Be vewy quiet… we’we hunting bin Waden!
For some, it seems, it might be hard what to make of this Grey Lady story on the efforts by our American intelligence poobahs to get access to operate in Pakistan’s seemingly lawless tribal areas… which have been duly been rebuffed by Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf.
It seems to me that we have some kind of failure of communication as to wtf Pakistan was doing with that
American aid since 9-11… ten billion dollars in cold hard cash that was supposed to aid Pakistan’s efforts in patrolling the tribal areas for al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists. Pakistan, evidently, sees it differently. For Pakistan, it’s some kind of protection money so that Pakistan stays in one piece, lest the holy shitstorm that we have already unleashed down the middle of Asia incorporate the only Muslim nation with nuclear weapons. Oh… that same nation also happens to be harboring (intentionally or otherwise) OBL and the al Qaeda leadership, not to mention the Taliban leadership.
Which is really nothing new, as the United States never really has had a coherent policy toward Pakistan (and under the current Bush Administration, towards anywhere or anything else). The current version of “policy” is prop up Pervez, because as nasty as he is, anyone else is likely to be worse (democracy be damned).
I suppose we should take this moment to remember why we are supposedly in Iraq (forget the oil… as if!), and committing so much blood and treasure there. The stated reasons were that “we didn’t want [Saddam’s] smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud in an American city”, and because Saddam was personally involved with AQ and 9-11. Both of which were not only false, but objectively absurd at the time. Still, most, or at least many Americans (and certainly, the American media and Congress) did not want to bother with truth… only with “truthiness“: we knew it in our gut.
Well, it’s 2008. Pakistan has (1) OBL and minions within its borders and (2) an arsenal of nuclear weapons. And the usual political unrest that years of uneasy military dictatorship might bring on. And American policy is nothing more than to keep the current players playing, whether they act in our interests or against them, simply because we’re too clueless to think of any alternatives. Oh– and our military is stretched to the limit, having been placed there on the presumption that what is actually going on in Pakistan was going on in Iraq.
Got all that? I suppose I picked another bad week to give up drinking.
January 28th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
I don’t know if you guys have heard about this yet, but Benazir Bhutto gave an interview to David Frost of Al-Jazeera English on November 2, 2007. During that interview, she was asked about a letter sent to Musharraf in which she told the dictator who she wants investigated for her assassination. Her description of on the people she wants investigated is as follows:
I looked into whether or not her claim referring to the death of Osama bin-Laden is possible, and it turns out that it is. Of course, we have no idea what is truth is what is not, but I do think that the former Prime Minister of Pakistan is a decent source to take seriously, at least seriously enough to warrant an investigation into her claims.
It’s very concerning news for the reasons you have described here. If Musharraf knows bin-Laden is dead, could that be the reason he’s told George W. Bush that he can’t go into his country to hunt bin-Laden down?
As you said, we have been dealing with “truthiness”, not truth, for the past 7 years (if not much longer). If all of those Osama bin Laden videos have been fake since the end of 2001, I want some heads to roll. I hope a journalist with financing and access will have the cajones to go after this story.