(no subject)

[winterbadger]

After seeing two of the clips that ABC is circulating of its interview(s) with Gov Palin.

[Poll #1258459]

Comments

[snolan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Pakistan is a sticky situation. The national government has plausible deniability that they are in anyway helping the terrorists in the mountains, but they also are not being very effective in combatting said terrorists, nor cooperating with NATO forces in taking care of that problem for them.

The harder we push them to do something; the more difficulty they have in holding onto power, and a change of regime would probably not be good news for Westerners at all there. If we take action on our own, and get caught doing it; the same results are very likely. Pakistan is essentially a dry powder keg waiting for a spark...

[winterbadger]

...and one with nuclear weapons.

My impression from reading press reports and books about Pakistan is that the Army is doing what it can, from time to time, to fight the *foreign* insurgents in the tribal areas, but that how hard they go at them depends on political infighting *inside* the army between those who want to crush the terrorists, those who support them, and those who don't particularly support them but find them to be a useful tool and don't want to make them go away entirely.

The situation seems to be complicated by the existence of the extremist *native* guerrilla movement, which is in some ways separate and some ways intertwined with the foreign fighters. The ethnic and religious divisions crosscut the national divisions--many Talibs and their Pakistani hosts are ethnically Pashtun and so have connections on both sides of the border. Many of the religious extremists are Deobandis and so have connections throughout the region.

And of course the terrain makes military operations there very, very difficult. The British really never mastered this area even when they controlled India, and punitive expeditions int he hundreds of thousands sometimes had trouble getting in and then getting back out again.

And, of course, any time that the government tries to push hard against the terrs after we have been pressing them to, they look like tools of the Americans and thus provide fuel to the arguments of the radicals...