I remember years ago, when I was flying from Bangkok to the US East Coast. It was back in the 1970s and the Pan Am round-the-world flight at that time made stopovers in New Delhi and Karachi. Out of curiosity, since I had never been in India before, I got off the plane and wandered around the airport lounge (such as it was) for awhile. Well, for awhile turned into a couple of hours as our departure was delayed and I couldn't get back onto the plane. So I had to stand around the 'lounge' and do nothing but watch the European tourists, whose planes were also being delayed, go bonkers. One French lady I recall became hysterical and had to be dragged away to some distant room to be sedated. By the time I got onto the plane, I had contracted some strange but harmless malady that stayed with me for several days.
That was India. The next stop was Karachi, Pakistan. When we landed there, I took one look out the window and decided to stay on the plane. Haven't been back to Pakistan since, thank you very much.
As we all know, Pakistan is a God-forsaken land inhabited by crazy people. It is no country for old men, to borrow a phase. Nor for Christians or even Ahmadi Muslims. Those are the folks who believe that there was a successor prophet that followed Mohammed. Because of that, they are not recognized by mainstream Islam. Ahmadis are persecuted in Pakistan and are not allowed to call themselves Muslims. Now Jihad Watch has a report on an Ahmadi man who is being charged for blasphemy in Pakistan for reading a koran in public.
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/02/pakistan-second-ahmadi-faces-blasphemy-charges-for-reading-from-quran-in-public/
At UC Irvine, where I teach part-time, there is as of recently, an Ahmadi Muslim Student Union. They are separate and distinct form the UCI Muslim Student Union. (I guess they don't get invited to disrupt Israeli ambassadors' speeches and that sort of stuff.) Not too long ago, some representatives of the Ahmadi mosque in nearby Chino came to speak at UCI. I attended and chatted with them before the start of the show. They conceded to me that in Pakistan they were subjected to persecution by mainstream Muslims because of their belief in a latter-day prophet named Ahmed. During the q and a, I made sure to bring out that point for the benefit of the audience. Though the Ahmadis seem to eschew things like suicide bombings, persecution of non-Muslims, and terrorism, the folks who spoke that evening seemed to pretty much follow the straight party line as far as promoting Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.
As for Pakistan, geo-politics aside, I don't know why we keep pretending that that Hell-hole calling itself a country is our friend and ally. Personally, I don't think it's worth a bucket of warm spit, to borrow another phrase. Same thing goes for Afghanistan. The sooner we cut off ties with all those basket case countries, the better off we will be.
I don't know why we keep pretending that that Hell-hole calling itself a country is our friend and ally.
ReplyDeleteIt may have something to do with the fact that we have several thousand troops and a lot of equipment still in Afghanistan, which for all you Republicans and UC Santa Cruz Community Studies majors, is a landlocked country. We pretty much need our supply line through Pakistan to get everyone, and everything worth hauling, out of there, not to mention supplying them in the meantime. The alternatives are Iran, or, a collection of tin-pot dictators who make their central Asian subjects nostalgiac for the enlightened rule of Joseph Stalin.
Pakistan was our ally way back in the day because Nixon and Kissinger didn't like the way India's quasi-socialist government was chummy with the Soviet Union. The U.S. stayed loyal to Pakistan through the ul-Haq years, when the madrassas were built and the country for Indian Muslims became the country where tribal Islam was THE thing. It used to be good for Amadiyas and Shias before ul-Haq, our good friend.
Then we were chummy with the ISI going after the Parcham and Khalq factions of the Afghan communist party, and when the ISI spawned the Taliban. So we've had some strange bedfellows there for a long time. Its been a bi-partisan enterprise, Charlie Wilson (Democrat and idiot) and Ronald Reagan (Republican who had early stage Alzheimer's by the time he was elected -- and said George Bush's terrorists were his favorite freedom fighters).
Our current "friendship" took a turn in September 2001 when someone from the White House called up the president, Musharraf, and told him either cooperate with our efforts to nail the Taliban or be prepared to be bombed right back to the stone age. Of course once in, it wasn't quite that simple. We had to pay their military a whole lot of money, but that was the price of getting to Afghanistan in the first place.
Sorry life isn't a simple scenario of evil orcs vs. virtuous elves.
I remember when they burned our embassy with loss of life. A DEA buddy friend of mine was a hero that day in saving others.
ReplyDeleteIt's clear in retrospect that we chose the wrong horse in that instance and suffer from all that flowed from it.
ReplyDeleteIt is hard to put ourselves in the leaders' position though. They were more concerned with the Cold War and Russia was our main problem at the time. It was the same with the internment of the West Coast Japanese during WWII. The overwhelming number of people were worried by an attack or 5th column.
We should do all we can to fix our errors now. We should build a stronger bond with India..... but that seems to be too hard for our president and state dept to comprehend.
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I haven't seen any evidence that our president has any problem over building strong bonds with India. He even supported cutting them some slack on nuclear non-proliferation, which considering they are next door to Pakistan, may be a reasonable thing to do.
ReplyDeleteOur preoccupation with the Roosians and the communis' has cost us dearly in many ways... we could have built alliances with half of what became the Soviet bloc if we hadn't been so paranoid, particularly China and Vietnam which WANTED alliance with us circa 1945. Lots of third world megalomaniacs plays us AND the Soviets for fools... spout the right communist or anti-communist rhetoric, and one great power or the other will ship us lots of advanced modern weapons to kill our rivals with.
Afghanistan: We should have stayed out in 1979, we should have stayed out after 1979, and in 2001, when we had one of the plainest casus belli in the history of the world, we should have gone in, kicked butt for six months with the support of our friendly local ground forces, the Northern Alliance, then pulled out and let the Afghans sort things out on the ground.
Now, we should of course get out... but as Barack Obama so presciently said, we should be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.