{"id":217643,"date":"2022-08-08T12:01:21","date_gmt":"2022-08-08T11:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=217643"},"modified":"2022-08-06T05:55:01","modified_gmt":"2022-08-06T04:55:01","slug":"how-a-missile-in-kabul-connects-to-a-speaker-in-taipei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/08\/how-a-missile-in-kabul-connects-to-a-speaker-in-taipei\/","title":{"rendered":"How a Missile in Kabul Connects to a Speaker in Taipei"},"content":{"rendered":"

3 Aug 2022 – Washington\u2019s hard power display of taking out Al-Qaeda\u2019s Al-Zawahiri will not be reciprocated by Beijing over Pelosi\u2019s provocative visit to Taiwan. It does however, definitively bury the decades-long era of cooperative US-Chinese relations.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo Credit: The Cradle<\/p><\/div>\n

This is the way the \u201cGlobal War on Terror\u201d (GWOT) ends, over and over again: not with a bang, but a whimper.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Two Hellfire R9-X missiles launched from a MQ9 Reaper drone on the balcony of a house in Kabul. The target was Ayman Al-Zawahiri with a $25 million bounty on his head. The once invisible leader of \u2018historic\u2019 Al-Qaeda since 2011, is finally terminated.<\/p>\n

All of us who spent years of our lives, especially throughout the 2000s, writing about and tracking Al-Zawahiri know how US \u2018intel\u2019 played every trick in the book \u2013 and outside the book \u2013 to find him. Well, he never exposed himself on the balcony of a house, much less in Kabul.<\/p>\n

Another disposable asset<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why now? Simple. Not useful anymore \u2013 and way past his expiration date. His fate was sealed as a tawdry foreign policy \u2018victory\u2019 \u2013 the remixed Obama \u2018Osama bin Laden moment\u2019 that won\u2019t even register across most of the Global South. After all, a perception reigns that George W. Bush\u2019s GWOT has long metastasized into the \u201crules-based,\u201d actually \u201ceconomic sanctions-based\u201d international order.<\/p>\n

Cue to 48 hours later, when hundreds of thousands across the west were glued to the screen of flighradar24.com (until the website was hacked), tracking \u201cSPAR19\u201d \u2013 the US Air Force jet carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi \u2013 as it slowly crossed Kalimantan from east to west, the Celebes Sea, went northward parallel to the eastern Philippines, and then made a sharp swing westwards towards Taiwan, in a spectacular waste of jet fuel to evade the South China Sea.<\/p>\n

No \u201cPearl Harbor moment\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now compare it with hundreds of millions of Chinese who are not on Twitter but on Weibo, and a leadership in Beijing that is impervious to western-manufactured pre-war, post-modern hysteria.<\/p>\n

Anyone who understands Chinese culture knew there would never be a \u201cmissile on a Kabul balcony\u201d moment over Taiwanese airspace. There would never be a replay of the perennial neocon wet dream: a \u201cPearl Harbor moment.\u201d That\u2019s simply not the Chinese way.<\/p>\n

The day after, as the narcissist Speaker, so proud of accomplishing her stunt, was awarded the Order of Auspicious Clouds for her promotion of bilateral US-Taiwan relations, the Chinese Foreign Minister issued a sobering comment: the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland is a historical inevitability.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how you focus, strategically, in the long game.<\/p>\n

What happens next had already been telegraphed, somewhat hidden in a Global Times report<\/a>. Here are the two key points:<\/p>\n

Point 1: \u201cChina will see it as a provocative action permitted by the Biden administration rather than a personal decision made by Pelosi.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s exactly what President Xi Jinping had personally told the teleprompt-reading White House tenant during a tense phone call last week. And that concerns the ultimate red line.<\/p>\n

Xi is now reaching the exact same conclusion<\/em>\u00a0reached by Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year: the United States is \u201cnon-agreement capable,\u201d and there\u2019s no point in expecting it to respect diplomacy and\/or rule of law in international relations.<\/p>\n

Point 2 concerns the consequences, reflecting a consensus among top Chinese analysts that mirrors the consensus at the Politburo: \u201cThe Russia-Ukraine crisis has just let the world see the consequence of pushing a major power into a corner\u2026 China will steadily speed up its process of reunification and declare the end of US domination of the world order.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chess, not checkers<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Sinophobic matrix predictably dismissed Xi\u2019s reaction to the fact on the ground \u2013 and in the skies \u2013 in Taiwan, complete with rhetoric exposing the \u201cprovocation by American reactionaries\u201d and the \u201cuncivilized campaign of the imperialists.\u201d<\/p>\n

This may be seen as Xi playing Chairman Mao. He may have a point, but the rhetoric is pro forma. The crucial fact is that Xi was personally humiliated by Washington and so was the Communist Party of China (CPC), a major loss of face \u2013 something that in Chinese culture is unforgivable. And all that compounded with a US tactical victory.<\/p>\n

So the response will be inevitable, and it will be classic Sun Tzu: calculated, precise, tough, long-term and strategic \u2013 not tactical. That takes time because Beijing is not ready yet in an array of mostly technological domains. Putin had to wait years for Russia to act decisively. China\u2019s time will come.<\/p>\n

For now, what\u2019s clear is that as much as with Russia-US relations last February, the Rubicon has been crossed in the US-China sphere.<\/p>\n

The price of collateral damage<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Central Bank of Afghanistan bagged a paltry $40 million<\/a> in cash as \u2018humanitarian aid\u2019 soon after that missile on a balcony in Kabul.<\/p>\n

So that was the price of the Al-Zawahiri operation, intermediated by the currently US-aligned Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). So cheap.<\/p>\n

The MQ-9 Reaper drone carrying the two Hellfire R9X that killed Al-Zawahiri had to fly over Pakistani airspace<\/a> \u2013 taking off from a US base in the Persian Gulf, traversing the Arabian Sea, and flying over Balochistan to enter Afghanistan from the south. The Americans may have also got human intelligence as a bonus.<\/p>\n

A 2003 deal, according to which Islamabad facilitates air corridors for US military flights, may have expired with the American\u00a0withdrawal debacle<\/a> last August, but could always be revived.<\/p>\n

No one should expect a deep dive investigation on what exactly the ISI \u2013 historically very close to the Taliban \u2013 gave to Washington on a silver platter.<\/p>\n

Dodgy dealings<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cue to an intriguing phone call last week between the all-powerful Chief of Staff of the Pakistani Army, Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, and US deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. Bajwa was lobbying for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to release a crucial loan at the soonest, otherwise Pakistan will default on its foreign debt.<\/p>\n

Were deposed former Prime Minister Imran Khan still in power, he would never have allowed that phone call.<\/p>\n

The plot thickens, as Al-Zawahiri\u2019s Kabul digs in a posh neighborhood is owned by a close advisor to Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the \u201cterrorist\u201d (US-defined) Haqqani network and currently Taliban Interior Minister. The Haqqani network, needless to add, was always very cozy with the ISI.<\/p>\n

And then, three months ago, we had the head of ISI, Lieutenant General Nadeem Anjum, meeting with Biden\u2019s National Security Advisor \u00a0Jake Sullivan in Washington \u2013 allegedly to get their former, joint, covert, counter-terrorism machinery back on track.<\/p>\n

Once again, the only question revolves around the terms of the \u201coffer you can\u2019t refuse\u201d \u2013\u00a0and that may be connected to IMF relief. Under these circumstances, Al-Zawahiri was just paltry collateral damage.<\/p>\n

Sun Tzu deploys his six blades<\/strong><\/p>\n

Following Speaker Pelosi\u2019s caper in Taiwan, collateral damage is bound to multiply like the blades of a R9-X missile.<\/p>\n

The first stage is the People\u2019s Liberation Army (PLA) already having engaged in live fire drills, with\u00a0massive shelling in the direction of the Taiwan Strait out of Fujian province.<\/p>\n

The first sanctions are on too, against two Taiwanese funds. Export of sable to Taiwan is forbidden; sable is an essential commodity for the electronics industry \u2013 so that will ratchet up the pain dial in high-tech sectors of the global economy.<\/p>\n

Chinese CATL, the world\u2019s largest fuel cell and lithium-ion battery maker, is indefinitely postponing the building of a massive $5 billion, 10,000-employee factory that would manufacture batteries for electric vehicles across North America, supplying Tesla and Ford among others.<\/p>\n

So the Sun Tzu maneuvering ahead will essentially concentrate on a progressive economic blockade of Taiwan, the imposition of a partial no-fly zone, severe restrictions of maritime traffic, cyber warfare, and the Big Prize: inflicting pain on the US economy.<\/p>\n

The War on Eurasia<\/strong><\/p>\n

For Beijing, playing the long game means the acceleration of the process involving an array of nations across Eurasia and beyond, trading in commodities and manufactured products in their own currencies. They will be progressively testing a new system that will see the advent of a BRICS+\/SCO\/Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) basket of currencies, and in the near future, a new reserve currency.<\/p>\n

The Speaker\u2019s escapade was concomitant to the definitive burial of the \u201cwar on terror\u201d cycle and its metastasis into the \u201cwar on Eurasia\u201d era.<\/p>\n

It may have unwittingly provided the last missing cog to turbo-charge the complex machinery of the Russia-China strategic partnership. That\u2019s all there is to know about the \u2018strategic\u2019 capability of the US political ruling class. And this time no missile on a balcony will be able to erase the new era.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at <\/em>Asia Times and<\/em> columnist for<\/em> Consortium News and<\/em> Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he\u2019s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. He is the author of <\/em>Globalistan<\/a> (2007),<\/em> Red Zone Blues<\/a> (2007), <\/em>Obama Does Globalistan<\/a> (2009), <\/em>Empire of Chaos<\/a> (2014) and <\/em>2030<\/a> (2015), all by Nimble Books. Pepe was contributing editor to <\/em>The Empire and The Crescent and<\/em> Tutto in Vendita in Italy and is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thecradle.co<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3 Aug 2022 – Washington\u2019s hard power display of taking out Al-Qaeda\u2019s Al-Zawahiri will not be reciprocated by Beijing over Pelosi\u2019s provocative visit to Taiwan. It does however, definitively bury the decades-long era of cooperative US-Chinese relations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":217644,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[93,2753,703,2905,244,133,1126,1050,112,278,2064,1148,961,70,2686,492,2534],"class_list":["post-217643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-afghanistan","tag-agent-provocateur","tag-al-qaeda","tag-ayman-al-zawahiri","tag-china","tag-cia","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-pentagon","tag-russia","tag-south-china-sea","tag-taiwan","tag-ukraine","tag-usa","tag-war-of-terror","tag-war-on-terror","tag-wwiii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}