winterbadger: (pooh tao)
Catching up before the year ends. I've already beaten last year's 21, but I'm nowhere near the desired 50.

The Assassination of the Archduke: Sarajevo 1914 and the Romance That Changed the World by Greg King and Sue Woolmans (26)

The Rise of Islamic Capitalism: Why the New Muslim Middle Class Is the Key to Defeating Extremism by Vali Nasr (27)

Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding by Hussain Haqqani (28)


In Progress:
The Battle of Midway by Craig L. Symonds
How Can Man Die Better: The Secrets of Isandhlwana Revealed by Mike Snook
Dunkirk: Retreat to Victory by MG Julian Thompson
Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy
Boer Commando by Denneys Reitz
winterbadger: (afghanistan)
Afghan President Hamid Karzai calls on India for military aid.

Given that one of the greatest drivers of Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan is fear of that country becoming allied to Pakistan's fraternal twin/deadly for, India, this is a seriously destabilising move. Especially it's being done publicly.
winterbadger: (pakistan)
One of my friends posted a link to this story in the Post about the erosion of civil liberties in the US. I started to reply, and then realised that it would perhaps be more appropriate to post my response here than co-opt his entry.

Read more... )
winterbadger: (pakistan)
Osama bin Laden dead: officials - Americas - Al Jazeera English

President Obama speaking now.

This is amazing. I have no idea how this is happening, or what it means. But it answers some questions...while leaving others.
winterbadger: (afghanistan)
500/500 for my term paper in Professor Thistlebottom's class. His comments on this and the last previous essay were quite friendly and devoid of picky grammar comments. Perhaps, as with horses, one just needs to be firm and decisive.

I won't bore you with the entire 11-page paper, but it raised an interesting question: if the Afghan security and intelligence system becomes weaker, what else can the US do to shore up the situation there? It's a hypothetical based on a counterfactual premise; while there continue to be problems with the military and police there, I think there's been tremendous progress. The problem, IMO is the national political part. Karzai has been compared to Diem in Vietnam, and I think it's a fair comparison. He's not very popular; he's not very capable; we more or less put him where he is. In addition, he seems to have lost confidence in the US and NATO--probably because we've been very frank about criticizing his government's corruption and election cheating--and is flailing around wildly for an alternative. But the terms that his enemies want before they will talk to him are higher than he's prepared to go. We can't possibly get rid of him, because we'll get just what we did when Diem went down--a chaotic mess where any hope of a credible national government supported by the people goes by the wayside.

My essay argued that we have to look at what is keeping the insurgents going. It's not popular support--people in Afghanistan HATE them, and while they don't like the Karzai government either, they're prepared to tolerate it *if* it can protect them and let them go about their business, even make things a little better here and there. I think we have to look at the basic nature of Afghan warfare and peel off the insurgent groups that can be peeled off. They're run by some pretty loathsome people, but loathsome people are who, in the final analysis, run things in that part of the world. If we can bribe (to be frank) the Hekmatyars, maybe even the Quetta Shura with NATO withdrawal and a chance to participate in ruling the country, I think we could get them to stop fighting (with guns).

But only if we don't have someone egging them on. And right now, Pakistan is doing that. They are afraid that if we withdraw, Afghanistan will go back to civil war, and so they want the major factions that will predominate in such a war to owe them. They are deathly afraid of India gaining a foothold there and surrounding them. And they have their own insurgents (that IMO have grown out of the vipers they've nursed in their bosom) that they do not have the resources to defeat. I think we need to engage much more fervently with Pakistan. Stop sanctioning them and making them question whether or not we support them. Pressure India (who owe us a lot IMO, after the boosts that they got from Bush) to make it clear they have NO ambitions in Afghanistan. And we need to provide serious (hands-off) COIN support to Pakistan to help them squelch their own Taliban. The people in the FATA don't like these folks, but if the only way the government can deal with them is to clear all the villages and drive people out of the hills, guess who they will like less? So we need to supply the Paks with helos, comms, and most of all training, training, training. We simply cannot send troops in there to partner with them the way we have in Afghanistan--they wouldn't be tolerated. So we have to help them learn how to do modern COIN: presence, patrolling, making friends with the population, building infrastructure that people need, working with local government instead of dictating to it, building local self-defense forces instead of insisting that "foreign" troops (Punjabis instead of Pathans) should guard them.

I think if we're prepared to throw our weight behind Pakistan, they can be convinced to stop supporting the Afghan Taliban. And if they AT don't have that support *and* they have a chance to participate in Afghan decisionmaking, they will talk.

Now, how we get the Paks to stop supporting LeT and the Kashmiri militants, which would probably be India's price for backing off, I have NO idea....
winterbadger: (coffee cup)
I really enjoyed a movie I watched recently, a movie about Bengalis living in London and trying to puzzle out where "home" really was, and it made me realise how many great films I've seen about the South Asian experience in the UK. So I decided to sponsor a virtual film festival: I'm nominating my slate of great movies about the mixture of South Asian cultures and communities with those of the UK, *in* the UK, and the challenges that mixing presents. I'll try to provide a thoughtful commentary on each of the titles each day of the festival (if I have time). Commentors are welcome to suggest alternative films. I'm also working on the flip side, tentatively title "Claiming Tea for the Queen: Britain's Love Affair with India", which will focus on films dealing with the British experience in South Asia.

So, the festival week lineup:Read more... )
winterbadger: (editing)
"Suspected US strike kills eight, CIA chief in Pak"

As my friend who pointed that out to me observed, they probably meant that to be a semicolon, not a comma...

Crossposted to cranky_editors.
winterbadger: (pakistan)
Just catching up on The Daily Show from a few weeks back, and JS had the Pakistani Ambassador to the US, Hasan Haqqani. Honestly, it's so hard not to like intelligent, quick-witted, humourous people! And so many moderate Pakistanis (or at least those who appear moderate) fit that bill. Amb. Haqqani really pitched himself perfectly, capping Stewart's remarks with disarmingly apt jokes of his own, then switching to serious evaluation of the situation, then letting loose a friendly but ironic jab at the US.

Of course, more than a little dissimulation was thrown in. I'm sure that even two weeks ago the Pakistani government knew that more than "a few thousand" people had been displaced by the fighting. And the mistakes that had been made in dealing with the Taliban which he freely admitted were all, it was implied, made by other people than the current government. If PM Zardari really did negotiate with the Talibs to show they couldn't be relied on, it was a brilliant stroke, but that has just a little bitt too much a ring of a pat answer to a tricky question.

But it was an excellent performance, leavening humour, frankness, and warning. A real Pakistani charm offensive--and very charming he was. Clearly someone realises that they can get the same sort of exposure for Pakistan's case that they would on the Sunday morning shows by going on TDS, but with a much more supportive questioner in JS.
winterbadger: (pakistan)
If the Pakistanis don't deal with the Taliban sheltering in their country, we are going to feel the need to go in and deal with them ourselves (as will, in time, the Afghans).

But when we do so more and more openly and violently, this sort of thing is bound to happen. Keep going this way, and the Pakistanis will be killing NATO troops soon.

We need to find a way out of this situation, but I can't for the life of me imagine what it is...
winterbadger: (great seal of the united states)
After seeing two of the clips that ABC is circulating of its interview(s) with Gov Palin.

[Poll #1258459]
winterbadger: (pakistan)
Bhutto killed at rally

I'm not a big fan of Benazir Bhutto's, but I can't see how this does anything but make the situation worse.
winterbadger: (British colonial infantry)
I was browsing through Wikipedia this afternoon and a name caught my eye. Back in the day, I remember a scenario of the old SPI game "Patrol" featured British troops trying to track down the Faqir of Ipi. So when I saw that title again, I had to take a look.

Wikipedia's summary of that gentleman's military exploits reads, in part:

The Faqir of Ipi [ born Mirza Ali Khan in 1897] was a Pashtun from today's North-Western Pakistan, then British India. ... The village of Ipi is located ...in North Waziristan Agency, Waziristan, from where the Faqir of Ipi started his self styled jihad against the British government. He waged a highly effective guerrilla warfare against the British Empire throughout the 1930s and 1940s until the British departure in 1947. At one point nearly 40,000 British and Indian troops were reported to be in the field trying to capture him, while he succeeding in evading the tight net surrounding him. His own force of armed tribesmen, probably not exceeding one thousand men, armed with rifles and a few machine-guns, and occasionally one or two pieces of antiquated cannon were fielded against this much larger British army equipped with modern artillery, tanks and aircraft. The Faqir of Ipi was always short of ammunition, had no radio communication, and relied upon a traditional network of informants and messengers for his intelligence while the British had much more sophisticated communications and intelligence capabilities developed in World War II.


As Kipling would probably remind us, nothing much changes in that part of the world.
winterbadger: (pakistan)
Pakistan deports ex-PM on return

Heard this on the news this morning and chuckled to myself. Yes, Mr Sharif, you can legally return. But no one said you could *stay*.

Honestly, this man is about as committed to democracy as a pig is committed to dieting. Being prime minister meant for him the ability to line his pockets, find jobs for his family and political cronies, and dream up ways to employ the forms of government to illegally suppress dissent and protect his corrupt governance.

I'm not sure what to wish for Pakistan. I think General Musharraf is undoubtedly the best man to preserve the nation's stability and security at this point. I don't believe that there are any civilian political leaders who can be trusted with government. But I do believe that somehow states need to evolve towards democracy, or they will forever be dictatorships where ruling power is handed (or seized) from one hand to another. I just don't quite know how one gets to a stable democracy from the position that many developing nations find themselves in today.

But I do know that it seems very unlikely to me that an invading foreign army is the way to move forward...

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