27 Comments

1. Mike Sylwester:

Since 3/4 of all terror plots in Britain were hatched in Pakistan, Britain ought to make it very difficult for people to travel from Pakistan to Britain. Furthermore, anybody who travels from Britain to Pakistan should experience great difficulties coming back to Britain.

And anybody from Pakistan who is in Britain with an expired visa should be deported back to Pakistan.

Dec 14, 2008 - 6:37 pm 2. NahnCee:

So UK is going to give Pakistan nifty-neat technology and toys which will doubtless end up in the very same hands as planned the Mumbai massacres, where we are already being told that the Paki terrorists were technologically superior to the backwards Indian cops.

I just want to know where all the money Dubya has paid out to Musharref over the past six or seven years has gone. And whether it will end up in the very same place as the Brit’s technology will be going.

Nuke ‘em. They’ll all dirty.

Dec 14, 2008 - 7:17 pm 3. EvilDave:

Mike:
Such thoughts may help the war on terror, but they are officially “racist” and would deny people their precious “human rights”.

So, better Britain’s live as slaves than to not be nice to everyone.

Dec 14, 2008 - 7:23 pm 4. Mike Sylwester:

One important development during the past decade is that the Moslem religion has become an object of public contempt. Moslems cannot avoid the ubiquitous displays of such attitudes.

Now Pakistan in particular is the object of world-wide contempt. Every Pakistani, no matter whether he lives in Pakistan or abroad, must feel it. The world’s stereotype image of the Pakistani is an ignorant, vicious, terrorist hillbilly male who honor-kills his own daughters and gangrapes uppity neighbor women. It’s a society where hundreds of schools have been burned down in recent years. It’s a society where nobody with any sense ever would invest a single dollar for a business. Only a Pakistani living in Pakistan, with absolutely no other choice, would invest there.

Any Pakistani traveling into Britain (or into the USA) should be subjected to a thorough search as they pass through customs, and he should understand why.

Dec 14, 2008 - 7:55 pm 5. JAK:

Fascinating and refreshing interview with Salman Rushdie on the CBC today of all places. Highly recommended. It’s available as podcast here:

http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/pastpodcasts.html?28#ref28

Writers & Co. – 14/12/2008 – Salman Rushdie Interview

Dec 14, 2008 - 8:29 pm 6. Alexis:

Although John Quincy Adams was later vilified by Andrew Jackson, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams defended Andrew Jackson’s invasion of Florida. John Quincy Adams used an argument that a nation that demonstrates an inability or refusal to control its territory has forfeited its claim to it.

This argument could be used vis a vis Pakistan or any other nation that refuses to control its own territory.

Pakistan will probably do the absolute minimum fighting necessary to maintain its territorial claim over the Northwest Frontier. It is hoped that some Pakistani statesman will realize that clearing out the Taliban and al-Qaeda is the most effective means to get the Americans out of Pakistan’s hair. American money may entice some Pakistanis, but it is the promise of leaving Pakistan alone that will likely induce more Pakistanis to cooperate, if only to ensure that they don’t get constantly nagged by impatient Americans.

Dec 14, 2008 - 8:36 pm 7. Alexis:

Imagine the following T-shirt:

Thank you, Osama.
I just love getting
searched at airports.

Dec 14, 2008 - 8:38 pm 8. E. Nigma:

How long ago were British Foreign Service people talking about “negotiating” with the Taliban to resolve the “crisis in Afghanistan”?
The thinking hasn’t really changed, it’s just that people cannot say certain things right now, in the shadow of what happened in Mumbai.
Six million pounds. Wow. How many people can that pay off for a year? Who is seduing who, anyways?
Which way is the intelligence really passing?
Double agent, what’s that?

Something very ugly is going to happen somewhere in the UK, very soon. Too many clues to ignore.

Dec 14, 2008 - 8:51 pm 9. Lifeofthemind:

Bush tried to go back to a period of clarity in International Law. The period before the Vietnam War or really before WW-II when International Law was The Law of Nations. Sovereign States met known criteria, received benefits and paid the consequences for outrages committed from their territory. Those who could not rise to the demanded level of responsibility were subject to a lower level of authority and subject to outside supervision as in a protectorate or colony. Special messy cases such as the deteriorating Ottoman Empire demanded close and constant action because it was seen that they threatened the legal standards that freedom and commerce depended on. Anyone committing violence outside of the state system was an unlawful combatant and would be punished as such. There were benefits to conforming even for those outside of the centers of wealth and power. Now there are no incentives to respect or cooperate with the expectations of Westphalian Law and Western morality.

Dec 14, 2008 - 10:55 pm 10. Lifeofthemind:

To me the great tragedy of the last 8 years is that President Bush was never able to get this clear message, of my above post, out. Earlier Presidents like Reagan or FDR, really all of them except maybe Carter, understood these simple truths and most of them were able to clearly articulate them. Even if I might have disagreed with them on policy I am confident that most of them would have been effective at making the public understand and follow on these issues. Perhaps it is a sign of how unified and powerful the MSM have become at controlling the debate that Bush 43 failed at this task. Obama may be the transformative agent that follows in Gordon Brown’s path and dismantles the system that has provided for accountability and commerce, if not uninterrupted peace, for 360 years.

Dec 14, 2008 - 11:16 pm 11. lewy14:

Recall that Westphalia was a treaty between sovereign princes. There was at least a notion of where sovereignty resided, and that it did indeed exist.

Where does Pakistani sovereignty reside? Does anybody in Pakistan actually have the ability to answer that question, if they wanted to? Who is the “prince?”

De facto, we treat the entity that appears to have control over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons as the “prince”. Doing so, we face the reality that such “prince” cannot control his territory. However, failure to deal with the “prince” may result in loss of control over the nukes.

Challenging, at best.

Dec 14, 2008 - 11:19 pm 12. Lifeofthemind:

@lewy14,
Right you are.
Friedrich von Schrötter, “Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country”.

Pakistan is a legal fiction and its army dreams of being as important as the Prussian but in reality it cannot control its own officers let alone the national territory. The people are not sovereign, the army is not and the law is not and the old aristocracy are not. Obama faces no more softball debates. Someone has to be able to answer the question when the problem is in Pakistan, “Who do you call?”

Dec 15, 2008 - 12:01 am 13. Mike Sylwester:

Pakistan might be entering a situation similar to those situations in Germany and Italy during the early 1930s, when right-wing and left-wing groups battled for local power in dirty little civil wars. Eventually strong leaders emerged — Hitler and Mussolini — from outside those countries’ political and military leaderships.

In the current case of Pakistan, the country’s leader, the widower Bhutto, does not seem to such a leader who can win a dirty little civil war. Pakistan’s military — even under a Perez Musharraf — does seem to be able to win such a war either.

If the world’s economy slips into a depression, what will happen in Pakistan, which was wallowing in failure even during the world’s go-go years? Pakistan’s economy will become a black hole, from which emerge only eminations of opium.

Dec 15, 2008 - 12:40 am 14. Fletcher Christian:

Mike, I’d go further. Any Pakistani citizens resident in Britain should be expelled forthwith. No exceptions – including Pakistanis married to Brits. If said spouse wants to stay with the deportee, then they can go to Terrorististan with him or her – along with any kids. The single exception might be accredited diplomats – accredited by us.

“The world’s stereotype image of the Pakistani is an ignorant, vicious, terrorist hillbilly male who honor-kills his own daughters and gangrapes uppity neighbor women.”

No, you’re wrong. “Pakistani” should be replaced by “Moslem”. Filipino Moslems, of a completely different ethnic group, are even worse than Paks or Arabs.

Dec 15, 2008 - 1:11 am 15. Wadeusaf:

Since before the 1980’s Pakistan’s greatest export commodity has been people. Like Mexican’s and others from exotic and impoverished Central American locations, wave after wave earned more money and sent more back to their family. Unlike those from the middle America’s, due to the British system and colonial affiliation, many of those exported received and education and dual citizenship. The roots were always in the old country. Middle class and a greater degree of affluence also demarcates the difference among the Pakistani exports from other exported persons.

It is not the ignorant “hillbilly” we need to fear. As in the make up of the 9/11 bombers and most of the foreign fighters in the AQI, it is a small group of mostly underutilized middle class youth that is taking the violence and extremism to newer lows. I would be willing to bet that each and every one of the AlQ azhats killed in Mumbai was the off spring of a middle class family.

The independent citizen is our ally in this endeavor. The Taliban and AlQ are too extreme and too tied to drugs and too tempted by power and too sick with blood lust, the independent hill dweller fears them, will accept there rule up to a point, but would rather not.

Dec 15, 2008 - 4:45 am 16. Cannoneer No. 4:

Zombie Spooks Ravage Pakistan

Dec 15, 2008 - 4:55 am 17. RWE:

There is indeed a “Line of Terror” but, liens have two ends and that is the essence of the terrorist problem.

People like to claim that Afghanistan is the origination of the attacks of 9/11/01 but in fact there were two ends to that line. One end was in the desolate country where a philosophy that could not be practiced openly in its homeland flourished. The other end of the line was in the West – where armed citizens were condemned as criminals – airline pilots were told in clear terms that any attempt to resist a hijacking would be dealt with severely by the FBI – bold action was to crater empty runways in Serbia and empty terrorist camps in Afghanistan – and murderers like OJ Simpson were let free lest the wrong people be offended.

It takes two to tango. It takes people willing to set themselves up to be victims for a terrorist with a friggin’ crummy knife he bought at a 711 to knock down buildings. The buck stops at both ends of that line. Fix both ends of it, but especially fix our end.

Dec 15, 2008 - 7:03 am 18. Lifeofthemind:

@RWE,
We were on the path to fixing our end after 9-11. When the Spanish folded and submitted to terror Americans laughed at them and reelected Bush. It took 7 years of relentless crafted assault on the body politic by the MSM for the forces of alliance to compliance with the global anti-semitic kleptocracy to gain power in America.

Dec 15, 2008 - 7:54 am 19. Steve Skubinna:

#4 Mike, you make a valid point, except that I believe the contempt is held only by kaffirs, and as such is meaningless to the jihadis. Now, were that contempt to be translated into concrete action by governments, it would put tremendous pressure on “the Muslim world” (whatever that really means) for Pakistan to clean up its act. On the other hand, i suspect that since that pressure would be coming from Muslims who have rejected jihad, it would be as negligible as the contempt of infidels. After all, the jihadis still murder many more of their coreligionists every year than they do infidels.

Sadly we are greatly hampered by political correctness even now. If we can’t even name our enemy, how effective can we be in facing and fighting him? Every time another atrocity is committed, apologists in our midst rise up to point out that not every Muslim is a terrorist. Oddly, these are usually the same people who won’t trust their fellow citizens with firearms because one random nut or criminal shoots somebody. Obviously we no more need to concentrate on the majority of nonviolent Muslims than we need concentrate on the even greater majority of nonviolent firearms owners, yet the appeasers among us insist on focusing on both groups and ignoring the perpetrators.

Dec 15, 2008 - 8:34 am 20. RWE:

No, we did not fix our end, at least not nearly enough. We actually adopted a practice of making sure that the most suspicious specifically were not targeted. We never really cracked down on illegal immigration or on expired visas. We should have reactivated Manzanar and filled it to the brim with any Islamic immigrant or visitor who might have been a problem, but instead we had hysteria over a few hundred at Gitmo.

We should have searched every mosque in the country, and put them all on permanent wiretaps. Instead we had hysteria over wiretapping communications that don’t even originate in this country and made it Racist to use Obama’s middle name.

We should have had the NRA organize Citizen’s Militias to guard every public building. Instead, we had more attempts at gun control.

There are a zillon things we should have done, but months after the WTC fell and long before we fixed the hole in the Pentagon the FAA mailed out a new student pilot’s license to Mohammed Friggin’ Atta!

Dec 15, 2008 - 9:34 am 21. NahnCee:

“It is not the ignorant “hillbilly” we need to fear. As in the make up of the 9/11 bombers and most of the foreign fighters in the AQI, it is a small group of mostly underutilized middle class youth that is taking the violence and extremism to newer lows. I would be willing to bet that each and every one of the AlQ azhats killed in Mumbai was the off spring of a middle class family.”

Disagree. I think Pakistan has managed to foster a triple-pronged terrorist threat: (1) they are hiding bin Laden and failed Al Queda terrorists from Iraq, (2) their military and ISI are a pack of terrorists in and of themselves playing political games with India over Kashmir, and (3) the disaffected middle-class Muslim youth that we see elsewhere around the world who really are not part of Al-Queda but just want to take a jaunt for a weekend and see if they can kill their very own American soldier, or failing that, go kill a few meebly Indians who won’t shoot back and blame it on Kashmir.

Between these three prongs, the majority of Pakistani’s *must* have claimed a personal affiliation so there cannot be any such thing as a “moderate Muslim Pakistani”.

There were three disparate groups in Iraq, too, and it still remains to be seen if they will be able to come together and make their country work. If possible, I think Pakistan is even worse in its divisiveness than Iraq has been.

I wonder if any one person — a “prince” — has control of Pakistan’s nukes, or if different groups have claimed different nuclear sites for their own.

so that even if they don’t have the knowledge or technology to shoot it off, bin Laden and his Al-Queda group (for example) can claim to the unlearned Pakistani’s who are sheltering him that he, too, has his very own nuclear bomb as befits a great leader and Muslim sheikh. While Bhutto may claim several, and Gul a couple of more, and I’ll bet even Dr. Khan and/or Musharref may have one or two baby ones hidden under their beds for old times’ sake.

Dec 15, 2008 - 11:04 am 22. sirius_sir:

While the core concept of the “axis of evil” rested on the notion of state-support as the engine of terrorism, the “line of terror” idea appears to rely upon the idea of supporting formal states in conflict with ungovernable and illegitimate subnational units.

First, we should recognize the fact that the concept of the “axis of evil” is still relevant regarding those states which still do openly support terrorism: c.f. Iran’s support of Hezbollah.

Second, we should require a putatively allied state such as Pakistan to do whatever is required to dismantle and destroy terrorist networks in its own country. It should not be considered enough to mount ineffectual internal counter-terrorism efforts, claim certain areas and populations are at once too difficult to engage and yet remain protected under the umbrella of Pakistani sovereignty and are thus considered off limits to outside action or incursion by other interested States.

We should make it clear to the Pakistani government that our safety and its own continued survival depend on a close and entirely open alliance against the terrorist extremists. It’s not entirely clear to me why we should not also require as a near-term condition of further ongoing material support that our own fighting and/or intelligence assets oversee and incorporate internally with Pakistan’s own.

Dec 15, 2008 - 12:58 pm 23. Cannoneer No. 4:

RWE@20:

We should have had the NRA organize Citizen’s Militias to guard every public building.

If they were Organized Militia, they’d be National Guard.

Unorganized Militia still exist, (all able bodied males between the ages of 17 and 45 who are not in the organized militia) but the NRA has no authority to call them up. They call themselves up, like Flight 93, or wait for the governor or president.

The American Federation of Government Employees representing the workers of the General Services Administration’s Public Buildings Service’s Federal Protective Service would not tolerate the competition anyway. They pay enough “campaign contributions” to ‘rat politicians to prevent such things.

A whole lot of things former Bush supporters now excoriate him for failing to do were never within his power to accomplish.

Dec 15, 2008 - 4:03 pm 24. marymcl:

Flight 93 is one thing. They answered fire with fire OK? and all honor and praise to them for what they did. I hope I will be forgiven here for say that for their sakes I hope there really is a Valhalla somewhere, because no-one deserves it more.

That said, the last thing this fractured country needs right now is red, white and blue vigilantes, no matter how righteous they believe their motivations to be. Anyone who wants to bear arms and wear colors for the sake of his country should go enlist in the armed forces. That’s what they’re there for, and they are in need of volunteers, in case no-one’s noticed.

Dec 16, 2008 - 8:48 am 25. NahnCee:

Sanctimonious Mary – what will happen when Obama defunds the military and strips it of its arms and colors? Can we take up and bear individual arms *then* in your pink little unicorn’d world?

Dec 16, 2008 - 12:05 pm 26. marymcl:

Oh give it a rest already. Nobody said anything about the Second Amendment. You can bear all the arms you want, and I’d never object to any of it. I’m talking about something entirely different and what’s more I think you know it.

But as long as you brought up sanctimony, there’s a great example of it on the tree-hugging thread. Someone felt moved to announce her disapproval (as if it mattered) of someone else’s plan to retire in peace and quiet, and in the process took a few bitchy little potshots at his “caregiver” wife and called his spirituality a “tarted-up” excuse for cowardice. Anyone you know?

Dec 16, 2008 - 6:32 pm 27. Wadeusaf:

Nahncee,

The difficulty with your an my interpretation of who is who in Afghani and Paki politics is the inseperable religious over and under tones. As a decidedly Muslim state, Pak is standing with multiple interpretations/misunderstandings of what law to be lawless about, and what cause gives cause to lay claim.

IOW at any given moment of time in Pakmis-under-stand, none agrees with everyone else. The extremes say submit or die, and so kill you for what ever reason they can determine. Everyone is left scratching their head and/or tail trying to figure out what none will tolerate.

And yes, it is as simple as all of that.

Dec 17, 2008 - 1:22 pm

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