The U.S. is pressuring the Pakistani government to launch a military operation in North Waziristan in tandem with the marked escalation of drone attacks there, something paralleling the Pakistani army offensive in the Swat Valley in May of last year that led to the displacement of three million civilians.
In addition, the Pentagon has recently announced that U.S. and NATO forces will be stationed at a military base in the capital of Pakistan's Balochistan province. [5]
Washington is now pushing to expand special forces operations in Pakistan's tribal areas, supplementing CIA drone strikes and NATO helicopter attacks in the region.
Until now, "The main role in a secret war on Pakistan territory has belonged to the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA has operated armed drones to hunt down insurgent leaders and also organized a number of secret missions carried out by Afghan operatives, known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams."
The introduction of American ground forces - in the words of an American official, "We've never been as close as we are now to getting the go-ahead to go across" - would "open a new front in the war that is becoming more and more unpopular in America.
"It also could ruin relations with...Pakistan, especially considering the risk of civilian casualties." [6]
However, civilian deaths on both sides of the Khyber Pass and the destabilization of nuclear Pakistan are matters of small importance to American and NATO geostrategists, who nurture grand designs for Central and South Asia.
A recent Chinese analysis put the matter this way:
"Though it started long ago, the game is still on. There are only more players with more pieces moving and moved on a bigger board, all for a newer rendition of the Great Game.
"Whichever way people prefer to describe the game - geostrategy or geopolitics - there has been a center-piece: interest in a geography that is important to world powers, past and present; that is, in whatever way these powers deem it as important.
"Sitting at one end of the board is the same old player, known as the Russian Empire, while at the other end now is an alliance orchestrated not any more by the British Empire but rather by the Americans and the military coalition they dominate, known as NATO." [7]
Indian analyst and former diplomat M. K. Bhadrakumar stated in a recent article entitled "NATO weaves South Asian web" that after its summit in Lisbon, Portugal last month NATO "is well on the way to transforming into a global political-military role" and "is by far today the most powerful military and political alliance in the world."
Speaking about long-term U.S. and NATO strategy in Asia, he added:
"It is within the realm of possibility that NATO would at a future date deploy components of the US missile defense system in Afghanistan. Ostensibly directed against nearby 'rogue states', the missile defense system will challenge the Chinese strategic capability." [8]
Regarding the long-planned agreement on constructing a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) natural gas pipeline concluded earlier this month [9], the author said:
"TAPI is the finished product of the US invasion of Afghanistan. It consolidates NATO's political and military presence in the strategic high plateau that overlooks Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and China. TAPI provides a perfect setting for the alliance's future projection of military power for 'crisis management' in Central Asia.
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