With Musharraf gone three weeks, the New Duranty Times yesterday published an article by Dexter Filkins, detailing the double game he and others in Pakistan have played for years. It is the keenest, and most useful, article on Pakistan ever to have appeared in the Times. And it should give pause to all the supporters of our “staunch ally,” and to all those who defended Musharraf over the years.
Thirty billion dollars later, Our Great Pakistani Hope did not wait to utter his nunc dimittis. He took his congé and dismissed himself before others could embarrass him by doing it for him. But now the game he was playing has been made obvious to everyone, courtesy the Times.
There he was, Musharraf, our Stout Friend, last in that long line of Pakistani generals whose trustworthiness, stout-heartedness, and fierce opposition to “Muslim extremists” was lauded by everyone. Will there be no end to this? Will faith in a man forever replace an understanding of what prompts those who make up nearly the whole society, a society and state suffused with Islam? For the last fifty years men like Musharraf have been fooling American generals (“You wouldn’t fool us, would you?” “I would if I could.”). They have fooled the Americans into thinking of them as stout-hearted fellows, pukka sahibs with terry-thomas moustaches, so much better than those leftist Indians with their New Left Book Club subscriptions still in force. Oh, think of Nehru, whom the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen, and their limited ilk, could practically see still walking in the Fellows’ Garden with Sidney Webb, or Harold Laski, or Victor Gollancz. Think of Krishna Menon getting the goat of the Dulles brothers in Bandung, or some other conference. Think of the Soviets building steel mills for India and how much to the advantage of Pakistan that kind of thing reverberated in Washington, where Islam was, all through the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s — a little boost from ARAMCO didn’t hurt — seen only as a “bulwark against Communism.”
It’s time to put away childish things — as perhaps has been understood about the misconceptions, and the inattention, to Russia. It’s time to see Islam as what it is, as what the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira contain. It’s time to see the tenets that arise naturally from those canonical texts, and the attitudes toward Infidels that Islam inculcates. These texts and tenets and attitudes create a miasma of hostility that is not to be dissipated by Western generosity. It hangs over, like the pollution over Beijing, any society suffused with Islam. Even those who within that society claim to be more enlightened and mock the “extremists” will nonetheless help in their own way to prolong Infidel confusion, just as long as those “advanced” members of any Muslim state or society still cling — out of fear or filial piety or confusion or a blend of all three — to the notion that “Islam and Islamic law are good things.” By continuing against all the evidence to defend it, this Total Belief-System that is responsible for the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of Muslim societies, these “enlightened ones” prove to be not our allies, as some seem to think they are. Rather, in the effect that they have, they are promoters of or enablers of Jihad, even if they would be horrified to think so, and horrified that such a charge could and would be made not by Infidel idiots, but by Infidels well-versed in the texts, tenets, attitudes of Islam, and in the history of Muslim conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims.
Pakistan: thirty billion dollars down the drain. Not as bad as Iraq, where the squandering has now reached close to two trillion. Not as bad as Egypt, with close to $70 billion now given to a country whose population, hating the regime, becomes with every American dollar supplied that corrupt Mubarak-Family-and-Friends Plan more anti-American (it never ceased to be viciously anti-Israel) every day. Not as bad as Afghanistan, where the Bright Idea of Secretary Gates is now to send another twenty billion to the hopeless case of Afghanistan, in the forlorn hope that something — anything — will make things better, as if “making things better” in Muslim countries is the best way to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam and Jihad, or to force Muslims, or at least the thinking minority among them, to begin aloud to connect Islam and those political, economic, social, etc. failures that can so easily be linked to Islam itself.
How many more tens of billions will flow to Pakistan for a pitiful raid here, or bombing run there? When will the American military, on the spot, and the civilians at home, decide that a much less compliant policy is needed? There needs to be an end to this idiotic creation, the Infidel Man’s Burden. Instead, the Camp of Islam, with all of its instruments for conducting the Jihad, is to be held in check, and weakened from within so that it cannot continue to threaten the West and the rest of the Infidel world as it so obviously does — but mainly through, not terrorism, but the Money Weapon, Da’wa, and demographic conquest.