Archive for Pakistan

The Definition of Experience

Posted by: Jason | December 27th, 2007 · 11:40 PM

(image: nytimes)

The world had problems long before the day Benazir Bhutto was killed. Back in the 2000 presidential race, I remember a common campaign term called “gravitas”. I’m still not quite sure of its definition, but we were all guessing as to whether a young governor from Texas had any or not. I guess in light of the events which would later unfold during his presidency, he did.

I keep asking myself today, would we have elected President Bush in 2000 had we known in advance about the attacks on the twin towers? For what little experience does a governor from Texas really have with foreign affairs, having a dad for a president or not.

Today the media has been discussing another governor and presidential candidate without foreign policy experience, Mike Huckabee. “Is this race completely different for Huckabee now?” they keep asking, suggesting his being the lone inferior on the subject. Is it?

If you consider the competition it’s not. For the last time I checked, governors in Arkansas didn’t have any less foreign experience than those from Massachusetts, or mayors from New York for that matter. Certainly John McCain’s credentials feature more foreign policy in them. But what does that really mean?

We should consider the merits of the candidate in times like these today, as we witness the horrible assassination of a former prime minister of Pakistan. While of course, any presidential candidate should espouse a view of understanding towards radical Islam, as Huckabee has, more importantly, a president must have the wisdom, as President Bush has, to get down on his knees and pray for judgment and strength.

The world was a dangerous place yesterday, as it is today. And new developments in the ongoing saga of violence we see in our world do not change the scope of our election cycle. The best man is still the best option for the job, and while experience is always something to consider, we should remember that countless governors, from Bush to Reagan, have all faced crisis without former foreign experience. Just as Lincoln, a former one term congressman from Illinois, in many ways commanded the northern victory in the Civil War.

Mitt Romney made a decent point today when comparing his past with John McCain. When asked about experience, he said, if foreign experience is all that matters, than we’d “just make someone from the State Department run the government”. It’s an excellent point. Because it’s not about experience, Donald Rumsfeld’s war plan for Iraq proved that, it’s about the ability to lead effectively. To me, I’m going to ignore the events of today in questioning a governor’s experience to deal with such issues, for as history has shown us, they do just as well as any senator or “experienced” Washington politician can.

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Pessimism in the Establishment

Posted by: Ion | August 22nd, 2007 · 7:27 AM

One of the remarkable things about Barack Obama’s controversial antagonism toward Pakistan under Musharraf, is how unremarkable it was from the perspective of the Democratic foreign policy establishment. Indeed, the sense that broader Pakistan is turning into an Al Qaeda stronghold (not merely in the tribal Pak-Afghan border towns), is now fairly common currency at a certain level of American strategic thinking.

For effect, Foreign Policy’s recently released 2007 Terrorism Index, reveals a large collective failure of confidence from the American foreign policy establishment in the Pakistani government’s ability (or willingness) to confront and resist Al Qaeda infiltration of their country. A fear that is propelling an even graver suspicion –that Pakistan is ripe to become a nuclear terrorism enabler– to a consensus majority:

(Foreign Policy via Future Atlas)

There’s trouble with this though. And I don’t mean to suggest that the identification of Pakistan as the next Al Qaeda enclave is an unfounded fear. The escalation of internal violence and radicalism in the lawless north and th erosion of domestic support for Musharraf has been considerable and is unavoidably disconcerting, given the limitations of US pressure.

It’s also hard to disagree with Bhutto’s assessment that the persistence of terrorism implicitly serves Musharraf’s political purposes:

“As long as we have a cabinet … that needs the threat of terrorism to sustain a military dictatorship in Pakistan we’re never going to get rid of terrorism.”
(OpEdNews)

That’s certainly been a fatal concord so far. But the trouble is that Iraq seems a better candidate for an Al Qaeda vessel state, if you believe the last-chance surge is ineffective and failing as the survey participants do (see below).

The second part of the question –which identifies Pakistan as the prime nuclear proliferation threat– reveals a possible locus of this otherwise peculiar contradiction. For its nuclear dimension, a collapsed Pakistan as Al Qaeda stronghold is by far the most pessimistic option among those available.

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The Face of a Thousand Protests

Posted by: Ion | June 21st, 2007 · 1:37 AM

(image: SnappedShot)

Brian Ledbetter has a hilarious retrospective photo album of the ubiquitous “Islamic Rage Boy” (pictured above). Rage Boy appears to be a professional protester in Srinagar, India, who can be found at virtually every Muslim street protest in the area, screaming for the cameras on cue.

As he always looks like the most fanatical and angry zealot in the crowd, Western photojournos love to photograph him. Consequently he has appeared in the press all over the world under a dozen different banners and causes, as a Kashmiri nationalist, a member of Muslim League Jammu Kashmir, a Jamiat-ul-Mujahideen striker, a Pakistani Peoples Political Party representative, an activist from All Parties Hurriyat Conference, etc. etc.

Visit the Rage Boy Portfolio>>

(extruded credit: JihadWatch via Hotair via SnappedShot via Discarded Lies)

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The Girls of the Red Mosque

Posted by: Ion | June 7th, 2007 · 1:15 AM

Fascinating SBS Australia report on the radical girl gangs of Islamabad’s Red Mosque and their clerical leadership’s ambitions to replace the local Pakistani justice system, with private Sharia courts and guerrilla justice.

Part 1:

Part 2:

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Pakistani Minister Gets Molested

Posted by: Ion | May 18th, 2007 · 5:41 AM

Ms Shireen Rehman is a Minister of Parliament from the Pakistani Peoples Party Parliamentarian (PPPP). During a recent street rally, a fellow minister got a little aggressive with his, um…support:

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That Barren Land

Posted by: Ion | April 24th, 2007 · 7:00 AM

More lovely poll results from Pakistan:

Only 3 percent of Pakistanis think Al Qaeda conducted the September 11 attacks.
(Daily Times - Pakistan)

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Taliban Morphing Into Al Qaeda

Posted by: Ion | March 8th, 2007 · 6:18 PM

M Rama Rao reports for the Asian Tribune that the Taliban has become tactically so analogous to Al Qaeda, that they are functionally indistinguishable entities. Most notable is the Taliban’s increasing use of internet video to spread its grim advertising. When the Taliban was in power, electronic devices were uniformly prohibited:

Firstly, the Taliban, which is based in the tribal belt of Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), is executing ‘collaborators’. Warning notes are pinned to the victims saying “American spies will face the same fate”.

Secondly, the Taliban have embarked on a media blitz to communicate with friends and enemies alike. They have been recording videos of the executions and posting them on the Internet.

If these two developments are considered together along with other trends in Taliban working, a very interesting story begins to unfold.

“The Mullahs have gone Hollywood” says Fred Burton, the Stratfor expert on global terrorism, in a tongue in cheek remark. In his view, this tactic (of publicity through video) is borrowed directly from the al Qaeda work book and it is the most striking of several other shifts in Taliban style.

[…]

Hitherto, the Taliban and its leadership have maintained a much low media profile. It could be because of their fundamentalist ideology because the Taliban have always frowned on depictions of the human form as evil. When they were all powerful in Kabul, the Taliban had outlawed movies, television, photographs and even painted portraits of people.

The scene began to change from mid-February this year when As-Sahab released a video called “Pyre for the Americans in the Land of Kharasan”, which showed the Taliban planning and carrying out an operation to capture a purported American base in Zabul province. Other videos showed the Taliban executing dozens of alleged informants, some of whom were beheaded with swords.

Full Story>>>

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Cheney O.K.

Posted by: Ion | February 27th, 2007 · 4:12 PM

The vice president appears to be alright, after attempted assassination by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

link

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Cheney in Pakistan

Posted by: Ion | February 26th, 2007 · 2:59 PM

Ahead of the expected Taliban spring offensive, Cheney has made a surprise visit to Pakistan, ostensibly to pressure Pervez Musharraf to act:

Cheney held two-hour-long talks with Musharraf in the backdrop of reports in the US that President George W Bush has decided to send a tough message to the Pakistani president that aid would cut to Islamabad if al-Qaeda militants were not hunted down.

“Cheney expressed US apprehensions of regrouping of al-Qaeda in the tribal areas and called for concerted efforts in countering the threat,” according to a Pakistan government statement issued after the meeting.

He expressed serious US concerns on the intelligence being picked up of an impending Taliban and al-Qaeda “spring offensive” against allied forces in Afghanistan,” the statement said. (source)

For some time now, Musharraf has been reluctant to make any determined effort to evict Taliban revanchists who are using Pakistan’s tribal areas as a protected staging area. The reason for this reluctance is said to be his fear of a Islamist revolution, that might be instigated by any aggressive steps against the Taliban. The problem here being that Musharraf fears the Taliban more than the United States, as a threat to his despotic rule. That must change.

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Pakistani governor of Al Qaeda haven calls for rapprochement with Taliban

Posted by: I