In a noteworthy exchange, Joe Biden showed off some mad hearing skillz and got Ambassador Crocker to concede that it would be better for America to eliminate actual al-Qaeda in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area than to eliminate AQI in Iraq. Crocker is, of course, correct.
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Where the Enemy Is
08 Apr 2008 04:05 pm
Comments (20)
Careful, Matt. Obama's people might take you seriously and plan an invasion of Pakistan if he wins. Then we'll have to expand the size of the military by a factor of ten and draft PBR-quaffing bloggers into the war effort.
Fred is sort of funny here. If there ever was an invasion of Pakistan, it would be of the northern tribal area. It wouldn't be a full on invasion as that would be a worse quagmire than Iraq. There is no need for a regime change in Pakistan anyhow. I expect that the current status quo where we send in bombers and air strikes into the northern Pakistani region, but we don't actually invade, to continue. It would be great if Pakistan itself stepped up to the plate and helped out more proactively.
Ah yes, if you liked Iraq, you'll loooove the war in Pakistan ...
You morons, no one is actively promoting a war with Pakistan. There's a difference between dropping bombs in a lawless part of Pakistan that even Pakistan is reluctant (due to resources) to engage in and overthrowing the government said country.
I love how Clinton and McCain supporters throw that out there to insinuate Obama is a warmonger. Did we forget he's the only one who got this Iraq thing right in the first place?
It would be great if Pakistan itself stepped up to the plate and helped out more proactively.
It would have been great if we hadn't based our entire Pakistan "strategery" on Musharraf, alienating a huge percentage of the Pakistani people in the process. It will take some real diplomacy to mend that fence.
Anybody got video of this exchange?
There's nothing on youtube yet.
You morons, no one is actively promoting a war with Pakistan.
Well, except for Barack Obama, who actively wanted an invasion of Pakistan (not just "dropping bombs", but a real invasion with ground troops).
It will take some real diplomacy to mend that fence.
Surely Barack Obama's invasion of Pakistan will turn around Pakistani public opinion.
Obama's policy WRT force in Pakistan is not very different at all than what the administration currently does.
It will take some real diplomacy to mend that fence.
Surely Barack Obama's invasion of Pakistan will turn around Pakistani public opinion.
Posted by Al
Barack will simply give a soaring, inspiring speech and the Paks will be happy with the apostate invading their sovereign territory to get his "World Mastermind of All Radical Islam".
Just you wait and see! They will love The Black Messiah!
Well, except for Barack Obama, who actively wanted an invasion of Pakistan (not just "dropping bombs", but a real invasion with ground troops).
And the right-wing drifts further and further into Fantasyland. Life must be so much easier in a world without facts.
A few days ago I read in the New York Times that Mike Hayden said it was a big problem that Al Qaeda was in western Pakistan. No shit! They have been there for over five years. But as long as Musharraf was undisputedly in charge in Pakistan he didn't want any intervention so Bush didn't do anything. It's almost as if Bush had a man-crush on Musharraf. More likely, it was a con man being conned by another. I read an article in Washington Post by Musharraf, and it was very smooth and suave, but it said nothing. Bush certainly seemed taken.
To have policy change by the whims of the leader is how things used to be when there were kings.
"If there ever was an invasion of Pakistan, it would be of the northern tribal area. It wouldn't be a full on invasion as that would be a worse quagmire than Iraq. There is no need for a regime change in Pakistan anyhow. I expect that the current status quo where we send in bombers and air strikes into the northern Pakistani region, but we don't actually invade, to continue. It would be great if Pakistan itself stepped up to the plate and helped out more proactively."
None of this is either correct or useful.
First of all, any invasion of the tribal areas would turn into another Iraq in double quick time (other than the likelihood that these areas wouldn't quite have all the hardware the Iraqi insurgents had available to them - but they'd have enough.) There happen to be three million people up there, and while that's only 2% of the Pakistani population, that's more than enough to kick the crap out of any military forces going in there without some credibility.
Second, any attempt by the US to invade any part of Pakistan would immediately rouse a significant part of the full population to oppose it - and probably force the Pakistani military to back down from supporting it and possibly even to militarily oppose it. Even Musharraf wouldn't agree to such a thing - he dismissed any US ground attempts in the FATA areas as ridiculous. He pointed out those mountains aren't anything like Iraq.
Third, the current parties in the Pakistani parliament have made it clear that the US not welcome to conduct its "war on terror" at the expense of Pakistan. While they did declare that dialog with militants did not equate to accepting "terrorists", clearly they have no interest in encouraging any more extensive US military activities in Pakistan than have currently taken place - and those, too, are under some question.
Fourth, for the most part, the US has been conducting bombing attacks in the FATA. They have been mostly Predator attacks which don't quite rise to the status of air strikes in the conventional sense. And even those have irritated the crap out of many Pakistanis, particularly since many of them have missed their targets, killed civilians, and been done without any clear indication of Pakistani cooperation.
Fifth, the entire notion that there is any possibility of a military solution to Al Qaeda in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere else is a pipe dream. "Al Qaeda" is a "movement", a "brand", a "concept" - even killing bin Laden wouldn't stop it. Only changes in US foreign policy could remove the US as a target for most "Al Qaeda" purposes.
Sixth, even if there was such a solution, Pakistan, while being the only country which would have any possibility of actually doing it, is the last country which will because of the connections between the Pakistani military and intelligence services and the militant groups and their usefulness in dealing with Afghanistan and India.
While Obama never said anything about an "invasion" of Pakistan (Al and Ford are, as usual, in loony-tune land), he DID talk about "finishing the fight in Afghanistan" and "taking the fight to Al Qaeda in Pakistan" - and neither of those are achievable objectives. Not to mention that he has NEVER stated ANY specifics as to HOW he intends to do either of those things.
Any notion that pulling out of Iraq and sending those troops to Afghanistan or Pakistan is some sort of "solution" is idiocy.
Bengt Larsson,
The recently democratically-elected prime minister of Pakistan isn't keen on a U.S invasion of his country either. It's not about the "whims of kings", and the U.S. government was among the parties pressuring Pervez to accede to his people's demands for new elections.
Of the Senators I saw speak today, Feingold was the most dishonest about this, shouting about how we shouldn't be in Iraq because there is more of an Al Qaeda presence in Pakistan while:
1) Not acknowledging that the AQ presence in Iraq is reduced because the Iraqis and the U.S. military have been hounding them there and AQ central has reversed course and ordered new recruits to go to Pakistan instead, and
2) Feingold would have no intention of authorizing a military intervention in Pakistan, and
3) Such an intervention isn't feasible. The best tack is to continue to kill AQ members in Afghanistan and Iraq, and targeted strikes elsewhere with special forces and air power (e.g., Somalia, the Philippines).
Yeah, right, Fred. Knock off one Al Qaeda guy a few times a year by Predators.
That ought to reduce the organization's effectiveness (assuming they never get another recruit) in, oh, five thousand years.
You're an idiot.
Again, the best way to deal with Al Qaeda is to remove the US from its list of enemies by changing US foreign policies. Of course, that means giving Israel the shaft, so it won't happen.
So Fred, do you think Bush fucked up by having unmanned drones kill AQ members in Pakistan.
The AQ members in Pakistan are the ones that attacked us. If KFC became a terrorist organization, would you sent the national guard into Kentucky or would you waste all your resources going after all of the "California Fried Chicken" and "Texas Fried Chicken" places in our cities? The latter is the equivalent of going after AQ in Iraq. It is little more than a branding tool to make oneself look tough, a bit like a bunch of weedy guys in a metal band that decide to toughen their image with umulats. Bin Laden hated the likes of al-Zarqawi and said in his tapes to not send money to him, but to send money to bin Laden. Where is bin Laden again? Oh yeah, Pakistan.
Al Qaeda, whatever it is today, is not a serious threat to the vital security interests of the US. It's helpful to depict this travesty in terms of fast food franchises, because it really is all about pr, branding, and propaganda.
I'm sure that most of the Democrats banging on endlessly about "the real threat" know this. It's just an easy, no-cost way to look tough while arranging surrender terms in Iraq.
Yeah, the group that committed the largest terrorist attack in history, right in the middle of Manhattan and on the Pentagon, isn't a threat yet a boxed-in tinpot dictator was somehow a threat. There's some strategic thinking right there.
AQ, which no longer exists as in 2001, got lucky and took advantage of our inattention to pull off a one-time event which, by the standards of modern warfare, was a lot less significant than it's subsequent promotion. The London Blitz was at least ten times worse. Germany and Japan lost the equivalent of a 9/11's worth of fatalities every day for the last two years of the war, along with all of their major cities pretty much in their entirety.
An aggressive, genocidal, totalitarian police state which was already at war with us, fueled by revenues from the second or third largest oil reserves on the planet, and controlling the keystone state in the region producing most of the terrorism and representing the fulcrum of the world economy, was a much bigger deal.
The only terrorism I'm aware of that's really had any major strategic implications was Gavrilo Princip's assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, and only then because of the inept leadership of the contemporary European nation-states.
Comments closed April 22, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
And better still if everyone had a pony!
Posted by Al | April 8, 2008 4:11 PM