Another day, another Donors’ Conference, in downtown Kabul. Again, it will be the non-Muslim nations who will commit, and actually deliver, still more tens of billions to a place, Afghanistan, that was never a nation but always a collection of warring tribes – and even warring families, and individuals. Afghanistan is of no real consequence except as a land area where, for a time, the Taliban who were raised up and put in place by Pakistan, then gave refuge and succor to Al Qaeda. Because we are run by people who cannot think clearly, the idea seems to be that we are to spend tens of billions of dollars in this particular place, even though by now at least three things are clear.
To wit:
1) The government of Hamid Karzai, at every level, is hopelessly corrupt, and this corruption inflames the populace, and causes more to support the Taliban they once had grown to despise. But the corruption occurs because there is now something to be corrupt about – the very money that flows in from donor nations that do not know how to tell the Americans no, do not know how to analyze the situation correctly, and feel as though, if they did not send troops, or are refusing to send more troops, or are intending to withdraw the troops they have, then the least they can is send a few hundred million or a billion. It’s madness. It makes no sense. Were no money to come from the outside, Karzai and Karzai’s brother and all the other warlords would be disappointed, but at least the spectacle of their corruption – they would now have so little to be corrupt about – would be over, and the Taliban could not use that as a rallying cry.
2) There is no winning of Afghan hearts and minds. They are Muslims and we are Infidels. A handful of people may wish to cooperate with us, may sense that we wish them well, and are far more to be trusted than the sinister Pakistanis, but these people cannot possibly influence the mass of primitive Muslims who will always see us as what, in fact, we are – Infidels. That puts a limit, a very low limit, on any collaboration beyond temporary overlaps of self-interest. Money will not do it.
3) We must come to understand that what keeps Afghans economically down is a combination of things that all come from Islam – the habit of mental submission, the habit or duty of submission to authority, if that authority is Muslim; the hatred of Bid’a or innovation, the deep inshallah-fatalism; the insistence that women are an inferior species and must remain uneducated and be kept down; the deep belief that Muslim and Infidel can never be friends, that Muslims have a duty only to other Muslims, and cannot possibly be loyal to Infidels; and the deep belief that Muslims have a duty, the one that gives most meaning to their lives: to support, to defend, to protect, to lie for, and to tear down all obstacles that stand in the way of, Islam and the spread of Islam and the dominance of Islam.
But let’s return to the country that matters more than Afghanistan, and that is Pakistan. Just this week, Hillary Clinton was visiting. She was there, the State Department trumpeted, to announce a “massive” package of aid, of very kind, at every level, from water treatment and supply plants, to projects to improve the Port of Karachi. Why, the Pakistanis needn’t worry about all their problems, or about the diversion of billions to all kinds of other causes — including that of producing the nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them – because the Americans were not content with having spent the last day or two, before the comic farce in Kabul opens and more billions are handed over from the Infidels to the Muslims, and went back to neighboring Pakistan.
And what was the purpose of Hillary Clinton’s visit? Oh, it was to try to do things that would “minimize the mistrust.” Which “mistrust” is that, you ask? Is it, by any chance, the mistrust that has formed in the minds of every sane American, at every level, of Pakistan’s reliability as a “staunch ally” of the U.S.? Meanwhile, in Pakistan, Hillary Clinton has announced another half-billion dollars in aid in order, so we are told, to offer tangible evidence of our friendship — apparently the last $30 billion, since 9/11/2001, has not been enough — and, above all, to “overcome Pakistani mistrust” of the United States. It is we who have every reason to mistrust meretricious Pakistan, that has been leading on, inveigling, fooling, diddling the American government for the past fifty years.
But it is we — you and I — who are now contributing still more money so as to “overcome Pakistani mistrust.” And, not incidentally, to relieve the rich Arabs — Saudi Arabia in the lead — of any requirement that they contribute to the wellbeing of fellow members of the Umma. Oh no, that’s always and everywhere a task for Infidels, no matter how many trillions the Saudis and other rich Arabs pile up, and pile up, and pile up. It wouldn’t do to have them share the wealth with Pakistan or other Muslims. That’s a task for the Infidels, that’s a task that calls for more and ever more Jizyah, pocketed without gratitude and a sense of entitlement beyond anything non-Muslims can possibly understand, and a craven willingness to give and keep on giving, that should be beyond anything non-Muslims should possibly tolerate.
But our ill-prepared rulers, who may have forgotten that among the responsibilities of rule is that of thoroughly informing themselves of what they need to know, nonetheless have never forgotten how to give away, almost on whim it sometimes seems, huge sums. $440 million here, to Mahmoud Abbas, pour ses beaux yeux, and now something more for Hamid Karzai, and of course how could we overlook Pakistan, whose government and people, it seems, mistrust us. And what better way to overcome that mistrust than to give Pakistan still more aid, aid that the papers described as “massive”?
It’s fun to give away large sums. You feel important. You feel you’ve done good. You sometimes earn, if not any gratitude for the American people (the ones footing the bill) at least some gratitude toward you and your family. And that kind of thing can come in handy: how many countries helped contribute to Bill Clinton’s accumulation of more than one hundred million dollars since leaving office? And even if Kuwait did not receive economic aid, Kuwaiti gratitude for the Gulf War’s outcome was expressed later on, with million-dollar fees to George Bush, Sr. for a short lecture. It’s fun to give away money, and if you don’t have a carefully wrought and clever policy, then giving money away is the next best thing. Why, the American government has been giving vast sums away for more than sixty years. For some – for the countries of Western Europe and for Israel – this money has gone to organic allies, unshakable members of the West whose loyalty is not being bought because it need not be bought, it is already there. And there are some impoverished countries or peoples who do express gratitude to the Americans. But no Muslim country or people have demonstrated any gratitude to any Infidel donors. They take, as by right, whatever they can get, and keep trying to inveigle the Infidels into giving some more.
And one way to get more is to be displeased with what you have been given so far. Pakistan has no cause, and no right, to “mistrust” the American government. But the natural enmity, at times rising to hysterical hatred, felt for Infidels, as exhibited in Pakistan, is presented not as a result of Islam – no, Islam shall be the Great Unmentionable whenever Americans in high office worry about the attitude of Pakistanis – but as simply a result of American mishandling of this or that situation.
And thus it is, nearly a decade after the most fantastic, and fantastically heedless, transfer of American wealth to Muslim states and peoples, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, to Egypt, to Jordan, to the “Palestinians,” nowhere in any of those countries can one find the slightest gratitude, or friendship, or anything like those feelings that we think we have a right to expect, because we keep applying understandings that have no application to the closed mental world of Islam. This American and other Western aid made, and makes, no difference. Indeed, it is likely that the more they think they can count on such aid, and want to inveigle more, the more likely it is that they will show displeasure – for it is displeasure that causes us not to re-examine the whole policy of aid to “win Muslim hearts and minds” but, rather, to think we’ve done wrong, we must do right, and the way to do right is with some “massive” aid projects that will help the “ordinary Pakistanis.” But the ordinary Pakistanis will never like us, not as long as Islam retains its hold upon their minds. You can be sure that the Christians in Pakistan do not hate or fear or mistrust the American government; they wish it well. They only wish that that government would come to their rescue, would force the Pakistani government not to join in the anti-Christian persecution by letting malefactors off, but actually protect the Christians (and Hindus) of Pakistan.
But to give away money is fun and feels good, because you are not wasting money but Doing Good, when you are the Secretary of State, or the President, and you are Doing That Good in the easiest possible way, with someone else’s money – with that of the long-suffering taxpayers who have no say, who cannot make themselves heard, though one doubts that Americans wanted to spend tens of billions on “reconstruction” in Iraq (when Iraq has all the oil, and thus all the money, in the world, and if it doesn’t have those trillions yet, it could certainly have borrowed against that future flow), and Afghanistan, and hopeless primitive meretricious Pakistan. And there may be just a little gratitude, from the rulers at the top, who are good at skimming a lot of that American aid off for themselves and their families. And so, at a later date, when you are out of office and need to make “real money,” you may find that you, and your spouse, and even your children, will be especially welcomed by the elites – still in power of course, since they never leave – in the Muslim lands you so benefitted. And of course, you can always justify the money you handed over, and convince yourself – you don’t take much convincing, that it was worth the effort, that effort to “win” Muslim hearts and minds” by what are essentially bribes.
But we already have the evidence. We already know, we should have learned a long time ago, what Pakistan is all about. Pakistan has been the favored Third-World recipient of American military aid for the past half-century. It started to receive this aid beginning in the mid-1950s as part of that ill-fated – some, less charitable, would call it farcical — military “alliance,” CENTO, which was supposed to block the Soviet Union to its south as NATO did in Europe. CENTO was a military alliance without any value to us, in which the Americans and British supplied all the money and all the military equipment, and such supposedly true-blue unshakable Islamic allies as Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan stood by. They were regarded as allies because the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen, had so often been told that “Islam is a bulwark against Communism” that they came to deeply believe it.
After Qassem’s coup in Iraq, with the death of the Prince Regent, Faisal, and the murder and mutilation of “strong man” Nuri es-Said, Iraq left CENTO and it became clear that CENTO was worthless. But Pakistan never lost its most-favored-nation status in Pentagon eyes. Pakistani generals, with their studied expressions of deep sincerity, their fly-whisking pukka-sahib fake-Sandhurst manner, always impressed American generals, who knew no better. And what was still worse, the State Department proved a pushover — not least, perhaps, because of the suspicion that Nehru and his Foreign Minister, Krishna Menon, with more than a hint of the Faiban Society and Victor Gollancz’s New Left Book Club, were entirely too Marxist, and didn’t those steel mills the Indian government let the Soviets build prove it?
Pakistan has been inveigling weapons and money out of the Americans ever since. So outrageous, however, was Pakistan’s behavior, that those who had been following it closely — including Senator John Glenn and Senator Larry Pressler — finally passed the Pressler Amendment, designed to force the Executive Branch (including the Pentagon and the State Department), to start to make Pakistan observe its solemn commitments as to the use of American weaponry. The Pressler Amendment passed, but the Executive branch continued to do as before. And Pakistan’s rulers, the military (with occasional zamindars allowed to pretend to govern), continued to prepare for the One Cause That Mattered: aggression and war against India and Hindus.
We have all heard about General Zia ul-Haq. General ul-Haq is the man whom suave anglophone Pakistanis (and their children in private schools and universities in the West who have too often had such an influence on their impressionable roommates and classmates) always assure us was the one man responsible for bringing “fanaticism” to formerly nice, kind, peaceful, tolerant, Pakistan. This is utter nonsense, though no doubt found plausible by some of their unknowledgeable and unwary auditors. It’s true, even among Pakistan’s generals, that Zia ul-Haq was unusually fanatical, but fanaticism in Islamic Pakistan was always there, from the get-go. Even if Mohammad Ali Jinnah himself was not a fully observant Muslim (he drank wine, some say he even touched pork), Islam itself was never moderate, and that meant that the primitive Pakistani masses would always accept, and not veer from, Islam as we in the West have now come, haltingly and reluctantly, to understand. Their Islam was and is fanatical as all totalitarian Total Belief-Systems are fanatical. Since Pakistan was born as the “Land of the Pure,” of, by, and for Muslims — just look what happened to the Hindus who had been present at Partition, and what happens to the Christians now — Zia ul-Haq was only an extreme example, one who hastened the madrasizaton of Pakistani education, such as it was.
But there are so many others. Who paid for the project, based on nuclear secrets stolen from Western labs by the thieving metallurgist A. Q. Khan, if not the Pakistani military? And where did they get the money? Well, directly or indirectly, the money came from American taxpayers, for it was our money that allowed the freeing up of other sums to be spent on special projects by Pakistan’s military.
And A. Q. Khan did not limit himself to building, on the American dime, the “Islamic Bomb” that is the only thing in Pakistan that should matter to the American government – that is, who has possession of those bombs, and where they are stored, and whether they can be transferred, and what delivery systems the Pakistani military possesses or is developing. No, he also offered nuclear know-how, it appears, to North Korea, to Iran, and possibly to Libya. Which of those countries received his aid has not been made public, but it is known that offers were made. And what happened to A. Q. Khan? The answer is: He’s a national hero. He’s the Great Man of Pakistan, and the Americans have not been, despite endless entreaties – entreaties to those to whom they have given tens of billions of dollars – able to question A. Q. Khan. The Pakistani government gives him protection. The Pakistani public worships him. The only one who rivals A. Q. Khan in popularity is Aafia Siddiqui, the fanatical Muslimah who, after having been shown every kindness, having been admitted to MIT and then, for graduate work, to Brandeis (with generous scholarships at both places), became involved with Al Qaeda, and fled to Afghanistan, or Pakistan, where eventually the Americans found her. She, of course, has accused the Americans of torture, and has feigned innocence, and no matter what is carefully explained by the American authorities, it doesn’t matter. Aafia Siddiqui is a heroine, a glorious example of how a Muslimah should treat the Infidels. By their National Heroes ye shall know them. In Pakistan, the National Heroes are A. Q. Khan and Aafia Siddiqui.
But none of this has stopped the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, from arriving in Islamabad on Sunday, and then on Monday proudly announcing all the “massive” new aid – part of the package of $7.5 billion that had been approved by Congress – that would now go to Pakistan. But why? The Pakistanis at this very moment are continuing to expand their nuclear arsenal. And that costs money. And they are demanding, and perhaps getting, new jet fighters from the Americans. And they continue to plan for war on India, their enemy – the word “hereditary enemy” might be tempting but even that would not adequately describe why India is the enemy. India is the enemy because India is largely Hindu, and India once was possessed by Muslims, and therefore should once again be possessed by them. It is not India that has been making war on Pakistan for the past fifty years, it is not India that has supported terrorist groups to set off bombs and to kill people all over Pakistan, but rather, Pakistan that has allowed to flourish, and its military even encouraged as a useful adjunct to its own anti-India campaign, all sorts of terrorist groups. Just yesterday an Indian minister announced that the terrorist attack in Mumbai had, from first to last, been under the control of Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence Unit, or I.S.I.
But we are supposed to worry, while the Pakistanis keep us away from A. Q. Khan, and while they make a Pakistani Idol out of Aafia Siddiqui, and while their press continues to be full of the most astounding and absurd charges against the Americans, and while the I.S.I. continues to support the Taliban, save perhaps in one or two places – as Swat – where it seems that the economic interests of the zamindars and the generals are threatened. But there is no indignation, moral or otherwise, against Al Qaeda or against the Taliban when they stick to attacking Americans or other Infidels. There cannot be. Pakistan is Muslim; its people, or the people who count, are Muslim. The non-Muslims are non-persons, who can be used, as child labor (weaving rugs), as domestics who can be cruelly exploited, as the poorest of the poor, but who cannot be treated as citizens equal to Muslims. That would be impossible. And it would be impossible, too, for Pakistan’s government to protect Christians and Hindus from Muslim wrath, from trumped-up charges, from extrajudicial killings by Muslims putting the Shari’a into practice on their own, or policemen determined to see Shari’a, not secular, justice done.
So here we are. It is Pakistan that “mistrusts” us. It is Pakistan that must yet again be given billions. Why? Because those who rule over us cannot do otherwise. They are not clever, they are not cunning, they lack the imagination to figure out what Islam means, and how to best weaken the Camp of Islam. They are going to try the mixture as before: handouts to Muslim states, which will become indefinite, a kind of Jizyah that the Americans do not dare end for fear of the reaction of the Muslim recipients.
That’s where we are in the pitiful history of American efforts to deal with Pakistan. So as better to deal with Afghanistan. So as to keep this group in power. Yet they are far less significant, in the Muslim scheme of things, than they seem to be, with the dozens of terrorist groups that exist, and with the many other instruments, aside from terrorism and combat, or qitaal, through which Muslims worldwide are pursuing the struggle, or Jihad, to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam.
And we are funding them. And it has apparently not occurred to anyone in high office that we should demand that Pakistan apply for aid not from us, but from the fabulously rich fellow Muslims, that is the Arabs of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, U.A.E., Qatar, and so on. Where is the solidarity of the Umma? And since the Arabs will never come through as the endlessly generous and gullible Americans and Europeans do, the only result will be resentment, building in Pakistan, at those Arabs, and the theme may be introduced that is badly in need of introduction. To wit, that the Arabs see themselves as clearly superior to non-Arabs, and Islam itself, the realization may start to dawn if we help, just a little, to talk about it amongst ourselves, and let ourselves be overheard, that Islam has been, is, and always will be a vehicle for Arab supremacism.
And with that, possibly the Pakistanis, who won’t stop for a minute “mistrusting” us until such time as the hold of Islam upon the minds of Pakistanis lessens, may at long last start to “mistrust” us less, and then Arabs who use Islam for their own purposes, a bit more.
Wouldn’t that be good?
Wouldn’t that save hundreds of billions or even trillions?
Isn’t it, really, the only way to stop the endless squandering that has defined our policy toward Muslim states and peoples, based on ignorance and vain hopes, up to now?
If you understand Islam, and you wish Muslims well, what is it you wish for them if not to break the hold that this Total Belief-System has on so many of them? Does it make sense for Infidels to give money to support Muslim peoples and states, so that they will continue to hobble along, with Islam unweakened, but the West economically weakened by such endless aid, and such crazed attention to a problem — the Jihad — that requires other means, other ways to check the forces of Jihad in the countries of Western Europe, imperilled by an ideological assault, by the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da’wa, and demographic conquest?
Given the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan — do we still need to wait to use that term? — isn’t what I suggest worth at least a try?