Fitzgerald: Zardari and Petraeus

“Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari on Monday said the United States drone raids on Pakistani territory should be stopped, describing them as counter-productive, private TV channel Geo reported.” – from this news article

Asif Ali Zardari is the crook, slightly less Islamist in inclination, who is the widower of Pinky Bhutto. In other words, he's one of the anglophone zamindars who own most of Pakistan, though some in the military, that other center of power and for some a royal road to riches, are giving the zamindars, or landowners (with jute, textiles, stuff like that), a run for their money.

He's better than Nawaz Sharif, in just the same way that beetle-browed Brezhnev was "better" than party-theoretician Mikhail Suslov, or that Chou En-Lai (with his worldly cigarette-holder, and his French) was "better" than that dour and determined Long-Marcher and epic natator, Chairman Mao. But he's still awful, still mendacious, and still not about to come clean and say the truth to General Petraeus or anyone else: Look, we're Muslims. We don't like you. You are Infidels. Our people cannot like you. Their sympathies are naturally with any Muslims fighting you, unless that particular Muslim group has just finished decapitating the people in the next village, and now threaten them. That's the only way they will give you, and only most temporarily, any cooperation, and they will do so only so that you supply them, or supply us, with weapons galore. Oh, and money, of course, money. You can't expect us to ask Saudi Arabia or the U.A.E. or Kuwait or Qatar for money; the money must come from Infidels.

No, he won't say that.

Still, there are hints of it all the time. A news article a few months ago said this: “Mr. Zardari and the People's Party wants to be tough with the militants but they do not have support in the country, where there is growing anti-American sentiment largely fueled by the indiscriminate missile attacks and cross-border incursions."

It's up to General Petraeus, who is slow and methodical, to figure out why this anti-American sentiment exists, and to figure out also that what the military do is a very small part of what must be done. Petraeus is entirely too slow in his learning-curve about Islam. And his new post as head of CENTCOM does not, apparently, allow him to take a peek at what is happening elsewhere, in Thailand or Indonesia, or most importantly, in Western Europe. No, so far this seems to have escaped him, though there are glimmers, here and there, that his understanding of the meaning and menace of Islam is broadening and deepening.

But s-l-o-w-l-y. Too s-l-o-w-l-y.

And meanwhile, the meretricious rulers of Pakistan, the zamindars and generals, for all their smiling anglophonic plausibility, are not much different deep down from those they rule over. They dislike Infidels, but above all they dislike the Americans, who appear to believe that they should be getting something for the tens of billions they have poured into Pakistan over the years -- $30 billion since 9/11/2001 alone. How outrageous of those Americans! How intolerable for them to expect us to really fight other Muslims! How dare they, no matter how frustrated, attack the Taliban and Al Qaeda without asking our permission first, so that we can decide when and where, and how often, to warn our fellow Muslims?

When will the people who make American policy cease to be so endlessly naive, so willfully ignorant of Islam and what it teaches, what it inculcates, what it does to the minds of Believers? Will it be another few months, another few years, what? Don't you think that all over Europe people are enraged, are in despair, that their governments ever allowed so many Muslims to enter France, and Great Britain, and Germany, and Belgium, and Sweden, and Denmark, and Norway and Spain and Italy and The Netherlands? Is there anyone who, if he could turn the clock back forty years, would not have kept out every single Muslim immigrant? No, there is not.

Why is it so hard for the Americans whose task it is to instruct and protect us to do what they should, to even make the attempt to read the texts, to study the tenets, to read the real -- as opposed to the false, the mendacious, the gone-native propagandistic -- scholars of Islam and of Islamic conquest?

Posted by Hugh at November 5, 2008 5:38 PM
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