axiom.c
The Taliban’s Rising Tide
Author → Asif → in World-News → on Jul 11 2008 10:19AM
Tags:
Taliban
Pakistan
Afghanistan
There are some interesting comments from other readers about this
situation:
'I have read reports from aid workers in Afghanistan claiming many Afghani civilians caught in the crossfire are confused. The US supports the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Pakistan supports the Taliban which is trying to overthrow the government of Afghanistan. The heroin cultivation and trade is the engine driving the Afghanistan economy. The situation is chaotic. Pakistan will not fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda as long as an unstable Afghanistan is perceived to be in its best interest. And as long as NATO and US troops are in Afghanistan it is not in Pakistan's interests to help Afghanistan stabilize. Pakistan wants NATO and the US out of the region. No amount of aid will change this reality. Until the foreign troops leave there will be war.— Jim Harrington, San Diego, CA
At the bottom of this whole situation is the question:
"Why the escalating popularity, and power, of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but fundamentally of Islamism in general, and NOT only in Afghanistan and Pakistan??"
Both movements being the outgrowth from the, USA and Saudi Arabia assisted, movement to repulse Soviet domination and occupation of Afghanistan have simply stuck to their guns, and in the process inevitably radicalized their positions of total rejection of FOREIGN domination be it Soviet , American or Xian of any Moslem state, people or nation.
The USA and Israel, a USA surrogate as perceived by a sizable portion of Islamic public opinion, gave them all every reason to credibly portray both states as the NEW threat to Islamdom and as the, as much as the “communist”, “doctrinaire”-political enemy of Islam.
The ascendancy of the neocon/Christian Fundamentalist movement, with very strong undertones of a Zionist Christianity, in the USA with the Bush (Perle-Wolfowitz) Administration and the rise of the Israeli/Zionist right with Sharon and successor(s) together with both states practices and policies of relentless aggressive wars and unbridled violence in Afghanistan , Iraq and in occupied Palestine NOT only confirmed both movements vision /portrayal of the conflict as a Judeo-Christian/Islam conflict BUT equally rallied to their support, and ranks, almost all of the indigenous “nationalist” movements and the forces of the LEFT, their erstwhile major competitors/rivals for public support and popular commitment.
Thus the Bush (Perle-Wolfowitz)/Sharon alliance, with its underlying imperialist/Fundamentalist/Zionist doctrine, both the USA and Israel managed to achieve, the hitherto “unthinkable”: a common front of “nationalist” movements, Islamism and the Left.
— Omar I Nashashibi, Amman/Jordan
Follow the money! $7 BILLION went into $omeone's pocket. Who $upplied weapon$
GOP corruption and cronyism is bankrupting our country!!!!!
— JAC, CA
The fact is that nobody respects our international interests because, well, they aren't respectable. No amount of money thrown at people's faces will change that. This may be a stretch, but it is somewhat naive to suggest that propping up governments that do not have the support of their own people will in some way make us safer.
The Muslim world is in flames, and we can claim credit for that. U.S. funding of the warring regimes of Israel, Pakistan, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, and of course Iraq only worsens our international position while at the same time neglects our dire needs at home.
We should also get out of bed with Israel, the most egregious terrorist and human rights abuser of them all, a relationship which makes quite the showcase of American hypocrisy.
So how about we take those countless billions in taxpayer dollars and invest in American infrastructure to revamp vital institutions like education, health care, and public transit, rather than flushing it down the toilet to be whisked away to some undisclosed location?
— Hazem Isawi, Chicago
I don't know where you, or the deluded members of Congress have gotten the idea that the Pakistani's can be bought with foreign aid. For years we have supported a dictator who suppressed democracy in that country. Nothing that we are going to give them financially is going to make them follow our lead now. It is a waste of foreign aid money in a time of economic distress in the United States.
You make a lot of the fact that 1,000 Pakistanis have been killed in the past year. That is nothing in a country as violent as Pakistan. We lose that number on our highways here every week or so, perhaps even more.
The Pakistani's are a country that is made up of modern Muslims and backward medievalists. They are pretty evenly split and one side is hardly going to be able to suppress the other. The only answer for them is to either go to war against each other, in which event there will be hundreds of thousands killed, given the propensity of the medievalists to seek death in fighting the infidel, or to split the country into two parts - one modern and one stuck in the past. They are clearly not one country religiously or philosophically.
We will just be kidding ourselves if we think that we can buy them off. The modernists aren't willing to go to war against the medievalists, and that has been apparent for many years now. They know that the cost in deaths and destruction would be too high. The lunatic group is from the mountainous regions where there are no real cities and they have little to lose economically, while the modernists are from the developed areas and they have much to lose in such a war. The real answer is to split the country into two and let the lunatic fringe go its own way, but the Pakistanis haven't seen it that way just yet, although their attempt to negotiate a truce with the medievalists is an attempt to do so informally.
There is nothing that we can do now, partly because the Bush Administration has acted so stupidly during the part seven years, partly because of stupidities even earlier when we abandoned Pakistan after the Soviets were thrown out of Afganistan with their help, and because of our favoritism of India during the Clinton Administration. The Pakistanis are not going to do anything for us, except take our offered money and do nothing useful for us with it.
We can only hope that the new administration can build a better relationship with that country; just don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.— Joel L. Friedlander, Syosset, New York
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