More on Pakistan's little problem with the ISI, and the need to "weed out" Taliban supporters (no doubt a Tiny Minority of Extremists). "Pakistan intelligence helping Taliban: NATO general," by Bronwen Roberts for Agence France-Presse, August 10:
KABUL (AFP) - Pakistan's intelligence agency is helping the Taliban to pursue an insurgency in Afghanistan that has seen a 50 percent hike in attacks in some areas this year, the NATO commander here told AFP.
The number of foreign fighters, including Europeans, is also increasing here while NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) still lacks the soldiers it needs, US General David D. McKiernan said in a weekend interview.
"There certainly is a level of ISI complicity in the militant areas in Pakistan and organisations such as the Taliban," the four-star general said, echoing allegations by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and others.
"I can't say to what level of leadership that goes to but there are indications of complicity on the part of ISI... to the extent that they are facilitating these militant groups that come out of the tribal areas in Pakistan."
Karzai has directly accused the ISI of fuelling the unrest in Afghanistan, which sees near daily militant attacks, but Pakistan has rejected the claim.
McKiernan, who took command of the 53,000-strong ISAF force in June and who led US troops into Iraq in 2003, said the increase in unrest in Afghanistan is in part because Afghan and international troops have pushed into new areas.
Insurgents have also changed their tactics to operate in smaller groups carrying out more attacks while militant sanctuaries in Pakistan have been allowed to grow and are sending more fighters across the porous border.
These include men who are not from the Pashtun tribe that straddles the border and from which the Taliban, who were in government in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, are largely drawn.
"Unfortunately we see a higher number of non-Pashtun, non-Afghanistan fighters this year than this time last year," McKiernan said.
"They are really from a variety of ethnic groupings: some are from areas in Pakistan, some are from places like Uzbekistan, or Chechnya, some are from Europe and some are from other Arab countries," the general said.
If Afghanistan's borders were secured and it were up to the Afghan people, the insurgency could be dealt with "rather quickly," McKiernan said.
"But when you have a problem of porous borders and fighters and weapons and resources and command and control and logistics being brought in from outside of Afghanistan, that adds a complicating context to the insurgency," he said....
Here you will find me in total agreement. The ISI are definitely part of the problem in the eastern campaign.
Remind me again, what part of this hasn't been common knowledge for years?
The answer to this problem is obvious.THe British government needs to:
A/spend more money on pakistani/moslem
"community" centers.
B/Give pakistan a huge cash gift
C/Allow even more pakistanis into the UK
Why are our politicians so willfully stupid ?
Maybe this problem will be dealt with in the future and the west is just playing a slow game.
I have just found these links:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-War-Games-India.html?_r=3&sq=india&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=2&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
http://vv.telegraphindia.com/1080810/jsp/nation/story_9671798.jsp
http://www.fencecheck.com/forums/index.php/topic,4134.810.html
Hopefully the USA will get the $10 billion contract for the F 18's.
Are you a normal American? Yes, of course you are, just like me, otherwise you would not be up at 6 a.m. Eastern Standard Time writing or reading at Jihad Watch.
If you are that Normal American, you are familiar with the concept of "Complete Satisfaction, Or Your Money Back." The American government, without so much as a by-your-leave (I wasn't consulted nor were you, fellow taxpayer), has given the government of Pakistan, a country constructed of, by and for Muslims, that ever since Mohammad Ali Jinnah's death at the very beginning of the state, and especially after the reign of General Zia ul-Haq, has been tossed between generals and zamindars (populist, man-or-woman-of-the-people zamindars, bien entendu), zamindars and generals, while the people languish in their consolation that is also the source of their misery, Islam, and the Hindus leave, and the Christians are persecuted, and the Sunnis attack the Shi'a just for fun, and the whole place goes slowly but inexorably to hell, and A. Q. Khan goes off and steals some Western secrets, and now Pakistan possesses "the Islamic bomb" and Pakistan also suppresses not only "the people" but individual peoples, in Baluchistan and elsewhere, and is a political, economic, social, and moral and intellectual mess.
But America has not wanted to see Pakistan plan. There are many reasons. There was the longstanding imaginary love affair, unrequited on one side of course, of American generals with Pakistani generals, an affair that goes back to the days of CENTO, and unhappiness with the Soviet-leading policies, so the Dulles brothers stolidly thought, of Krishna Menon and Jawaharlal Nehru, those Cambridge Fabians, possibly still subscribers, some in the C.I.A. may have suspected, to the Left Book Club of Victor Gollancz.
There were those anglophone children of the zamindars -- see Ms. Bhutto in Briggs Hall at Radcliffe for one example, winning over by winsome personal example a host of people, who never saw, later on, her rants calling for action against the Hindus, the Kashmire Pandits, but who only saw her as funny, sweet, baking hockey-pucks-in-cakes for the hockey team Pinky Bhutto. And there are so many examples just like her ("my son had this Pakistani roommate at Middlesex, or was it Yale, and he was a great guy, kept inviting my son to visit him..." and so on and so predictably, and comically, and with such self-satisfaction, forth).
And now Pakistan, with Musharraf the latest embodiment of every Pentagon cliche, with that ramrod-straight bearing, one more "straight-talking" (!) terry-thomas-moustachioed general, possibly even Sandhurst-educated, whom "we know we can trust," and of course all those -- is it Kayani this week who is everyone's favorite "pro-American" general in the Pakistani army (I forget, for there are so many of those "pro-American Pakistani generals," each of them even better and more trustworthy than the next), and then whoever is now to replace, or has replaced, Musharraf. What is transient, the feigned and most temporary "friendship" for America by this or that Muslim general or leader of a deeply Muslim state, whose people have nothing else but Islam to console them for all the woes that Islam helps to cause, is confused with the permanent and deep enmity of Muslims for Infidels, one that is inculcated, and not a product of this or that resentment that can be overcome, this or that grievance that can be assuaged.
And not to be forgotten, either, is the role now played in this country of that small army of smiling Pakistanis who have somehow made their way, parlaying their exaggerated "opposition to Musharraf" and "democratizing" sympathies to fool enough of the hiring-and-promotion people at various universities to now provide useful adjuncts, in their "international relations" and "government" and "history of the subcontinent" gigs, to the efforts by members of MESA Nostra, more often Arabs, or Arab sympathizers, in departments of MIddle Eastern studies.
For one example of the smyler with the knyf under his cloke, the half-way "reformer" who remains a Defender of the Faith, but is also sly as all get-out, see the case of Mr. Haqqani, now the Pakistani ambassador to Washington, but until recently, head of the department of internationl relations at Boston University, where he had steadily climbed, now that the old guard had retired and anything was possible, and he managed to have hired a fellow Pakistani who not only has repackaged himself as an "expert" in fields for which he has no training and no background, but has carefully excised from his past his appearances on behalf of Islam (as at a mosque in suburban Boston with eager Infidels, in one of those Outreach Evenings that end with delicious exotically-spiced chicken-and-pita to make sure the Infidels go home contented and grateful for "all that they have learned" about Islam) that reveal him to be quite different from what he now presents to his insufficiently vigilant, or perhaps too indifferent-to-Islam, colleagues, and who, for all I know, is climbing steadily through the ranks and someday will assume the position that Mr. Haqqani managed to obtain.
But unless you are paying close attention to all of this, and so few do, then a smiling face, an assurance of deep and abiding friendship and of trustworthiness, by this general, or that populist zamindar, or that clever ambassador with a mellifluous voice now well-versed in the ways of this country, and in how to speak most plausibly and convincingly to Americans ("they are just like children, these Americans, whether professors, or students, or Senators, or generals -- Ali, Mohammed, I'll get you those visas, you've got to come here, you just won't believe it!") with the results, the dismal results in our expensive and misdirected, often nearly futile policies, that we all see.
"NATO general: "There certainly is a level of ISI complicity in the militant areas in Pakistan and organisations such as the Taliban"
Er.....General, may one ask WHAT exactly are we going to do about it ?
This is common knowledge General David D. McKiernan, did it take u all these years to know. Now as u have discovered this why dont you let the bigger dhimmis and your commander in chief in US know.
with friend like these (Musharraf and ISI) who'll need our enemies...
"I can't say to what level of leadership that goes to but there are indications of complicity on the part of ISI... (AFP)
A serious problem we have today in waging war is that we are "over lawyered". We need to replace the lawyers with common sense people like we had in WWII if we really want to win.
If it looks like a duck, acts like a duck, and quacks like a duck, its a duck. In WWII that would have been actionable logic. Today they have to have documented overwehlming evidence which is difficult and sometimes impossible to get from the enemy.
Well, Hugh, you need to quit being so ambiguous and guarded about what you really think of American/Pakistan relations. Just go ahead next time and give it to us Normal Americans straight.
From the above Telegraph India link:
"On Thursday, Indian Air Force SU-30 fighter planes arrived at the Nellis Air Force Base near the nuclear test site in the Nevada desert for “Red Flag” combat training exercises that will mark an unprecedented level of engagement between the defence forces of India and the US."
-- --
Great opportunity for us to do a bit of reverse engineering on those SU-30s.
Here's something that Mr Fitzgerald brought to our attention some years ago, and that bears repeating, and repeating, and repeating.
Words of wisdom from a brilliant Indophile, one David McCutchion (1930-1972), written circa 1971, just before the author's very untimely death:
"What do I think of it all? Appalling...Pakistan should never have existed -- it has cost more lives than the whole of the British Empire in 200 years. What should I think of a culture that burns down the British Council library in Lahore because an English publisher printed a picture of Mahomet? "
"Fanaticism plus Machiavellianism plus brutality equals Islamic Pakistan."
Correction to the above: David McCutchion's acerbic observations were first brought to the attention of jihadwatchers by Mr Fitzgerald not 'some years ago', but one year ago.
"A serious problem we have today in waging war is that we are "over lawyered". We need to replace the lawyers with common sense people like we had in WWII if we really want to win."
A common meme, and a useless one besides. Give George Patton a boatload of tanks and the fight in Afghanistan and he'd give you as many replays of the great Soviet invasion as you were willing to let him. Maybe you could even dig up a couple of Air Corps guys to export a few million tons of HE into the Afghan mountainsides!
"Remind me again, what part of this hasn't been common knowledge for years?"
Eh, that's never stopped JW from its crusade to present Robert Spencer's Annotated google Newsfeed before. :)
Yeah, that last italic tag should have been closed. Alas!