Pakistan Urges On Taliban

Robert C. Jones:

It seems to me that the Pak Army/ISI outlook on the world requires them to be hostile to and continually provoke a country next door that is many times their size and has a vastly superior economy; a country whose superiority gets bigger by the day. This doesn't seem a very wise thing to do. It is as silly as it would have been for Mexico to plot the recovery of California in 1910.

We have not forced the Pak Army GHQ into a conflict of interest nor have we pinned them on the horns of a dilemma. They have done that to themselves with their cloud cuckoo land vision of the world, the future and their place in it. They are going to destroy their country if they don't wake up. I see no reason at all for the US to understand and make allowances for what are essentially emotional and corrupt teenagers.

Could you explain this sentence for me?

"and recognize that in regard to Pakistan the most important thing for the US is to not inadvertently disrupt the nuclear deterrence with India through our efforts to deal with AQ"

I don't understand what you mean.

Oh, and for those of you so keen on making this about religion, pick up a history book on the Partition sometime, please? I'm just saying....

<em>On one hand, maintaining solid relations with the US is critical to their deterrence with India.</em>

I wonder why the Indians are so keen on a relationship with the Americans, given the reality behind that statement. Because, naturally, without such a deterrance the Indians will immediately gobble up Pakistan.

Why have we enabled such delusions all these years? It's made a conflict between the two more likely, not less. No matter the mess made, Client-Daddy - or chief enabler - America will pick up the pieces.

That which we ignored when it was deployed against India is now being used against our own men and women. Heartbreaking.

Perhaps we had no choice in the past because of our interest in breaking the Soviet Union and perhaps we have no choice now because we are terrified of a conflict between the two subcontinental powers, but it is still heartbreaking.

Isn't it possible that we are making a confict more likely? What price has been paid for Mumbai? So, why not try it again? How long will surrounding powers ignore such behavior? At some point, everyone will get sick of the Americans and quit listening.

I do not envy those with real responsibility over the issue.

Tom Ricks has an interesting post in his blog today in which he speculates that the US gov has had it with the Pak Army/ISI and will just start doing things that need to be done, just doing them without announcing any kind of change of policy.

If there were any truth to that, I wonder if maintenance of the fiction of "rogue elements of the ISI" is just an attempt to give the Pak Army GHQ a face saving way out if they care to take it, sort of a last chance, or more cynically, another in a series of last chances.

These religious rants are tedious. People speak of Islam as if it were a physical presence. However, all religions are collections of people (I don't mean to lecture on the obvious). Most Muslims I know are as dedicated to Islam as most Christians I know are dedicated to Christianity. For example, Jimbo, with his talk about killing, would seem to have missed two major points that Jesus taught (the turn the other cheek and forgiveness points). I bet he likes making money too. Among the least doctrinaire Islamic Muslims seem to be those in Afghanistan. Even the Taliban, with their jihadic talk have a self-reinforcing interpretation of it.
These (and my) rants are unfortunate because they distract from an interesting point that Jimbo was making regarding alignment and adjustment of tactics and strategy.

Tyler is delusional. You really should read the Koran. The enemy is Islam

Try reading Andrew Bostom, or Ibn Warraq.

When I read this article this morning, the first thing I saw was the length of Jimbo's comment. I thought 'wow, it's great that someone has taken time, thought about the issue, and constructed a lengthy response.'

Until I read that same response. Quite obviously, Jimbo is not a religious scholar, though his bigotry is hanging out. While Jimbo obviously has a decent command of the English language, his command of the facts is tragically lacking.

The fact of the matter is, Jimbo, that Islam *is* "Just another religion," which takes for granted the authority of previous Abrahamic Religious texts, including the Old Testament and the New Testament (save for the divinity of Jesus). The Qur'an teaches that Jews and Christians are "people of 'the book'," (Bible = Latin for "The Book") and they they should be let alone. The word 'infidel,' as it has come into our usage, doesn't simply mean a non-Muslim-- rather, it probably referred to the polytheists that were in the neighborhood during Islam's formative period (And it sounds awfully similar to the Philistines et al. that Old Testament God commanded His people to destroy).

Furthermore, in the 20 September 2001 to the nation in the wake of 9/11, President Bush was very careful to make it known to Americans (as well as the world at large) that the enemy is/was NOT Islam or all Muslims. The perpetrators of this attack, rather, were enemies of the faith that were "trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself."

Next time before you rant, sir, please check facts.

No, Jimbo your can-do managerial emptiness and pseudo-Christian moralizing (including the folksy alias) are the problems.

Your country's largest covert action was Afghanistan and you let Pakistan dole out the cash. Then you overlooked their nuclear acquisition program to sweeten the deal. Now the world faces a hive of Islamist terrorists with sanctuary in a nuclear state.

When a Democrat president started to slowly address this you 'culture Warriors' brought the government to a standstill to fight your silly Christian civil war over which adult is touching which adult's genitals.

When the ex-Commie Afghanistan president begged for your help to fight the Islamist terrorists post 1989, you refused to even talk to him and installed those very warlords in power - who plunged Afghanistan into further chaos spawning the Taliban.

When 911 happened, NATO & UN offered to help you in Afghanistan but you brushed them off and told them to stay in Kabul so they won't cramp your sloppy bombings & warlord allies.

Then you defied world opinion and international law to invade Iraq. Formerly the most industrialized and middle class country in the Mid-East it is now a Shiite stronghold one step above the 'stone age' you promised to reduce it to.

The rush job on Afghanistan meant neither Bin Laden nor Mullah Omar were killed/captured and the 'war of choice' in Iraq gave them all the breathing room they needed to add a third decade of war to that brutalized country.

And your suggestion to all this is to plod along with your divisive culture wars talking points & pointless managerial memos.

The Koran is as littered with as many bizarre tribal brutalities as the Old Testament is - when you scrap the latter than I'll listen to you condemn the former. I have enough Muslim and Christian friends to know there are plenty of whackos on both sides.

You wonder if your 'socialist' indoctrinated nation has the 'stomach' for 'self preservation'? This would seem to translate as: "KILL!" in common English, right? The clearest threat to the USA's existence is your own bankers & Pentagon mandarins.

You can replace small-s soldiers with capital-w Warriors all you want, it may give you a warm moral buzz but it won't change the facts on the ground nor the judgement of the history books.

James Williams

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of speaking on a radio show broadcasting in Florida about the complexities that arise when you attempt to fight an enemy with a faulty assessment. Of course we were talking about Afghanistan in particular but Islam, globally. During that interview the Host made a point of saying that it appeared a larger percentage of the American population was becoming more educated and more engaged in this conversation. He essentially asked if that gave me some comfort and I told him yes but with a caution.

From my vantage point, we are now at a very dangerous point in this discussion. People are generally lazy when it comes to foreign policy and politics in general. It requires effort to study the issues enough to understand them and then the politicians to fully understand their stand on any issue. In foreign policy it requires doing that but then being willing to delve deeper to more fully understand whatever history there may be between players on the world stage. Although having the discussion of the Rules of Engagement (ROE) finally on national TV is promising, the fact is, knowing just those three words does little to change policy.

What was once considered to be a sound high school education in world history would have been enough to allow the student the ability to understand the dynamics of our many cultures and the basic geography of the globe. These would then have been enough to make people ask whether or not the rules under which our Warriors have to perform made sense and then to ask what was promulgating those rules.

At least some of us were intrigued by what we had learned and were motivated to then read a little bit further. Of course we didn't have the list of 'distractions' available to the average high school student of today and the average history teacher, of that generation, still believed it was all right to be an American. For instance, Thomas Jefferson, while his Christianity is in question, never-the-less understood the value of Biblical teaching and morality. He infused this into the fabric of the constitution that would be the foundation of jurisprudence and governance in this country. And just as importantly, he understood our age old enemy in Islam.

Since those days we have watched our halls of education become temples of indoctrination; performing a kind of bloodless sacrificial offering on the altars of misinformation in an effort to expunge from the American psyche the evil concept of American nationalism - certainly the idea that our founding fathers established this country with a Judeo/Christian world view. And if the entire American model was so evil, how could anyone justify going to war to defend it or us - ever?

In order for that kind of training to take root, you also have to paint every other culture and their ideology as superior to what we have traditionally held dear, here in America. Convince a child of this and it is nearly impossible to recover him later in life.

So it is of little surprise that when academics began telling us that Islam was a 'peaceful' religion only 'seeking God', wisdom and dealing with the inner struggle (jihad), that in a century, our entire country would view Islam as just another religion. Of course, history and the extraneous writings of the Islamic Scholars tell us different. The actions of the true soldiers of Islam, tell us different. The actions/inaction of the 'innocent' population in Afghanistan tell us different. So how is it that we could so profoundly bumble what should have been a fairly simple mission there? With the strongest, best trained, best equipped military machine ever assembled in the history of mankind, how is it that we seem to have been halted by so primitive a force? Answer; Faulty assessment.

Our original Mission was clearly stated: Locate, Close with and Destroy the enemy that attacked us on 9/11/2001. Identify all those who gave them shelter, comfort and the ability to plan and train for an attack on US soil and destroy them - then come home. There was one caveat to that 'Commander's Intent Statement'; be prepared for a long war. What this told us was that this enemy was insidious and tenacious. It told us that even after we had completed this mission, there would undoubtedly be other attacks and other missions to hold them accountable. Could it be, that in those early days, we were willing to assess the enemy in a way we have since lost the stomach for? Or could it be that the evil indoctrination of several generations has caused us to doubt the morality of self preservation and the damnable nature of Islamic doctrine and it's adherents?

Once the 'Commander's Intent' was made clear, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff began assembling an order we know as the Five Paragraph Order; acronym SMEAC which stands for Situation, Mission, Execution, Admin and Logistics and Communication. It is in the pages of the 'Situation' paragraph that this mission began to fall apart for within this paragraph resides the fruit of our intelligence gatherers and the assessment of the enemy, his doctrine, the population of the country you will be fighting in and the government of that country.

The confluence of decades of academic socialist indoctrination, the watering down of the truth of Islam, the tearing down of the American ideal and the decision to use operatives from the Muslim Brotherhood as advisors conspired to insure we would fail at this juncture of the planning phase of the war. And this has colored our entire understanding of how and when we should engage this enemy.

Once the order was written, with it's faulty assessment, it was all but inevitable that something like the 80 year old doctrine of Counter Insurgency (COIN) would be hauled out, dusted off and re-tooled to govern our actions against an enemy who had been so hopelessly, falsely assessed.

Now for the damning statement that unhinges all who in their gut sense something is wrong; the Rules of Engagement, which I have made the case are directly attributable to all of the deaths of our American Warriors, is precisely correct. They are precisely correct if you are fighting within the paradigm of Counter Insurgency Doctrine. The question then, is not how to change the ROE, rather it is whether or not COIN is the right strategy under which to conduct combat operations against this enemy, in this country.

And the answer is a resounding, no!