McClatchy Newspapers says the State Department provided a certification that Pakistan was assisting with the campaign against terrorism only two days before it found Osama Bin Laden in the heart of that country.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who signed the March 18 certification, acknowledged Thursday that the U.S.-Pakistan alliance was on shaky ground but signaled no change in the administration’s policy toward the country.
“It is not always an easy relationship. You know that,” Clinton said in Rome. “But on the other hand, it is a productive one for both our countries and we are going to continue to cooperate between our governments, our militaries, our law-enforcement agencies, but most importantly, between the American and Pakistani people.”
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The U.S., however, has a long history of not strictly holding Pakistan and other countries to conditions that Congress sets for aid. As a result, Pakistani officials have come to consider their cooperation so indispensible that Washington will do all that it can to stretch the requirements and overlook flagrant transgressions, some experts said.
“It essentially will always be a political decision, and we won’t let such requirements get in the way,” said former State Department intelligence analyst Marvin Weinbaum, an expert at the Middle East Institute.
But in the way of what?
US relationship with Pakistan has been described as complicated. That may mean that the two countries can be simultaneously at war and at peace with each other, depending on the time and place. Just yesterday, UAVs killed 13 “militants”, including foreigners, in North Waziristan. The targets were believed to be a “top al Qaeda leaders as well as terrorists from numerous Pakistani and Central Asian terror groups.”
Pakistan is a busy place. The target area, “Datta Khel is a known hub of Taliban, Haqqani Network, and al Qaeda activity. While Bahadar administers the region, the Haqqani Network, al Qaeda, and allied Central Asian jihadi groups are also based in the area. The Lashkar al Zil, al Qaeda’s Shadow Army, is known to have a command center in Datta Khel.” It is no secret that parts of Pakistan are to all intents and purposes, the enemy. Admiral Mike Mullen put it this way. “The ISI has a long-standing relationship with the Haqqani network. That doesn’t mean everybody in the ISI. But it’s there. Haqqani is supporting, funding, training fighters that are killing Americans and killing coalition partners. And I have a sacred obligation to do all I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Well a lot more could happen. The Times of India quotes Wikileaks as saying that as recently as 2009, “Pakistan’s powerful army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani does not support President Asif Ali Zardari’s ‘no-first-use’ nuclear policy”. In that view, Pakistan reserves the rights to strike first, possibly against India.
“Although he has remained silent on the subject, Kayani does not support Zardari’s statement last year to the Indian press that Pakistan would adopt a ‘no first use’ policy on nuclear weapons.
“Despite increasing financial constraints, we believe that the military is proceeding with an expansion of both its growing strategic weapons and missiles,” cables sent by the then US ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson prior to Kayani’s Washington visit between February 20-27, 2009, said. …
The major US concern has not been that an Islamic militant could steal an entire weapon but rather the chance someone working in government of Pakistan’s facilities could gradually smuggle enough fissile material out to eventually make a weapon and the vulnerability of weapons in transit, according to the recently released cables.
Those concerns may be on the rise again, especially about first strikes of another sort. Eli Lake at the Washington Times reports that analysts are sifting from material captured from the Bin Laden raid to see whether he had contacts within the Pakistani nuclear establishment.
According to three U.S. intelligence officials, the race is on to identify what President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, has called bin Laden’s “support system” inside Pakistan. These sources sought anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to reporters.
“My concern now is that we cannot exclude the possibility that officers in the Pakistani military and the intelligence service were helping to harbor or aware of the location of bin Laden,” said Olli Heinonen, who served as the deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 2005 to 2010.
“What is to say they would not help al Qaeda or other terrorist groups to gain access to sensitive nuclear materials such as highly enriched uranium and plutonium?”
What is to say that Pakistan might not use American taxpayer money to attack America? Well not the certification. Certifications don’t do that, they are designed to get cooperation. But toward what? Well there we go again.
The US is in a tight embrace with many of the most dangerous countries in the world. But whether it is the embrace of love or the a death grapple, or perhaps both, is hard to say. This pattern of selective engagement/conflict is also evident in Western policy toward Syria. The WSJ says, “European Union ambassadors agreed Friday that the bloc should extend sanctions against 13 Syrian officials, not including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, EU officials said.” This is similar to US policy, which targets some members of the Syrian ruling elite, but not Assad himself.
MSNBC argues the sanctions are more about messaging than effects. “Senior Syrian officials whose assets have been frozen under new U.S. sanctions have none in the United States, and the EU, considering an arms embargo, does not sell weapons to Syria.” This may be in pursuit of another favorite administration strategy: to open the door for Assad into a room farther from Teheran. Syria’s ally, Iran, is in the middle of a power crisis between the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Khamenei ordered the reinstatement of a the intelligence minister and Ahmadinejad refused.
Although Khamenei is not constitutionally allowed to intervene in cabinet appointments, an unwritten law requires all officials to always abide by the supreme leader without showing any opposition.
Clerics close to Khamenei have launched a campaign to highlight his role in Iranian politics, saying that to disobey him is equal to apostasy, as he is “God’s representative on earth”.
“Iran’s elite revolutionary guards, who played an important role in securing Ahmadinejad a second term in Iran’s 2009 “rigged” elections, have distanced themselves from Ahmadinejad in recent months,” so the thinking may be that now is the time to walk everyone to the Grand Bargain table. From the Iran to North Africa the entire region is in turmoil. According to the AP, the Internet is alive with jihadi chatter calling for revenge for the death of Osama. But it is mostly small scale stuff. Terrorism’s patrons are momentarily busy, fighting for political survival against opponents at home. This may have caused some to lose heart. “One of the most senior Saudi Arabian Islamist extremists has surrendered to local authorities, becoming the first known such figure to give himself up following the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.”
From one point of view, the diplomats may believe that now is not the time to topple regimes. Now is the time to make deals.
The locomotive of Wahabism, Saudi Arabia, is now turning its attentions to threats that are closer to home. Reuters reports, “the world’s No. 1 oil exporter faces the twin challenges of creating jobs for a young population at a time of unrest in the Arab world, and pursuing economic reforms with a royal succession looming.” The KSA may have a lot of oil, but it is not enough to pay for the rising expectations of the its unemployed young men. The Financial Times argues that Osama Bin Laden and his generation have been bypassed by a newer generation of militants who see the opportunity to seize home governments instead of having to fight Quixotic battles abroad.
Does this mean that the Jihad is dying down? Or does it mean the world is entering into a new phase, one in which militants in the Middle East or Southwest Asia no longer feel the need to go abroad to seek power? The West’s diplomats are going to be found with a foot in each camp. They mean to extrat something, having in mind Benjamin Disraeli’s dictum: “we have no permanent friends. We have no permanent enemies. We just have permanent interests.”
And as for those parties the diplomats help their reply may be similar to the one the Austrian Chancellor Schwarzenberg gave when asked how he would thank Russia for its assistance to Hapsburgs in Hungary. “We will astonish the world by our ingratitude.” The double-cross is a time honored device in the polished world of diplomacy. We can only hope that the State Department gets its money’s worth of something from Pakistan. Whether that is purchased affection, feigned friendship or a prelude to a sharper knife than might otherwise be used, is hard to say, except by those who drive the bargain. A bargain for what? Now there we go again.
There was a man named Jabez Stone, lived at Cross Corners, New Hampshire. He wasn’t a bad man to start with, but he was an unlucky man. If he planted corn, he got borers; if he planted potatoes, he got blight. He had good enough land, but it didn’t prosper him; he had a decent wife and children, but the more children he had, the less there was to feed them. If stones cropped up in his neighbor’s field, boulders boiled up in his; if he had a horse with the spavins, he’d trade it for one with the staggers and give something extra. There’s some folks bound to be like that, apparently. But one day Jabez Stone got sick of the whole business.
He’d been plowing that morning and he’d just broke the plowshare on a rock that he could have sworn hadn’t been there yesterday. And, as he stood looking at the plowshare, the off horse began to cough–that ropy kind of cough that means sickness and horse doctors. There were two children down with the measles, his wife was ailing, and he had a whitlow on his thumb. It was about the last straw for Jabez Stone. “I vow,” he said, and he looked around him kind of desperate–”I vow it’s enough to make a man want to sell his soul to the devil And I would, too, for two cents!”
Then he felt a kind of queerness come over him at having said what he’d said; though, naturally, being a New Hampshireman, he wouldn’t take it back. But, all the same, when it got to be evening and, as far as he could see, no notice had been taken, he felt relieved in his mind, for he was a religious man. But notice is always taken, sooner or later, just like the Good Book says. And, sure enough, next day, about supper time, a soft-spoken, dark-dressed stranger drove up in a handsome buggy and asked for Jabez Stone.
“We have no permanent friends. We have no permanent enemies. We just have permanent interests.”
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Commando raid to take out Pak’s nukes.
Then Pak can be punished at will.
I have to cooperate with Pakistani people. 7-11 is the only place that sells Slurpees.
“We have no permanent friends. We have no permanent enemies. We just have permanent interests.” A general dictum applicable at levels of politics. Republicans in the House and Senate can hold up any future aid to Pakistan. What will they get in return? Will they even make an attempt to keep the pot boiling at just the right temperature? I have my doubts. None that I see appear sufficiently ruthless.
Memorable dialog from an old, forgotten short-lived TV show:
Crook: “Have you heard of the idea that there is honor among thieves?”
Mayor: “Sure, we have the same arrangement in politics.”
And indeed they do. One driver for making bad deals is preventing the marks (citizen taxpayers) from finding out that bad deals exist.
When I was at the Pentagon I had to meet a Congressional requirement to do an annual review of NASA facility upgrades and certify that they were not duplicative with USAF efforts. Almost all of this was a no brainer; putting new windows in at JPL could not be duplicative of facility upgrades the USAF was doing – it was not as if we could go borrow JPL’s windows. But one year I made a major mistake. I found something NASA was doing in a facility upgrade that potentially was duplicative with an existing USAF capability and duly reported it. And then the excrement hit the impeller. I received numerous calls from government civilians who said I should not have done that. When I told them all they had to do was prove my information was wrong they soon descended into irrationality and usually ended the discussion with a common 6 year-old’s threat to his older brother: “I’m telling! I’m telling!”
You see, if we did not lie to Congress about NASA then NASA might in turn not lie about us and where would that lead?
It’s one of the ironies of history that the Church used the Norman English to invade Ireland in order to reorganize the Church there and bring in more in line with the Continental Church–and then, of course, about 370 years later, the English became Protestant and beat the bejayzus outta the Irish Catholics for how long? Well, in some ways, down until today.
That was a real lemon of a bargain, all right. But it’s the way things work. Re: Islam, the Paks, the Arabs, etc., check out Genesis 16:12; “And the angel of the LORD said unto her (Hagar), Behold, thou art with child and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael; because the LORD hath heard thy affliction. 12 And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.”
Irony of ironies that Ishmael spent 1300 years turning the Cradle of Civilization into a ruined hell hole, yet it has all the oil we need–or more precisely, the oil Europe and China and India need. (We could opt out of the Mideast if we turned our technology loose on the oil, natural gas, and coal we have. Europe isn’t so gifted by nature, and will always be beholden at least to Russia or the central Asian ‘stans.)
But Europe doesn’t have to be a total slave to Ishmael except, irony of ironies, the West is saddled with multi-culti, a cultic lunacy if there ever was one. It is matched only by the awful idiocy of AGW. And irony of ironies, Europe is totally in the thrall to both these monstrosities at the same time, and that time is now.
It just never ends. Pakistan is nuked up and armed to the teeth in a war against India, which is to say, a war against itself–for it is of India, broken off by Muslim hotheads, namely Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who, irony of ironies, is commonly called Quaid-e-Azam, “the great leader”. (Really, they call him that.) Anyway, Genesis 16:12 apparently applies to all who immerse themselves in the religion of Ishmael’s descendants.
And finally, irony of ironies, it will probably be Muslims themselves who nuke themselves–even though they complain incessantly about how badly the rest of the world treats them. They kill more of each other than anyone kills them, but they don’t seem to get it. One day soon, sadly, they will get it, or so all the signs indicate. Sauron put all his might into a ring, the least of things, in order to magnify his power beyond invincibility, but all he did was make it possible for a crazed hobbit the ring destroyed to fall with it into the only fire that could destroy it.
Tolkien was a prophet.
We can always take the example of the Nepalese and crap in their water supply.
Just saw Michael Scheuer on Fox diss a House plan to cut all aid to the Pakis. He seemed to think we need to keep sending them money to stop them from using their nukes. I think that paying the Danegeld will guarantee the return of the Dane.
The scale and tempo of the Pakistani atomic program is so great that India does NOT explain it.
It is much more likely that their atomics are ‘Sunni’ and that their near term race is with Tehran.
Pakistan must covet the energy reserves controlled by Tehran.
And then there are those Near Abroad lands — laden with energy reserves – -just over the border from Afghanistan.
——
While we look upon Islamabad with great ire — think upon Riyadh. Their most ardent enemy was OBL and his crew. How must they feel knowing that Pakistan has been promoting them — all the while taking billions in aid!
——
A slip of the lip indicates that Abbottabad is a key location ( THE location ? ) for Pakistan’s atomic arsenal. This would explain the non-response to our SEAL commandos. In the event of weird activity, all rapid response troops would stage to protect the arsenal — FIRST.
——
Currently we need Pakistan’s support to supply our many troops in Afghanistan.
We should withdraw from Afghan–leaving a small well defended air base , capable of annihilating any AQ that threaten the US
–then we do not need Pakistan as such a small base can be supplied from the North.
Pakistan is in a warm civil war about to got very hot, Libya, Afghanistan and many African states are in hot civil wars–as is Syria.
they are not our business
We could exhaust all our blood and treasure meddling in these countless civil wars–a complete waste of American blood and treasure.
The key threat to America is our economy and debt and the looming threat from China.
It is time to declare victory and come home from MENA, AfPak etc. while maintaining small hardened garrisons in Afghan and Iraq and a naval base in the Gulf.
We already have a huge airbase and 100 nukes in our NATO ally Turkey from which we can end any strategic threat to fundamental American interests in the region.
“Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
I wish we DID have permanent interests.
One of the key elements of nuclear weapons systems under the theory of deterrence is “command and control”. Without command and control the weapons have little utility as signaling devices. You can think of command and control as the “sight” of the weapon. Without the sight, it becomes just a general menace to the world.
The problem with the Islamic way of war is that deniability and deception are exalted to the detriment of command and control. They have secret weapons without sights. The reason an Islamic nuclear bomb can be qualitatively different from Western or Asian bomb is because of the C2 issue.
So I would ask Scheuer: how do you know you’re paying off the right guys? If the US the Saudis are now surprised that their past money bought them so little, why is paying for the nukes going to be any different?
Back in the day I did some staff work for peace negotiations between the post-Marcos government and the MNLF rebels in the south. The government was buying them off with an economic package and the grant of an Autonomous Region. The trouble was that the peace process itself created the incentive for other rebel groups to form so that they too could be bought off. There’s a built in moral hazard problem when you start paying off extortionists, no matter if you call it “aid money” because it brings more extortionists into the market.
In reality the State Department will only keep paying Pakistan for as long as the “loose nuke” danger continues to exist. So guess what? The danger will never go away. Fortunately for most of us, we get to die of natural causes after 70 or so years, so we only have to make it to that finish line before dusting our hands of the whole sordid story of human treachery.
Maybe all we can do is keep paying Pakistan until the people reading this blog grow old and die. After that, it’s somebody else’s problem.
b @ 8: A slip of the lip indicates that Abbottabad is a key location ( THE location ? ) for Pakistan’s atomic arsenal. This would explain the non-response to our SEAL commandos. In the event of weird activity, all rapid response troops would stage to protect the arse — FIRST.
fify
9.
would that be our ‘great islamicist enemy’ turkey?
you know, the one that wouldn’t let us use our NATO base?
9.
would that be our ‘great islamicist enemy’ turkey?
you know, the one that wouldn’t let us use our NATO base?
the one that is dealing with hamas the terrorist organization?
the one that is sending flotillas to attack Israel, your bete noir?
shaal i go on and on?
Taking out Pak’s nukes will send the right message to the rest of MENA (incl. those genocidal Turkish “allies”). It’s a bit risky, yes, but we have the capability. It seems to me that to not to do it, given that we can, is madness.
Wretchard: “We can only hope that the State Department gets its money’s worth of something from Pakistan.”
So I guess if we keep paying the Danegeld, they’ll leave us alone, right?
Right?
Everybody knows that I think Kipling said it best:
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: –
“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”
Let’s see. OBL is dead. And, we’ve gotten 72 versions.
Isn’t that what the ROP said would happen?
The Ambassador from The Sublime Porte in one comment calls Turkey our loyal ally who we should delegate our MENA policy to and then quotes TJ’s warning about “entangling alliances.”
Islam enables people to offload responsibility. The people of Pakistan, like all people everywhere, need to be convinced that their lousy government, like everything else that is wrong with their lives, is their responsibility and not that of the Americans or the Joooos. If they tolerate those who wage war on the West in their midst then war will come to them. If they want pity and support because they are the helpless captives of an alien occupying army that is waging war on the US then they need to work very hard to convince us of the difference.
The French invested deeply in honoring the Resistance, and obscuring widespread collaboration, to emphasis that the occupying Germans were aliens. That meant that anything done to attack the enemy was justified, even if it caused what is now called “collateral damage.” It was a healthy even if not completely accurate way for the French to emerge with their identity intact as separate from the fascists. Recent revisionist efforts to criticize Allied conduct in WW-II because of civilian casualties contributes to or may be symptomatic of the growing Islamist culture of self pity and passivity.
@9 Victor: “Currently we need Pakistan’s support to supply our many troops in Afghanistan.”
Bingo. There may come a time when we declare Afghanistan “fixed enough” to allow us to withdraw and focus on a greater threat. Strategic triage: set the smaller issues aside for a bit while we focus on the more serious issues. Like medical triage, this means our focus shifts as we staunch the various wounds.
Wretchard,
I wrote about the real meaning of the “targeted killing” at Abbottabad over on the ChicagoBoyz blog.
These are the opening two paragraphs:
PAKISTAN EXPOSED – If Osama and Al-Qaeda are ISI, Then What?
Posted by Trent Telenko on May 5th, 2011
The discovery of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan’s most secure stronghold at Abbottabad, just 800 yards from Pakistan’s West Point is clear and convincing evidence that Pakistan is a state sponsor of terrorism against America. There is no other reasonable explanation.
We already knew Pakistan is what we feared a nuclear-armed Iran would be — a nuclear-armed, terrorist supporting, state. Just ask India about Mumbai and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Now we know that Pakistan is attacking us too. Al Qaeda is the operational arm of Pakistani intelligence (ISI) attacking us just as Lashkar-e-Taiba is its operational arm attacking India.
The rest at this link:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/21968.html