http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/wo...-soldiers.htmlPakistani officials on Saturday accused NATO of conducting a helicopter attack on two military checkpoints at the northwestern border with Afghanistan, in strikes that military officials said killed at least 25 soldiers.
In response, Pakistan has closed the border crossing, blocking NATO supplies from entering Afghanistan. The strikes are likely to further complicate an already disintegrating relationship with the United States, which has accused Pakistan of not doing enough to stop attacks on American forces in Afghanistan by militants taking shelter in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas.
This move is consistent with the direction that Pakistan has been going for some time...unfortunately, it will be considerably more expensive to get our troops in Afghanistan supplied with weapons and other materiel wtih Pakistan's borders closed...but I think this had to happen.
What do you think of this WH?
I have huge respect for your generally anti-war position, and I recognize that we occasionally disagree on U.S. military action, but I wonder what you think of Pakistan's action?
Pakistan has always been super-protective of their 'sovereignty' issues' since they broke off from India. We have treated them pretty much with kid gloves in the past because of their possession of nuclear weapons ('keep them close') and because they were more westernized than many of their neighbors. But ever since the first Gulf War, their muslim population has been becoming more and more anti-US.
^^^ We began the first Gulf War essentially at the invitation of Saudi Arabia, who was threatened by Iraq's move over Kuwait. Muslim hard-liners (including Bin Laden) expected that we would leave the Saudi soil after the war ended. The fact that we stayed has been problematic to them ever since, because they see us as infidels defiling the locations of their holy cities.
Hate to break it to you. We were in Saudi Arabia long before the Kuwaiti incident.
And remember that Pakistan broke from India primarily over the issue of religion. Gandhi was Hindu and was assassinated by a muslim. As the U.S. presence grew in the region and the U.S. military became more and more willing to oust Muslim extremism wherever it was found (except of course in Saudi Arabia), the pakistani muslim population became more and more uncomfortable with the perceived western orientation of their governments. Actually, Pakistanis were accused of working against Western interests even before the first Gulf War, and the U.S. has been nervous about their nuclear status for a very long time. We always believed we could talk them into our positions on things. Not so much any more.
I bet I could give you the exact date...but we were not there in anywhere NEAR the presence we were during and after the first Gulf War.
Agreed. We only had a small number of specialized units beforehand in Saudi Arabia, but they were there, and I don't mean embassy military. You agree, or not?
Agreed. But small enough that it was not a national presence that would lead religious zealots (i.e. Bin Laden) to go ape about it.
Probably because the general public didn't even know they were there, and wouldn't believe it if someone said so.
Pakistan =
Pakistan demands US vacate air base after deadly strikes
Pakistan blames NATO forces for killing up to 28 Pakistani soldiers at military outposts
NBC, msnbc.com and news services
November 26, 2011
Read the full article at:The Pakistani government has demanded the United States vacate an air base within 15 days after blaming NATO air forces for the fatal attack on military outposts in northwest Pakistan.
The government issued the demand Saturday after NATO helicopters and jet fighters allegedly attacked two Pakistan army posts along the Afghan border, killing up to 28 Pakistani soldiers and plunging U.S.-Pakistan relations deeper into crisis.
Pakistan initially retaliated by shutting down vital NATO supply routes into Afghanistan, used for sending in nearly half of the alliance's shipments by land.
In a statement sent earlier to reporters, the Pakistan military blamed NATO for Friday's attack in the Mohmand tribal area, saying helicopters "carried out unprovoked and indiscriminate firing." Masood Kasur, the governor of Pakistan's northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, said the raid was "an attack on Pakistan's territorial sovereignty."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45442885/ns/world_news-sout... /
I'm not sure why we had to waste Pakistani "border guards" by the dozens but even (and maybe especially) if they weren't border guards, the reaction smacks of the routine at this point.
Didn't Pakistan close the supply line for a few days last time something similar happened?
Fact of the matter is, to some extent Pakistan will call the shots on Afghanistan in the political settlement. They have relations of historical long standing with Afghanistan, along with India and Iran. We don't, and we won't.
IHMO Afghanistan isn't very important to us in the long frame, unless the strategic intent all along has been to create a zone of political instability from Syria to India, and hence a more or less permanent reason for humanitarian intervention, a conclusion that has become increasingly hard to dismiss out of hand, as outlandish as all the WWIV talk sounded at first.
In this context an open war with Pakistan, or Iran, or both at the same time, hardly seems unthinkable.
I'm not looking forward to it.
Something happened starting in 2009. The drone attacks in Pakistan as well as the air war in Afghanistan got stepped up dramatically, and that wimp Obama even attacked extremists inside Yemen and Somalia.
Just now he has expanded the war on terruh to Uganda...
And after Stuxnet, and all the weird bombings in Iran, and all of the top nuclear scientists that are mysteriously dying there in the last few years, there is less and less doubt a covert war with Iran is already well underway.
The Saudi's use our love of their oil. The only real reason that Bush could have wanted to invade Iraq was to make sure that oil would be available if the Saudi government toppled (19 WTC attackers were Saudi). The WMD was obviously trumped up and the only bad intelligence was that cooked up by the White House.
This is what our oil money buys us; the madrasas that breed the waves of Islamic nuts in Pakistan and Afganistan are built and financed with oil money. We subsidize the creation of more replacement nuts for every one we kill. Ironically, the best use of our defense dollars would probably be to secure new forms of energy that would lessen our depence on oil (thorium reactors, please!).
The comments are a bit off topic, I know, but our presence in the area is only serving to destabalize Pakistan more than inherently is. We can either start building education systems in the area while our own decays from lack of funding or just get our asses out of there (& reduce our dependence on oil).
Based on my experiences this statement is quite reasonable.
I agree that Pakistan will be highly influential in any political settlement in Afghanistan, precisely because their populations share religious fundamentalism and essential cultures. In many way, Pakistan has always been perceived as "Muslim Lite" because they are more culturally westernized than Afghanistan with respect to education of women, etc. They are, nonetheless, just as religiously fundamental in their population base as the afghans and most Saudis.
We will have no more influence over Afghanistan in the long run than any other of the many empires that have overrun the region and been buried in its sand and mountains. We didn't go in there to gain influence, imho. We went in there because of the "You are with us or against us".
It isn't important to us at all in the long run, I think. Its importance in the short run was only as the place where the terrorists were based, with the consent of the government.
Remember Charlie Wilson and the attempt to sustain 'nation building' (for lack of a better term) after the Soviets were defeated and bankrupted? Remember how the 'peace dividend' in the 1990's meant that we believed that we no longer had to put money into places like Afghanistan?
Bin Laden was funneling money into Afghanistan's warlords after we stopped, and that money filled the vacuum that was created by the absence of Russian armies and American aid.
We don't like to do 'nation building' (unless it is initiated by conservative administrations), but the result of no functioning nation is that the area becomes a haven for bad guys.
I see no reason to expect that it will be any different after we pull out this time, either. That doesn't mean we ought to stay, but we should have no illusions about what will happen when we are no longer there.
Remember that Karzai said that he would ally with Pakistan against USA before he would ally with USA against Pakistan.
and some inevitable "he said, he said":
Pakistan NATO Attack: Afghanistan Reportedly Called In Airstrikes
Afghan troops and coalition forces came under fire from the direction of two Pakistan army border posts, prompting them to call in NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, Afghan officials said Sunday. The account challenges Islamabad's claims that the attacks, which have plunged U.S.-Pakistan ties to new lows, were unprovoked.
It also pointed to a possible explanation for the incident Saturday on the Pakistani side of the border. NATO officials have complained that insurgents fire from across the poorly defined frontier, often from positions close to Pakistani soldiers, who have been accused of tolerating or supporting them.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/1...comm_ref=false
Last edited by boutons_deux; 11-27-2011 at 01:43 PM.
What I believe happened starting in 2009 was a different administration coming in and believing that the Iraq war was ill-advised and doing more harm than good, and that administration's discovery that Pakistan, while giving lip service to our goals in Afghanistan and the region, had been sabotaging those efforts through its own intelligence and military agencies.
Therefore, Obama's focus on Afghanistan (rather than Iraq) and his insistence that the Afghan war was the war that needed to be won inevitably led him to a position of conflict with Pakistan. He said before he was elected that he wouldn't hesitate to send air power into Pakistan (remember they already knew then that the Taliban was hanging out is Waziristan) to go after them.
This is him doing it. Whether or not it will have negative consequences beyond what we have seen so far, I don't know. But I think this was clearly predictable to this point.
I agree with you in the main.
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