over 'Khuda hafiz', using a Qur'anic rather than Urdu name for God, is a symbol of change

• 
• • Syed Hamad Ali
  • guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 April 2012 10.15 BST

Pakistanis who continue to use 'Khuda hafiz' see the phrase as 'part of an ideological battle to retain what they see as a more pluralistic approach towards religion'. Photograph: M. SAJJAD/AP

 

Does it matter what name people use for God? This is the question thrown up as a result of a strange development in Pakistani etiquette.

Until about 10 years ago "Khuda hafiz", which means "God protect you", was the phrase commonly used to say goodbye. But, in the past decade, "Khuda hafiz" began to be overtaken by a new term "Allah hafiz". Now, "Allah hafiz" is used by everyone from religious clerics to fashion models and the country's top TV anchors.

While languages change and evolve with time, and Pakistan certainly has bigger problems such as corruption and militancy, the alteration has unsettled liberals in Pakistan, who say it reflects a wider change in the country's cultural landscape.

Khuda is the Urdu word for God, borrowed from Persian. Yet today, some people claim that Khuda can refer to any God, while Allah is the specific name for God in the Qur'anic scripture. Others have gone so far as to claim the word Khuda may even have pagan origins.

The promotion of "Allah hafiz" first began in the 1980s under the rule of General Zia-ul-Haq when Pakistan was involved in the US- and Saudi-backed jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. According to some reports, "Allah hafiz" was first used in public in 1985 by a well-known TV host on the state-run PTV. However it would be years later that the greeting took off.

The arguments used by Muslims who are against using the name Khuda appear similar to the ones used by those Christians in the United States who say Allah is a different God to the one they worship. There is no denying there are key theological differences between Islam, Christianity and other religions when it comes to the nature of God, but these don't necessarily mean people from different faiths can't use the same name, while simultaneously holding on to their own unique beliefs.

A few years back, a Roman Catholic bishop from the Netherlands, Tiny Muskens, attracted media interest after calling on people of all faiths to use the name Allah for God: "Allah is a very beautiful word for God. Shouldn't we all say that from now on we will name God Allah? What does God care what we call him? It is our problem."

And millions of English-speaking Muslims have no hesitation in using the name God to refer to Allah. There are more than 10 million Christians who live in the Middle East who use Allah to refer to God. In Malaysia, there has been controversy on the matter for years about Christians being allowed to use Allah to refer to God, with even churches being attacked by some Muslims who object.

Some have speculated the name Khuda may actually come from the word "Khud" which means "self" ("Khud-a" therefore translating as "self-revealing"). In Pakistan, the name Khuda is rooted in the very culture and history of the country. In the national anthem the final verse makes a reference to Khuda. A few years back a very popular film came out with the title Khuda Kay Liye ("For the Sake of God"). When former president Pervez Musharraf left office in 2008 he famously said in his farewell speech "Pakistan ka Khuda hafiz hai" ("God protect Pakistan").

Some continue to use the "Khuda hafiz" despite the popularity of "Allah hafiz". To these people, "Khuda hafiz" is part of an ideological battle to retain what they see as a more pluralistic approach towards religion, yet for others it is tradition or nostalgia that keeps the usage alive. Outside Pakistan, "Khuda hafiz" is also known to be used in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and among Muslims in India.
Interestingly, while Allah is an Arabic word, the Arabs themselves don't use "Allah hafiz" – which is a purely Pakistani-manufactured invention mixing Arabic with Persian. Rather the Arabs use "ma salama" or "Allah ysalmak" when parting company. And for any who feel there is no need to mention God in a greeting in any language, remember even the English word "goodbye" derives from "God be with you", which was the standard greeting at one time.

How Pakistan makes US pay for Afghan war

By Dilip Hiro

The following ingredients should go a long way to produce a political thriller. Mr M, a jihadi in an Asian state, has emerged as the mastermind of a terrorist attack in a neighboring country, which killed six Americans. After sifting through a vast cache of intelligence and obtaining a legal clearance, the State Department announces a $10 million bounty for information leading to his arrest and conviction. Mr M promptly appears at a press conference and says, "I am here. America should give that reward money to me."

A State Department spokesperson explains lamely that the reward is meant for incriminating evidence against Mr M that would stand up in court. The prime minister of M's home state condemns foreign interference in his country's internal affairs. In the midst of this imbroglio, the US decides to release $1.18 billion in aid to the cash-strapped government of the defiant prime minister to persuade him to reopen supply lines for US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces bogged down in the hapless neighboring Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Alarmingly, this is anything but fiction or a plot for an upcoming international sitcom. It is a brief summary of the latest development in the fraught relations between the US and Pakistan, two countries locked into an uneasy embrace since September 12, 2001.

Mr M is Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, a 62-year-old former academic with a tapering, hennaed beard, and the founder of the Lashkar-e Taiba (the Army of the Pure, or LeT), widely linked to several outrageously audacious terrorist attacks in India.

The LeT was formed in 1987 as the military wing of the Jammat-ud Dawa religious organization (Society of the Islamic Call, or JuD) at the instigation of the Pakistani army's formidable intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The JuD owes its existence to the efforts of Saeed, who founded it in 1985 following his return to his native Lahore after two years of advanced Islamic studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, under the guidance of that country's grand mufti, Shaikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz.

On its formation, the LeT joined the seven-year-old anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, an armed insurgency directed and supervised by the ISI with funds and arms supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Saudis. Once the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the Army of the Pure turned its attention to a recently launched anti-Indian jihad in Indian-administered Kashmir and beyond.

The terrorist attacks attributed to it range from the devastating multiple assaults in Mumbai in November 2008, which resulted in 166 deaths, including those six Americans, to a foiled attack on the Indian parliament in New Delhi in December 2001, and a successful January 2010 attack on the airport in Kashmir's capital Srinagar.

In January 2002, in the wake of Washington's launching of the "war on terror", Pakistan formally banned the LeT, but in reality did little to curb its violent cross-border activities. Saeed remains its final authority. In a confession, offered as part of a plea bargain after his arrest in October 2009 in Chicago, David Coleman Headley, a Pakistani-American operative of LeT involved in planning the Mumbai carnage, said: "Hafiz Saeed had full knowledge of the Mumbai attacks and they were launched only after his approval."

In December 2008, the United Nations Security Council declared the JuD a front organization for the banned LeT. The provincial Punjab government then placed Saeed under house arrest using the Maintenance of Public Order law. But six months later, the Lahore High Court declared his confinement unconstitutional.

In August 2009, Interpol issued a Red Corner Notice, essentially an international arrest warrant, against Saeed in response to Indian requests for his extradition. Saeed was again put under house arrest but in October the Lahore High Court quashed all charges against him due to lack of evidence.

It is common knowledge that Pakistani judges, fearing for their lives, generally refrain from convicting high-profile jihadis with political connections. When, in the face of compelling evidence, a judge has no option but to order the sentence enjoined by the law, he must either live under guard afterwards or leave the country.

Such was the case with Judge Pervez Ali Shah who tried Mumtaz Qadri, the jihadi bodyguard who murdered Punjab's governor Salman Taseer for backing an amendment to the indiscriminately applied blasphemy law. Soon after sentencing Qadri to capital punishment last October, Shah received several death threats and was forced into self-exile.

Aware of the failures of the Pakistani authorities to convict Saeed, US agencies seemed to have checked and cross-checked the authenticity of the evidence they had collected on him before the State Department announced, on April 2, its reward for his arrest. This was nothing less than an implied declaration of Washington's lack of confidence in the executive and judicial organs of Pakistan.

Little wonder that Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani took umbrage, describing the US bounty as blatant interference in his country's domestic affairs. Actually, this is nothing new. It is an open secret that, in the ongoing tussle between Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and his bete noire, army chief of staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, the Barack Obama administration has always backed the civilian head of state. That, in turn, has been a significant factor in Gilani's stay in office since March 2008, longer than any other prime minister in Pakistan's history.

How to trump a superpower
Given such strong cards, diplomatic and legal, why then did the Obama administration commit itself to releasing more than $1 billion to a government that has challenged its attempt to bring to justice an alleged mastermind of cross-border terrorism?

The answer lies in what happened at two Pakistani border posts about two kilometers from the Afghan frontier in the early hours of November 26, 2011. NATO fighter aircraft and helicopters based in Afghanistan carried out a two-hour-long raid on these posts, killing 24 soldiers.

Enraged, Pakistan's government shut the two border crossings through which the US and NATO had until then sent a significant portion of their war supplies into Afghanistan. Its officials also forced the US to vacate Shamsi air base, which was being used by the CIA as a staging area for its drone air war in Pakistan's tribal areas along the Afghan border. The drone strikes are exceedingly unpopular - one poll found 97% of respondents viewed them negatively - and they are vehemently condemned by a large section of the Pakistani public and its politicians.

Furthermore, the government ordered a comprehensive review of all programs, activities and cooperation arrangements with the US and NATO. It also instructed the country's two-tier parliament to conduct a thorough review of Islamabad's relations with Washington. Having taken the moral high ground, the Pakistani government pressed its demands on the Obama administration.

An appointed Parliamentary Committee on National Security (PCNS) then deliberately moved at a snail's pace to perform the task on hand, while the Pentagon explored alternative ways of ferrying goods into Afghanistan via other countries to sustain its war there.

By contrast, a vociferous campaign against the reopening of the Pakistani supply lines led by the Difa-e Pakistan Council (Defense of Pakistan), representing 40 religious and political groups, headed by Hafiz Saeed, took off. Its leaders have addressed huge rallies in major Pakistani cities. It was quick to condemn Washington's bounty on Saeed, describing it as "a nefarious attempt" to undermine the council's drive to protect the country's sovereignty.

Meanwhile, the loss of the daily traffic of 500 trucks worth of food, fuel and weapons from the Pakistani port of Karachi through the Torkham and Chaman border crossings into Afghanistan, though little publicized in US media, has undermined the fighting capability of US and NATO forces.

"If we can't negotiate or successfully renegotiate the reopening of ground lines of communication with Pakistan, we have to default and rely on India and the Northern Distribution Network (NDN)," said a worried Lieutenant General Frank Panter to the Readiness Subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee of the US House of Representatives on March 30. "Both are expensive propositions and it increases the deployment or redeployment."

The main part of the NDN is a 3,220-mile (5,100 kilometer) rail network for transporting supplies between the Latvian port of Riga and the Uzbek town of Termez (connected by a bridge over the Oxus River to the Afghan settlement of Hairatan). According to the Pentagon, it costs nearly $17,000 per container to go through the NDN compared to $7,000 through the Pakistani border crossings.

Moreover, US and NATO are allowed to transport only "non-lethal goods" through the NDN.

Other military officials have warned that the failure to reopen the Pakistani routes could even delay the schedule for withdrawing American "combat troops" from Afghanistan by 2014. That would be bad news for the Obama White House with the latest Washington Post/NBC News poll showing that, for the first time, even a majority of Republicans believe the Afghan war "has not been worth fighting". A CBS News/New York Times survey indicated that support for the war was at a record low of 23%, with 69% of respondents saying that now was the time to withdraw troops.

In the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, the PCNS finally published a list of preconditions that the US must meet for the reopening of supply lines. These included an unqualified apology for the air strikes last November, an end to drone attacks, no more "hot pursuit" by US or NATO troops inside Pakistan, and the taxing of supplies shipped through Pakistan.

Much to the discomfiture of the Obama administration, a joint session of the National Assembly and the senate called to debate the PCNS report took more than two weeks to reach a conclusion.

On April 12, parliament finally unanimously approved the demands and added that no foreign arms and ammunition should be transported through Pakistan. The Obama administration is spinning this development not as an ultimatum but as a document for launching talks between the two governments.

Even so, it has strengthened Gilani's hand as never before. Furthermore, he has to take into account the popular support the Saeed-led Difa-e Pakistan Council is building for keeping the Pakistani border crossings permanently closed to NATO traffic. Thus, Saeed, a jihadi with a US bounty on his head, has emerged as an important factor in the complex Islamabad-Washington relationship.

Squeezing Washington: The pattern
There is, in fact, nothing new in the way Islamabad has been squeezing Washington lately. It has a long record of getting the better of US officials by identifying areas of American weakness and exploiting them successfully to further its agenda.

When the Soviet bloc posed a serious challenge to the US, the Pakistanis obtained what they wanted from Washington by being even more anti-Soviet than America. Afghanistan in the 1980s is the classic example.

Following the Soviet military intervention there in December 1979, the Pakistani dictator General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq volunteered to join Washington's Cold War against the Kremlin - but strictly on his terms. He wanted sole control over the billions of dollars in cash and arms to be supplied by the US and its ally Saudi Arabia to the Afghan mujahideen (holy warriors) to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. He got it.

That enabled his commanders to channel a third of the new weapons to their own arsenals for future battle against their archenemy, India. Another third were sold to private arms dealers on profitable terms. When pilfered US weapons began appearing in arms bazaars of the Afghan-Pakistan border towns (as has happened again in recent years), the Pentagon decided to dispatch an audit team to Pakistan.

On the eve of its arrival in April 1988, the Ojhiri arms depot complex, containing 10,000 tons of munitions, mysteriously went up in flames, with rockets, missiles and artillery shells raining down on Islamabad, killing more than 100 people.

By playing on Ronald Reagan's view of the Soviet Union as "the evil empire", Zia also ensured that the American president would turn a blind eye on Pakistan's frantic, clandestine efforts to build an atom bomb. Even when the CIA, the National Security Agency and the State Department determined that a nuclear weapon assembled by Pakistan had been tested at Lop Nor in China in early 1984, Reagan continued to certify to congress that Islamabad was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program in order to abide by a law which prohibited US aid to a country doing so.

Today, there are an estimated 120 nuclear bombs in the arsenal of a nation that has more Islamist jihadis per million people than any other country in the world. From October 2007 to October 2009, there were at least four attacks by extremists on Pakistani army bases known to be storing nuclear weapons.

In the post-9/11 years, Pakistan's ruler General Pervez Musharraf managed to repeat the process in the context of a new Afghan war. He promptly joined president George W Bush in his "war on terror", and then went on to distinguish between "bad terrorists" with a global agenda (al-Qaeda), and "good terrorists" with a pro-Pakistani agenda (the Afghan Taliban).

Musharraf's ISI then proceeded to protect and foster the Afghan Taliban, while periodically handing over al-Qaeda militants to Washington. In this way, Musharraf played on Bush's soft spot - his intense loathing of al-Qaeda - and exploited it to further Pakistan's regional agenda.

Emulating the policies of Zia and Musharraf, the post-Musharraf civilian government has found ways of diverting US funds and equipment meant for fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban to bolster their defenses against India. By inflating the costs of fuel, ammunition and transport used by Pakistan's 100,000 troops posted in the Afghan-Pakistan border region, Islamabad received more money from the Pentagon's Coalition Support Fund (CSF) than it spent. It then used the excess to buy weapons suitable for fighting India.

When the New York Times revealed this in December 2007, the Musharraf government dismissed its report as "nonsense". But after resigning as president and moving to London, Musharraf told Pakistan's Express News television channel in September 2009 that the funds had indeed been spent on weapons for use against India.

Now, the widely expected release of the latest round of funds from the Pentagon's CSF will raise total US military aid to Islamabad since 9/11 to $14.2 billion, two-and-a-half times the Pakistani military's annual budget.

There is a distinct, if little discussed, downside to being a superpower and acting as the self-appointed global policeman with a multitude of targets. An arrogance feeding on a feeling of invincibility and an obsession with winning every battle blind you to your own impact and even to what might be to your long-term benefit. In this situation, as your planet-wide activities become ever more diverse, frenzied, and even contradictory, you expose yourself to exploitation by lesser powers otherwise seemingly tied to your apron strings.

Pakistan, twice during America's 33-year-long involvement in Afghanistan made a frontline state, is a classic example of that. Current policymakers in Washington should take note: it's a strategy for disaster.

Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of 33 books, the most recent being the just-published Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (Yale University Press, New Haven and London).

(Copyright 2012 Dilip Hiro.)