Shocking revelations from the NYT: the government of Pakistan doesn't like the United States of America.
Mullen Asserts Pakistani Role in Attack on U.S. Embassy
Pakistan’s intelligence agency aided insurgents who attacked the embassy in Kabul last week, said Adm. Mike Mullen, the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Who could have guessed from the way they played so fair with us in the little matter of their putting Osama bin Laden up right next to their military academy?
But the point is that we must continue to engage with Pakistan because they are the front door to the real prize: Afghanistan, with its strategically crucial resources of gravel, scree, unbridged torrents, furious holy men, gay warlords, and Pashtun proverbs, such as "When the flood waters reach your chin, put your son beneath your feet."
Also, if we get bored with Afghanistan, just think of what that will do to the credibility of our attempts to project hegemony over Somalia and Yemen. And what about the fate of the Kerguelen Islands?
While you waste your time thinking about college football, there are men out there in the think tanks worrying for you about the real Great Game.
While you waste your time thinking about college football, there are men out there in the think tanks worrying for you about the real Great Game.
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27 comments:
"When the floodwaters reach your chin, put your son beneath your feet."
I am ethnically Afghan (Hazara, not Pashtun), non-religous, but I have never heard of this proverb.
Did a quick google search and most of it is attributed back to Steve Sailer.
The Pashtun culture is many crazy things, but it is not cowardly. This does not sound like one of their sayings.
Yep they have given us strict instructions to pass along to THEM any intel re their beloved land. "Hey,Mustafa,yeah we found the Taliban chief,the one we had been asking about? Yeah,heres the info. He is living in North Toiletistan.1313 Skullcrack Lane. Yep.You're on it?Cool." Thats gonna work.
Steve,
You've never heard of Operation Gladio?
Intelligence agencies do this kind of thing all the time to their allies.
Dear Mr. Anonymous:
Just follow the link in the posting to the quote in "Generosity and jealousy: the Swat Pukhtun of northern Pakistan" by Charles Lindholm, 1982, Columbia University Press, p. 161.
The point of the proverb is not that the Pathans are cowardly but that they are individualistic to a degree that even nuclear family ties become subordinate.
Woah woah woah lets back up here, it's the ISI. The ISI itself is extremely splintered, just within the last week an ISI agent's home was suicide bombed (as in a man ran a truck with explosives into it), because this guy was supposedly responsible for putting away a few of the terrorists plaguing Pakistan.
While at the same time, the ISI directly funds the terrorists. It's one big cluster$%@& there.. I don't understand what the government in Pakistan is doing, the civilian one is irrelevant they don't have much power(just talking heads), it's all in the military and ISI, I don't know what these guys have planned or what they're trying to accomplish.
But I think it would do some good to cut them off from US funds. It goes straight to the military that gets spent on useless military crap Pakistan doesn't need.
The American government obviously knows Pakistan is not an actual ally (like Britain, Canada, etc), but they really must sense some strategic value in it otherwise why waste their time?
The Kerguelen Islands seems awesome, though. Can I live there?
They're building a new 100 million dollar prison in Bagram, Afghanistan:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/19/bagram/index.html
If you are a French scientist.
The Kerguelens (a.k.a., the Desolation Islands) would seem like a good place for super high end hunting. Let zillionaires pay a fortune to hunt cold weather animals released there. For example, they could clone woolly mammoths, then release them there, but you could only hunt them using Cro-Magnon weapons. But don't clone sabre-toothed tigers. Hopefully, mankind has learned some lessons from Jurassic Park.
Given that Perry might be the next President and seems to love Israel more than the USA (They're 'Gods Chosen People' after all) I'd say we going to be involved in the Middle East for quick a while.
Why not sent troops to Lebanon? They have good beaches and lots Lebanonese want to immigrate here or get some American aid money.
"The main island [of Kerguelen] is 6,675 km2 (2,577 sq mi) in area and is surrounded by a further 300 smaller islands and islets, forming an archipelago of 7,215 km2 (2,786 sq mi)"
This is half the size of Connecticut. Steve Sailer's idea for use of this island [in a comment above] is actually feasible, at that size.
You forgot one little detail: nukes. Doesn't having nukes make Pakistan kinda important?
Oh, shit. Better send in the drones and blow the fuck out of Waziristan.
Ooops! That didn't work.
What was plan B (or C, D, E, F, etc.).
Coup! What coup? Harvard '74? or Princeton '81?
3 billion. Are you kidding? That's Geithner money.
Yes, Mr. Netanyahu, yes, we paid the ISI, 3 bills. Yes, I know you get 5+. It's okay. We'll make it up on the back side.
The Kerguelens aren't particularly cold. They are only about as far south as the American-Canadian border is north. They're just really windy.
EVERYONE wants to pretend Pakistan is our friend. Because the alternative is that they are our enemy, which would require war, against a nuclear power. And no one wants that. America is weak, divided (ethnically), lacking the will we had in 1945.
So EVERYONE pretends. That Pakistan is our friend not our enemy. Similar pretension is done with China, with Russia, and so on. Particularly the Muslim world.
This is the reason why you need to respect Latin Americans. Inferior as they may be, they have balls and dignity and will tell Americans to their face that they don't like them and want them to f-k off. You got to at least respect that. I respect a lot more a man who tells me to my face that he hates me and wishes me harm than a coward who smiles to my face and pretends to be my friend because he is too afraid to face me face to fave, and then sticks a knife into my kidneys when I turn my back, or shamelss scoundrels who hate me but pretend to be my friends to take advantage of me. For all their faults, Latin Americans at least have this. They inherited from their conquistador ancestors the concept of being a man and standing up for yourself even if your foes are vastly more owerful than you are. You got to respect them for that. Pretty much everyone in the World hates Americans with indescribable intensity, but the Latins are the only ones who say it to the face of Americans and boldly oppose the U.S. Arab governments for the most part kow tow to Americans even though they hate them. The same for Europeans except for the French. Saddam Hussein humiliated himself opening his country's nuclear facilities to U.N inspections after the U.S and England DEMANDED it. Can you imagine Hugo Chavez, Lula or even Evo Morales caving in? They would tell America to shove it. In the case of Hugo Chavez, he would probably make a video yelling at U.S leaders and telling them to "bring it!". Such is the hot-headed Latin soul...
I hope we don't follow Rep. Mark Kirk's (RINO-IL) recent statement that we should align the US with India. Wouldn't trust them under any circumstances.
I just finished "Apaharan" DVD ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0451631/ )about Muslim kidnappers in India and frankly, the US needs to stay as far as we can from Muslim countries. Note that the Muslims think otherwise and have resorted to making movies like "My Name is Khan" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188996/ ) in an effort to appear non-threatening to America.
Neither is Israel. And US government and Wall Street aren't on our side either.
After 9/11, we had the opportunity and justification to do ANYTHING we wanted in Afghanistan. We should have divided it into several nations based on different ethnicities. We should have Yugoslavianized it. But we missed that chance.
"When everyone is dead, the Great Game is finished. Not before." -Kipling
Good post. I would've laughed if the situation -- so many dead young Americans (and others), so much national wealth wasted -- weren't so tragic. As it is I just cracked a smile.
Laughed like an idiot at the sabre-toothed tiger comment.
Pakistan is like a black hole at the heart of Eurasia. Nothing good ever comes out of it.
The larger question is if we withdraw from Afghanistan, what leverage do we have regarding nuclear armed Pakistan which is our enemy? Or at least, significant parts of the Intel and Army apparatus?
In Afghanistan, we can and do launch drones which whack-a-mole of AQ and ISI jihadis. A useful reminder needing near weekly application that the US can and will kill people who are its enemies.
Leave Afghanistan, and you lose both the logistical base, launch short notice over the mountains and be on target to kill some one in minutes not hours, but you also lose intel -- the who, the where he is, the how he's identified.
I have not seen, as ugly as the cost to the US is in Afghanistan, how else the US can manage Pakistan's jihad short of open nuclear warfare. How else are we going to restrain them from going to an ATTACK ON OUR EMBASSY to an ATTACK ON OUR HOMELAND? If the ISI/Pakistan/AQ/Jihadi networks are willing to attack the US embassy, even after we pay them a LOT and kill lots of them also, what will they do if we simply withdraw because well, they forced us to do so?
Weakness invites attack. Now more than ever with proliferation of nukes, the US MUST BE STRONG and be SEEN TO BE STRONG. A soaring speech by the feckless, weak Obama won't do it. It will take real action like weekly killings at the least to get it done.
But then Pakistanis know we're not really on their side either. After all, US has been cozying up to India, the arch-enemy of Pakistan, thereby undermining Pakistani interests.
And it was not the Pakistanis who created the Taliban and the like. It was American support of Afghan rebels in the 80s. Pakistan has been trapped between big powers(USSR, India, China) and trouble spots(Iran and Afghanistan), and so it mastered the game of playing all sides--not least because Pakistan itself is diverse and divided. Even so, Pakistan is not a nation calling the shots but returning the shots.
Mexico is not really on our side either, but according to Hollywood and NY, Mexican illegals are better Americans than American citizens who support border controls.
So, AIPACKISTAN isn't working out. Maybe INDISRAEL will work out better.
We are orders of magnitude more likely to end up in a shooting war with Pakistan while we are bombing stuff in Pakistan, fighting their proxies in both Pakistan and Afghanistan,and trying to turn Afghanistan into a decent country, than if we pull out.
But that would only save money and lives and make us safer--it wouldn't keep the military contractor gravy train rolling, it wouldn't give the next set of generals and top level spooks their opportunity to play the Great Game, and it would require a quorum of politicians to display brains and balls on the same day. So, we will continue ineffectually dicking around in Pakistan and Afghanistan and Yemen and Sudan and Somalia and every other ungovernable shithole on the planet. Eventually, it will blow up in our faces, instead of just burning wealth we're borrowing from China and killing or maiming hundreds of Americans and tens of thousands of foreigners a year. But with luck, the current crop of politicians will not be blamed, and the next crop will explain that whatever bad cnsequences follow our idiotic policies are really just proof that we are the good guys and our enemies are evil and cowardly and hate us for our freedoms.
Is an enemy another country that might not agree with our ways and loaws? Or owners of companies that have goals to own most of the press to control congress and public opinion, and to profit from it by starting wars, to gain countries to take oil from and sell weapons to?
See : "Under Iraq National Oil Company, foreign firms keep 75 percent Profit ....."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3566161
Exxon (old Standard Oil owned by the Rockefellers - who might be conmtrolled by Russian mafia last time I read, and started the fake think tank Council of Foreign Relations which urged war in Iraq and Libya - and was on major TV networks nation wide) now has a 75% profit deal in Iraq, they get 75% of all the money from the formerly owned by Iraq oil fields, instead of Iraq getting 100%* from their land like they used to.
"Jul 28, 2011 ... Exxon, the biggest American oil company, reported earnings of $10.7 billion for the quarter, up from $7.56 billion the year before," http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/business/global/exxon-and-shell-earnings.html?_r=1 "
Exxon keeps charging us plenty for gasoline, and does not even offer to pay for the ammo and war machines used to help their business.
Military Stuff we, USA, bought from the owners of Exxon's weapons companies most likely, or their cohorts. - so they charge us to resupply ammo, and used our taxes to pay for their invasion, to profit from the war.
They own most of the media, with their friends, and they spread evil methods to control us with pictures of solders with their families and children, so we feel happy for solders, "...and not dislike war."
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