Is Pakistan the enemy?
Even in this age when “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is our foreign policy mantra (maybe it always was?) and Putin seems hell bent on returning everyone to the Cold War (or World War III?), Pakistan lurks as not a true friend and probably a die-hard enemy. I’ve said this many times before in these blog posts, but let me list the reasons yet again. You will see that I’m not just being paranoid. This country takes our aid and military help and basically uses it against us. Its duplicitous actions have a long history.
The most obvious and egregious sin of the Pakistani government (being Muslims, they should understand sin, right?) is how they support both al Qaeda and the Taliban. In an article in the Sunday (March 23) NY Times magazine, adapted from The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (scheduled to be released next month) and titled “What Pakistan Knew About bin Laden,” author and reporter Carlotta Gall presents damning evidence that ISI, the nefarious Pakistani intelligence agency, had a desk whose occupant was bin Laden’s handler. This confirms suspicions I’ve always had. No wonder bin Laden felt comfortable living only a few hundred yards from Pakistan’s top military academy.
Moreover, Gall’s article shows that both the Bush and Obama administrations, and, guilty by association, the CIA, are either traitors, completely incompetent, or dumb asses in their handling of the Afghan situation. It’s now clearly substantiated that Pakistan’s strategy all along “has been to make a show of cooperation with the American fight against terrorism while covertly abetting and even coordinating with the Taliban, Kashmiri and foreign Qaeda-linked militants.” In fact, ISI has worked with jihadist madrasas to help prepare fighters and suicide bombers to attack our forces in Afghanistan.
The latter should come as no surprise. Remember, the Saudis do the same thing. But, for Pakistan, it’s not quite the tight-rope act of Saudia Arabia. The ISI’s goal is jihad. It’s not clear that the Saudi princes want that to happen because the royal family should fear for their lives if radical and fundamentalist jihadists sweep the region clean of infidels—the heads of the Saudi princes would roll. But, for the Saudis, the U.S. has some excuse—their oil. That’s a deplorable excuse, of course, and probably just a bow to our allies in Europe. We can do just fine without either Russian or Saudi or Iranian oil and natural gas, but most countries of the E.U. addicted to them, to the point that European leaders are licking Putin’s boots.
The U.S. governments that have been involved in the Afghan War, in order to save face, have never stated that Pakistan supports terrorism. Obama quietly went after bin Laden because that was the only way he could do it. Pakistan hides both al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists, so it doesn’t officially allow the U.S. to pursue terrorists into their hideaways in the western part of the country, notably the Waziristan region, an area where the Taliban and al Qaeda devils are free to move around and have a good old time. Bush was no better, losing focus on Afghanistan altogether to go after Iraqi oil and avenge papa Bush. For the Afghan-Taliban problem, there is no oil, only opium poppies, so maybe the powers-that-be, our foreign policy dimwits in DC, just don’t give a damn about stopping the murder and mayhem. By doing so, they are insulting every person who died in 9/11 and every innocent Afghan and Pakistani who has lost his life in this crazy war.
Pakistan is more of a direct threat to Israel and the region than Iran. It’s also a direct threat to India. It shakes the nuclear stick at India, so, why worry about Iran’s ability to make nukes when Pakistan, a radical and jihadist Muslim state, already has them? Don’t be surprised if the ISI puts a nuke in Kabul. Don’t be surprised if a Pakistani nuke is responsible for blowing away Tel Aviv or Mumbai. The Pakistanis will stop at nothing, it seems. Nuclear proliferation in Pakistan was guaranteed by A. Q. Khan in Pakistan; no one did anything to stop him.
We’ll eventually pay the price. Pakistan has sufficient internal chaos to guarantee that those nukes will be deployed somewhere. The question is not if but when, in fact. The government is riddled with opposing factions, ISI being the strongest. Yet the official Pakistani goal is to make a deal with the Taliban and annex Afghanistan after weakening Karzai’s government, which doesn’t have the strength or competence to resist. Karzai knows this and probably has his exit strategy already planned (or multiple ones—you always need a Plan B). There’s every indication that Musharraf arranged the assassination of Bhutto. Gall writes: “As Bhutto had long warned, a conglomeration of opponents wanted her dead and were all linked in some way. They were the same forces behind the insurgency in Afghanistan: Taliban and Pakistani militant groups and al Qaeda, as well as the Pakistani military establishment, which included the top generals Musharrag and Kayani.” In this kind of chaos, who controls the nukes?
Does Pakistan have other problems beyond tyrannical governments and mind-numbing poverty? You bet! Freedom of religion is non-existent, for one, but this is not surprising in that region of the world. Even Israel has only one accepted religion, probably a good enough reason for the existence of an independent Palestinian state. While the Israelis seem to respect women’s rights (except among the ultra-Orthodox, of course, even here in this country), the persecution of women and female children seems to be the common denominator for this part of the world, and Pakistan is an extreme case. It’s not just that Pakistan harbors the Taliban, notorious for its attacks against women and female children (the male children fill the madrasas). Pakistan also plays the duplicitous and hypocritical game here. The Susan B. Anthony’s of this country, of neighboring India, and all other Muslim states, including Saudi Arabia, are either dead or in prison.
Like the Bible, the Koran says many things. Some things are universal moral truths. Others are at best fables and fairy tales. You can read either religious tome and support any cause you want, from the Crusades (the Christians’ jihad) to the murder and maiming of innocent women and children (al Qaeda and the Taliban’s jihad). Radical fundamentalists represent only a small percentage of people subscribing to the dogmas of the three great religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but they seem to cause havoc in this world in inverse proportion to their numbers. Most people just want to live in peace, expecting to be left alone and willing to let others do the same. But fundamentalism is a mental illness where domination and abuse of other human beings is the underlying goal.
Can I say any good things about Pakistan? No! At least, not about the government and its fundamentalist or power-hungry sectors. Maybe, with time, its good people will rise and exterminate the evil contained within its borders. But right now these people are weak and ineffective, so the evil is like a plague upon the land. We should seal up the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan, quarantine them together, and make it understood that they’d better behave within that quarantined area…or else. And then have the patience to wait for sanity to return to these lands. In short, if they want to live in the Middle Ages, so be it!
And so it goes….
