It's time to get ruthless in Pakistan

I disagree with you Dov, on the need to take out their nukes.

We need to do more than just send in troops. We need to recognize who we are fighting with. You correctly bring up Iran. Yes, he took us by surprise, didn't he- Ayatollah Khomeini. Surprises is where it is at. But why so many surprises?

Because if you let your foreign policy get run by Political Correctness, you end up with foreigners defecting from countries, who spend bookloads convincing you that Shariati was just influenced by Sartre- oh nothing terrible there - Parisian coffee intellectual. Bullshit! Then you get whammed by Khomeini. Because all the intellectuals spend their hours whitewashing their own country, their own culture...its insanely transparent!

So why do we get surprised!? Because we want to believe Bullshit!! After all, if you don't believe bullshit, then the OIC comes after you, and the SPLC labbels you an "Islamophobe".

The threat in Pakistan is 100% clear. It is not terrorism, or the Taleban, it is Jihadism. In Pakistan, the more you push against Islam, the more the people assert it. The problem isn't the Taleba, it is Muslim resentment. It is a grassroots militant mentality, which is asserting Islam as a counteraction to modernity. It's a new Communist ideology of Islam. Pussyfooting and calling it Islamism or Muslim Extremism is the fastest way to loose Pakistan.

You say the ISI don't know whose side they are on. Take away Pak's nukes, and you make sure all the military establishment is against America, you say.

Are you sure Dov?

The Paks have always been against us. IF we weren't bribing them, and giving them nice guns, and distracting them, they'd have gone Khomeini on us in the seventies!

I am not so sure not taking out nukes is an option. We have to take out their nukes, because that way when Islamists seize power, they can't go after us. We can do so by destroying critical points in the nuclear chain. It is not so difficult to do with a team of Special Forces, and it needs to be done immediately

That implies we do better to stop attacking them.

The United States cannot afford to stand by and let Pakistan either fall to the Taliban or fragment in some way.

How many US soldiers does it take to keep Humpty Dumpty from fragmenting?

This egg has hit the fan. We could build a WWII size army and still not put pakistan back together.

When we cannot prevent the thing you say we cannot afford to allow to happen, what then? Should we expend massive resources failing to prevent it, so we can say we did everything we could?

No.

We can afford to stand by and let pakistan fragment or fall to taliban. The consequences to the USA are not very severe. It just isn't that important. You guys have worked yourselves up into a frenzy, listening to each other and agreeing and making bigger claims and agreeing with those. But really central asian politics are just plain not that important.

I tell you what. Before we take out taliban, we should do a trial run for practice here in the USA. We should consider the dangerous fundamentalist christians in the US south, and we should get rid of them. Send in the army to occupy the area, and bomb anybody who looks like a fundamentalist christian leader. We have to do it because of the danger they'll take over the US government. Even now their terrorist cells and increasingly well-armed paramilitary forces -- what, you say that fundamentalist christians don't have paramilitary forces? Not yet, but once the occupation army starts bombing them they'll get some pretty quick.

So once we figure out how to pacify our own fundamentalist christians, then maybe the pakistani army can use the same methods.

Here is what a CIA veteran suggests:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/graham-e-fuller/global-viewpoint-obamas-p_b_201355.html

Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.

But U.S. policies have now driven local nationalism, xenophobia and Islamism to combined fever pitch. As Washington demands that Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan, Islamabad can no longer manage its domestic crisis.

>>>The United States cannot afford to stand by and let Pakistan either fall to the Taliban or fragment in some way

I completely agree about not letting the country fall to the Taliban, which has been described as an "experimental Frankenstein's monster" created by Pak with US help. But fragmenting Pak is not necessarily bad.

The natural fault lines are Pashtun areas, Baluch areas, and Punjab+Sindh. Ralph Peters has been proposing such borders for a while.

The benefits in the present context are :

1. Reduces the mischief-making potential of the rump state

2. Whatever entities are left over, such as Af+Pashtun, or a new Baluch nation, will be eternally grateful to, and firm allies of, the US

3. Hussein Haqqani writes that the Pak army settled upon Islam as a way to keep all these warring ethnicities together. Well, this way, there is no such need any more.