Why Pakistan.....

[mburbank]

I've been saying for some time now that Pakistan is far more dangerous to us and far more guilty than Iraq ever was or Iran is now. They are a military dictatorship with Nuclear weapons. They ran the Nuclear black market and we let them off. The Pakistani intelligence service almost certainly knows where Bin laden is. They have not secured their border (which is admittedly next to impossible). They have made little or no effort to keep the Tliban from basing itself on the border with Afghanistan.


Mushariff is walking a tightrope just to stay alive. The Taliban has already tried to kill him twice, and while he controls the military right now, he doesn't control intelligence which has it's own military branch. If he moved seriously against the tribal areas he'd be chased out of power if he was lucky enough to keep his head. Our alliance isn't really with Pakistan, it's with Mushariff, and there's only so much he can bring to the table.

Why do we put up with it? Because without their nominal support in the 'war' against terrorism, Afghanistan would collapse into Anarchy, the Taliban could well take over again and we'd have to go back there, something we are ill equipped to do. And because this 'war' has never been about toppling dangerous states or spreading democracy, or even about oil. It's about the US flexing it's muscles, settling old scores, and hoping to scare the crap out of every country in the middle east along the way. It's about being the biggest bad ass on the block, showing Bush Senior his son is the man with the bigger cock, pursuing neocon dreams of world domination and a host of other bizarre and unsettling things that have little in common beyond screwing Iraq, the one place where all their needs got met at the same time. Don't look for logic. This is foreign policy by a committee of lunatics, each with theri own individual lunatic designs.