My Canadian Counterpart makes a lot more sense about Pakistan and Afghanistan than our beloved King David[Petreaus] does. He’s got two posts up that should be mandatory reading for any one of the current crop of idiots in Congress. And should be read twice to learning impaired assholes like Allen West-and most of Lex’s fan’s too.
First, he points out, that having allowed the abominations that are India and Pakistan to come into existence-we are woefully misinformed about what is important to them:
With very few exceptions, American foreign policy over the last six decades been conducted on the mistaken premise that everyone shares the same interests with the United States. That’s definitely not true in Pakistan and never was. Americans were concerned first about Soviet expansionism, then global terrorism. Pakistan’s first, last and only concern is India.And they aren’t wrong, necessarily. Imagine if the Soviet Union was ten times as powerful as the U.S, but was situated where Mexico is and had cut America in half as recently as forty years ago. Do you think that Washington wouldn’t be every bit as paranoid as Islamabad is? Now imagine that America’s closest and most powerful ally had deepened relations with Moscow and made the unprecedented move of exempting it from the nuclear non-proliferation rules that bind everyone else. Looked at that way, Pakistan’s conduct makes infinite sense.
More importantly-he points out what the boneheads at Fox News and Powerline have yet to recognize-that the war on terrorism, is a huge tactical mistake by the United States. Whole hordes of people are still whining about how George W. Bush should be getting “credit”.
Credit for what? For involving the United States in a war that is laying the seeds of its own economic and political destruction? Sure-good job asshole! You should have gotten him five year before to get “credit”. You snoozed, got fixated on another worthless country-you lose.
The jihadis are pissed at American foreign policy. Period. But if a president actually had the balls to go on TV and say that, most Americans – who are genuinely peace-loving to point of having an almost studied ignorance of the rest of the world – would say “Well, why don’t we change our foreign policy?” And that can be problematic for a people who like buying their oil at fifty cents a barrel.If the Bush administration knew anything, they knew that anything worth doing was worth overdoing. Even after 9/11, they never relented in telling us that we were making war to ensure that girls were going to school eight times zones away, which had never before happened in all of human history. The inhuman incineration of nearly 3,000 innocents in New York City was just no longer enough. The war in Afghanistan wasn’t long about retribution. It became, by the military’ s own branding, a “just crusade.”
The historical problem with a crusade is that they tend not to go well unless they’re won quickly. If they aren’t, they tend to become problematic. Assuming that you’re going to forcibly change anyone’s religious virtues is about as silly as thinking that they’ll change yours.And that’s really what the “War on Terror” comes down to. “Terror”, in and of itself, isn’t an enemy. It’s a tactic. The United States didn’t win the War of Independence by fighting against outflanking maneuvers any more than they’ll win a War in Terror. If you think about it really hard, you might just understand that you’re an idiot for even having thought very hard about it in the first fucking place.
Al Qaeda is the enemy today, every bit as much as the Nazis were in World War Two. Well, when you kill bin Laden, you defeat the enemy. Unless you don’t. Then you’re fucked, just as you would be if you thought that killing Boy George would have prevented the 1980s.Then you’re you’re in a position where you think that you’re a hero, until Kajagoogoo rises in to destroy us all and there’s no one to defend us because you’re off collecting your trophy.Yeah, we got bin Laden. But when you really think about it, that’s like thinking that murdering Donald Trump is going to cancel The Apprentice. No one ever counts on NBC’s bringing Warren Buffett out of the darkness, do they?Doing a Fredo on Osama is important, have no doubt about it. But in the grand scheme of things, he’s only Fredo. It doesn’t matter how many times that you dump him off of the rowboat if his ideas survive.
But hey, why let the facts get in the way of a good pro-war narrative? The simple truth is that the United States can no longer afford these protracted crusades-even if they were in our best interests. ( Which they are not). This is especially true, given the fact that Pakistan’s enemy ( who in my perfect world would still be subjects of the British Empire)-are sitting on the sidelines making obscene profits at our expense. And India’s enemy is doing even better. And they never had to send one chugokujin to fight anywhere. Remember that the next time you shop at Wal-Mart.