Neglect Fuels Aggression: Obama’s ‘See No Evil’ Policy Sows Future Violence
One of the main features of this sick and sad era in international relations is that hugely important developments are ignored, having no effect on Western policy. Here’s one such case: Indian investigators have confirmed that Pakistani intelligence was deeply involved in the massive, bloody Mumbai terror attack in 2008, killing 166 people.
The story should be on the front-page of every Western newspaper.
This Pakistani involvement has long been suspected, but now there is strong evidence on the record. Remember: Pakistan is a huge U.S. aid recipient. It suffers no consequences for being a sponsor of terrorism — not only after this case, but also after previous attacks and after helping terrorist groups in Afghanistan.
The strategy of ignoring this problem fits into the broader strategy of the Obama administration: buy short-term quiet and apparent popularity at the price of strategic decline and future crises. Let’s go through the Mumbai story, and then look at the bigger picture.
The group carrying out the Mumbai attack was Lashkar-e-Taiba, an organization completely dependent on Pakistani financing, training, arming, and providing safe haven for them.
U.S. officials now have new and dramatic evidence of this, because the source for the information is an American in U.S. custody. His name is David Headley. He has pleaded guilty in a federal court of involvement in the attack and is cooperating with the government. He has detailed how officers from the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, Pakistan’s notorious intelligence force, helped carry out the raid.
According to Headley, as recorded in a report on the interrogation, the Pakistanis directed and funded the group. In Headley’s case, he was trained as a spy, paid, and sent to India where he took photos and videos of potential places for attack. The material was turned over to the group’s intelligence liaison, who then suggested where and how to kill lots of people, including American citizens staying in hotels and the office of the Jewish Chabad group.
This should lead to a major crisis in U.S.-Pakistan relations, regardless of the fact that Pakistan is “helping” the United States against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. How much is it helping? U.S. officials have also reported that Pakistani intelligence is assisting the Taliban in killing Americans in Pakistan, and is not working all that hard to find Osama bin Laden and his friends.
Now let’s be clear: there has been a genuine policy dilemma for the United States, with the need to balance Pakistani help against Pakistani sabotage of U.S. policy and terrorism. The point is that the Mumbai information should be the last straw.
It is weird and strange to watch grown men in high office of supposed dignity, travel about the world and meet to discuss the introduction of an an imagined fairytale peace and good-will bluff to con the world with.
Are they expecting the world not to notice the difference?
Meanwhile back in the UK, the sale of a real fairytale book; The Three Little Pigs, is being banned because it offends muslims.
Personally, I think they are banning the wrong fairytale.
“Or does the Obama administration want to be an ally of those who murdered 166 people in Mumbai, the equivalent of backing those who carried out the September 11, Lockerbie, Spanish train, and British underground attacks?”
In a word, yes. Obama has done everything he can in the past two years to try and distance himself from India. All of the hard work the Bush administration did to try and improve relations with India has now been lost. Why does Obama do this? Because he has this insane idea that if he’s nice to all Muslim nations that they will fall all over themselves and adore him. What a naive fool. The Iranians are still building their nuclear bomb, the Syrians ignore him, and the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, is probably more dangerous to the west than the Taliban. So much for trying to befriend these animals. There may be a “silent majority” in Pakistan that support the west, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the ISI or the Pakistani Army.
We should do everything in our power to court better relations with India. We will need a powerful ally like that in the coming confrontation with Pakistan, and it will be coming very soon. Even Obama and Clinton will not be able to ignore the duplicity of the Pakistani governmnet much longer after they sabotage efforts to end the war in Afghanistan as well as prevent us from killing bin Laden. We need India much more than they need us and Obama is too foolish to see that.
Obama’s non action is a loudly spoken action.
Maybe the CIA should be tasked with learning who from the Pakistani security forces was involved and then send them a present – you know, the same kind of gift that they sent to the innocent and defenseless people/tourists in Mumbai, with a note “with love, from the American people”.
Ignoring revelations that Pakistan aided in the Mumbai attacks, is little different than GW Bush
Ignoring revelations that Saudi Arabia aided in the 9/11 attacks (and is still funding terrorism worldwide), which is little different than any US president from Carter onward
Ignoring Muslim terrorism and pretending Muslims are peaceable or calling Islam a Religion of Peace ™. This is no different than
Ignoring revelations that Iran sponsored the mass-murder of our Marines in Beirut, after which Reagan secretly traded arms with the Iranians, which is no different than
Ignoring revelations that Muslims aid and abet terror and Jihad pretty much anywhere they reside on earth, even though we know most of them are really nice folks…
So in conclusion:
Ignoring revelations that Muslims around the world celebrate and cheer and are quite often heartened after terror attacks or
Ignoring revelations that Muslims are involved in funding terror, recruiting for terror, and that Muslims support terror operations all around the world, or
Ignoring the fact that Islam itself is a wicked ideology, inspiring Muslims to genocidal hatred and to wage Jihad in order to instill terror in the hearts of their enemies (which is anybody who is not Muslim, or just not Muslim enough…)
Is just another day in the the West. What’s the big deal?
morton, that is brilliant.
oil, however, is the only deal. the only reason they haven’t murdered us all is because they need someone to sell it to.
i keep hoping there’s life on another planet.
I think in all fairness, the current response by the US State Department to state-sponsored atrocities of the Pakistani government is nothing new. In 1971, despite worldwide coverage of the West Pakistani brutality on its East Pakistani citizens (the original British model of a Two State solution) was completely ignored by the US, especially in the ensuing Bangladesh War. Then, the reason was that State was making overtures to China, who was not on friendly terms with India.
I was a student at Mysore University at the time of the Bangladesh War; my fellow Indian students would constantly ask me, “How can a democracy like the United States of America ignore the most populous democracy in the world to favor one of the most egregious dictatorships in the world?”
Then the president was a Republican. Today the president is a Democrat. Alas, the question of why the US ignores the deplorable state of affairs in Pakistan has nothing to do with the Presidency. Rather, it has everything to do with those foreign affairs experts at State who perpetually grope about in a foggy bottom.
According to Wikipedia this is the American apprehended:
So it also appears as an indictment of the inability of the security services to react responsibly.
Get a grip and get real.
For one thing, there isn’t any credible evidence that that terrorist attack at Mumbai was sponsored by the government of Pakistan, and for another thing, our government needs to have a friendly symbiotic alliance with Pakistan if we want to rid that country of al Quada and the Taliban (and OTHER terrorist factions), which will be in Pakistan’s best interests, also, and they know it.
For another thing, the people in this country who want us to sever ties with Pakistan are the very same irresponsible crackpots who got our government to condemn Turkey for atrocities which Turkey [allegedly] committed against Armenians NEARLY A CENTURY AGO, and look what that got us. Until, for strictly self-serving reasons, a group of spiteful and vindictive crackpots got our government to condemn Turkey, Turkey was one of this country’s staunchest and most reliable allies in NATO, and now, thanks to those same aforementioned damned fool crackpots, Turkey is walking a fine line of trying to retain its friendship with the USA, while bending to internal pressure to support Iran and certain terrorist organizations.
Don’t make assumptions, conjectures and accusations about Pakistan which are not supported by the facts. To do so in these perilous times is detrimental to THIS country’s best interests. (Besides, it is Gates and Panetta more so than Obama and Clinton, who are establishing the relationship that we should have with Pakistan, now that Clinton and Obama have thoroughly f*cked up our dealings with not just Israel and Turkey, but other countries in the Middle East, also. Iran is the only country over which Obama continues to insist that he, alone, should negotiate, and look what that is getting us, also.)
You neither read (or believed) the article or heard of the confession of the surviving Pakistani terrorist, an army vet who said he received official training before the attacks.
To follow your screwy logic, we can assume that since Timothy McVeigh was in the army, the federal government got that nut job to blow up that building in Oklahoma City, right?
First, thanks for the personal attack. It helps make your point…how? Second, it’s totally different, since Pakistan is a society in which the army and intelligence services, which are both jihadist in many respects – and proudly so – control the terror groups operating out of their soil. More specifically, they use al Qaeda types – whether Arabs, Taliban or just regular Pakistani/Punjabis – against India repeatedly, as in the Kashmir. The Pakistani gov’t, not al Qaeda, controls its border with India.
Moreover, since India is a huge, nuclear-armed country with whom a confrontation can turn deadly and fateful, literally, it is reasonable to assume that all such carefully planned and executed jihad attacks such as Mumbai have the approval of important elements in the Pakistan gov’t.
Insults are all you really have to counter this, I would guess.
I do not understand why anyone who leans the least bit left cannot write a post without calling people who disagree with them “crackpots.” Didn’t they ever learn that ad hominem attacks are not good debate? (Or did that rule get abbrogated by allinsky?)
Um, tell me ditzy, would that be like accusing someone of being a “lefty” because you’re too ignorant to comprehend what they’re talking about?
“Debate”? What debate? “Ad hominem” attacks? What ad hominem attacks?
Brian simply stated his position on an issue. YOU were the one who, in acknowledging your ignorance of the issue, engaged in a quite inappropriate ad hominem attack by accusing Brian of being a “lefty”, thereby conceding that you could not come up with a valid argument … or that you were just being cranky and bitchy to compensate for the fact that Brian made you feel stupid.
BTW, you really ought to learn the proper use of the term, ad hominem.
In the meantime, here are three more, um, big words that you can add to your vocabulary: Was your [ditzy] reply [ironic] or a [paradox]?
For another thing, the people in this country who want us to sever ties with Pakistan are the very same irresponsible crackpots who got our government to condemn Turkey for atrocities which Turkey [allegedly] committed against Armenians NEARLY A CENTURY AGO
Please document your claim. Are they really the same people?
Because I won’t be so presumptuous as to speak for Brian, I will defer to his judgment as to how to reply to your inane comments.
But if I was him, either I would ignore your too cutesy inquiry, or I would tell you that the onus was on you to disprove his assertions.
Hit a nerve, did he? Have a lose affiliation with those crackpots of whom he speaks, do you?
I suspect that he is long gone from here, considering that you replied to his comments 24 hours after he posted them, as you have a tendency to do frequently, for obvious reasons.
It’s a fair assumption, or inference, at this point that you are Brian. Care to answer honestly?
LOL!!! It’s a more reasonable assumption that you will believe whatever you want to believe, regardless. What would you have, Larry, if you didn’t have your delusions? All that you ever post here are your screwy assumptions, your even screwier conjectures and your clueless, extremely irresponsible accusations – NONE of which are EVER supported by the facts.
But you certainly do have an imagination, you wild ‘n crazy, mixed up kid you.
Hey guy, you’re too preoccupied with your narrow focus on Muslims. It is the Communists, a.k.a., the Socialists and NOT the Muslims who are intentionally destabilizing all of the countries in the free world, just as they’re been trying to do for a hundred years now, or haven’t you been paying attention …, or does it detract from your agenda to address THOSE issues?
Brian??? Um, no. But I’ll give you three more guesses, and the first two don’t count. (Pssst, I’ll give you a hint; you mess with me and you’re messing with Brian and visa versa.)
No hard feelings, I hope. If I didn’t like you, I wouldn’t play with you when I’m bored with nothing else better to do at the moment. (I just couldn’t STAND IT if you were angry with me. he he he he he )
So much writing over a mere request for documentation?
The MSM current event question of the moment apparently is why, after nine years, is Bin Laden still alive? Answer: For the same reason the CEO of Wikileaks is still alive and leaking, nay flooding, cyberspace with secrets and getting working class Iraqis and Americans killed. What good is having a CIA of middle class college educated desk jockeys and bimbos passing paper for promotions that can’t discus and identify the nature of the enemy much less locate him? And this is the big government model that’s supposed to bring every swinging dick and perky tit affordable quality health care? Yup, health care is a right just like the traditional Muslim on jihad doing acts of war has the right to endless due process.
There was a time not too long ago when Julian Assange of Wikileaks (and his slimy collaborators in the media) would have been arrested, extradited and tried for espionage here in this country.
But not under the Obama/Holder Administration.
Why do I suspect that Obama and Holder condone what Assange is doing? Do you think that maybe it’s all part of their very sick plan to hatefully and viciously redistribute power and wealth from white people to people of color everywhere?