- John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (1866)

Hillary Clinton’s recent ‘charm offensive’ against Pakistan began with a bang, though it wasn’t quite the sort of ‘hit’ she would have wanted or wished for, it being her first visit to the country as Secretary of State.

Within hours of her arrival in the Pakistani capital Islamabad, a busy market street in the north-west city of Peshawar was rocked by the deadliest car bomb blast so far for 2009, killing 105 and wounding at least 200 others; most of the dead were women and children.

Similar reprisal attacks by militants have killed hundreds of innocents in recent weeks, ever since the Pakistan Government was arm-twisted by the Obama Administration to have the reluctant and unenthusiastic Pakistani army crackdown hard on the Taliban in South Waziristan, considered to be their main militant sanctuary outside Afghanistan.

From that point on the charm was, if anything, only conspicuous by its absence. Not to be outdone, the normally feisty Hillary soon countered with an undiplomatic ‘bang’ of her own, reminding journalists at an interview in Lahore that "al-Qaeda has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002 . . . I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to", then quickly added an equivocal jab to the jaw with "Maybe that’s the case; maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know."

That Clinton ‘outburst’ may have been originally intended for utterance couched in more diplomatic parlance at private pow-wows with Pakistani leaders. The media hype about charm aside, her visit was specifically intended to convey US concerns over increasing - and audaciously successful - Taliban attacks. [It’s a safe wager that American ‘concerns’ focused not on the security of the Pakistani populace but on the security of that nation’s cache of nuclear weaponry, the euphemistic ‘collateral damage’ now considered commonplace in modern and allegedly precision-warfare anyway.]

The obvious has not been noticed, or deliberately ignored by the Pentagon’s top brass advising the Commander-in-Chief. As Tariq Ali wrote in CounterPunch magazine: "While the farce plays out in Kabul, in neighbouring Pakistan the situation has become more deadly. The Zardari government (effectively run by the US Ambassador Anne W. Patterson) has ordered the Pakistan Army to wipe out the Taliban in South Waziristan near the Afghan border. This, too, will fail. The result will be a bitter legacy, fuelling hatred and revenge attacks in the region and, ominously, creating further tensions inside the Pakistan Army. Incapable of understanding that it is the Afghan war’s spill-over into Pakistan that has exacerbated the crisis in Pakistan, the Obama administration’s directives can only make it worse."

At the end of her 3-day visit, Hillary in frustration threw caution to the winds and directly took her message to the people of Pakistan in televised appearances in Islamabad. McClatchy Newspapers reported that after three days of encounters with America-bashing Pakistanis - who rejected her contention that the US and Pakistan face a common enemy, Clinton’s ominous conclusion: "We’re not getting through to the Pakistanis."

Prominent women and tribesmen from the North West Frontier Province delivered the same hostile message that Hillary heard over the two preceding days from students and journalists: Pakistanis aren’t ready to endorse American friendship despite an eight-year-old anti-terrorism alliance between the countries and a multibillion-dollar new US aid package. "We are fighting a war that is imposed on us. It’s not our war. It is your war," journalist Asma Shirazi told Clinton during the women’s meeting. "You had one 9-11. We are having daily 9-11s in Pakistan."

In July, Pakistani officials complained to the Obama administration that a US offensive against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan was driving more militants into the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez, writing in the New York Times, claimed the Pakistanis told the US they did not have "enough troops to deploy to Baluchistan to take on the Taliban without denuding its border with its archenemy, India." Pakistani officials still consider India their top priority and the Taliban militants a problem that can be negotiated, wrote Schmitt and Perlez. "In the long term, the Taliban in Afghanistan may even remain potential allies for Pakistan, as they were in the past, once the United States leaves . . ." [That’s truly light at the end of the tunnel. Problem solved. Q.E.D.]

Bruce P. Cameron, writing on the Consortiumnews website, noted that the core challenge to Obama’s Afghan War may not be the Taliban, nor even al-Qaeda, but rather Pakistan’s shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), with its dual loyalties when it comes to fighting Islamic extremists. "During the long-simmering dispute with India over Kashmir, ISI-backed Pakistani Taliban were deployed to bloody up Pakistan’s bitter rival. In the mid-1990s, the ISI-organized Afghan Taliban were used to establish an Afghan regime closely tied to Pakistan.

"Those groups of ISI-trained militants are now at the centre of the Af-Pak conflicts, with the Afghan Taliban fighting US and NATO forces in Afghanistan and the Pakistani Taliban seeking to dislodge the Pakistani government, which the ISI ostensibly serves."

Hillary could have saved herself a wholly counter-productive trip had she devoted time to watch NBC’s airing on October 11 of its roundtable discussion Meet the Press featuring the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers, Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Carl Levin, and retired General Barry McCaffrey. The show’s moderator, David Gregory, gave voice to the crucial question that must surely have been uppermost in Hillary’s own mind: ‘Can we beat the Taliban?’

Answered General McCaffrey, "Well, I, I think in 10 years of $5 billion-a-month and with a significant front-end security component, we can leave an Afghan national army and police force and a viable government and roads and universities. But it’s a time constraint that we can’t change things in 18 to 24 months. So I think we got to lower expectations."

How does one ‘lower expectations’ if one can’t beat the Taliban? Maybe the US armed forces have been taught some novel way of tricking the enemy that the world’s non-military populace is unaware of and can only guess at. [Play possum, perhaps?]

The fiscal implications of McCaffrey’s fanciful daydream of 10 years to ‘lower expectations’ is truly staggering: $5 Billion a month means $60 Billion a year and $600 Billion in total which American taxpayers need to cough up – and all because of the Pentagon’s failure to beat the Taliban! [Costly yet cheap when one considers that the US Federal Reserve busted over $700 Billion of borrowed money to save the too-big-to-fail behemoths of Wall Street in just 10 months starting September 2008.]

What are Obama’s options?

With the Pakistani military still playing its old double game – and still obsessed about India – Obama has unenviably little choice. Any attempt at isolating Pakistan could have unthinkable consequences: a coup against President, Zardari, with a pro-Taliban military officer taking over.

Writing in TruthDig, William Pfaff noted that Pakistan was seen as the great danger in the region, with erratic politics and nuclear weapons—and an active Islamist revolt thereby having the potential to create, in the words of Obama’s adviser Bruce Riedel, "the most serious threat to the United States since the end of the cold war."