The US/UK academic and media elevation of Hafiz Sayeed, as well as his casting in a politician's role by the TSPA/ISI, fit perfectly with a theory I advanced some months ago on the India-US thread:
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 3#p1313293
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 8#p1314628
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 6#p1314636
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 4#p1314664
[The "Arab Spring"] is a situation partially created and wholly taken advantage of by the West to consolidate the strength of the Muslim Brotherhood, newly adopted as an Anglo-American Sunni Islamist proxy, in North Africa and West Asia. The MB has been chosen because ideologically it is at odds with Al-Qaeda/Wahhabandism/Salafism.
The collateral threat to India lies in the fact that these experiments in the Arab world will undoubtedly be replicated in Pakistan. The current Pakistani Islamist leadership of the TSPA and ISI is overwhelmingly pro Al-Qaeda/Wahhabandi/Salafi. If this bunch can be replaced with another group of equally vicious Islamists, equally anti-India, but pro-Muslim Brotherhood and anti Al-Qaeda/Wahhabandi/Salafi... it should be clear why this would represent a win for the West, and a serious threat to India.
To recap briefly, after 9/11, the grand thesis in Washington was that many Muslim countries were led by oppressive and corrupt dictators/monarchies, some of whom were anti-US but many of whom were allies of the US; and that anti-US Islamists were taking advantage of popular disaffection with US-backed tyrants to strengthen militant fronts like Al-Qaeda etc. Different groups in the Washington establishment espoused two alternative paths to deal with Muslim countries.
1) The Bush Neoconservatives wanted to invade certain Muslim nations with anti-US regimes, depose their dictators (making an example of them), fight Islamist groups with American forces on foreign soil, and eventually re-model the invaded countries under pro-Western and apparently "democratic" regimes.
The problem with this, as we saw in Iraq:
a) Nation building is expensive and time-consuming. The initial mission was under-manned and overconfident. As time went on, the US electorate lost faith in the process, and were further aggravated by domestic economic collapse to withdraw any support for the war. Hence, given a half-a$$ed effort, an ambiguous result was the best that could be achieved.
b) More importantly: the balance of power post-invasion was one in which the masses were anti-US, and the clergy (who control the Muslim masses) were also anti-US. All Islamist groups were anti-US, and in fact, competing with one another to be more "pure" (hence, inflict more damage on the US). This allowed no scope for leveraging the existing factional splits between different Islamist groups, for a very long time. Eventually, when the Sunni Triangle was pacified, it was only because Muslim Brotherhood (MB) aligned Islamist militias were finally co-opted by the US against Wahhab/Salafi militias (al Zarqawi etc.) But the general disposition of US plus its non-Islamist (Chalabi, Alawi etc.) proxies vs. all Islamist groups, made the process of co-option very difficult.
2) Having learned these lessons, the Obama administration has come out with the other approach: a Clinton-Wilsonian approach of backing putsches by some (MB-friendly) Islamists against existing regimes. Their calculation is that MB-friendly Islamist regimes will have at least short-term support among the general public (because of disaffection with the old regime), and long-term support among substantial sections of the clergy; plus, they will have a vested interest in fighting against the anti-US Wahhab/Salafi political groups and clergy in their respective nations. As an added bonus, these MB-pasand regimes are likely to be anti-Iran for sectarian reasons.
Advantages of this:
a) It allows you to associate yourself with highly visible signs of public protest, because of legitimate popular disaffection with the old regime. Facebook, Twitter, thousands of people in the public square. It looks like a "good cause" mission of spreading demokrajy... so the American people, fed appropriate narratives by the media, will back it more readily than they would back an invasion.
b) It also looks less like "intervention" and more like "Muslims determining their own fate." The US can pull strings from behind the scenes without putting boots on the ground. Hence, the international community of US allies, NATO etc. are more likely to get behind this sort of operation rather than an Iraq-style invasion.
c) Ultimately the Muslim nations concerned remain Islamist totalitarian countries, and hence immune to progress, prosperity and independence... they are still capable of being controlled through colonial machinations.
Remember that the Clinton-Wilsonians were the original architects of "Color Revolutions" in Europe, Central Asia and Africa throughout the 90s. This is merely an extension of that operating procedure to Muslim countries.
By and large the experiment has succeeded in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia, of whom all have deposed questionable dictators and replaced them with MB-friendly regimes. (Interestingly, Libya was the only case in which the MB lost elections by a small margin... one wonders if the Benghazi episode was payback for "promises not kept?") In Syria, both the Iraqi and the Egyptian MB are backing the guerrillas against Assad. GCC have resigned themselves to going along with the program and jockeying for as much political space as available.
Importantly, a nexus for many of the strings being pulled is in Istanbul, where the Gulenists have played the role of benign, US-approved godfather to all the MB-pasand movements elsewhere in the region.
And Pakistan?
To implement the same program in Pakistan, the West needs a committed Islamist who is not a Wahhabandi. In my earlier set of posts, I had thought the West might try to elevate someone connected to the MB-linked Hizb Ut Tahrir.
I was wrong on that detail. The man they seem to have chosen is Hafiz Sayeed. JuD is an Ahle Hadees group, and has been on the backfoot recently, losing cadres to the Wahhabandi groups fighting in AfPak. Ahle Hadees aren't directly or visibly connected with the MB as far as I know. However, through antecedents in the Khliafat movement they do have connections to the Gulenist Islamists in Turkey... once again, underscoring the potential role of Istanbul as the lynchpin of Washington's new Muslim strategy.
Elahi Ameen
