Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear and Ballistic Missile Program

Pakistan's Army Chief with Saudi Crown Prince

The Washington Post broke the story [1] on Wednesday, January 23, that satellite images suggested Saudi Arabia had constructed its first-known ballistic missile factory. Paul Sonne, reporting for The Washington Post, notes: “If operational, the suspected factory at a missile base in al-Watah, southwest of Riyadh, would allow Saudi Arabia to manufacture its own ballistic missiles.”

The report adds: “The ballistic missile manufacturing complex — which satellite images suggest broke ground in 2013 when King Salman was defense minister — highlights the nation’s intention to make its own advanced missiles after years of seeking to purchase them abroad.”

How the Saudis obtained the technological expertise necessary to build the facility is unclear, according to the report, though one potential supplier could be China, which has sold ballistic missiles to Saudi Arabia in the past and has helped supply ballistic missile production capabilities to other nations, particularly to Pakistan, whose military has forged deep institutional ties with the Saudi royal family since the 1980s.

Regarding Saudi Arabia’s fervid desire to acquire nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities to match Iran’s military superiority in the Middle East region, the Washington Post report is not the only instance of its kind. David Sanger and William Broad reported in The New York Times [2] in November that before Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was implicated in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, American intelligence agencies were trying to solve a separate mystery: was the prince laying the groundwork for building an atomic bomb?

According to the New York Times report, the Saudi heir apparent had been overseeing negotiations with the US Energy Department to get Washington to sell designs for nuclear power plants to the kingdom. The deal was worth upward of $80 billion, depending on how many plants Saudi Arabia decided to build.

But there was a hitch: Saudi Arabia insisted on producing its own nuclear fuel. Such fuel can be used for benign or military purposes: if uranium is enriched to 4 percent purity, it can fuel a power plant; at 90 percent, it can be used for a bomb. Saudi Arabia has vast uranium reserves and there are currently five nuclear research centers operating in the kingdom.

The report further noted that the Crown Prince set off alarms when he declared in a CBS News interview in March last year, “Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.” 

Regarding Saudi Arabia’s clandestine nuclear activities, in November 2013, BBC’s defense correspondent, Mark Urban, published a report [3] that Pakistan’s military had made a secret deal with Saudi Arabia that in the event of Iran developing a nuclear weapon, Pakistan would provide ready-made nuclear warheads along with delivery systems to Saudi Arabia.

Similarly, in 2004, it emerged during the investigation of Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, dubbed as “the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program,” that he had sold centrifuge designs to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Additionally, in recent years, Pakistan’s defense production industry, with Chinese assistance, has emerged as one of the most sophisticated military-industrial complex in the region. Not only does it provide state-of-the-art conventional weapons to the oil-rich Gulf states, but according to a May 2014 AFP report [4], Pakistan-made weapons were used in large quantities in Sri Lanka’s Northern Offensive of 2008-09 against the Tamil Tiger rebels.

Moreover, in May last year, Pakistan’s former army chief, General Raheel Sharif, was appointed to lead a 40-member military alliance of Muslim nations dubbed as “The Muslim NATO.” Although the ostensible purpose of the alliance is to combat terrorism, in fact the alliance of Sunni Muslim nations was cobbled together by Saudi Arabia as a counterweight to Iran’s meddling in the Arab World, which Saudi Arabia regards as its own sphere of influence.

Furthermore, it’s worth noting that Pakistan’s military and Saudi Arabia have forged very deep and institutionalized ties. Thousands of Pakistani retired and serving army officers work on deputations in the Gulf Arab States. And during the 1980s, when Saudi Arabia lacked an efficient intelligence set-up, Pakistan’s Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) virtually played the role of Saudi Arabia’s foreign intelligence service.

Notwithstanding, the Trump administration recently announced the most stringent set of sanctions against Iran to appease Benjamin Netanyahu. Donald Trump has repeatedly said during the last two years that the Iran nuclear deal signed by the Obama administration in 2015 was an “unfair deal” that gave concessions to Iran without giving anything in return to the US.

Unfortunately, there is a grain of truth in Trump’s statements because the Obama administration signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in July 2015 under pressure, as Washington had bungled in its Middle East policy and it wanted Iran’s cooperation in Syria and Iraq to get a face-saving.

In order to understand how the Obama administration bungled in Syria and Iraq, we should bear the background of Washington’s Middle East policy during the recent years in mind. The eight-year-long conflict in Syria that gave birth to scores of militant groups, including the Islamic State, and after the conflict spilled across the border into neighboring Iraq in early 2014 was directly responsible for the spate of Islamic State-inspired terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq, an informal pact existed between the Western powers, their regional Sunni allies and jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a Iranian axis. In accordance with the pact, militants were trained and armed in the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan to battle the Syrian government.

This arrangement of an informal pact between the Western powers and the jihadists of the Middle East against the Iranian axis worked well up to August 2014, when the Obama Administration made a volte-face on its previous regime change policy in Syria and began conducting air strikes against one group of Sunni militants battling the Syrian government, the Islamic State, after the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

After this reversal of policy in Syria by the Western powers and the subsequent Russian military intervention on the side of the Syrian government in September 2015, the momentum of jihadists’ expansion in Syria and Iraq stalled, and they felt that their Western patrons had committed a treachery against the Sunni jihadists’ cause, that’s why they were infuriated and rose up in arms to exact revenge for this betrayal.

If we look at the chain of events, the timing of the spate of terror attacks against the West was critical: the Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014, the Obama Administration began conducting air strikes against the Islamic State’s targets in Iraq and Syria in August 2014, and after a lull of almost a decade since the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005, respectively, the first such incident of terrorism occurred on the Western soil at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and then the Islamic State carried out the audacious November 2015 Paris attacks, the March 2016 Brussels bombings, the June 2016 truck-ramming incident in Nice, and three horrific terror attacks took place in the United Kingdom within a span of less than three months in 2017, and after that the Islamic State carried out the Barcelona attack in August 2017, and then another truck-ramming atrocity occurred in Lower Manhattan in October 2017 that was also claimed by the Islamic State.

Keeping this background of the quagmire created by the Obama administration in Syria and Iraq in mind, it becomes amply clear that the Obama administration desperately needed Iran’s cooperation in Syria and Iraq to salvage its botched policy of training and arming jihadists to topple the government in Syria that backfired and gave birth to the Islamic State that carried out some of the most audacious terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Thus, Washington signed JCPOA in July 2015 that gave some concessions to Iran, and in return, the then hardliner Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki was forced out of power in September 2014 with Iran’s tacit approval and the moderate former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was appointed in his stead who gave permission to the US Air Force and ground troops to assist the Iraqi Armed Forces and allied militias to beat back the Islamic State from Mosul and Anbar.

The Trump administration, however, is not hampered by the legacy of Obama administration and since the objective of defeating the Islamic State has already been achieved and Donald Trump gave indications of withdrawing American troops from Syria as early as April last year, though the long-awaited decision was finally announced on December 19, therefore Washington felt safe to annul the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 and the crippling “third-party sanctions” have once again been put in place on Iran at Benjamin Netanyahu’s behest.

Although the European Union is resisting the Trump administration’s pressure to cancel the Iran nuclear deal for now, the neocolonial world order is led by the United States; Europe will find no choice but to toe Washington’s line sooner or later.

Manbij False Flag: The Empire Devours Its Own Soldiers

Immediately after Donald Trump’s announcement of withdrawal of American troops from Syria on December 19, the Kurdish leadership reportedly threatened [1] to set free hundreds of Islamic State’s prisoners and their family members being held in makeshift prisons in the Kurdish-held areas of Syria.

Some of those prisoners are foreign fighters and their countries of origin, Western countries in particular, are unwilling to accept them since they lack evidence to prosecute them. Though the Kurds have since backtracked on their statement, it shows the level of frustration shown by the Kurdish leadership regarding President Trump’s abrupt and apparently whimsical decision to pull American forces out of Syria after a telephonic conversation with Turkish President Erdogan on December 14.

The next step the Kurdish leadership took was to rush to Paris to hold discussions with French President Emmanuel Macron who has donned the globalist, interventionist cap after the inauguration of isolationist, “alt-right” president in the US in January 2017.

President Macron reassured the Kurdish leadership that hundreds of French troops stationed in Syria as a part of global coalition to battle the Islamic State will remain there and take the lead after the withdrawal of 2,000 American troops, though it is unlikely that the French forces will stay in Syria for long once the American forces pull out. Particularly, if we keep the fact in mind that President Macron has been facing the biggest challenge to his presidency in recent months in the form of Yellow Vest protests.

Notwithstanding, four American soldiers were killed and three wounded in a suicide bombing in Syria’s northern flashpoint town of Manbij on Wednesday. Additionally, ten civilians were also killed and more than a dozen injured in the bombing.

Although Islamic State promptly claimed the responsibility for the attack via its Amaq news agency, the jihadist group is simply a weapon. The finger that pulled the trigger and created circumstances for the attack to take place is to be blamed for the atrocity.

Reuters reported [2] on Wednesday: “An explosion hit near a restaurant, targeting the Americans, and there were some forces from the Manbij Military Council with them.” The report further adds: “The Manbij Military Council militia has controlled the town since the US-backed Kurdish-led forces took it from Islamic State in 2016. It is located near areas held by Russian-backed Syrian government forces and by anti-Assad fighters backed by Turkey.”

It bears mentioning that the so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) are nothing more than Kurdish militias with a symbolic presence of mercenary Arab tribesmen in order to make SDF appear more representative and inclusive in outlook. The Manbij Military Council, as mentioned in the Reuters report, is comprised of mercenary Arab units of the Kurdish-led SDF.

Thus, it is quite easy for the fighters of the rest of Sunni Arab jihadist groups, including the Islamic State, battling the Shi’a-led government in Syria to infiltrate the Arab-led units of the Syrian Democratic Forces, specifically the Manbij Military Council.

And since the Syrian Kurds are opposed to the Trump administration’s policy of withdrawal of American troops from Syria, therefore it is quite likely that the Kurdish-led SDF did not maintain the level of vigilance necessary for keeping the evacuating American soldiers out of the harm’s way. The US soldiers mingling with the Arab-led units of SDF in a public restaurant on a busy street in Manbij appears to be one such incidents of costly negligence that claimed precious lives.

Regarding the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility for the suicide bombing, it has a history of making dubious claims for grandstanding and for attracting international attention in order to generate funds and attract potential jihadists to its transnational network of terrorists. It even claimed the responsibility for the Las Vegas attack in October 2017, which was perpetrated by Stephen Paddock who killed 58 people in cold blood and left hundreds injured at a concert at Mandalay Bay.

Since the Ghouta chemical weapons attack in August 2013, numerous false flag attacks have been staged in Syria by the militants and their regional and global patrons in order to cross then-President Obama’s purported “Red Line in Syria” – that Washington would not tolerate a chemical weapons attack against the Syrian opposition – in order to enforce an American no-fly zone over Syria.

The suicide bombing in Manbij on Wednesday that targeted evacuating American soldiers appears to be one such false flag attack that was either perpetrated by the Kurds themselves or by one of myriad Sunni Arab jihadist outfits battling the Shi’a-led government in Damascus, which are on the payroll of their regional and global patrons, in order to impede or possibly overturn the Syria exit strategy of the Trump administration by keeping the bogey of the Islamic State alive.

Fact of the matter is that Islamic State has been comprehensively defeated as it does not hold any territory in Syria and Iraq now. As far as its capability to wage guerilla warfare is concerned, Washington could not possibly hope to degrade it even if American forces remained stationed in Syria and Iraq for another decade.

Remember that despite fighting America’s longest seventeen-year war in Afghanistan, according to a recent report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the US-backed Afghan government only controls 55% of Afghanistan’s territory. It’s worth noting that SIGAR is a US-based governmental agency that often inflates figures.

Factually, the government’s writ does not extend beyond a third of Afghanistan. In many cases, the Afghanistan government simply controls district-centers of provinces and outlying rural areas are either controlled by the Taliban or are contested between the militants and the government.

It’s worth pointing out that the distinction between Islamic jihadists and purported “moderate rebels” in Syria is more illusory than real. Before it turned rogue and overran Mosul in Iraq in June 2014, Islamic State used to be an integral part of the Syrian opposition and enjoyed close ideological and operational ties with other militant groups in Syria.

Besides, how could heavily armed militants in a sectarian war between Sunni jihadists and Shi’a-led government be possibly labeled as “moderate rebels” with secular and nationalist ambitions? Fact of the matter is that all the militant groups operating in Syria are fanatical Islamic jihadists who regard Shi’a Muslims as apostates and hence liable to death.

Thus, though practically impossible, even if Washington does eliminate all Islamic State militants from Syria, what would it do with myriads of other militant outfits in Syria, particularly with tens of thousands of al-Nusra Front jihadists who have carved out a new sanctuary in Syria’s northwestern Idlib governorate since last year?

The only practical solution to the conundrum is to withdraw all American troops from Syria and let Damascus establish writ of the state over all of Syria in order to eliminate all militant groups from Syria, including the Islamic State, though the Zionist lobbies in Washington might have objections to strengthening the hands of Iran and Russia in Syria.

After eight years of utter devastation and bloodletting, a consensus has emerged among all belligerents of the Syrian war to de-escalate the conflict, except for Israel which wants to further escalate the conflict because it has been the only beneficiary of the carnage in Syria.

Washington’s interest in the Syrian proxy war was mainly about ensuring Israel’s regional security. The United States Defense Intelligence Agency’s declassified report [3] of 2012 clearly spelled out the imminent rise of a Salafist principality in northeastern Syria – in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor which were occupied by the Islamic State until October 2017 – in the event of an outbreak of a sectarian war in Syria.

Under pressure from the Zionist lobby in Washington, however, the former Obama administration deliberately suppressed the report and also overlooked the view in general that a proxy war in Syria would give birth to radical Islamic jihadists.

The hawks in Washington were fully aware of the consequences of their actions in Syria, but they kept pursuing the ill-fated policy of nurturing militants in the training camps located in Syria’s border regions with Turkey and Jordan in order to weaken the anti-Zionist Syrian government.

The single biggest threat to Israel’s regional security was posed by the Shi’a resistance axis, which is comprised of Tehran, Damascus and their Lebanon-based surrogate, Hezbollah. During the course of 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into northern Israel and Israel’s defense community realized for the first time the nature of threat that Hezbollah and its patrons posed to Israel’s regional security.

Those were only unguided rockets but it was a wakeup call for Israel’s military strategists that what will happen if Iran passed the guided missile technology to Hezbollah whose area of operations lies very close to the northern borders of Israel.

Thus, the Zionist lobbies in Washington literally coerced then-President Obama to coordinate a proxy war against Damascus and its Lebanon-based surrogate Hezbollah in the wake of the “Arab Spring” protests of 2011 in Syria in order to dismantle the Iranian resistance axis against Israel.

Over the years, Israel not only provided medical aid and material support to militant groups battling Damascus – particularly to various factions of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in Daraa and Quneitra bordering the Israel-occupied Golan Heights – but Israel’s air force virtually played the role of air force of Syrian jihadists and conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria during the eight-year conflict.

In an interview to New York Times [4] on January 11, Israel’s outgoing Chief of Staff Lt. General Gadi Eisenkot confessed that the Netanyahu government approved his shift in strategy in January 2017 to step up airstrikes in Syria. Consequently, more than 200 Israeli airstrikes were launched against the Syrian targets in 2017 and 2018, as revealed [5] by the Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz in September last year.

In 2018 alone, Israel's air force dropped 2,000 bombs in Syria. The purpose of Israeli airstrikes in Syria has been to degrade Iran’s guided missile technology provided to Damascus and Hezbollah, which poses an existential threat to Israel’s regional security.

Though after Russia provided S-300 missile system to the Syrian military after a Russian surveillance plane was shot down in Syria on September 18, killing 15 Russians onboard, Israel has conducted only a couple of airstrikes in Syria, one on the Christmas Day in which Israeli F-16 fighter jets took cover [6] of civilian airliners flying to Damascus and Beirut airports. The purpose of the airstrike was to locate the precise location of the S-300 air defense system installed in Syria by Russia in order to target it on a later date, or to keep the Israeli air force out of its reach.

Was Manbij Attack a False Flag to Impede Syria Withdrawal?

Syrian Kurdish leader Saleh Muslim.

Reportedly, four American soldiers were killed and three wounded in a suicide bombing in Syria’s northern flashpoint town of Manbij on Wednesday. Additionally, seven civilians were also killed and nine injured in the bombing, though some reports are mentioning a higher number of casualties.

Islamic State has claimed the responsibility for the attack and named the suspected bomber. "Suicide attacker Abu Yassin al-Shami wearing an explosive vest set off towards a patrol including members of the Crusader coalition and the PKK apostates near the Palace of Princes restaurant in the city of Manbij," a statement posted on Islamic State-affiliated Amaq news agency said.

“An explosion hit near a restaurant, targeting the Americans, and there were some forces from the Manbij Military Council with them,” Reuters reported [1]. “The Manbij Military Council militia has controlled the town since U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces took it from Islamic State in 2016. It is located near areas held by Russian-backed Syrian government forces and by anti-Assad fighters backed by Turkey.”

The ethnic and sectarian conflict in Syria and Iraq is a three-way conflict between the Sunni Arab militants, the Shi’a-led governments and the Kurds. Although after the declaration of a war against a faction of Sunni Arab militants, the Islamic State, Washington also lent its support to the Shi’a-led government in Iraq, the Shi’a Arabs of Iraq are not the trustworthy allies of the United States because they are under the influence of Iran.

Therefore, Washington was left with no other choice but to make the Kurds the centerpiece of its policy in Syria after a group of Sunni Arab jihadists overstepped their mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014, from where the United States had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

The so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) are nothing more than Kurdish militias with a symbolic presence of mercenary Arab tribesmen in order to make them appear more representative and inclusive in outlook. The Manbij Military Council, as mentioned in the Reuters report, is comprised of mercenary Arab units of the Kurdish-led SDF.

Thus, it is quite easy for the fighters of the rest of Sunni Arab jihadist groups, including the Islamic State, battling the Shi’a-led government in Syria to infiltrate the Arab-led units of the Syrian Democratic Forces, specifically the Manbij Military Council.

And since the Syrian Kurds are opposed to the Trump administration’s policy of withdrawal of American troops from Syria, therefore it is quite likely that the Kurdish-led SDF did not maintain the level of vigilance necessary for keeping the evacuating American soldiers out of the harm’s way. The US soldiers mingling with the Arab-led units of SDF in a public restaurant on a busy street in Manbij appears to be one such incidents of costly negligence that has claimed precious lives.

It’s worth noting that the Syrian militant groups are no ordinary bands of ragtag jihadist outfits. They were trained and armed to the teeth by their patrons in the security agencies of Washington, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan in the training camps located in Syria’s border regions with Turkey and Jordan.

Along with Saddam’s and Egypt’s armies, the Syrian Baathist armed forces are one of the most capable fighting forces in the Arab world. But the onslaught of militant groups during the first three years of the proxy war was such that had it not been for the Russian intervention in September 2015, Syrian defenses would have collapsed.

The only feature that distinguished the Syrian militants from the rest of regional jihadist groups was not their ideology but their weapons arsenals that were bankrolled by the Gulf’s petro-dollars and provided by the CIA in collaboration with regional security agencies of Washington’s traditional allies in the Middle East.

Fact of the matter is that the distinction between Islamic jihadists and purported “moderate rebels” in Syria was more illusory than real. Before it turned rogue and overran Mosul in Iraq in June 2014, Islamic State used to be an integral part of the Syrian opposition and enjoyed close ideological and operational ties with other militant groups in Syria.

It bears mentioning that although turf wars were common not just between the Islamic State and other militant groups operating in Syria but also among rebel groups themselves, the ultimate objective of the Islamic State and the rest of militant outfits operating in Syria was the same: to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. Besides, how could heavily armed militants in a sectarian war between Sunni jihadists and Shi’a-led government be possibly labeled as “moderate rebels” with secular and nationalist ambitions?

Regarding the Syrian opposition, a small fraction of it was comprised of defected Syrian soldiers who go by the name of Free Syria Army, but the vast majority was comprised of Islamic jihadists and armed tribesmen who were generously funded, trained, armed and internationally legitimized by their regional and global patrons.

Islamic State was nothing more than one of numerous Syrian militant outfits, others being: al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al Islam etc. All the militant groups that were operating in Syria were just as fanatical and brutal as the Islamic State. The only feature that differentiated the Islamic State from the rest was that it was more ideological and independent-minded.

The reason why the US turned against the Islamic State was that all other Syrian militant outfits only had local ambitions that were limited to fighting the Syrian government, while the Islamic State established a global network of transnational terrorists that included hundreds of Western citizens who became a national security risk to the Western countries.

Regarding the dominant group of Syrian militants in the northwestern Idlib governorate, according to a May 2017 report [2] by CBC Canada, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which was formerly known as al-Nusra Front until July 2016 and then as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS) until January 2017, had been removed from the terror watch-lists of the US and Canada after it merged with fighters from Zenki Brigade and hardline jihadists from Ahrar al-Sham and rebranded itself as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in January 2017.

The US State Department was hesitant to label Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) a terror group, despite the group’s links to al-Qaeda, as the US government had directly funded and armed the Zenki Brigade, one of the constituents of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), with sophisticated weaponry including the US-made antitank missiles.

Though after the report was published in CBC News, Canada added the name of HTS to its terror watch-list in May 2018, Turkey designated it a terrorist organization in August 2018 and Washington came up with the excuse that since HTS is a merger of several militant outfits, and one of those militant groups, al-Nusra Front, was already on the terror watch-list of the US, therefore it too regards HTS a terrorist organization.

The purpose behind the rebranding of al-Nusra Front, first as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS) in July 2016 and then as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in January 2017 and purported severing of ties with al-Qaeda, was to legitimize itself and to make it easier for its patrons to send money and arms.

Washington blacklisted al-Nusra Front in December 2012 and persuaded its regional allies Saudi Arabia and Turkey to ban it, too. Although al-Nusra Front’s name has been in the list of proscribed organizations of Saudi Arabia and Turkey since 2014, it kept receiving money and arms from its regional patrons.

Finally, regarding the deep ideological ties between the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front, although the current al-Nusra Front has been led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, he was appointed [3] as the emir of al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, in January 2012. In fact, al-Jolani’s Nusra Front is only a splinter group of the Islamic State, which split from its parent organization in April 2013 over a leadership dispute between the two organizations.

US will Maintain Military Presence in Syria after Withdrawal

The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered contradictory messages in a speech in Cairo on Thursday, January 10. On the one hand, he said Washington will withdraw American troops from Syria in line with Donald Trump’s momentous announcement on December 19, and on the other, he emphasized the US will continue fighting the Islamic State and will also contain the influence of Iran in the Middle East region.

Obviously, both these divergent goals are impossible to achieve, unless Washington is planning to maintain some sort of long-term military presence in Syria. In an exclusive report [1] by the Middle East Eye’s Turkey correspondent, Ragip Soylu, he contends that the US delegation presented a five-point document to the Turkish officials during National Security Advisor John Bolton’s recent visit to Turkey.

“Those in attendance with Bolton during the two-hour meeting at the presidential palace in Ankara included General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and James Jeffrey, the US special envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition,” according to the report.

A senior Trump administration official briefed on objectives outlined at the meeting, speaking to the reporter, said, "As the president has stated, the US will maintain whatever capability is necessary for operations needed to prevent the Islamic State’s resurgence."

And then the reporter makes a startling revelation, though hidden deep in the report and mentioned only cursorily: “The US is not withdrawing from the base at al-Tanf at this time,” the official said. The revelation hardly comes as a surprise, though, as John Bolton alluded to maintaining long-term US military presence at the al-Tanf base during his visit to Jerusalem on Sunday, January 6.

The al-Tanf military base is strategically located in southeastern Syria on the border between Syria, Iraq and Jordan, and it sits on a critically important Damascus-Baghdad highway, which serves as a lifeline for Damascus. Washington has illegally occupied 55-kilometer area around al-Tanf since 2016 and trained a Syrian militant group Maghawir al-Thawra there.

Thus, for all practical purposes, it appears the withdrawal of American troops from Syria will be limited to Manbij and Kobani in northern Syria and Qamishli and al-Hasakah in northeastern Syria in order to address the concerns of Washington’s NATO-ally Turkey pertaining to the Kurdish militias which Ankara regards as “terrorists,” and the fate of US forces operating alongside Kurds in Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria and al-Tanf military base in particular is still in doubt.

The regions currently being administered by the Kurds in Syria include the Kurdish-majority Qamishli and al-Hasakah in northeastern Syria along the border with Iraq, and the Arab-majority towns of Manbij to the west of the Euphrates River in northern Syria and Kobani to the east of the Euphrates River along the Turkish border.

The oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate in eastern Syria has been contested between the Syrian government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, and it also contains a few pockets of the remnants of the Islamic State militants alongside both eastern and western banks of the Euphrates River.

The Turkish “east of Euphrates” military doctrine basically means that the Turkish armed forces would not tolerate the presence of the Syrian PYD/YPG Kurds – which the Turks regard as “terrorists” allied to the PKK Kurdish separatist group in Turkey – in Manbij and Kobani, in line with the longstanding Turkish policy of denying the Kurds any territory in the traditionally Arab-majority areas of northern Syria along Turkey’s southern border.

Regarding the evacuation of American troops from the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria, clearly an understanding has been reached between Washington and Ankara. According to the terms of the agreement, the Erdogan administration released the US pastor Andrew Brunson on October 12, which had been a longstanding demand of the Trump administration, and has also decided not to make public the audio recordings of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, which could have implicated another American-ally the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the assassination.

In return, the Trump administration has complied with Erdogan’s longstanding demand to evacuate American forces from the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria. Another demand Erdogan must have made to Washington is to pressure Saudi Arabia to lift the Saudi-UAE blockade against Qatar imposed in June 2017, which is ideologically aligned to Erdogan’s AKP party since both follow the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, in return for not making public the audio recordings of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

It bears mentioning that after the Khashoggi assassination and the international outrage it generated against the Saudi royal family, Saudi Arabia is already trying to assuage Qatar as it invited Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani to attend the Gulf Cooperation Council summit in Riyadh on December 10, though Doha snubbed the goodwill gesture by sending a low-ranking official to the meeting.

The reason why the Trump administration is bending over backwards to appease Ankara is that Turkish President Erdogan has been drifting away from Washington’s orbit into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. Turkey, which has the second largest army in NATO, has been cooperating with Moscow in Syria against Washington’s interests for the last couple of years and has also placed an order for the Russian-made S-400 missile system, though that deal, too, has been thrown into jeopardy after Washington’s recent announcement of selling $3.5 billion worth of Patriot missile systems to Ankara.

In order to understand the significance of relationship between Washington and Ankara, it’s worth noting that the United States has been conducting airstrikes against targets in Syria from the Incirlik airbase and around fifty American B-61 hydrogen bombs have also been deployed there, whose safety became a matter of real concern during the foiled July 2016 coup plot against the Erdogan administration; when the commander of the Incirlik airbase, General Bekir Ercan Van, along with nine other officers were arrested for supporting the coup; movement in and out of the base was denied, power supply was cut off and the security threat level was raised to the highest state of alert, according to a report [2] by Eric Schlosser for the New Yorker.

Perceptive readers who have been keenly watching Erdogan’s behavior since the foiled July 2016 coup plot against the Erdogan administration must have noticed that Erdogan has committed quite a few reckless and impulsive acts during the last few years.

Firstly, the Turkish air force shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 fighter jet on the border between Syria and Turkey on 24 November 2015 that brought the Turkish and Russian armed forces to the brink of a full-scale confrontation in Syria.

Secondly, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was assassinated at an art exhibition in Ankara on the evening of 19 December 2016 by an off-duty Turkish police officer, Mevlut Mert Altintas, who was suspected of being an Islamic fundamentalist.

Thirdly, the Turkish military mounted the seven-month-long Operation Euphrates Shield in northern Syria immediately after the attempted coup plot from August 2016 to March 2017 that brought the Turkish military and its Syrian militant proxies head-to-head with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and their US backers.

Fourthly, Ankara invaded Idlib in northwestern Syria in October 2017 on the pretext of enforcing a de-escalation zone between the Syrian militants and the Syrian government, despite official protest from Damascus that the Turkish armed forces were in violation of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

And lastly, Turkey mounted Operation Olive Branch in the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin in northwestern Syria from January to March 2018. And after capturing Afrin in March last year, the Turkish armed forces and their Syrian jihadist proxies have now set their sights further east on Manbij and Kobani.

Fake News of Trump’s Volte-face on Syria Exit Strategy

Quoting Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton, who was recently on a visit to Israel and told reporters in Jerusalem that American forces would remain in Syria until the last remnants of the Islamic State were defeated and Turkey provided guarantees that it would not strike Kurdish forces allied with the United States, fake news have been circulating on the mainstream media that Trump has made a turnaround by delaying his planned Syria withdrawal.

Quoting the corporate media’s preferred, though highly partisan and dubious source of information on Syria, The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), Al-Jazeera’s sister news outlet The New Arab in particular is reporting [1] the Syrian Observatory’s purportedly “extensive network of on-ground activists and reporters” has seen American military convoys of hundreds of trucks and vehicles headed to the US military bases in Raqqa in eastern Syria, and Manbij and Tal Abyad in northern Syria from the Iraq border.

The policy decision to withdraw American forces from Syria, however, has already been taken in principle by the Trump administration, and whether the complete exit of the US troops from Syria would take a few weeks or several months is simply a matter of modalities to be worked out by operational commanders of the American forces.

Taking notice of the fake news, even Donald Trump was compelled to clarify his intentions on the Syria exit strategy in a tweet on Monday, January 7, saying: “The Failing New York Times has knowingly written a very inaccurate story on my intentions on Syria. No different from my original statements, we will be leaving at a proper pace while at the same time continuing to fight ISIS and doing all else that is prudent and necessary.”

Regarding the American military convoys headed to Raqqa, Manbij and Tal Abyad, the US commanders planning for the withdrawal of the American troops from Syria have recommended that the Kurdish fighters battling the Islamic State be allowed to keep the US-supplied weapons, a move that would likely anger NATO-ally Turkey, according to an exclusive report [1] by Reuters.

The report further adds: “The proposal to leave the US-supplied weapons with the Kurdish YPG militia, which could include anti-tank missiles, armored vehicles and mortars, would reassure Kurdish allies that they were not being abandoned.”

Thus, the convoys carrying surplus weapons of the American forces in Iraq to the US military bases in Syria were actually meant to distribute the weapons among Washington’s Kurdish allies in order to compensate the Kurds for their loyalty, despite objections from Washington’s NATO-ally Ankara.

Regarding inveterate neoconservative hawk John Bolton’s reassurance to the Israelis on Washington’s Syria withdrawal in Jerusalem, it should be looked in the backdrop that over the years, Israel not only provided medical aid and material support to militant groups battling Damascus – particularly to various factions of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in Daraa and Quneitra bordering the Israel-occupied Golan Heights – but Israel’s air force virtually played the role of the air force of the Syrian jihadists and conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria during the eight-year conflict.

Though after Russia provided S-300 missile system to the Syrian military after a Russian surveillance plane was shot down in Syria on September 18, killing 15 Russians onboard, Israel has conducted only a couple of airstrikes in Syria, one on the Christmas Day in which Israeli F-16s took cover [2] of civilian airliners flying to Damascus and Beirut airports. The purpose of the airstrike was to locate the precise location of the S-300 air defense system installed in Syria by the Russians in order to target it on a later date, or to keep the Israeli air force out of its reach.

Notwithstanding, on December 28, the Syrian army said it entered Manbij for the first time in years, after the Syrian Kurds urged Damascus to protect the town from the threat of impending Turkish military offensive, though Turkish President Erdogan has termed the handover a “psyops” by the Kurds.

According to a report by RT: [3] “A high-ranking Turkish delegation arrived in Moscow on Saturday, December 29, only a day after international media broke news on Kurdish militias inviting Syrian forces to enter Manbij before the Turks do. Syria’s military proclaimed they ‘raised the flag’ over Manbij, but there have been no independent reports confirming the moving of troops into the city.”

The report notes: “The Saturday Moscow meeting was key to preventing all actors of the Syrian war from locking horns over the Kurdish enclave. Obviously, Turkey will insist that it is their forces that should enter Manbij, Russia will of course insist the city should be handed over to Assad’s forces, Kirill Semenov, an Islamic studies expert with Russia’s Institute for Innovative Development, told RT.”

The report further adds: “Realpolitik, of course, plays a role here as various locations across Syria might be used as a bargaining chip by all parties to the conflict. Semenov suggested the Turks may agree on Syrian forces taking some parts of Idlib province in exchange for Damascus’ consent for a Turkish offensive toward Manbij or Kobani.”

It becomes abundantly clear after reading the RT report that a land swap agreement between Ankara and Damascus under the auspices of Moscow is in the offing to avoid standoff over Manbij.

The agreement would likely stipulate that Damascus would give Ankara free hand to mount offensives in the Kurdish-occupied Arab-majority towns Manbij and Kobani in northern Syria in return for Ankara withdrawing its militant proxies from Maarat al-Numan, Khan Sheikhoun and Jisr al-Shughour, all of which are strategically located in the south of Idlib governorate.

Just as Ankara cannot tolerate the presence of the Kurds in northern Syria along Turkey’s southern border in line with its “east of Euphrates” military doctrine, similarly even Ankara would acknowledge the fact that Damascus cannot possibly conceive the long-term presence of Ankara’s jihadist proxies in the aforementioned strategic locations in the south of Idlib governorate threatening the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia.

If such a land swap agreement is concluded between Ankara and Damascus, it would be a win-win for all parties to the Syrian conflict, excluding the Kurds, of course. But the response of Damascus and Moscow to the concerns of the Kurds has been tepid of late.

Not only have the Kurds committed the perfidy of playing the proxies of Washington during the Syrian conflict which abandoned them after Trump’s announcement of withdrawal of American troops from Syria, but we must also recall another momentous event that took place in Deir al-Zor governorate in February 2018.

On February 7, the US B-52 bombers and Apache helicopters struck a contingent of Syrian government troops and allied forces in Deir al-Zor that reportedly [4] killed and wounded scores of Russian military contractors working for the Russian private security firm, the Wagner group.

The survivors described the bombing as an absolute massacre, and Kremlin lost more Russian citizens in one day than it had lost throughout its more than three-year-long military campaign in support of the Syrian government since September 2015.

The reason why Washington struck Russian contractors working in Syria was that the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – which is mainly comprised of Kurdish YPG militias – had reportedly handed over the control of some areas east of Euphrates River to Deir al-Zor Military Council (DMC), which is the Arab-led component of SDF, and had relocated several battalions of Kurdish YPG militias to Afrin and along Syria’s northern border with Turkey in order to defend the Kurdish-held areas against the onslaught of the Turkish armed forces and allied Syrian militant proxies during Ankara’s “Operation Olive Branch” in Syria’s northwest that lasted from January to March 2018.

Syrian forces with the backing of Russian contractors took advantage of the opportunity and crossed the Euphrates River to capture an oil refinery located to the east of Euphrates River in the Kurdish-held area of Deir al-Zor.

The US Air Force responded with full force, knowing well the ragtag Arab component of SDF – mainly comprised of local Arab tribesmen and mercenaries to make the Kurdish-led SDF appear more representative and inclusive – was simply not a match for the superior training and arms of Syrian troops and Russian military contractors, consequently causing a carnage in which scores of Russian citizens lost their lives.

Clearly, Moscow and Damascus hold the Kurds responsible for the atrocity along with Washington, and hence it is unlikely that the Syrian military would come to the rescue of the Kurds in the event of a Turkish military offensive east of Euphrates.

Trump’s Midterm Electoral Defeat and Syria Withdrawal

Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw American troops from Syria was reportedly made during a telephonic conversation with the Turkish President Erdogan on December 14, before President Trump made the momentous announcement in a Tweet on December 19. The decision was so sudden that even the Turkish president was caught off guard, according to a December 22 Associated Press report [1] by Matthew Lee and Susannah George.

Clearly, an understanding has been reached between Washington and Ankara. According to the terms of the agreement, the Erdogan administration released the US pastor Andrew Brunson on October 12, which had been a longstanding demand of the Trump administration, and has also decided not to make public the audio recordings of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, which could have implicated another American-ally the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the assassination.

And in return, the Trump administration has given a free hand to Ankara to mount an offensive in the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria, though for the time being the Turkish president has delayed the offensive against the Kurds until the nitty-gritty of the deal is settled in a planned Trump-Erdogan meeting in Washington in January.

The reason why the Trump administration is bending over backwards to appease Ankara is that President Erdogan has been drifting away from Washington’s orbit into the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. Turkey, which has the second largest army in NATO, has been cooperating with Moscow in Syria against Washington’s interests for the last couple of years and has also placed an order for the Russian-made S-400 missile system, though that deal, too, has been thrown into jeopardy after Washington’s recent announcement of selling $3.5 billion worth of Patriot missile systems to Ankara.

Regarding the murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, a question would naturally arise in the minds of astute readers of alternative media that why did the mainstream media, Washington Post and New York Times in particular, take the lead in publicizing the assassination?

One apparent reason could be that Khashoggi was an opinion columnist for The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon. The Washington Post has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA because Bezos won a $600 million contract [2] in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service.

It bears mentioning that despite the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman being primarily responsible for the war in Yemen that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and created a famine in Yemen, the mainstream media hailed him as a “moderate reformer” who brought radical reforms in the conservative Saudi society by permitting women to drive and by allowing cinemas to screen the Hollywood movies.

So what prompted the sudden change of heart in the mainstream media that the purported “moderate reformer” was all of a sudden reviled as a brutal murderer? More than anything, it was the timing of the assassination and the political mileage that could be obtained from Khashoggi’s murder in the domestic politics of the United States that prompted the mainstream media to take advantage of the opportunity and mount a smear campaign against the Trump administration by publicizing the assassination.

Jamal Khashoggi was murdered on October 2, when the US midterm elections were only a few weeks away. Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in particular have known to have forged close business relations with the Saudi royal family. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Donald Trump chose Saudi Arabia and Israel for his maiden overseas visit in May 2017.

Thus, the corporate media’s campaign to seek justice for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi was actually a smear campaign against Donald Trump and his conservative political base, which is now obvious after the US midterm election results have been tallied. Even though the Republicans have retained their 51-seat majority in the Senate, the Democrats now control the House of Representatives by gaining 39 additional seats.

Clearly, two factors were mainly responsible for the surprising defeat of the Republicans in the US midterm elections. Firstly, the Khashoggi murder and the smear campaign unleashed by the neoliberal media, which Donald Trump often pejoratively mentions as “Fake News” on Twitter, against the Trump administration.

Secondly, and more importantly, the parcel bombs sent to the residences of George Soros, a dozen other Democratic Congressmen and The New York Times New York office by Cesar Sayoc on the eve of the elections. Although the suspect turned out to be a Trump supporter, he was likely instigated by shady hands in the US deep state, which is wary of the anti-establishment rhetoric and pro-Russia tendencies of the so-called “alt-right” administration.

Notwithstanding, it would be pertinent to note here that regarding the Syria policy, there is a schism between the White House and the American deep state led by the Pentagon. After Donald Trump’s inauguration as the US president, he has delegated operational-level decisions in conflict zones such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria to the Pentagon.

The Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster represented the institutional logic of the deep state in the Trump administration and were instrumental in advising Donald Trump to escalate the conflicts in Afghanistan and Syria.

They had advised President Trump to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan from 8,400 to 14,000. And in Syria, they were in favor of the Pentagon’s policy of training and arming 30,000 Kurdish border guards to patrol Syria’s northern border with Turkey.

Both the decisions have spectacularly backfired on the Trump administration. The decision to train and arm 30,000 Kurdish border guards infuriated the Erdogan administration to the extent that Turkey mounted Operation Olive Branch in the Kurdish-held enclave of Afrin in northwestern Syria from January to March 2018.

Remember that it was the second military operation conducted by the Turkish armed forces and their Syrian militant proxies against the Kurdish-held areas in northern Syria. The first Operation Euphrates Shield in Jarabulus and Azaz lasted from August 2016 to March 2017, immediately after the foiled coup plot against the Erdogan administration in July 2016.

Nevertheless, after capturing Afrin on March 18, the Turkish armed forces and their Syrian jihadist proxies have now set their sights further east on Manbij, where the US Special Forces are closely cooperating with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.

The Turkish “east of Euphrates” military doctrine basically means that the Turkish armed forces would not tolerate the presence of the Syrian PYD/YPG Kurds – which the Turks regard as “terrorists” allied to the PKK Kurdish separatist group in Turkey – in Manbij to the west of Euphrates River and in Kobani to the east of Euphrates River, in line with the longstanding Turkish policy of denying the Kurds any Syrian territory to the west of the Euphrates River in northern Syria along Turkey’s southern border.

Thus, it doesn’t come as a surprise that President Trump replaced H.R. McMaster with John Bolton in April; and in a predictable development on December 20, James Mattis offered his resignation over President Trump’s announcement of withdrawal of American troops from Syria.

It bears mentioning that unlike dyed-in-the-wool globalists and “liberal interventionist” hawks, like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who cannot look past beyond the tunnel vision of political establishments, it appears that the pacifist isolationist Donald Trump not only follows news from conservative mainstream outlets, like the Fox News, but he has also been familiar with alternative news perspectives, such as Breitbart’s, no matter how racist and xenophobic.

Thus, Donald Trump is fully aware that the conflict in Syria is a proxy war initiated by the Western political establishments and their regional Middle Eastern allies against the Syrian government. He is also mindful of the fact that militants were funded, trained and armed in the training camps located in Turkey’s border regions to the north of Syria and in Jordan’s border regions to the south of Syria.

Quoting the retired US Brigadier General Anthony Tata on December 21, Donald Trump tweeted: “General Anthony Tata, author, ‘Dark Winter.’ ‘I think the President is making the exact right move in Syria. All the geniuses who are protesting the withdrawal of troops from Syria are the same geniuses who cooked the books on ISIS intelligence and gave rise to ISIS.’”

Under the previous Obama administration, the evident policy in Syria was “regime change.” The Trump administration, however, looks at the crisis in Syria from an entirely different perspective because Donald Trump regards Islamic jihadists as a much graver threat to the security of the United States than Barack Obama.

In order to allay the concerns of Washington’s traditional allies in the Middle East, Israel in particular, the Trump administration conducted a few cruise missile strikes in Syria, but those isolated strikes were nothing more than a show of force to bring home the point that the newly elected President Donald Trump is an assertive and powerful president, but behind the scenes, President Trump has been willing to cooperate with Russia in Syria in order to defeat the Islamic jihadists who were portrayed as “moderate rebels” by the mainstream media.

Finally, up until now, Donald Trump was trying to appease the State and Defense department bureaucracies, but after the humiliating defeat in the US midterm elections and the clear hand of the American deep state and corporate media in it, Trump has apparently decided to play hardball. This is the reason why he has announced the withdrawal of 2000 American troops from Syria, and the decision to substantially scale back the number of US troops in Afghanistan is reportedly also in the offing.

Kashmir’s Savior and the Frontier’s Gandhi

There are only two illustrious South Asian leaders who never went to jail during their otherwise stellar political careers. One was the founder of Pakistan, Jinnah, and the other a crusader against corruption who has been given the sobriquet ‘Pakistan Khan’ by his cultist followers. Perceptive readers are already well aware of the reason why nobody can dare to arrest the latter, even if he lays a four-month-long siege to the paramount institutions of state and stops the state machinery from functioning.

Regarding the allegation levelled against Jinnah by Orientalist historians that he was an imperialist collaborator, it is so preposterous that it would be a waste of time trying to dispel the ludicrous accusation. Instead, I would implore the readers to allow me the liberty to scribble a tongue-in-cheek rant here.

It’s an incontestable fact that Jinnah, Iqbal and Sir Syed were imperialist collaborators who fell prey to the divide-and-rule policy of the British Raj. There were only two progressive Muslim leaders who joined forces with Mahatma Gandhi’s socialist and anti-imperialist Congress against the tyranny of the Raj. One was Sheikh Abdullah of Kashmir and the other was Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Bacha Khan) of Pashtunistan.

After the partition of British India, Sheikh Abdullah worked hand in glove with Pundit Nehru to make Muslim-majority Kashmir a part of secular Indian utopia. The Muslims of Kashmir trusted the charismatic messiah with their lives and the latter met their expectations by conniving with the Congress’ pundits. Today Kashmir is thriving and prospering under the suzerainty of India and the dynamic leadership of Sheikh Abdullah’s descendants, Farooq Abdullah and Omar Abdullah, the true representatives of Kashmiri Muslims.

Had it been up to the visionary and tactful Bacha Khan, he too would have made sure to make Pashtunistan a colony of India. However, a plebiscite was held on the eve of independence in the erstwhile North West Frontier Province; and regrettably, the gullible Pashtuns of the doomed province overwhelmingly voted to become part of an Islamist and reactionary Pakistan.

Let me clarify here that I am not against Bacha Khan and his Red Shirts, ‘Khudai Khidmatgar,’ movement, as such. It was a laudable achievement that he politically mobilised the Pashtuns for independence and enfranchisement. But I have doubts about his political acumen. From his bearing, he appeared like a simpleton who was given to whims and personal attachments. But the people that he was dealing with, Gandhi, Nehru and Patel, were shrewd politicians.

The astute leadership of Congress wheedled and coaxed Bacha Khan and Sheikh Abdullah to form a political alliance with the thinly veiled Hindu nationalist Congress against the interests of Pashtun and Kashmiri Muslims, whom the aforementioned leaders respectively represented. And the way I see it, it had less to do with any political convergence of ideas; rather, it was more about their personal bonding with the shrewd leadership of Congress.

Jinnah was a brash and forthright statesman who used to treat his party workers and associates as subordinates. And Pashtuns, as we all know, are given to ‘Pashtunwali’ (honour), courtesy and other such trappings of symbolic respect. Gandhi and Nehru struck a chord there with feigned cordiality and ensnared two leading Muslim luminaries of freedom struggle, hence striking a political marriage of convenience between the Congress and the Pashtun and Kashmiri nationalists.

In the end, Sheikh Abdullah legitimised the Indian occupation of Kashmir by becoming its first chief minister, though he was later imprisoned by none other than his good old friend, Pundit Nehru. But when Pakistan and, more importantly, the Kashmiri Muslims needed his leadership and guidance the most, he backstabbed them simply because of his personal friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru.

More to the point, in the British Indian context, the divide-and-rule policy originally meant that imperialists used this strategy to sow the seeds of dissension and communal hatred to prolong their tyrannical rule in India. However, some Indian historians later came up with the fancy notion that the colonial powers lent their support to the idea of creation of Pakistan in order to use the latter as a bulwark against communist influence in the region; this latter conspiracy theory is farthest from truth.

Firstly, the British imperialists took immense pride in creating a unified and cohesive British Indian army, and it’s a historical fact that the latter organisation was vehemently opposed to the division of the British Indian armed forces. It simply defies common sense that if the colonial power was apprehensive of the expanding influence of Soviet Union in the region; in that case, it would have preferred to leave behind a unified and strong India army, rather than two divided armies at loggerheads with each other.

Secondly, although Pakistan joined the Washington-led and anti-communist SEATO and CENTO alliances in the 1950s and it also fought America’s Jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s, but we must bear in mind that there were actually two power-centres of communism during the Cold War, i.e. the Soviet Bolshevism and the Chinese Maoism.

If the intention of the colonial powers was to use Pakistan as a bulwark against communist influence in the region, then how come Pakistan established such cordial relations with the communist China during the 1960s that it voted in favour of China’s membership into the United Nations in 1971, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto played a pivotal role in arranging Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

Fact of the matter is that both India and Pakistan had good relations with the Western powers during the Cold War. However, India had friendly ties with Soviet Union and adversarial relations with China, while Pakistan had adversarial relations with Soviet Union and friendly ties with China. The relations of India and Pakistan with the communist powers were based more on their national interests than on ideological lines.

The relatively modern Indian historians who came up with this fancy conspiracy theory have actually retrospectively applied the theory to the historical chain of events: that is, they conceived the theory after Pakistan joined the anti-communist alliances and after it played the role of Washington’s client state during the Soviet-Afghan Jihad. At the time of independence movement in 1940s, neither the Hindus nor the Muslims knew anything about the aftermath of their respective freedom struggles.