George Bush, September 26, 2001: “…it’s also a war that declares a new declaration, that says if you harbor a terrorist you’re just as guilty as the terrorist; if you provide safe haven to a terrorist, you’re just as guilty as the terrorist; if you fund a terrorist, you’re just as guilty as a terrorist.”
Bush, August 31, 2006: “…we have made it clear to all nations, if you harbor terrorists, you are just as guilty as the terrorists; you’re an enemy of the United States, and you will be held to account.”
Mercury News, September 1, 2006: “The United States reportedly has spent more than $1 billion underwriting the border fight, but when the military failed to crush the separatists, the Bush administration agreed to support Pakistan’s truce-making efforts and pledged millions of dollars in additional aid. The truces between Pakistan’s military and the separatists have coincided with rising violence against civilians and increased attacks by the Taliban in four Afghan provinces along the Pakistani border, according to a United Nations-run security-monitoring program that Western diplomats consider highly reliable…..Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his top aides have charged repeatedly that Musharraf’s regime is supporting the Taliban, harboring their leaders and allowing them to maintain training camps and supply bases in Pakistan.”
RELATED CLIP: ABC News.
By the way, the last time Pakistan cut a deal in Waziristan with the Taliban in 2004, violence broke out in Azam Warsak. Pakistan, as we all know, is a nuclear power.
Get ready for Cold War II! Woo hoo! At the very least, we’ll get a whole bunch of creepy nuclear holocaust movies like we did in the ’80’s.
Let’s look at the Middle East here for a second. What you’ve got is an age-old blood war mixed with religious fervor that suggests God is on the side of one or the other. Whatever your stance on spiritual matters — or lack thereof — it doesn’t take a student of history to begin to understand that what we have here is a sliver burrowed so unexecavatably deep that the best case scenario solution, short of divine intervention, will take generations upon generations to unravel and then heal.
Hatred is its own kind of addiciton. And as anyone who has been severely addicted to anything, and come out of it, can tell you, the road to addiction is gradual and likewise, so is the road to recovery.
Do we REALLY want Dubyah Bush as our intervention counselor?
All this, of course, assumes that Bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Taliban don’t nab Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, or that things became so flared up in Waziristan that the anti-American, pro-Taliban sector of the population doesn’t take out Musharraf.
Look on the bright side: they’d have to nab the expertise to use Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal too, and that’s impossible. There aren’t any al-Qaida sympathizers among the Pakistani military or intelligence services, or among their nuclear scientists, no siree. Besides, they’d nuke India first, so the smoking gun would turn out to be a mushroom cloud over some other hapless country. It’s like an early warning system. Nobody ever said the War On Terror would be perfect. I’m voting Republican.
It’s not so much that they could possibly get their hand on a full nuke, but the leaking of nuke materials that might be used in the future. Remember AQ Khan? He’s the father of the Pakistani bomb. Do a google or Wikipedia on him. He was proliferating nuke technology for money and is now under house arrest, and Musharaff refuses to allow him to be interviewed. As much as they deny the Pakistani military had knowledge of his activities, it is simply unfeasible that they didnt at some level facilitate it. And AQ Khan, like others in the Pakistan military junta establishment, does have deep Islamist affiliations. It is a very very murky world.
From the Wikipedia page on AQ Khan:
++++
In September 2005, Musharraf revealed that after two years of questioning Khan—which the Pakistani government insisted it do itself without outside intervention—that they had confirmed that Khan had supplied centrifuge parts to North Korea. Still undetermined was whether or not Khan passed a bomb design to North Korea or Iran that had been discovered in Libya.
And the money shot:
It is widely believed Dr. Khan’s two daughters, who live in the UK and are UK subjects (thanks to their part-British, part-South African mother Henny), are in possession of extensive documentation linking the government of Pakistan to Dr. Khan’s activities; such documentation is presumably intended to ensure that no further action is taken against Dr. Khan.
I thought the sarcasm of my previous comment would be obvious. Perhaps not?
Perhaps not.
So to be clear on this: I hereby declare the subject of potential nuclear retaliation from al-Qaeda, particularly as ineptly effected by the current presidential administration, to be open for humor, sarcasm and colorful commentary.
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!