The government of Pakistan does something, a little something, but with a great show for its American benefactors, to counter terrorism in this or that part of Pakistan. At the same time, it makes deals with supporters of the Taliban in Waziristan, and then misrepresents those deals.
Meanwhile, in the cities of Pakistan, including Quetta, the Taliban and its Pakistani supporters cooperate freely with one another. After all, the Taliban owes its existence to Pakistan. It was in the madrasas in Pakistan that each little Talib once studied, and then, properly enthused, moved back in small groups to Afghanistan in the early 1990s, after the Soviet army had been defeated, in order to establishe in Afghanistan Peace on Earth and Good Will Toward All Those Willing to Abide by the Strictest Shari’a. And for the rest — death.
Pakistan is not an “ally,” much less a “staunch ally.” It cannot be. It cannot be because of the tenets of Islam, and because the population is overwhelmingly, deeply and truly and disturbingly Muslim. It cannot be no matter what the smoothest and most plausible of generals (Musharraf, for a while) would have us believe, and evidently have succeeded in getting powerful people in Washington to believe. It cannot be no matter what the zamindars say — Pinky Bhutto and the anglophone children of the elite, who in private schools and colleges in the West are good at winning over first their innocent roommates, then the rest of the students, and then of course the faculty and administrators, who are all eager to be fooled about Pakistan and about Islam.
Meanwhile, the Pakistanis who happen to have acquired English citizenship (which is not the same thing as being “English”) through birth or naturalization procedures, but who possess not a “dual loyalty” (that might be manageable) but rather a “single loyalty” — and that loyalty is only to Islam — continue to move freely about the cabin of the world. Indeed, they move about freely especially in the First-Class Compartment of the West, in which, unaccountably, they have been allowed to make themselves at home.
Billions of dollars in debt relief, billions in further economic aid, and even billions in military aid have been squandered on Pakistan. After all, Pakistan was always a favorite of American generals: those rectitudinous terry-thomas-moustached generals, that business of “Islam is a bulwark against Communism” — that was all ye knew on earth, and all ye needed to know. Taliban warriors, upraised in Islam and in terror, live freely in Pakistan — after having come from all kinds of places. They live untouched in Pakistan and return at will to Afghanistan. Other terrorists raised in Pakistan have over a much longer period persecuted non-Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir, forcing the mass exodus, for example, of 400,000 Kashmiri pandits, as well as murdering Hindu villagers. And still other Pakistani terrorists are raised and trained and supported within Pakistan, sometimes by the intelligence service of the Pakistani military, or I.S.I. The ISI is an entirely sinister group that also helped support and now protects A. Q. Khan. The terrorists it sometimes has supported have over the years attacked deep within India, in Mumbai twice with hundreds of casualties, and in Delhi (the Parliament building) and elsewhere — so many of the attacks until recently going unreported outside India, and seldom paid attention to.
That is Pakistan. This is the land of our “staunch ally,” where even Musharraf has begun, with the shameful revelations in his new book, to distance himself from Washington. How long will Pakistan receive American aid — again, a disguised Jizyah whenever Infidels give payments to Muslims, payments that the Muslims take as by right and that the Infidels give as by fearful duty? Bush and Co. can swagger all they want, but their timidity, their lack of imagination, and their obstinacy in a clumsy course that does not recognize the need and possibility of dividing and demoralizing the Camp of Islam, infuriates more and more. More and more innocent and well-meaning American soldiers pay with their lives for that obstinacy, that lack of imagination, that timidity, that stupidity, that Baby-Huey approach based on unrectified ignorance of Islam.
They will be made to sit in the corner, wearing their dunce-caps, soon. But not soon enough.