Pakistan is moving towards a more extremist Islamic state.
But though Pakistan is presented at times as anti-extremists or as a moderate Muslim Country but this is far from the truth.
Pakistan is a captive of Islamic extremists who occupy all levels of the Pakistan government and including the military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
When pressure is put on Pakistan by USA and the West they round up the usual suspects and then let them go after a few days if these detainees have friends in high or even low places.
Pakistan Politician Assassinated For Questioning Blasphemy Laws
James Carroll Boston Globe
Though Carroll's comment is about America's relationship with Pakistan it could easily be applied to other nations in which welfare of the citizens of such nations is in fact a very low priority for the US 's foreign policy which is concerned with what's best for America.
US Funded Pakistani ISI is Training and Supplying the Taliban
Pakistan's Double-Dealing with USA-Ahmed Rashid
Pakistani Taliban -Pakistan hides and encourages Islamic Extremists
The Byzantine style intrigue -no end to duplicity on all sides-Pakistan, Aghamistan kashmir India USA, Taliban , Islamists , Hindu extremists and so on.
Pakistan and India jockeying for control of Afghanistan & Kashmir
Is Pakistan playing both sides?
Pt3 Some truth about Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, & the West. "ERIC MARGOLIS"
James Carroll argues that Pakistan deserves to be next in getting rid of its brutal corrupt government which has been kept somewhat in tact due to the billions each year the US gives to Iraq so they can buy American weapons and dole out a few million for the President, military commanders family and friends.
United States ' relationship with Pakistan is to say the least is bizarre , contradictory and in essence departs from the reality on the ground in Pakistan.
The U.S. military , CIA and its intelligence and security agencies have been unable to capture Osama Bin Laden or to dismantle the AlQaeda network or a dozen other Islamist groups including the Taliban
Whoever is the nominal leader of Pakistan is of little consequence to the Pakistani military ISI which is the real power base in Pakistan and not the the president or the civilian government .
The ISI simply bypasses continues to provide financial and material support for the Taliban and other Islamist terrorists groups.
Pakistan's involvement with the terrorists goes further as Pakistan either supplies these groups with weapons or allows shipments of weapons to these groups to enter Pakistan and be delivered to the terrorists inside Pakistan or to those inside Afghanistan on the other side of Pakistan borders .
Pakistan allowed Islamic terrorists groups to set up offices for acquiring new recriuts and allowing if not helping Islamic terrorists organizations to set up military style training camps inside Pakistan's borders.
Pakistan has been supporting various Islamic extremist groups such as the Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamist terrorists in Kashmir fighting for Independence from India and if the Islamic extremists take control the creation of a Sharia radical Islamic State.
India has pointed its finger at Pakistan saying there is lots of evidence that the terrorist attacks by Islamists terrorists in India were in fact being allowed to train and work out of Pakistan.
The Pakistani government denies such involvement with these terrorist organizations.
But as scholar Ahmed Rashid points out this sort of denial is typical of Pakistan.
But the facts are that if the ISI was serious about shutting down these groups they could easily do so since the ISI know where these training camps are .
The Americans unfortunately in its war on terror has been almost exclusively trying to hunt down Osama Bin Laden and is not interested in destroying the Afghan Taliban or the franchise the Pakistani Taliban.
If for instance Pakistan were serious about capturing Osama Bin Laden it is within their power to do so since the ISI and Pakistani military are fully aware of Bin Laden's whereabouts inside Pakistan.
To appease the Americans the ISI will round up a few Arabs now and again claiming they are Al Qaeda or Taliban fighters which some maybe or not. But the ISI is not going to take down those Islamists organizations it sees as part of Pakistan's covert operations in Kashmir or in India in its ongoing political and military struggle with India.
Ahmed Rashid: Terrorist Sanctuaries in Pakistan. Obama appears to believe whatever nonsense Pakistan tells him. He mentions India's concern about Pakistan. But he is still naive about Pakistan's actual role in supporting terrorists such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Pakistan uses these groups for its proxy war against India in Kashmir and beyond. For instance many have concluded that the terrorists attacks on Mumbai was able to take place due to either help given to the terrorists by Pakistan or Pakistan merely looking away and permitting such activities to take place originating from Pakistan.
The upshot is that Obama like Bush will continue to play this diplomatic game with Pakistan.
Obama makes more excuses for the Pakistan's refusal to deal with Islamic terrorists in Pakistan
Pakistan should have been designated as a terrorist state rather than Iraq after 9/11 - It was the Pakistan army Intelligence services ISI government which supported the Taliban in Afghanistan and dozens of other Islamic extremists groups which were spawned inside Pakistan .
Pakistan's government for instance with the help of Saudi money paid for a thousand Madrassas run by Islamic extremists Wahhabis who teach their students about the best way to serve Islam is to become a Martyr.
As the Taliban did in Afghanistan they are replacing secular education for an exclusive religious instruction .
Pakistan's legal code incorporates Sharia laws and some ancient medieval tribal laws but rarely does the mainstream media or Obama talk about this because Pakistan is an ally .
But American governments and the Media also treat Saudi Arabia with kit gloves even though their regime is just as bad as the Aghan Taliban .
" Is Pakistan Next In Line?" by James Carroll "Boston Globe" via Information Clearing House - - February 28, 2011
- -THE REVOLUTIONS in the Arab streets, whatever their individual outcomes, have already overturned the dominant assumption of global geopolitics — that hundreds of millions of impoverished people will uncomplainingly accept their assignment to the antechamber of hell. The United States, meanwhile, has been faced with the radical obsolescence of its Cold War-rooted preference of strong-man “stability’’ over basic principles of justice. In 1979, with Iran’s popular overthrow of the shah, America was given a chance to re-examine its regional assumptions, but the Carter Doctrine militarized them by threatening war for the sake of oil. In 1989, when people power dismantled the Soviet empire, Washington declared its own empire, and replaced the Communist devil with an Islamic one. But what if the devil has a point?
The Obama administration’s initial ambivalence toward the popular Arab uprisings resulted less from uncertain political instincts than from the iron grip of a half-century old paradigm, the core principle of which, in the Mideast, is that oil matters more than human life. That paradigm is broken now, and Washington is chastened by the clear manifestation that its policies have been self-serving, callous, and even immoral. It is impossible to behold such developments without asking: What next? And to ask that question is to follow an automatic shift of the gaze toward Pakistan.
The United States has been preoccupied, as ever, more with the power elite of Pakistan than with the plight of its people, which makes it as wrong in its strategy toward that pivotal nation as toward the others. For the usual reasons of realpolitik, Washington has cozied up to one Pakistani dictator after another; ignored their corruptions; downplayed their mortal complicity in the most dangerous nuclear proliferation on the planet; turned a half-blind eye to the Pakistani military’s double game in Afghanistan. All the while, the same pressures that have blown the tops off half a dozen Arab states have been building there, too.
Pakistan is a country of 170 million people, 60 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day. Nearly that many are illiterate. In the last three years, unemployment has almost tripled to 14 percent, with the same increases in the cost of basic necessities that sparked unrest elsewhere. But Pakistan has also been staggered by last summer’s floods, which directly affected more than 20 million, and so devastated the nation’s agricultural infrastructure that by autumn the World Food Program was warning that 70 percent of the population lacked adequate access to nutrition. As if these “normal’’ pressures of natural disaster and economic inequity are not destabilizing enough, a massive Islamist insurgency, building on the primacy of tribal loyalties, increasingly threatens the Islamabad government. Early this month, as protests mounted to his west, the Pakistani prime minister made the by-then mandatory show of reform by dissolving his cabinet.
But the context for all of this in Pakistan is unique, for the more insecure Islamabad has felt, the more it has embraced the American-spawned fantasy of nuclear weapons as a source of all-trumping transcendent power. Since President Obama gave his historic speech in Prague two years ago, declaring a world purpose of nuclear elimination, Pakistan has been adding to its nuclear arsenal at a feverish clip, growing it from about 70 weapons to perhaps more than 100. The stated rationale for this is the threat from India, which is engaged in its own escalations, with highly touted military support from the United States — including a recent offer of dozens of prized F-35 stealth fighters. Nothing better demonstrates the stuck-in-amber obsolescence of US policy than this self-defeating — and profit-driven — fueling of the South Asia arms race. A balance of terror is no balance. So last week, Pakistan test-fired its nuclear-capable Babur cruise missile — a bow shot as much at Washington as at New Delhi.
And speaking of last week, what were those frenzied crowds in Pakistani streets calling for if not the lynching of Raymond Davis, the CIA operative who faces a murder trial in Lahore for his January killing of two Pakistanis? That Davis is tied to havoc-wreaking CIA drone strikes is enough to enrage a population, shackling his nation, once again, to the wrong side of history
Suggested books:
Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos : united States Failure Of state building , 2008.
Eric S. Margolis War At The Top Of The World: The Struggle For Afghanistan and Asia,2001
Eric S. Margolis' American Raj Liberation or Domination: Resolving the Conflict between the West And The Muslim World, 2008
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