Pepe Escobar...

The American Taliban Are Coming

The Obama administration, the US intelligence machine and US public opinion also refuse to acknowledge facts on faraway grounds at their own peril. The drone war over Pakistan - covert, mercenary and a mix of both - is considered not only by Pashtuns but by most of Pakistani public opinion for what it is: a US-conducted war - an extra-judicial, systematic mass killing of "unknown", "invisible" people. The Obama administration is not even acknowledging whether it is revaluating this strategy.

That's because they are not. The timing of the failed Times Square bombing could not have been more convenient - just when the Obama administration was stepping up the drone war in Pakistan, "secretly" allowing the Central Intelligence Agency last week to attack even larger batches of "unknown", invisible, low-level Pashtun fighters (with the accompanying collateral damage; over 400 civilians killed in 2009 alone). Even though Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, a Pentagon darling, will not emit a peep, this will be largely seen by Pakistani public opinion for what it is: a renewed declaration of war.

The age of the virtual jihadi nomad is a go. Forget the Osamas; now it's the time for the Shahzads. Illegal, covert drone wars are bound to spawn - spin or no spin - a terrible, absurd and deadly string of blowback. Lookout, the American Taliban are coming.

Ahmadinejad's position on the swap - which is the position of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as well as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps - developed just as the Iranian president, in New York, publicly refused the US/European Union tactic of always bundling together nuclear weapons and use of nuclear energy in the same discussion. In a call that rang across the developing world, Ahmadinejad pulled no punches. He denounced the Security Council and the IAEA as being manipulated against non-nuclear states and expressly demanded the world to cease development of nuclear weapons and to ban production, storage, proliferation, maintenance and use of nuclear weapons.

Looks like the UN apparently was paying attention. Apparently. On Wednesday, the five permanent Security Council members, in a joint statement, supported the idea of making the Middle East a nuclear-weapons-free zone. That would let the (nuclear) cat out of the bag - forcing Israel to declare itself a nuclear power and join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The chances of this happening under a Benjamin Netanyahu government are slim.

In fact, Washington paid only lip service to this nuclear-free wishful thinking because it is avidly courting the Arab vote to back up a Security Council fourth round of sanctions against Iran. It remains to be seen whether Arab states, mostly US clients, will be duped by this. They do want a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East for real, Israel included.

The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) got together in the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, on Thursday with a bang. After meeting Chinese President Hu Jintao, and once again condemning an "asymmetric, dysfunctional globalization", Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was at his ebullient best: "A new global economic geography has been born." Well, not quite. Not yet.

Anyone across the world fed up with Somali pirates in Zegna suits disrupting global trade is interested in what the BRICs are (potentially) up to. The world's largest developing countries, bound to be the engine of the global economy for the next four decades, are essentially up to what then Russian president Vladimir Putin outlined in his famous speech in Munich in 2007; forming a new global consensus. Call it the rise of the periphery (the "Second" and "Third" worlds). Call it the dawn of the post-Washington consensus.

It's nothing short of ironic that major players in the current global financial architecture are being forced to acknowledge that the global "economic and political tectonic plates are shifting". No, that was not Lula, but the George W Bush-appointed head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick. Zoellick even felt compelled to deliver the coup de grace to the patronizing concept of "Third World".

Is the World Bank finally waking up to the real world(s)? The BRICs met in Brazil roughly one week before the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual love fest in Washington. The old order may resent it, but the BRIC voice is and will continue to be ever more insistent. No wonder; they are shelling more funds to the IMF, thus they should have more say on where the money is going. They want an antithesis of Wall Street: transparency. The 2008 financial crisis - which by no means is over - was unleashed by a Wall Street-biased financial casino.