Pakistan, More Time Bomb than Ally
The only question is who will be damaged more when their political system implodes after a coup by the ISI’s carefully cultivated Islamist lunatic fringe, Pakistan or every other country connected to it including the United States?
Will we wake up and disentangle ourselves in time? Our strategic relationship with Islamabad is deemed necessary because of the logistical pipeline that flows through Pakistan (hint: smaller footprint makes Pakistan less valuable) but it is analogous to the guy who remains married to his wife who is a habitually violent, bipolar, crack addict because she stays home and watches the kids.
A superb post by Pundita on America’s whistling past the graveyard policy ofnPakistan:
He ain’t heavy, he’s my genocidal, hallucinatory, two-faced ‘ally’
Earlier this month the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, twisted his mouth into the shape of a pretzel to explain why it was okay for the U.S. to support Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal but not okay to support North Korea’s arsenal and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He also saw no problem with the United States as much declaring war on India when he sympathized with Pakistan’s need to use nuclear weapons against India in order to feel safe.Then Americans wonder why Pyongyang and Tehran laugh at Washington’s lectures on nuclear proliferation. The leaders of both regimes have been doing clandestine nuke business with Pakistan for decades. They know Pakistan is the biggest nuclear weapons proliferator on the planet — and so does Mullen, who is the highest ranking military officer in the USA and as such is the principal military advisor to the President of the United States, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense.
That’s not the half of the double standard America has practiced with regard to Pakistan. Barely a day goes by that the American news media doesn’t warn of the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran because of the regime’s end-of-time religious views, which American news analyst John Batchelor has termed “hallucinatory.”
It doesn’t get more hallucinatory than the views of Pakistani media mogul, Majeed Nizami, the owner of the Nawa-i-Waqt, The Nation, and Waqt TV channel. During a recent speech at a function given in his honor he declared that Pakistan’s missiles and nuclear bombs were superior to “India’s ghosts,” and that unleashing nuclear war against India was imperative. “Don’t worry if a couple of our cities are also destroyed in the process.”That would be the same Nation newspaper that cites the United States government as being behind every terrorist incident in the world, including the Times Square attack.If you think Nizami is an isolated nut case, you don’t know much about him, or Pakistan. He is the true face of the most powerful factions in Pakistan including its military leaders.
But in the view of the U.S. government and news media it’s okay for Pakistan’s military to hold hallucinatory views whereas it’s not okay for Iran’s leaders because, well, because.
It’s the same for anti-Semitic views that abound in Pakistan. In the same article that discussed Nizami’s view that nuclear Armageddon was the ticket to peace in South Asia, Pakistani journalist Shakil Chaudhary reported on a June 18 column in Nizami’s Nawa-i-Waqt paper in which Lt. Gen. Abdul Qayyum (ret), former chairman of Pakistan Steel Mills, approvingly quoted Adolph Hitler as saying: “I could have annihilated all the Jews in the world, but I left some of them so that you can know why I was killing them.”
Read the rest here.
zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » Pakistan, More Time Bomb than Ally | Syed Adnan Ahmed Blog:
July 15th, 2010 at 7:28 pm
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Duncan Kinder:
July 16th, 2010 at 1:09 am
Will we wake up and disentangle ourselves in time?
That time passed when we decided to invade Iraq.
Maybe earlier.
In any event, we shouldn’t worry too much about double standards, because we no longer are in much of a position to set standards anymore anyway.
zen:
July 16th, 2010 at 1:35 am
Hi Duncan,
.
It’s not even a question of standards or moral stature as bottom line: terminating a net loss relationship that can’t be salvaged.
Lexington Green:
July 19th, 2010 at 10:28 pm
If you made this crap up it would be too nutty for fiction.
I think that is the main reason no one talks about how totally whacked Pakistan is. All theories premised on human rationality having anything to do with war, politics or the handling of nuclear weapons have no application. No person with any sense has any idea what to do. Whistle past the graveyard and pretend that the loony bin is really a "country" which has a "government" which pursues "interests" and is capable of "rationality." These guys make the Iranians look like homo economicus.
onparkstreet:
July 20th, 2010 at 3:35 am
I’ve left my last comment – for a bit – on the subject at SWJ:
,
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2010/07/aussie-with-his-mind-on-hostil/#comment-11201
.
I don’t know. I don’t think I’m cut out for all of this national strategy or whatever blogging. It’s too depressing. What an utter and abject failure many of our national foreign-policy elite are. What an utter and abject failure many of our national decision-makers are. Depressing.
.
– Madhu
Jonathan:
July 20th, 2010 at 3:40 am
It’s always been a question of relative costs, not double standards.
We invaded Iraq because Iraq was dangerous, we wanted to punish Saddam Hussein, and there appeared to be no less-costly alternative to invasion.
We haven’t attacked Iran, because while Iran appears to be dangerous the cost of military action by us appears to be high, and we have held out hopes for the effectiveness of less-violent alternatives.
Similarly, we haven’t attacked Saudi Arabia, because we think that we can protect our interests more cheaply by coopting rather than conquering the Saudis.
And similarly, we have avoided treating Pakistan as an enemy, because we thought that we could do better by maintaining a nominally friendly relationship while keeping an eye on Pakistani Islamists and nukes.
These have been our rationales and they all make sense. (Whether they have been optimal is a separate question.) We can’t undo wars but we can change our policies as conditions change. The public and wonks alike increasingly think that our relationship with Pakistan no longer serves our interests. Maybe we’ll get it together in time to avoid a debacle.