Pakistan nuclear threat exaggerated

Reading about the Pakistan war, you are likely to be pretty scared: Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state is about to be taken over or become a failed state; the Taliban 60 miles from Islamabad. Potentially Apocalyptic. Even if you're sceptical, there is no way of arguing against it without access to another perspective, not provided by the MSM.

It reached absurdly shrill levels with the “two weeks to survive” warning, reported dutifully by Fox, who seemed to have been the first media organisation to hear about it (i.e., they were given it). The Telegraph report is obviously based on the Fox story, even to the extent that both finish with the coda that US officials don't know what the objective of the Taliban is – to take over Pakistan or establish an area of operations in NW Pakistan. This shows how journalists depend on one source only for a big story, often a government.source.

The Guardian coverage incidentally is a lot better than the neo-con leaning Telegraph. They are more willing to question it.

There is an article by Anatol Lieven – Pakistan's passing grade on the National Interest website, which deflates this conventional analysis (conventional, partly because it is the analysis that the media uncritically accept), making it look like alarmism or downright scaremongering. Lieven pours cold water on the idea that the state is endangered, although it is troubled by terrorism; he suggests that ethnic conflict between Pashtuns and other Pakistani groups is the main driver, not the War on Terror; he points out that the 60 miles between Swat and Islamabad happens to be occupied by a high mountain range, which absurdly doesn't get mentioned in the papers, at least not the right-wing papers.

Now getting involved in Pakistan is a big step; Pakistan is a serious geo-political player; it means potentially violating another country's sovereignty, a country much more populous than Afghanistan or Iraq, with the danger of escalating the war we are already fighting. In spite of this, there is no proper media debate or analysis. What seems clear is that the existence of Taliban havens in North-West Pakistan make the war in Afghanistan more difficult, possibly unwinnable. But getting involved in Pakistan has its own consequences: we make the leaders look like Western stooges, we could make the Taliban look like heroes. We may help destabilse Pakistan, by de-legitimising the Government, even the Army. We could make the people hate us as a result of civilian casualties. The exaggeration of the perilousness of the situation in Pakistan pre-empts any such debate, the western population goes along with it.

The wider moral I draw is this: we see this situation through the prism of the the free world vs War on Terror, world policing vs rogue states. Because the model we apply does not fit the reality, the situation is not as malleable as we expect. Lieven is saying that other, local factors will influence, even dominate why the local actors act as they do. We saw how the utopian scheme of democratising Iraq while destroying Terror and Tyranny initially floundered on ethnic and religious divides (not on a lack of UN resolutions), and contributed to a large-scale insurgency. They still dominate Iraqi politics in a democracy established only by a protracted and bloody war, the economic cost of which has contributed to US (and UK) dependence on Chinese credit. We deplete our resources for marginal gains, if they are gains at all.

Looked at from the local perspective, the Pakistanis will not want to defeat the Taliban because they see Afghanistan as their back yard, and fear encirclement by Hindu India. Their tardiness in fighting the global War on Terror, demanded by the West, has a rational basis.