Duplicitous Pakistan – friend or foe?
Before Libya and their insane and murderous dictator started grabbing all the headlines, the Pakistani government’s treatment of Mr. Raymond Davis was news. First, the media in our country lamented that the Pakistanis arrested someone with diplomatic immunity. Second, we suddenly saw an about face when reporters discovered that Mr. Davis is really a contractor with the C.I.A. To these mentally challenged members of the Fourth Estate, I say: so what? Nearly every embassy and consulate of every industrialized nation maintains spies working undercover as diplomats.
Israel, for example, a “friendly country,” has spied on us and to this day is trying to give Mr. Pollard a hero’s welcome in Tel Aviv. Diplomatic missions are famous for hiding James Bond types. One of the villains in my novel The Midas Bomb hides in the Venezuelan consulate in New York City. Our Mr. Davis is just another spy in a long tradition of spies, but he was not spying on Pakistanis per se—he was spying on Pakistanis in Lahore who hide, aid, and sympathize with the Taliban and al Qaeda. Perhaps he’s even called in some UAVs to take out nests of these jackals.
So be it! This is the real war on terror. The Islamic jihadists that are comfortably hiding in Pakistan are murderers that represent a cancer in human society that should be extirpated. I am a progressive liberal but I don’t think turning the other cheek to terrorists is going to do us any good. I also am tired of coddling Pakistan. They are duplicitous—with friends like these, the U.S. is in big trouble.
Just like the Saudis with their duplicitous sponsorship of the madrasas, Pakistani leaders hold out their hands for billions of dollars in aid (that’s your money, Mr. Taxpayer) while giving the Taliban and al Qaeda safe haven and financial support. It irks the hell out of me to think that some Pakistani bureaucrat is walking regally through his ornate government building, rich, fat and sassy from U.S. aid, laughing and enjoying the joke he and his cohorts are playing on the naive American infidels.
Pakistan is a particularly damaging example of how stupid American foreign policy is. Do you think the Pakistanis are actually helping us? If they were, there would be no question about Mr. Davis. In fact, there would be no need for Mr. Davis, at least not in Pakistan. The only reason that the Pakistanis are holding him is to keep their own unruly jihadists at bay. The weaklings in the government, those same fat and sassy bureaucrats, think that releasing him, as required by international law, would light a fuse. These weaklings also want to reserve the option of using him as a sacrificial lamb—better he be the one torn limb from limb than them. This is a government where immorality runs deep, a government out to save its own skin from a population that is completely aware of and often supports its duplicity.
I would not be surprised if high government officials were taking kickbacks from both sides of the political spectrum and from both sides of the Pakistan/Afghan border. Opium money undoubtedly plays a role in their politics and the economy, just as it does in Afghanistan. These duplicitous mad dog bureaucrats are our enemies, not our friends, and much more dangerous than the openly defiant Taliban. I would ignore their protests about UAV flights and send in special forces or even a battalion or two to save Mr. Davis. The rest of the world understands the duplicity of Pakistan. Why can’t we?
I’m not one to condone everything the C.I.A. historically has done. Some of our problems in that part of the world are definitely due to the C.I.A.’s hobnobbing with the Taliban in order to make the Soviets lives miserable, for example. I also can’t tolerate the methods of torture that are often used as we lower ourselves to the same level of the jackals we fight. But I’m a firm believer that special forces and clandestine operations represent the right tools in this war against the Islamic jihadists, not boots on the ground corresponding to conventional military. Regular soldiers in this situation only lack a red uniform to be the sitting ducks that the British were in the American Revolution—they are not the right people to fight this battle.
Yes, our silly media hounds tend to make a collective gasp now whenever the C.I.A. is mentioned. The U.S. media commonly paints special forces and clandestine operations as something reprehensible that is anathema to a nation steeped in liberty and freedom. Reporters should get their heads screwed on straight (a daunting task, I realize). I will always remember some reporter a few years back interviewing a Taliban fighter and stupidly asking him whether the man would try to kill the reporter if he were free. You know what the answer is, but the idiotic reporter seemed surprised at its vehemence. I know for some it’s hard to imagine this much hate, this much evil, taking hold of a human being. But this is what we’re fighting—absolutely insane hate and evil. Any group or a country that supports this kind of insanity is not only part of the problem, it is the enemy. The country of Pakistan is our enemy.
What about all those nukes they possess? What about all those nukes the North Koreans possess? Enemy states have nukes. Get used to it. More will with time. The Third World sees owning nukes as a rite of passage to international respect. Détente is multidimensional nowadays. Don’t worry, Pakistan will use their nukes against India or Israel before they attack us. These latter two countries will stop Pakistan dead cold with their own nuclear arsenal long before Pakistan can reach Europe, let alone us. I have argued before that an effective foreign policy with Pakistan could be sealing its borders and make them stew in their own juices. They have nothing to offer to the U.S., especially friendship. And we have everything to gain by flipping them the proverbial middle finger—diplomatically, of course.
Epilogue: I can’t resist blasting the media yet again. Our media today is extremely homogenized in the sense that it’s all sensationalist. That’s so, of course, because it’s driven by corporate greed. ABC is owned by Disney, NBC by Comcast, and Murdoch probably owns everything else. In this internet world, where few care about TV news or newspapers, desperation has set in for the traditional media. The conventional wisdom is that sensationalism makes money. This might even be true, but it’s pathetic. Reporters are aghast when dealing with the C.I.A., D.H.S., I.C.E., and so forth, because government is bad, don’t you know. And all these agencies are run by terrible people, don’t you know. And who they move against are all innocent victims, don’t you know. It’s all black and white, no shades of gray, don’t you know. Give me a break!
The most recent egregious example of media sensationalism was Tuesday at noon. I turned on Channel 7, the local ABC affiliate here in the tri-state area, expecting to hear the breaking news about the Somali pirates killing the rich missionaries (sadly, neither their bibles nor the Navy could save them from their own stupidity). Instead, the Channel 7 news team spent the first fifteen minutes bloviating about Carmelo Anthony, the new basketball player for the Knicks (they traded 4/5 of the present first string for him). I don’t know who’s worse—the news media that has become so sensationalist, or the viewers, listeners, and readers who demand this kind of superficial and sensationalist reporting. If Mr. Carmelo appears on the front page of the N.Y. Times Wednesday morning, I just may cancel my subscription. (He didn’t—the media was too busy counting Mr. Khadafy’s murderous body count in Libya.)
